AWARD

In 'Polybius' James Houston rigs together a bunch of retro electronics to play a song by musician Julian Corrie farewelling the tech of recent past.

I was first introduced to Scottish artist and filmaker James Houston's work five years ago when he released “Big Ideas (don’t get any)”; a strange and genious cover of Radiohead’s “Nude”, performed on a HP Scanjet 3c, a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, an Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer, and a Hard Drive array.

In his new project called "Polybius" Houston joins forces with musician Julian Corrie and an orchestra of outdated technology. The video shows Corrie sitting at the bottom of a drained swimming pool, using retro electronings to create his song about the complex and bittersweet relationship we have with our gadgets. This time around the duo repurposes a SEGA Mega Drive, a Commodore 64, several floppy disk drives and old hard drives to create the arrangement.  "I asked Julian Corrie to compose and perform a piece of bespoke music for antiquated hardware that I had turned into instruments then rigged together via MIDI", Houston explains.  

The video nostalgically recalls the tech of bygone eras; our beloved old games consoles, joysticks and gadgets that once blew our minds and quickly became the center of our universe, now replaced but never truly forgotten. The artist profoundly refers to the track as “a last curtain call in a farewell to forgotten friends”, and that sounds about right.