CLUSTER BOMB [collective], established in 2009 at Dartington College of Arts, are a contemporary performance company whom accept everyone and anyone into their intensive collaborative process towards making performances. As of autumn 2011 the [collective] have embarked up a year-long process towards developing our latest work - entitled Run! City! Run! - From our explorations into “Running as an artistic practice”.  While “Walking as an artistic practice” has reached an established level from artists like Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, the [collective] are attempting to develop the movement, motion and process several steps further, and faster, by using the process of running to develop new kinds of performance and theatre. Since establishing our new headquarters on the doorstep of the monstrous construction site of the Olympic Park in Hackney Wick, our performances have become increasingly influenced by our surroundings of mass-construction, surveillance and control. Many of our associate artists at ]performance s p a c e [ have been the subject of stop-and-search criminal investigations from the Counter-Terrorism units located within and around the Olympic Park. How can live artists express critically their concerns, questions and statements about freedom in their work in relation to the assumed freedom of running? How free is running? Our latest final performance - currently in development production - will critically explore the internal and external contradictions of the physical freedom of running, jogging and sprinting in relation to space and place where local residents are allowed to run around the Olympic Boroughs We are on schedule to start presenting our performance Run! City! Run!  at ]performance s p a c e [, Hackney Wick and other Olympic Boroughs in the late Autumn of 2012. Check our website for further information and dates of our performance www.clusterbombcollective.com or email us on clusterbmb@gmail.com
Christopher Maclaine - The End: The End certainly has a center: six stories of people on the last day of their lives. Most are about to commit suicide, or some metaphorical equivalent, but the mushroom cloud with which the film begins and ends reminds us that, as Maclaine’s voice intones on the sound track, we await “the grand suicide of the human race” — his conceit is that his characters have reached the end of their personal ropes the day before a nuclear holocaust.Throughout the film he compares the dehumanizing effects of mass culture to the dehumanizing effects of personal despair, weaving these two threads together until the mannequins he films in store windows, the anonymous people he films on the street, and his characters all seem variations on the same half-living, half-dead persona. In this film Maclaine bridges the longtime split between socially or politically engaged film-making and more poetic, or self-referential, work; The End simply takes as a given that societal and personal sicknesses are inextricably intertwined. Partly a response to the homogenized, white-bread 50s, the film has plenty of black humor (a murderer recalls his mother telling him again and again, “They’ll hang you yet, Charles”), reminding me of the dark jokes we used to make in elementary school about how hiding under our desks was going to save us from the bomb. Maclaine’s first story revolves around Walter, “our little friend,” who mooches off his pals until they dump him; like all the stories in The End, this one seems somewhat autobiographical. Shots of Walter running around San Francisco emphasize its hilly, spatially unsettling topography, a motif throughout the film. Years before Hitchcock took San Francisco’s verticality as a metaphor for inner turmoil in the great Vertigo, Maclaine made even more radical use of the city, tilting his camera to rotate a steep street into a vertical line, then going beyond it until it seems people and cars should topple off. Excerpt from Fred Camper Mad Genius: The Films of Christopher Maclaine (The Chicago Reader)
leftrightright: “I never did like cross country”