Landfill 16

We could make jokes, of course, about 'underground film', but there is something genuinely fascinating in how the material itself degrades when buried - enough that its materiality could inspire a strand of programming itself.

The widely differentiated effects on individual frames leaves great gulfs between them - startling when presented in succession. Sometimes we get an idea as to what is happening - the sound of footsteps in the snow, the noise of a robot goat trapped in a simulated gold-mine, unidentifiable murmurings, the suspicion of mechanism.

Some pieces look like fresco, literally repainted footage at times, but in the absence of pattern sometimes the eye catches systems of cracks like plaster stretched by age. In the visual clutter sometimes real shapes survive, a raptor on the wing, something like landscape, suddenly the push-rod perambulation of a spider, the bulbous body of what might be a black widow - there is that lick of red, high and dangerous, a splash of colour in a riot of other colours - natural meaning in an exercise in findings. There was something that might have been a pine marten, superimposed or revealed? Was that noise genuinely the countryside, the radio, and what was done to that to make that so?

Draw scrabble tiles from a bag at random often enough, and one might stumble upon words of great beauty. Give them space to be rearranged and it becomes much easier, but it is uncetain if that has been done here - Jennifer Reeves' process is unknown, a mystery. What role Wen Wu played as production assistant is no less of a question. There are moments of revelation, but this is treasure well concealed. Deeper digging, or a clearer path of excavation would have shed more light on intent, effect. For want of a guide, then, this is a rabbit hole not worth falling down.