DOCUMENT A-53 (working title)

THE TRIP

NOTES

Cut to Car journey. Inside, no windows. Through the windows are trees, road signs, detritus. Perspectives change and flip. From drones/boats/ game footage. Found footage of eastern festivals and architecture. Tourists. Dialogue. Talking about music, card games. Changes the radio to a story about a man throwing fistfuls of banknotes out of a window in Shanghai. He is in his mid thirties, a wealthy Chinese man born into wealth. Drives a Ferrari around the block. Around the KTV that costs 10,000元 per person. His father worked as a shoemaker. Sold a shoe to the chairman. Then made it big. The son was arrested for traffic offences and later found to be on drugs.

PART 5

MC gets into the soft homeliness of her red Mercedes. The bucket seats hug around her long, thin frame. Wrapped. The car's interior consists of many high luxury components: multi-contour leather bucket seats, digital cockpit, hyper-screen, Air conditioning with HEPA filters. MC opens the windows to take in the cold night air and quickly closes them again. The brief inhale of chilled air folds itself around the soft edges of the car's interior. The pupil's of her eyes widen as she starts the engine's ignition. The car roars to life and lurches backwards. She takes off with a squealing of rubber on tarmac. Burnt. Tiny fragments of tire find their way into the air and drift slowly towards the earth. Other particles remain airborne and are swept into updrafts, further polluting the smoggy air. Some of these airborne particles get sucked in by the cars air filtration system, floating within the car and pulled into the throat and oesophagus of MC. Swallowed and inhaled. Lining. The earth where MC took off from moments earlier, is decorated in long, curving marks on the floor. Rubber on tarmac.

Moments later MC is on the M32 road, gliding between lampposts that dazzle with white light. The long-life LED bulbs have long forgotten their amber ancestors. She feels the cultural phenomenon of personal celebrity. Street lamps flash through the car's windscreen and bounce off its sleek dashboard. Like flashes from a camera. Or spotlights on a stage. MC remembers and relives those dark, rainy afternoons in the back of her parent's saloon style car. Her eyes fill with tears that doubles the fracture of warm filtered light into a kaleidoscopic dance of colour on a black ground. Through the window MC sees faces rushing past. Cut up with roadside detritus. A lamp above a street sign flickers then suddenly sparks into daylight. The skyline has replaced the ground and above floats the spectres of the city's past. Forcibly. Frame by frame. Walking, running, cycling. People of the past. These pieces of the city's memories flip and distort.

NOTE: A Psychologist's perspective of MC's condition

Reflections are skewed in the car's rear and side view mirrors. High rise buildings and traditional courtyard homes bulge, swell and retreat over Mercedes' sleek body. Extreme curvatures by Her carbon fibre shell. As MC cranes her head outside of the window and looks down, long slivers of red glowing torches move backwards and forwards. Zoom in. A snake of cars sliver along the Skyway. MC sees superimposed over this aerial view, the animated figures from the video game F was playing last night. They dance between and on top of the cars and lorries parked at the roadside. Just their silhouettes can be made out. Transforming into long, vertical threads like barcodes. Stretching and condensing - the structure of their digital reality. PUPPETS. Blinking her eyes open, MC hears the loud booming of large kettle drums and looks up and into the rear view mirror.

In its reflection she sees a performance of a huge, articulated dragon. The dragon is dancing around a stage in the round, surrounded by people watching, phones in hand, filming the spectacle. The filming of the spectacle is also the spectacle. They are intertwined. The performance is taking place in the park. Large metal structures and boards are arranged so that the performers can jump onto and between the large blocks. MC is then momentarily transported to the park with performance. From the back of the crowd the dragon appears to dance over the spectators' heads. MC moves forward and stands amongst the star studded audience, trying to catch a glimpse. Making her way through the crowd as she draws nearer towards the front, she notices how the members of the crowd are uninterested in watching the show, but check and recheck their phone's screens continuously. Excitedly they compare the angles and durations of their amateur footage. Each one didactically conveying in poor quality the event captured on a phone. MC imagines a huge show reel of footage from all these phones overlaid one on top of the other. A temporal tower. Saturated in colour. Pure essence of distraction. She drifts back into the car's interior. A radio report conveys the story of a man throwing money out of a window in Shanghai. She looks out over the dash, it bulges into the car. She remembers the drone accident. MC is now looking up into the night sky through the windscreen. The screen has dissipated. The howling of the wind fills the car and lifts MC's hair into a wild frenzy. Camera looking down over her as the car speeds along the road, a blur of painted road markings stretch into the dark abyss.