'Loose Disclaimer'
6 x 1 minute videos added to the ends of video film VHS’s rented from video stores
6 x 10” x 8” photographs

Text reads:
The characters and incidents portrayed and the names herein are fictitious and any similarity to the name, character and history of any person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

A series of 6 one minute videos showing a film's 'Any coincidences...' disclaimer being illuminated by a marine distress flare around the periphery of a city at night. As the flare burns out to darkness the girl who performs the illuminations speaks (in voice-over) of the disparity between her experience of being in the video and her experience of watching it.

A film's disclaimer (that text which states '...any connection to people living or dead...etc') attempts to declare (to avoid litigation) that what you've just watched was 'only a film'. It's a terse, awkward and disingenuous way of asking an audience to put the film 'behind them'. Coming at the end of the credits it occupies a dark space; a limbo land that briefly separates fiction from the reality.
In Loose Disclaimer this text is 'broken' off the end credits of a film to be moved around in the darkness of a limbo world. A girl illuminates it, and its surrounding space with distress flares. ( It needs a bright light! ). She shows it to be occupying another kind of marginal space, the edges of a city at night.
In six one minute sequences we see the 'disclaimer' being taken to locations gradually ever closer to a city, to be abandoned once the city lights are visible. After each sequence fades to darkness, when the flare burns out, the girl with the disclaimer sign is heard criticising the appearance of the footage you've just watched,...how it was better or worse than her experience of being in it, she provides a very real, unscripted disclaimer to the slippage from reality that has taken place in the footage she illuminated.
Originally these 6 sequences were recorded onto the ends of films that I’d rented from video shops.
I'd then return the tapes to the video store so that the next person to hire the film might leave it running, and so might discover my signal. This was part of a larger project called 'Flashers.' There are now lots of 'Flashers' in circulation, inadvertently distributed through video shops.
I only record onto the section of surplus black tape that doesn’t carry any image, a few seconds after the credits finish. I film footage of distress-signal flares, which illuminate a dark environment for about 60 seconds. So, this secretes an intensely bright sequence into that black space; and when the flare burns out, the tape returns to darkness. In 'Loose Disclaimer' therefore we see the original disclaimer 'dislodged' to be moved around the surplus space at the end of the tape.

The characters and incidents portrayed and the names herein are fictitious and any similarity to the name, character and history of any person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and unintentional.