Title Roll
Record Sleeves, Custom Dolly, Projection, 120mins, Dimensions variable.

Commissioned for Relay, Title Roll is an installation that surveys a record collection spanning forty years. Scrolling through the spines of the collection over a two hour period, Title Roll creates a double vision that continually superimposes a partial view over the whole. 

Whilst inherent in the work of memory, this diplopia is preceded by a process that operates outside the visual; an ongoing selection driven by auditory stimuli. 

This is reflected in the physical order of records in the collection. Mainly grouped by genre, the occasional insertion of a disc without regard to those adjacent marks a process of archival disordering whereby items are incorrectly re-inserted into the whole. Over time, this process reveals a narrative of use; a procedural selection that defies the conventions of indexing.

Bernard G Mills

Finetuned exhibited a photographic version of Title Roll in 2005 and are delighted to have been able to commission the full work as part of Relay.

Bernard G Mills is a photographer who has been working since the 1960s. Fascinated by music and cinema since childhood, he was a renowned DJ for over a decade. His play lists reflected a passionate involvement with music that disregards conventions of category and taste. 

Title Roll is a filmic sound archive of a record collection that has become an idiosyncratic autobiography and a wider cultural index that spans forty years. Title Roll brings together his work as a photographer, cineaste and music collector. Like previous serial works such as Photographs: The Edge 1994-1998, a detailed photographic study of a section of the south coast (Brighton Media Centre Gallery 1998), Title Roll shares their formalist composition and has been developed over time. Evolving from a series of colour photographs Boxes 1-12 2005 (finetuned, eta. project space, Hove 2005), the audio-video installation Title Roll has taken more than two years to produce. 

Bernard G Mills lives and works in Brighton as a freelance photographer and designer.