Near the end of her Turner Prize-winning film ‘BRIDGIT’ (2016), Charlotte Prodger remembers reading “things Sandy Stone wrote in 1994 about virtual systems theory, technology as prosthesis”. Throughout Prodger’s films, technology is approached as an extension of the self, mediating participation in the world as surely as the physical senses. While ‘Stoneymollan Trail’ (2015) and ‘LHB’ (2017) also share these concerns, ‘BRIDGIT’ dwells in particular on this concept of prosthesis, proposing various contemporary, historical and bodily technologies as ways through which the ‘I’ not only expands but also mutates, absorbing the fragments of others without ceasing to be itself.
Stone, an artist and theorist known for her pioneering work in the academic field of transgender studies, is herself subject to the shifting and sometimes arbitrary subjectivity that comes with the digital world. Her name is thrown up in a random internet search performed by Prodger into ‘standing stones Lesbian Separatism’; standing stone becoming Sandy Stone. This coincidental encounter is one instance of the attachments between women that crop up throughout the film. These connections are mediated through given names. As labels, names point to a particular body yet are also oddly generic, with no specific ties to any individual; they can be reattributed, made to take in or speak of more and different things. Prodger names her hard drives after her mentors whose influence she wishes to record: in ‘BRIDGIT’ one icon is seen labelled ‘Turiya’ after the alter ego of musician Alice Coltrane.
In the Neolithic stone circles that appear throughout her film, Prodger finds a similar expression of extended embodiments and multiplying subjectivities. These constructions are ambiguous markers: the specificity of their appearance is clear, but more concrete explanation proves equally elusive. One might compare the act of laying down these stones to Prodger’s small acts of naming. A label has been attached to a location, providing it with a meaning (or content) that will shift over time, even if its external form does not. For Prodger, the name, and in particular the voiced name, holds the tension between the self’s essential continuity and inevitable mutation. While no-one is exempt from this process, the model of identity Prodger proposes in ‘BRIDGIT’ very clearly originates from, and is framed through, her own experiences as a queer woman whose selfhood is continually made and remade in its encounters with others. This volatile ‘I’ seems to invoke David Halperin’s definition of queerness as an identity without essence, taking Prodger’s narrative beyond any identification with the cis and hetero assumptions of écriture féminine that have dominated discussions of women’s autobiographical writing and filmmaking.1 In expanding the self, Prodger ‘queers’ it, breaking the binary between the ‘I’ and ‘not-I’.
‘BRIDGIT’ begins with a view of Prodger’s lower body lying on a sofa; the light coming in through the window is filtered through her feet and two potted plants. The viewpoint rises and falls, and it becomes apparent that the camera is balanced on the artist’s chest, moving as she breathes. Prodger shot ‘BRIDGIT’ entirely on her iPhone. For most of us our phone is always within arm’s reach, and this unforced proximity means Prodger’s filming feels like an entirely natural extension of her everyday life. The artist has described her iPhone as a prosthetic device, and through ‘BRIDGIT’’s intimate camera work it indeed becomes a bodily appendage, held so close to her flesh as to register every slight movement. The viewer feels as though they are grafted onto Prodger’s body, seeing not through their own eyes or even the artist’s, but a third eye held in her hands. While the viewer is invited in through the act of spectatorship, Prodger, if we imagine her watching this footage back, is distanced from her original perspective. She sees not as a total outsider, nor as herself, but rather joins us at a mid-point: beyond the usual bounds of her body yet still connected to it. The iPhone is not merely a camera, but also an external memory drive – a place outside of the mind to record inventories of experience, where fragments of life can be unloaded, or uploaded.
This uploading of experience further removes Prodger from herself. This distance does not produce greater clarity or objectivity however, but an obsessive, almost myopic, scrutiny. In the passage recalled by Prodger, Sandy Stone lays out how ‘narrow bandwidth’ interactions, such as those facilitated by digital devices, encourage deeper, more compulsive engagement than those across unmediated ‘wide bandwidth’ reality. The isolated fragments of iPhone footage that make up Prodger’s film testify to this neurotic inspection. Details surface and grab the attention, holding it fast in that moment and denying any further connections, catching the viewer in a closed feedback loop. In one sequence, the camera explores a blurry image of a lighted mountain. Blue sky unexpectedly follows dark rock as Prodger’s camera traces the horizon, edging slowly across the photograph to reveal discrete areas of blinding white and deep shadow. Glimpses of the artist’s hands and face are visible in the image’s reflective surface; occasionally her fingers slip over the lens and swaddle the scene in warm red flesh. Prodger pays rapt attention to detail, confounding any attempt to gain a firm footing with her increasingly distracting (and distracted) manoeuvres. As the camera makes its dizzying rounds, we recognise neither her nor the mountain, which is in fact her desktop background; the hard-drive icon luminous beneath a layer of dust and the shadowy imprint of the laptop’s keys.
Sidonie Smith has identified the double fiction of the female ‘autobiographical self’, whereby the writer must create herself twice in the face of the (male) reader.2 Not only must her life be made legible as a story, but so too must her transformation into a comprehensibly gendered woman. Prodger’s inability to coherently narrate herself – her proclivity for the mystifying close-up, for the fragment – could therefore be seen in relation to a failed identification of gender. As a queer masc-presenting woman, Prodger’s identity is continually called into question. In ‘BRIDGIT’ her gender and relationships baffle the strangers she encounters, many of whom have no shame in telling her how confusing she is. Sometimes Prodger resists and corrects them, but most often she acquiesces and plays the part they have created for her. In these moments she lives in a perilous state of near-embarrassment, at the mercy of others’ assumptions which threaten to tip her into self-denial: “The young guy at the optician just asked me if that was my daughter I was in with yesterday. Flummoxed, I replied no, she’s a friend. So now I’m closeted as well as being a cradle snatcher.” In re-labelling her relationship Prodger ambivalently embraces the arbitrariness of distinction between the person she is, that which she appears to be, and how she sees herself. Throughout her recollections the boundaries between these three states are always shifting: it is never clear where she ends and another version of herself (or indeed another self) begins.
Among this mass of details, distinctions and divisions occur on a minute scale. Everything is equally connected and separated by increments, the larger logic of its arrangement unfathomable. The boundary between the ‘I’ and the ‘not-I’ dissolves in this sea like grains of salt in water. While this conception of selfhood can be anxiety-inducing, it also opens the way for mutual generosity and openness: as much as Prodger vacates her identity, she welcomes others in to fill the void. This sincere reciprocity is at its most tangible in Prodger’s recollection of the recovery ward. Under anaesthetic her mind enters an altered state where the borders of her body seem porous and unstable. Prodger remembers a nurse gently stroking her hand and inserting a catheter while another tells her to think of something nice to urge on good dreams when she falls under. Prodger thinks about a field, but she can’t get it quite right and keeps changing her mind: “I never settled on one, and that slideshow, searching for the right field, was the last content before nothing.” She watches her dreams in total passivity, unable to control the visions enough to latch on to one and perfect it. She withdraws, relinquishing herself absolutely to the actions and suggestions of the nurses.
The nurses’ care is individually attentive, but also repetitive. Prodger is aware of her place within a continuous system, a rhythm of actions multiplying through time and space. One of the recovery nurses on her ward is also a 3D animator, and the grid he creates for the end of the film represents in its warp and weft this paradoxical tension. Superimposed over a shot of one of the standing stones, its fine white lines expand over the weathered menhir, the capacious modularity of the repeated squares veiling the singularity of a stone unchanged for centuries. Individuality cannot be contained by the network, yet the individual is still part of this constantly shifting group. The subtitles tell us that this grid is ward 48, and each patient marks a single point on this grid, a dot moving in step with all the others: “coming in at 7:30, waiting, then down in the lift, into theatre, out to recovery, back up to the ward, next ones come in, go down, go in, come out, go up.” These moving points are introduced by their names, ‘Margaret, Deborah, Eimear, Helen’ emblazoned in yellow across the stone circle. These markers appear as unique as the monoliths behind. However, even these apparent certainties are interchangeable in ‘BRIDGIT’.
Names are fluid: they weather like the sandstone that at first glance also appears unchanged by history. Prodger recounts that the ancient deities had multiple labels across the vast time and space over which they operated, and within the multiple phases of their own existence. This archaic form of naming models the instability of the self, calling attention to the fact that “identity isn’t static”. What is less obvious, however, is the tension Prodger draws out between the place of both flux and consistency in one’s own identity. She proposes that it is the very fixedness of proper names that allows queer people to stay afloat in the sea of other people’s estimations. Elle, Irene, V – each is carefully named by Prodger as an act of resistance to the various ill-fitting labels flung at them by strangers. While they might variously be sons, aunts, mothers and brothers, with her they remain always themselves.
We all have a sense of self that follows us from birth to death, that holds our memories and experiences in a continuous (if incoherent) chain. Encoded in this journey is both permanence and change; like the names of the goddess, Bridgit, whose many iterations originate in the monosyllabic ‘Bree’, her linguistic and spiritual progenitor. Names, therefore, are like containers. Just as liquid poured from a jug into a glass will take on a new shape, our selfhoods appear altered when expressed by a different word. Yet both water and identity retain their material uniqueness: they may be defined by a container they can slip out of – to change once more. In the case of Bree, this original ‘primal outpouring’ is stretched and addended: a guttural utterance from the very bones of the earth mutating across time and space, her various genealogies anchored by a single deep root. For Adriana Cavarero, the voice irrevocably contains the body from which it issues forth. It is a “simple vocal self-revelation of existence”.3 In other words, it is through the voice that we recognise another human and come to know them as an irreducible individual. It is not what is said but who says it that is most important. The voice has a physical presence in Prodger’s films, accompanying the low-fi visuals to produce a sense of being surrounded by the artist, sharing in her most intimate thoughts. As a rule, Prodger’s narration is disembodied, but that doesn’t stop us from connecting it to the snatches of her body we do see – the feet on the end of the sofa, the hands reflected in the computer screen, all are united by the voice as pieces of the same person.
In this context, Prodger’s narration becomes a formal device that exceeds its content. It bursts forth from her body, shattering it into pieces: an undiluted outpouring of unique, ineffable quality. Cavarero’s conception of the voice also has in it this idea of effluence, of vocal noise as an overspill of the body that produces it.4 But if Prodger embraces this directionality – utterance as leakage – she also adds to it its reverse, taking in another’s voice alongside her own. Her flat Aberdeenshire vowels are occasionally supplanted by a rolling, feminine, and more recognisably Scottish, brogue. This second voice is a potential surrogate for the artist’s words, allowing her to place them at a reflective distance beyond herself. But as much as this other voice can be used to explode Prodger’s identity and place pieces of it outside herself, it also enables her to take another body in: to endow her ‘I’ with the ‘embodied uniqueness’ of another.
The autobiographical accumulation in ‘BRIDGIT’ is not just narrative, but also formal – the iPhone camera and the second voice ensure Prodger doesn’t simply theorise an expanded self but enacts it in her body and the body of the film. The shifts across these technological or prosthetic fault lines (between her eyes and the camera, her voice and the other) mirror those she traverses in her everyday life as a queer woman, subject to others’ misidentification and denial. She finds a model for this in the Neolithic stone circles, whose rich and mysterious presence eludes capture, and has, it seems, always been a source of ambiguous power. But while this expanded ‘I’ is incoherent it is not inconsistent: Prodger reaches for a continuity of being that is not essentialist but historical, rooted in her particular journey, enduring just as Bridgit endured, altered in name and aspect, each modification only adding to her rich genealogy.
1. David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) p. 62 2. Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987) pp. 49-51 3. Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 3 4. Ibid, p. 11
Frances Whorrall-Campbell is a writer and artist based between London and Oxford. She has a special interest in artists’ writing and publications, with a focus on queer temporalities and biography.
This essay first appeared in Another Gaze 03. To read the rest, you can buy or subscribe here.
