'No Moving Parts' is an artwork based on the principles of the camera obscura. It has been made as part of 'Delinquents' - two related artworks for the new IDEA building.
(see also Jim Medway and Graham Parker's 'Saturday Night')

Delinquents uses the building and localities' history alongside an understanding of 'delinquency' which draws on both the classical use of the term in relation to societal ills and the more liminal artistic use of the description in terms of wilful creative transgression of boundaries, site or 'official' usage of technology.

"Rather than some kind of delinquent aesthetic, we were in pursuit of a claim to romantic delinquency...things failing to perform their 'proper' role usurped, transformed in our delinquent hands into something all together more interesting."

Andrea Philips, TVOD and Boundary Stories, Hybrid magazine, Dec 1993

The initial impetus for the proposal came from the initial site visit and the details of the building's official and unofficial history within the ongoing flux of social change in Salford. Walking around the site it is possible to see the structural evidence of its original purpose as a brewery in its architecture and positioning within the city, alongside the more cosmetic and provisional alterations of its recent attempts at reinvention (refurbished offices, exposed wires, half-finished display units) all existing alongside the physically and metaphorically ragged edges of the building where flooding, fire or vandalism mark the progress of an unofficial, delinquent history. It is this that marks the starting point for both projects.

No Moving Parts, by David Mackintosh, reflects the concerns also present in Medway and Parker's work in that the use of the term delinquency in reference to their practice has more to do with the person who folds their newspaper into a hat, rather than the person who throws a brick through a window.

'No Moving Parts' draws explicitly on that latter, apparently mindless activity, to transform acts of vandalism into something potentially poetic. One of the phenomena observed at the initial site visit was the amount of rocks sitting on floors and stairs near broken windows. They were oddly sized (suitable for small palms) and as equally incongruous as the half finished shop display units also dotted around the space. Yet they had a tiny historical value as marking an unspoken transaction, as significant or insignificant as any other in the building's history - a transference of possession as the building was handed from rag trade entrepreneurs to mountain bike bandits, who marked the occasion by breaking the skin of the building.

David Mackintosh will mark this transference by the construction of a camera obscura, using a hole in the glass where stones have been thrown through the window. He previously constructed camera obscuras for a primary school in Wigan which was closing to make way for housing developments. Upside down images of houses projected onto classroom walls, looking less like shelters than encroaching agents of threat. For the IDEA space, Mackintosh has developed the idea further through the use of web cams displaying the images of the obscuras, adding a further layer of technology to the lo-fi and provisional relay of the 'outside world'. The stones themselves will be gathered and marked as a small cairn on the roof of the building - an act of both defiance and marginal utility (turning desultory attack on the building into an act of recognition or mark of achievment).

Both 'Saturday Night' and 'No Moving Parts' share a common sense of site and utilisation of the physical evidence of the building's recent life. The use of electronic monitoring within the work is partially as mute witness, though in the first project in particular the monitoring of the hit rate and the physical consequence of tarring the imagery in the alcove when a certain level of virtual witnessing has been reached, implicates the remote viewer. Likewise the camera obscuras may function as 'field dressings' at points where neglect has been casually reflected by wounds to the building. Again the remote viewer sees an electronic rendering of a reflection of a mark of a tiny event gone and unlamented. Yet there is still an intimacy through these layers of representation which again implicates the witness. Both works take obvious acts of delinquency (fucking in doorways, breaking windows) and accords them a significance within the lifetime of the building, which they would never otherwise be granted. In doing so, the artists make a claim for the stake of the particular delinquent vision of artists within the future life of the physical building and its online presence.

David Mackintosh is an artist and curator whose work encompasses drawing, sculpture, video and music. He recently curated 'My Eye Hurts' - an exhibition of British artists working with sound which showed in Manchester before touring to Threadwaxing Space in New York. He produces work with Graham Parker under the name of Bono and Sting and they curate From Space in Salford. Recent/forthcoming Bono and Sting shows include 'Ever get the feeling you've been cheated', Paul Stolper Projects, London; Albrecht Dürer Kunstverein, Nuremburg; 'Polemics', CRASH!, ICA London