In March 2001, Flow Motion (comprising of Eddie George, Trevor Mathison and Anna Piva) created Dissolve – a digital audiovisual installation and web project that took Michaelangelo Antonioni’s ‘Zabriskie Point’ (1968) as starting point. Being Antonioni’s second English language film, released after his hugely successful masterpiece ‘Blow Up’ (1966), it was an expansive attempt at essaying America as it drifted into what, at the time seemed like civil war. The film was a ‘vanishing film’ pulled from the screens, disappearing from the cultural landscapes, almost as if it had never existed. ‘Blow Up’ was hailed as an encapsulation of the intensity (and the miasmic ambivalence) of London’s still blooming pop counter culture, ‘Zabriskie Point’ was critically reviled and a box office flop.
For Flow Motion, the film lived beyond its marginal space in cinema history. Exploring the film’s formal possibilities and its allusions to a hybrid space by incorporating digital and electronic technologies, which at the time of the film’s release had yet to exist, Flow Motion investigated the futuristic elements in Antonioni’s doomed epic.