Zac Jones dances in the Flinders Street Station Ballroom Hall 2012

The historical rooms above Melbourne's Iconic Flinders Street Station are off limits to the public and are in a state of shocking, and beautiful, disrepair. In 2012 a group of Melbourne artists who operate together as the Contemporary Site Investigations collective were granted access to the space for the purpose of creating a month long art intervention. The project, curated and produced by Philippa Abbott and Campbell Drake of A&D Projects, saw the buildings deserted spaces transformed by a month long residency supported by the City of Melbourne and Metro Trains. The artists were the first people to use the space in decades.
In this video Melbourne Dancer Zac Jones dances in the Flinders Street Station Ballroom Hallway; an improvised performance originally carried out in silence. The music which so serendipitously pairs the vision is the improvised work of one of the collective's artists, Cameron Robbins, on clarinet, playing with his friend and Australian Jazz drumming great Allan Browne. The 'tick-tick', metronome like sound which forms the backbone for the pairs' performance is amazingly an amplification of the enormous mechanics of the historical four faced tower clock, said to the the heartbeat of Melbourne city, which still functions manually. The piece was a component of Robbins' larger residency which also included the creation of a series of drawings using wind and light to control elaborate mechanisms which mapped energy through the site. To watch a series of shorts about CSI, including one documenting the recording of this music, click here: vimeopro.com/cameraclub/behind-the-clocks-contemporary-site-investigation-artists-and-flinders-street-station-2012/video/68360165
For more about CSI: contemporarysiteinvestigations.tumblr.com