In his short story The Chase, Italo Calvino presents a car chase with a difference. Both vehicles are stuck in a long line of traffic, yet the Italian master contrives a drama with all the momentum of a full-speed pursuit. "In this world of interchangeable appearances," he concludes, "the pursuer-pursued relationship continues to be the only reality we can rely on."
Video artists Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone would probably agree. Their latest installation, Wall of Death, also sets out to subvert the conventions of the traditional chase. And there are two key aspects to its composition.
The first is the wall of death itself. At three metres high and 12 metres in diameter, this wooden-panelled replica of the perilous fairground feature, where a motorcyclist must maintain a certain speed to prevent his bike dropping from the wall, provides, says Ellard, "an architectural space within which you're trapped, immersed within the work".
The structure also serves as a 360 cycloramic screen, and thereby invokes the early cinematic practices of the Lumière brothers in the late-19th century. Inside, a dual video-projector, the second key component, whirs overhead. As it revolves, it beams two diametrically opposed ovals of light around the walls from left to right. In the darkness, they look like searchlights. They are, in effect, moving screens.
Suddenly, engines rev, sirens wail, and a shout is lost beneath squealing tyres, as footage from classic 70s film car chases is shown within the ovals. (I spotted extracts from The Driver, The French Connection and Vanishing Point.)
"The car chase seems to us to be an exemplary moment within the history of cinema as spectacle," says Ellard. "And, prior to Jaws or Star Wars, there was a period when the car chase was what cinema seemed to be doing particularly well."
Each sample has been carefully treated in terms of resolution, brightness and contrast, and then edited in order to isolate the subject and object of the pursuit. One screen shows the pursuer, the other the pursued. And they stalk each other around the walls.
"It's difficult to watch both screens and impossible to track them simultaneously," says Ellard. "So there is an act of selection, of trying to keep up." You're not helped by the fact that the six speakers alternate the wheel-spins and engine noises between the two screens. "In a sense," says Ellard, "the viewer is involved in the chase."
It's quite disorienting, this complicity, especially as there are other people shuffling about beside you trying to fathom their own approach. Even if you do manage to glimpse the two screens in quick succession, don't expect to piece together a continuous narrative.
"Although the films sometimes got the better of us," says Ellard, "our intention was to show the pursuer and the pursued going round the same corner at the same time."
Which should confuse you even more. For here, as in Calvino's story, "neither pursuers nor pursued can be distinguished". The effect is unsettling, and there are many eerie moments in the 14 one-minute loops (seven per screen).
In one sequence, you see a ruby-red pick-up truck in an underground car park. It is stationary, its lights off. You track it around the walls as it remains still. This combination of movement (the film, and you following it) and stasis (the vehicle) is uncanny.
Meanwhile, on the opposite screen, a flame-licked sports car screeches round the same gloomy car park, seemingly oblivious to the other vehicle's whereabouts. Then the truck's headlights come on and it creeps forward. It accelerates and both vehicles speed around their own screens. You provide the link that unites them in a chase.
It's a sequence that exploits the full dramatic potential of the dual-screen format, while meeting the artists' aim of creating "a non-narrative spectacular". Wall of Death challenges our assumption of a space-time continuum - just as the Lumière brothers' head-on film of a train pulling into a station apparently prompted those in the front row to jump out of the way.
The prolonging of suspense is central to Wall of Death, both here and in the fairground original. Ellard agrees that both projects are about "the deferral of conclusions. If not death-defying, then the defying of gravity or logic or the expectation of what is possible."
Only once in the sequences do the pursuer and pursued appear in the same frame. To show the denouement of the films - usually a fatal crash or shooting - would be to go against the existentialist spirit of the piece: to keep going without purpose or resolution.
The pursuits, though, are not all confined to vehicles. One of the best sequences shows a sweaty Gene Hackman chasing a man on foot down side-streets and subways. You hear agitated mumblings, heavy breathing, the rap of urgent footsteps on concrete. These sounds are sometimes slowed down or echoed to give a chilling feel of a fugitive urban existence. And it's quite alienating as you stand there in the darkness, somewhere in a city yourself.
The artists' most recent project opened at the end of last year. It's a permanent public sculpture for the A13 in Barking. At a major traffic intersection, at the height of a flyover, they have erected 75 tall, stainless steel needles peaked with runway landing lights. The idea, says Ellard, is to give drivers the impression that they are "skating across the surface of a blue plateau of light".
It sounds enticing, though presumably you aren't encouraged to chase the car in front.
Wall of Death is at the Paper Bag Factory, 165 Childer Street, London SE8, from February 4-27. Details: 0171-831 7753.
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