Rob Kennedy, What are you driving at?, 2013.

Rob Kennedy (United Kingdom, 1978), What are you driving at?, 4’13”, 2013.

Roundabout’ was one of a range of government sponsored promotional film series produced buy Central Office of Information between 1962-74. These Technicolor ‘cinemagazines’ were designed to promote Britain’s industrial and cultural position as a progressive world leader to countries throughout the Commonwealth and further afield. What are you driving at? uses archive footage of dated and seemingly crude British manufacturing processes in plastics, beauty products and fashion, with images of a nebulous and fluid contemporary manufacturing ‘flow’ that has come to represent a more abstracted relationship to current industrial design and production. Set to the manipulated soundtrack from a recent Audi R8 television advertisement, the rhythms and power of the engine noise push and pull at the underlying economic and political heritage embedded in the contrasting images.