Transcript from Origin of the Species, spoken by S.
"Say when did the universe start? Well, it started with the Big Bang… and what was there before the Big Bang..? Nothing…you can’t imagine nothing…no time…you can’t imagine no time.."
"I always had a burning curiosity, and…evolution’s been my bag for an awful long time…and I was fortunate, you know I’d be…I’d be working up in the hills, up in the woods, cutting down trees and stuff like that, and I was right with nature all the time…and, everything that I saw that was strange and different and things like that, I just automatically…it just begged a question, you know, how come it’s like this? How did it get like this? And the thing that’ll…amaze you, Ben is…the time. It has taken so very very long, you know time has been around for an awful long time…even 3.8 billion years they say for life to be on Earth…and, an awful awful lot happens in 3.8 billion years…and some things happen very very slowly, and yet other times, things happen very fast…like for instance, man’s brain, it evolved very quick, and it’s all, it’s just trouble, there’s just trouble "
"I just, I don’t know what’s going to happen…I can’t see the world surviving, unless there’s some awful disease or something wipes man out. But Charles Darwin was pondering, just in the Descent of Man, he’s just pondering the beginnings of the early days of Earth… he says before man come along, it just looked as if the world was waiting for man to come along…because here was a beautiful amazing world, turning on itself, and there was no audience, there was nobody here to see it, there was nobody here to…appreciate it…because other animals are quite happy and stuff like that but they can’t ponder the meaning of life, or the meaning of the world or anything like that."
"What is it? If it’s moving…or it can be standing still or moving at the same time or something like that…and Sneuder’s Cat, or whatever you call him, it could be living and dead at the same time…and some things are only there if we observe them… You see and when I was a kid, well a teenager, something like that, and you used to say, these philosophers say, if you was in the woods…and it was just shite at that time, but it’s come to be true now, if you was in the woods and a tree fell down and it made this loud noise, if you were’ne there would that tree made a noise? Would it have made a noise? Of course it would…but now when you read this quantum physics…it could make a noise and it could not make a noise…it does’ne make sense, and er, everything’s really contradictory."
"Some things didn’t really matter, you know, some mutations didn’t matter all that much…and they were neither beneficial to survival nor detrimental to survival…but if they just hung on, there’d come a time when there was probably a time when that was the thing that saved the day."
"And some of the things that are just so very very subtle, they can change the whole…whole existence of a species or something like that…and it’s something so just very very subtle, very small, yeh.."
Stills from Origin of the Species - 16min, 16mm, 2008.
Hut three installed at the Regency Town House, Hove, 2008. View from the rear showing the projector and film looper.
Hut three interior, showing Origin of the Species and detail of reclaimed 1930's window.
