This output comprises: two site-specific films, directed and edited by Birrell, and a reflective artist’s paper: A Beautiful Living Thing, 2015 (14min); A Beautiful Living Thing: Part 2: Improvisation #1, 2016 (56min); and ‘A Beautiful Living Thing,’ special issue ‘On Libraries,’ Performance Research (2017).

Initiated by the sorrow that was felt in Glasgow and around the world at the loss of the Mackintosh Library, following the 2014 fire at GSA’s Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed building, the research asks: How might dialectical methods of composition, modes of lament and improvisation develop collective creative responses to traumatic events; in this case, a loss of heritage?

Filmed in the burned-out Library, the first film features a composition for solo violin - devised from Mackintosh's description of a work of art - performed by Bill Chandler (RSNO). The second film features performances across all 4 floors of the building by 18 members of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra (GIO).

This research draws on Svetlana Boym’s (2011, 2017) writing on the sensual and the transient materiality of the ruin and Luis Fernández-Galiano’s (2000) identification of the originary association between architecture and fire. Methods include: aleatory composing in relation to Mackintosh’s description of art as ‘a beautiful living thing’; collaborative and dialogic acts of listening; single take tracking and panning shots to position the camera as living optics; and close up shots to forensically capture the material impacts of the fire.

The films seek: to document the ‘chance composition’ created between Mackintosh’s architecture and the improvisatory destruction of fire; to document the transformation of the building at a pivotal moment in its history; and to explore the potential of improvisation as a method, with the principal objective of testifying - in a series of moving-image works - to the building’s continued existence as ‘a beautiful living thing.’