The book Drift emerged from a script co-written with Jason Wood for a film that we wanted to make and still want to make, but which remains unmade. The film currently lives in the form of this book, available from the Modernist. The written script sits within a field of satelites in the form of found images, photographs, diagrams, postcards and mangled streetview images.

Drift: A possible movie 

The best way to think of Drift perhaps is as a possible movie. Or at the very least a screenplay for a movie now destined to exist only in the imagination. You can also think of it as a series of Polaroids, snapshots of a British landscape languishing in stasis. When Chris Petit thought about turning from film criticism to filmmaking he conceived of a synthesis of the German road movies he admired transposed to a dreary, late 1970s England. Drift does something similar in a more contemporary setting, but rather than a soundtrack of Kraftwerk, the sonic backdrop would be later Scott Walker and dub. 

What began as a script depicting a journey from South London to the English coast of a man who had decided to disappear from his own life became a storyboard and then an art project of sorts as we attempted to convince financiers to make it. As the possibility of this happening began to recede we decided to keep refining it to best approximate the kind of film that given the opportunity we might have made. Drift is ultimately about an identity crisis, but it is also a document of an artistic endeavour that though unrealised managed to metamorphosise into something else.