Dial-A-Ride

Dial-A-Ride is a live science fiction/mystery film made daily in and around the Hayward Gallery in 2014, edited each afternoon, then shown at Hayward and streamed online each evening. Two women (actors, Monika Biiunait & Smilt Bagdin), members of secret community, arrive from Eastern Europe to reach their London contact (artist, Douglas Park). He is able to join missing links to complete their mission, but can he be trusted? The scripted scenarios meet headlong with documentary events, to make a film open to chance and outside influence, from the river’s tidal flow to the presence of South Bank Centre visitors. Waller’s film sits within the genre of science fiction/espionage but shares a sensibility with the mysteriously oblique French new-wave films of Jacques Rivette or the writing of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Philip K Dick. “Waller’s work then, in its conjunctions of past and present, might be a model of nonlinear time that allows for the influence of mysterious ambient forces on humanity; that puts faith at once in science and magic.”Martin Herbert, Art review Dec’12