Spatial-Golding present an immersive space situated between cinema and club. Specially made for a re-invented cinema context.
Decompression unravels in the spirit of a ‘happening’ – an encounter between audiences, space and the elements of cinematic abstraction, explored via Sally Golding and Spatial’s longstanding interest in expanded cinema and sound system culture.
Decompression brings scope to the examination of cinematic conditions by introducing live coding resulting in electronic sound and LED light compositions, and improvised direct to camera manipulations of frame rate interference, eliciting stroboscopic and sonic states. Threaded throughout the performance is an examination of the original text Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood (1970), which re-purposed, poses questions concerning contemporary technological-utopia, pressing the issue of the viewing experience and mass entertainment into relevance with regards to today’s globally connected audiences. The performance also features a 'prepared' light sensitive screen, tactile projection beams, and surround sound.
Decompression considers the point at which contemporary expanded cinema meets algorithmic event. An ongoing point of enquiry, the live audiovisual composition seeks to highlight: The ‘dematerialisation’ of technology via spatial activation of the sound system, programmed LED lighting and manipulated projection beams; ‘deterritorialization’ touching on the audience’s potential role as participant; and ‘detemporalization’ in which the concept of time-based media is instead driven by generative software processes.
The performance explores the frequency of light and sound as both reductive and complex - resulting in a sensory and hypnotic live set which challenges the viewer’s expectation of auditory and visual perception.
Collaborator:
Spatial is electronic musician and creative technologist Matt Spendlove (UK).
First premiered at Tyneside Cinema, UK, for the Projections series, 2018.
Materials: 4 x Raspberry Pi LED wall mounted lights, live coding, web camera, Strobotac, library sound FX, various synthesisers, data projector, haze machine.
“You’d be hard-pressed to call what we saw a film, but it was most certainly an experience. If you could imagine a hypnotic cross between a club, a light show, and a cinema you’d be mostly right.” - Hey Art, What’s Good?, Oct 2018
All images Spatial-Golding Decompression. Photos by Dee Chaneva for Tyneside Cinema.
A shifting project of generative feedback systems, amplified lighting, prepared screens and phasing projection beams.
Light Begets Sound is a durational performance focussing on the controlled phasing of both projector and LED lights articulated through custom software and custom built light sensitive instruments. Interrogating aural and optic as well as physiological senses through integrated feedback systems, the performance entices the audience into a state of hallucinogenic perception created through mixing desk input and feedback, and analogue and digital light combinations on a prepared screen.
An ongoing and evolving investigation - solo performances have taken place at S8 Mostra de Cinema Periférico, Fundación Luis Seoane, Spain (2017), Labor Berlin, Film in the Present Tense, Berlin (2017), Back to the Future, Filmwerkplaats, WORM, Rotterdam (2017). Collaborative performances with Spatial (UK) have taken place at Splice Festival, London (2017) and East End Film Festival, London (2017).
Materials: 2 × film projectors with no film, motorised colour shutters, camera flash units, various custom sound devices, mixing desk feedback, light sensitive prepared screen, custom sound-light control software by Spatial
Photo courtesy of [S8] Mostra de Cinema Periférico
Photo by Melina Pafundi, LaborBerlin
Photo courtesy [S8] Mostra de Cinema Periférico, Fundación Luis Seoane Museum
Photo courtesy [S8] Mostra de Cinema Periférico, Fundación Luis Seoane Museum
Photo courtesy [S8] Mostra de Cinema Periférico, Fundación Luis Seoane Museum
Photo courtesy [S8] Mostra de Cinema Periférico, Fundación Luis Seoane Museum
Multifarious live performance collaborations with UK musician and creative technologist Spatial transversing the club and gallery.
Golding harnesses the frequencies inherent in her choice of light sources including amplified camera flash units and laboratory strobe lights– creating discordant sonics and harsh lighting, whilst using torch light to tease begrudging sounds from small handmade light sensitive audio devices. Spatial constructs systems of minimalist vision and brings force to sound system culture through his use of home coded software and analogue modular synthesisers, flipping sound and light relationships into polyrhythmic convulsions.
Collaborative performances have taken place at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2016), Fort Process Festival, Sussex, UK (2016), Contact Festival, London (2016) and CAM2 – Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid (2016).
Materials: Golding – 16mm film projectors, motorised shutters, camera flash units, laboratory strobe light, mixing desk feedback; Spatial – custom software & live coding, synthesizers
Photo by Katja Goljat, Sonica Festival, Ljubljana
Photo by Katja Goljat, Sonica Festival, Ljubljana
Photo by Pedro Figueiredo, Fundação de Serralves, Porto
Photo by Pedro Figueiredo, Fundação de Serralves, Porto
Photo by Pedro Figueiredo, Fundação de Serralves, Porto
Photo by Pedro Figueiredo, Fundação de Serralves, Porto
Photo by Katja Goljat, Sonica Festival, Ljubljana
Immersive audiovisual performance with UK electronic artist Spatial, taking the audience on a hallucinogenic dark carnival ride exploring the slippage between parapsychology and technology.
Exploring themes of ‘transmission’ and ‘medium’, Breaching Transmissions implicates the audience as participant by harnessing abstract infrared camera images of the viewer’s bodies in space to reconfigure the typical performer-technology-audience relationship. A sensory assault probing the ‘haunted’ in modern media, inhabiting the space between illusion and perception to manifest spectral horror and the etheric double.
Credits: Breaching Transmissions premiered at Melbourne International Film Festival at the Grey Gardens gallery, supported by an Emerging and Experimental Arts Grant, Australia Council for the Arts
Read an experiential review: Breaching Transmissions – Can expanded cinema expand your mind?, The Conversation, Polly Stanton & Sean Redmond, August 2015
Materials: 16mm film optical soundtrack, Kinect camera, data projector, camera flash units, sound composition, portable sonic devices, torch light, lenses
Photo by Tony Zara, Melbourne International Film Festival
Photo by Tony Zara, Melbourne International Film Festival
Photo by Tony Zara, Melbourne International Film Festival
Photo by Tony Zara, Melbourne International Film Festival
Photo by Alex Cuffe
Audiovisual composition for the online or physical gallery space, pushing the thresholds of capture and display, and expectation and experience.
Composed of light sensitive audio devices, handmade synthesisers, a voice sampler, and a contact microphone on a film projector– the audio recording surmises moments experienced during the live performance of expanded cinema – constantly failing devices and worn away film strips, the menace of a pressurised ‘live’ environment and audience and performer expectations. The energy of the track is tense – threatening our capacity to perceive with threshold pushed to the limits bringing forth wails of electrical protest. The visual track mimics and interferes with these ideas– toy lights, torches and strobes– shine directly into the lens of a smartphone camera interrupt the video frame rate, making visible the shutter as system detritus. The vocals give the title to the track – lifted from the pages and spines of dusty tomes musing on the unusual technology-afterlife belief systems of the Spiritualist movement.
FEATURED IN THE WIRE TO ACCOMPANY SALLY GOLDING’S INTERVIEW, JUNE 2016 PRINT EDITION
Created for the exhibition Exhaust curated by Erin Sickler at Contemporary Art Tasmania, Australia.
Spirit Intercourse / 8min 40sec / 2015 / sound and video composition by Sally Golding / produced by Spatial
Headphones and full screen recommended!
A ‘darkroom composition’ reminiscent of tape cut-ups created by re-working the optical soundtrack area of the industrial film sound system as a form of psychoacoustic radio play. Presented both as a live audiovisual performance and an audio release.
Sound recordings taken from a flexi disc containing a dialogue about past life regression, and vinyl library sound effects, were reformatted as optical sound waveforms by recording into a 16mm sound camera, hand processing the film, and contact printing the resulting waveforms into a composition for live performance.
Sounds surface and regress, male voices ‘authorise’ and female voices ‘characterise’, as an uncannily obscured field of light and dark unfolds on screen. Created by the texture of the clear sticky tape used to hold down the composition during printing, the flickering film frames compel the viewer to hallucinate a non-existent visual subtext complemented by the alternating in/audibility. Sound and light weave into a disorienting cacophony, intensified and punctuated by an antique laboratory strobe light and an anti-syncopating rotating shutter intervening before the projector’s light beam. Indicated in the repetition of the sound sample, ‘To find a memory in the vastness of time…’ Ghosts – Loud + Strong explores the experience of sensations that threaten to exceed our capacity to perceive them.
A minimalist approach to vision with a focus on sound as text and imagery for the mind– the projected image mixed live with strobe lights and the performers own physical interference reveals fleeting glimpses of the wavy optical sound track, and subtle abstract artefacts created by the photochemical production process.
RELEASED BY PSYCHÉ TROPES ON HFF VOL.1 TRIPLE VINYL 180G LP COMPILATION
“Sally Golding deftly exploits precisely that flapping and buzzing embedded in the media that mutates, as it transmits from format to format, into recognisable sounds such at the swelling of a thunderstorm, layering in an impasto of noise.” – Stuart Heaney (Psyche Tropes, 2014)
2 × 16mm projectors, contact printed optical sound film & loop from original flexi disc recording & sound effects, rotating shutter, laboratory strobe, oscillator synth
From Golding’s early body of work investigating into the relationship of performativity and liveness, and the limits of the material film-sound system.
Photo by Pierre Acobas, Cable Festival
Photo by Pierre Acobas, Cable Festival
Photo by Pierre Acobas, Cable Festival
Photo courtesy of Collectif Jeune Cinema
A ‘darkroom composition’ reminiscent of tape cut-ups created by re-working both the picture and optical soundtrack areas of the industrial film system as a site for collage. Presented as a live audiovisual performance mixing film reel and film loop sources with light play.
A form of disjunctive archiving, images and sounds were contact printed from 16mm science educational films including the Voice of the Insect and Photons, as well as Golding’s home archive of classic Super8 horror and sci-fi films to create a haunting narrative about the nature of sound and light. Projected images are further manipulated with refracting lenses during the performance, shifting the locked rectangle of the screen. The soundtrack was made by manually sampling contacted printed waveforms and made sound graphics.
Double screen film performance. 16mm film reel and film loops, refracting lenses & filters
From Golding’s early body of work investigating into the relationship of performativity and liveness, and the limits of the material film-sound system.
Photo by Bryan Spencer, Open Frame
Photo by Bryan Spencer, Open Frame
A ‘darkroom composition’ created by re-working the optical soundtrack area of the industrial film sound system as a musical tool. Presented as a live audiovisual performance.
Slivers of someone else’s silver small-screen memory, evocations and apparitions unknitted by the passage of time. A photo-sonic film where images literally generate the experimental noise soundtrack, threading between rising pitches and faltering tones. Composed entirely in the darkroom, 9.5mm vintage home movies from the Brisbane area were contact printed alongside reproduced waveforms of local cicadas and instructional jazz scores. A wonky filmic resurrection functioning as a cine-essay, and dissolving in new points of opti-sonic language.
Layered single screen, double projector film performance. 16mm film reel and film loops, original 9.5mm archival images, waveforms, insects, obstructions with coloured filters and stroboscopic shutters
From Golding’s early body of work investigating into the relationship of performativity and liveness, and the limits of the material film-sound system.
Optical sound film strip collage
Photo by Klaus W. Eisenlohr, Directors Lounge
A shifting live performance exploring the ‘noise’ of light and sound, balancing film projection and mixing desk investigations.
Punk aesthetics treading the ground of industrial noise and sampling culture form a nebulous of light and sound which envelope the audience in the performer’s antics of ‘liveness’. Over a cacophonic disruption of plundered library horror sound effects and music samples hand printed as an optical sound collage onto filmstrips, Golding iterates and effects live spoken vocals of typical phrases described of near death experiences, initiating a bizarre live process of sonic decay. On screen a hand creeps around rumbling classic TV ‘fuzz’, originally created by an ironic process of digital and analogue re-filming between a smartphone and a Bolex film camera. The performance is overdriven by a rotating cyan and yellow colour filter wheel and a sonically and visually pulsing strobe light. A disjunctive experience – the media is embodied, haunted.
2 × 16mm optical sound hand contact printed film loop & reel; voice – phrases of the near undead; optical Devices – laboratory strobe, rotating colour filter wheel; bodily interference
Photo by Richard Bevan (video still), Analogue Recurring
Photo by Richard Bevan (video still), Analogue Recurring
Photo by Rich Dyson, Edinburgh International Film Festival
Drawings made by audience member Dot during the performance of Light At The End Of The Tunnel at Audiograft Festival
A shifting live performance exploring the ‘noise’ of light and sound, balancing film projection and mixing desk investigations.
Using film strips created in an artist film lab, light and sound are woven into an intense barrage of fleeting images, veiled through de-focussed projection beams, masking rotating shutters, and over-effected mixing desk feedback. The resulting compressed imagery reveals an audience of seated children reacting in expressions of horror and unease to an unseen source of fright, mixed with projection loops of a finger as it wags across the screen– and the performers own body as an obscuring shadow which blends the images together in sinister appeal. A laboratory strobe light cuts a rhythmic beat over the gurgling optical printed soundtracks created by blocky shapes forming a rhythmic stream of warped repetition. A rotating colour wheel turns the vision on screen into a hallucinogenic vortex of abstracted shape. A durational, shifting piece contrasting blurred/sharp flickering vision.
3 × 16mm projectors, contact printed optical sound film loops, rotating colour wheel, laboratory strobe, oscillator synth, prismatic interference, bodily obstruction
From Golding’s early body of work investigating into the relationship of performativity and liveness, and the physicality of light.
Golding’s seminal expanded cinema work using her body as a screen to break the expectations of projection-performer relationships, and to investigate the undertones of feminism and ‘otherness’ through imagery and sound.
Obsessions with horror iconography manifest as phantasmagoric projections onto the filmmakers own body in a bizarre accumulation of unreality. Notions of ‘projected’ identity, grotesquerie, and the uncanny are interrogated in this shifting projector alignment for face(s). Iterations of ‘monsters’, a beauty therapist, medical imagery and an ape to homo sapien transpire across Golding’s face and torso as the projector flash-fires stroboscopic light, as the soundtrack intensifies mixing physically emotive sounds of breathing, laughing, crying and disconcertingly a telephone ringing and a thunderstorm unfolding. Golding’s key expanded cinema work, bringing body and apparatus to the fore, has been presented in a range of venues and events, as well as in more unusual settings including a cinema stage (Metro Arts, Brisbane), the forest (Supernormal festival, UK) and a park (Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto).
”In my own expanded cinema work Face of An Other (2009) created in Australia, I walk into the path of dual projector beams, and wait for the images to arrive from the reels of film. In what is perhaps a moment of surprise for the audience, images of horror align onto my body—my face successively taking on the mask of movie monsters, a beauty therapist and a series of evolutionary great apes, whilst my chest is exposed to a skeletal rib cage and medical imagery of breasts and lungs. Caught like a wild animal in the projector headlights, I stand uncomfortably still whilst a soundtrack constructed from library horror effects unravels with the peal of corny screaming, a baby’s cry, canned audience laughter, and finally the sounds of a storm—which perhaps become ominous once again through this disturbing abstract pulp construction.” - Sally Golding, extract from Expanded Cinema Unowned: Noise and Liveness in the Contemporary, San Francisco Cinematheque, 2016 (read the full article here)
”A screen-possessed cadaver” – Dirk de Bruyn (Experimental and Expanded Animation, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
Featured in Not An Image of the Death of Cinema by Jonathan Walley, Expanded Cinema, published by Tate Modern (extract), 2012
16mm film reel & film loop, sound effects, unhinged Foley, stroboscopic ‘lightning’
Sound: Golding and Joel Stern
Photo by Steve Trigg, Brisbane Powerhouse
Photo by Steve Trigg, Brisbane Powerhouse
Photo by Steve Trigg, Brisbane Powerhouse
Photo by Pedro Figueiredo, Fundação Serralves, Porto
Photo by Steve Trigg, Brisbane Powerhouse
Face Of Another discussed by author and academic Jonathan Walley, Tate Modern expanded cinema symposium
Poster for Avant Goes Live, Karlstad
Drawing created by a young audience member during a performance of Face of An Other
A performance altering the dynamics of space, with the reversal of the projection beam, caught onto a hand held moveable object.
Live colour separation portraiture generating ‘Golding-colour’– an experimental and punk own film colour reproduction system. Three projectors each with red, green or blue filtration are aligned and projected towards the audience and captured onto a picture frame as the performer moves into the space. The alignment and misalignment generates a psychedelic picture motif– shifting hues and eerie faces from the past– the content mimicking the preoccupation of still life and Victorian portraiture subjects.
3 x RGB colour separation 16mm film reels, RGB filters, picture frame, composed library sound effects
From Golding’s early body of work investigating hacking and DIY darkroom techniques to create punk and playful performance aesthetics.
Photo by Klaus W. Eisenlohr, Directors Lounge