Sally Golding, Matt Spendlove
VR headset, digital projection, 4.1 audio, translucent screen. Variable duration and size.
What is a cinema without images? What are the sensorial conditions of vision? Where does the screen start and end?
In Parallax expands the traditional architectural space of film by doubling the in-real-life (IRL) gallery screen via a complementary virtual reality (VR) experience. The resulting parallax centralises the viewer in the space between IRL and VR, suspending them amidst two possible viewings of an interconnected but differently realised work.
Inspired by Spanish film artist and inventor José Val del Omar’s evocative concept of the “apanoramic overflow” of the screen (in which the image spills out onto walls, floor, even audience), the installation questions the fixed position of the viewer. In Parallax brings both the device and the body to a purely sensory cinematic experience. Letting visitors move freely around (or, in VR, penetrate) the screen while feeling sound intimately and collectively, the installation is a playful inquiry into how we see objects and experience the world from different perspectives and within shifting timeframes.
Funded by
Commissioned by the Museum of the Moving Image, New York City, for ‘Cinema of Sensations: The Never-Ending Screen of Val del Omar’ 10 March - 1 October 2023.
Produced and presented with the generous support of the Australia Council for the Arts, ArtsACT, and the Australian Consulate-General, New York.
Curated by
Almudena Escobar López
Team
Tim Cowlishaw - Co-Creative Technologist
James Backhouse - Systems Solution Architecture
Photography Credits
Images 1 & 2 courtesy of Matt Spendlove
Image 3 - 4 by video stills by Niger Miles
About the Project Collaborators
Matt Spendlove is an artist from London who creates immersive installations, audiovisual performances and sonic artefacts. Across these situations he explores spatial ambiguity, structural form, waveform materiality and the illusory contours of psychophysics.
His work channels the dynamics of sound system culture by incorporating low frequency vibration alongside hacked code and optisonic experiments. He combines a preoccupation with emergent behaviour, rule based repetition and chaotic systems to generate enlivened visual stimuli and shape dubbed out, cracked and reductive sonics into audible geometric form. Through textured intricate production, his shows bring corporeal presence carved out with a minimalist’s scalpel.
International commissions, recordings and performances have included Mutek, Montreal; High Zero, Baltimore; Unsound Festival, NYC/Krakow; Club Transmediale, Berlin; Filmwinter, Stuttgart; Algorithmic Art Assembly; San Francisco; E-FEST, Tunisia; MoTA Gallery, Ljubljana; Cafe OTO, London; Melbourne International Film Festival; Metro Arts, Brisbane; and Serralves Museum, Porto.
https://cenatus.org/
http://spatial.infrasonics.net/
Tim Cowlishaw (London, 1983) is a designer and researcher based in Barcelona. He works predominantly with interaction and sound, and is interestehttp://spatial.infrasonics.net/d in creative work with digital media both as material exploration of digithttp://spatial.infrasonics.net/al technologies and infrastructures, and as a method for critical practice-based research. He has collaborated on work presented at Sonar+D, Eufonic festival and Medialab Matadero (Spain), Somerset House (UK) and Metro Arts (Australia), and is pursuing a PhD at BAU School of Art & Design, Barcelona.
https://www.timcowlishaw.co.uk/
Intra Protocol is an installation-performance which occupies and enlivens the audiovisual systems of the cinema. In conversation with the broader context of expanded cinema, my piece sets out to interrogate the technical apparatus of a contemporary digital cinema environment. I manipulate the elements of projection, speaker arrays, and lighting rigs as a form of experimental audiovisual composition. I consider this to be a practise of ‘social architecture’, thinking about the cinema as a constructed environment that shapes and conditions our behaviours and responses. This piece moves between traditional cinematic space and the ‘microcinema’ of personal devices. The composition is a communication protocol, or a script, for a new cinematic interface.
From club-like sound system bass tones and beats, to the monument of the screen glowing with LED sound sensitive lights, to frenzied colour fields and a distributed synthesizer on the audience’s own mobile phone devices – Intra Protocol plays with anticipation in an unexpected ‘happening’ to use the theatre itself as a creative tool.
Credits:
Created to accompany the Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s exhibition Light: Works from Tate's Collection, and programmed by Liquid Architecture in responses to Lis Rhodes' influential film installation, Light Music (1975), for a live performance and screening event.
Created in collaboration with Spatial (Matt Spendlove).
Listen to a podcast with Sally Golding hosted and produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger for Liquid Architecture.
Condensed performance recording from Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 2022
Assembly Now [onsite] and Assembly Now [online] is both an in-gallery participatory installation and a virtual interactive experience.
Assembly Now [onsite] uses the literal reflection of the audience’s image, combined with randomised spoken word sound design interconnected with lighting effects, to reflect on the age of ubiquitous photography from selfie culture, and surveillance capitalism, to facial recognition and eye tracking. Emotion analytics software used in neuro-marketing and image recognition is a blend of psychology and technology– capturing data on expression, to assume correlations in mood determined by machine learning.
A blend of psychology and technology – Assembly Now captures what it feels like to be inside the image through surprising interventions.
Assembly Now [online] uses the interface of the mirror via the participant’s own computer screens to elaborate the psychology and technology of emergent algorithmic software, which functions as a contemporary screen filtering our emotions. Simulating and expanding the physical installation, participants in the online version will be immersed in a work that plays with perception, interactivity and unexpected encounters – including the viewer’s own reflection captured and integrated within the artwork.
Credits:
Exhibition commissioned to inaugurate Metro Arts’ new main gallery at West Village, as part of Brisbane Festival 2020. Online experience supported with funding from the Resilience Fund, Australia Council for the Arts.
A discussion between artist, Sally Golding, and writer and researcher, Kate Warren, about Assembly Now, can be read here.
Sally Golding collaborated with Spatial (Matt Spendlove) and Tim Cowlishaw on this project from concept through technical implementation and presentation.