Sally Golding

12 x custom LED light bars; venue LED lighting rig; speaker array; DMX sound-to-light protocol; VDMX software; sound design; LDR light sensitive audio device; laboratory strobe light; camera flash unit; voice

An ephemeral and immersive performance, Re(Evoke) manifests the visible light spectrum using a collision of soundscapes, blending cinema-for-the-ear with bass-driven electronic music to create an inseparable audiovisual synthesis.

Staged in the round with twelve hand-made light bars, and tapping into an array of venue lighting and speaker rigs, the performance draws the audience into a contrasting space of slowly pulsating and energising light fields which collide with stroboscopic shapes. Sonic assemblages composed with samples, vocals, beats and the sound of amplified lighting, are communicated as luminous values, infusing the lighting fixtures with RGB and white signals to create a liminal space for perception and sensation.


CURATED BY
Premiere for Essential Tremors music + art series, curated by Angus Andrew [Liars]


PERFORMACNES
Ainslie Art Centre, Kamberri/Canberra
Phoenix Central Park, Gadigal Country/Sydney.


COLLABORATOR
Matt Spendlove (Spatial)
mattspendlove.com
www.cenatus.org


ADDITIONAL CREDITS
Orb by Clemens Habicht for Essential Tremors, 2024

4 x Raspberry Pi wall mounted LED lights; live coding; web camera; Strobotac laboratory strobe light; various synthesisers; data projector; haze

Spatial-Golding present an immersive space situated between cinema and club. Specially made for a re-invented cinema context. Decompression considers the point at which contemporary expanded cinema meets algorithmic event.

Decompression unravels in the spirit of a ‘Happening’ – an encounter between audiences, space and the elements of cinematic abstraction, explored via Sally Golding’s 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 to enact electronic music and LED lighting compositions, and improvised direct to camera manipulations, all within the space of the cinema. Threaded throughout the performance is an examination of the original text, ‘Expanded Cinema’ by Gene Youngblood (1970), which re-purposed in this live context, 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.

An ongoing practice of enquiry, the live audiovisual composition seeks to highlight: ‘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
Matt Spendlove (Spatial), UK


COMMISSION
Premiere for Tyneside Cinema, UK, for Projections, 2018


MEDIA
“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

Multiple 16mm projectors; motorised colour shutters; camera flash units; custom sound devices; light sensitive prepared screen; custom sound-to-light software

Generative feedback systems, amplified lighting, prepared screens, and phasing projection beams, come together across shifting expanded cinema performances.

Light Begets Sound is a series of durational performances focussing on the potential of cinematic machine devices to immersive audiences in states of perception and sensation.

Across controlled phasing of projector and LED lights articulated through custom software and custom built light sensitive instruments, the performances expanded the space of the gallery, cinema and club, overflowing to encompass the audience.

Aural and optic feedback systems, prepared screens, and shadow play, invite the audience to experience dynamic flow states and unexpected encounters.

SOLO PERFORMANCES
[S8] Mostra de Cinema Periférico, Fundación Luis Seoane, Spain, 2017
Labor Berlin, ‘Film in the Present Tense’, Berlin, 2017
Filmwerkplaats, ‘Back to the Future’, WORM, Rotterdam, 2017)

COLLABORATIVE PERFORMANCES
With Matt Spendlove (Spatial)
mattspendlove.com
www.cenatus.org
Splice Festival, London, 2017
East End Film Festival, London, 2017

Golding: 16mm film projector; motorised shutters; camera flash units; laboratory strobe light; optical reflective sheeting. Spatial: custom software; live coding; synthesisers.

Multifarious live performance collaborations with UK musician and creative technologist Spatial, transversing the gallery, club and cinema.

Drawing from her background in expanded cinema and avant-garde music, Golding creates powerful sensory experiences designed to both disorient and seduce the spectator. Her live sets unravel in the style of a ‘Happening’ to incorporate aspects of the performance space by blending discordant sonics and cracked lighting, often incorporating the audience themselves into her unstable audiovisual systems. She explores perception through intangible elements such as light and temporality, seeking abstracted meaning in ephemeral situations and generative systems.

Spatial (Matt Spendlove) 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
Fundação de Serralves, Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, 2016
Fort Process Festival, Sussex, UK, 2016
Contact Festival, London, 2016
SONICA, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2016
CAM2 – Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid, 2016

2 x 16mm film optical soundtracks; Kinect camera & audience’s shadows; data projector; camera flash units; torch light; lenses; translucent screen. Variable duration and scale.

Exploring themes of ‘transmission’ and ‘medium’, Breaching Transmissions implicates the audience as participants by harnessing abstract images of the viewer’s bodies to reconfigure the typical performer-technology-audience relationship.

Interweaving optical sound composition, live 16mm film projection, light environments, and referencing the format of the séance in which parapsychology and technology coalesce, Breaching Transmissions invites the audience to enter a hypnotic, sensory zone.

An immersive audiovisual performance in collaboration with UK electronic musician and artist Spatial, Breaching Transmissions is a sensory assault probing the ‘haunted’ in modern media, inhabiting the space between illusion and perception to manifest spectral horror and the etheric double.

“Cinema reimagined, Golding's performances are cacophonic, overdriven and trance-like states blending expanded cinema, sound art and performance.” - MIFF, 2015


COMMISSION
Exclusive premiere commissioned by Melbourne International Film Festival, in partnership with Grey Gardens gallery. Supported by the Emerging and Experimental Arts fund, Creative Australia.


COLLABORATOR
Matt Spendlove
mattspendlove.com
www.cenatus.org


PRESS
Read an experiential review: Breaching Transmissions – Can expanded cinema expand your mind?, The Conversation, Polly Stanton & Sean Redmond, August 2015

Single channel video; sound; 8:40mins

Composed of direct light-to-camera sensor manipulations, light sensitive audio devices, handmade synthesisers, layered vocals, and a contact microphone on a film projector– the audio recording surmises moments experienced during the live performance of expanded cinema. The energy of the track is tense– threatening our capacity to perceive with threshold pushed to the limits and bringing forth wails of electrical resistance. The visual track both mimics and interferes– toy lights, torches and strobes– shine directly into the lens of a smartphone camera interrupting the video frame rate to make 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. The threshold is exceeded, the aura is manifested and cracked.


PRESENTATIONS & PRESS
FEATURED IN THE WIRE TO ACCOMPANY SALLY GOLDING’S FEATURE INTERVIEW, JUNE 2016

Commissioned for Exhaust, an exhibition curated by Erin Sickler for Contemporary Art Tasmania, Australia, 2015

STUDIO PRODUCER
Matt Spendlove (Spatial)

2 × 16mm projectors; contact printed optical sound film reel & loop from; sound effects; rotating shutter; laboratory strobe; oscillator synth and mixing desk feedback

From Golding’s early body of work investigating the relationship of performativity and liveness, and the limits of the material film-sound system.

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’– deliberately setting up oppositions 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…’ Ghost – 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 is mixed live with strobe lights and the performers own physical interference to reveal fleeting glimpses of wavy optical sound tracks, and subtle abstract artefacts created by the photochemical production process.

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


MEDIA
Sound also released by Psyché Tropes on HFF Vol.1, triple vinyl 180G LP compilation, with hand contact printed film strips

2 x 16mm film reel and film loops; optical sound; refracting lenses; colour filters

From Golding’s early body of work investigating the relationship of performativity and liveness, and the limits of the material film-sound system.

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 contact printed waveforms and handmade sound graphics.

16mm film reel and film loops; optical sound; insects; obstructions with coloured filters, shutter and stroboscopic light

From Golding’s early body of work investigating the relationship of performativity and liveness, and the limits of the material film-sound system.

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 expanded cinema 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.

16mm optical sound hand contact printed film loop & reel; live vocals; laboratory strobe; rotating colour filter wheel; performer’s bodily interference

From Golding’s early body of work investigating the relationship of performativity and liveness, and the limits of the material film-sound system.

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 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’, created by the 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.

PERFORMANCES INCLUDE
Audiograft, Oxford, 2015
International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2015
Black Box Live, Edinburgh International Film Festival, 2014
Analogue Recurring, Lo&Behold and State51, 2013

16mm film reel & film loop; sound effect and unhinged Foley; stroboscopic ‘lightning’

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 gaze and ‘otherness’ through imagery and sound.

Obsessions with horror iconography manifest as phantasmagoric projections onto the artist’s 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, and 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 theatre stage (Metro Arts, Brisbane), the forest (Supernormal Festival, UK) and a sculpture park (Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto).


PRESS
”In my own expanded cinema work Face of An Other, created in Australia in 2009, 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 sound 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


SOUND DESIGN COLLABORATION
Joel Stern

3 x RGB colour separation 16mm film reels; RGB filters; picture frame; library sound effects; performer’s own body

From Golding’s early body of work investigating hacking and DIY darkroom techniques to create playful and punk performance aesthetics.

A performance altering the dynamics of space, with the reversal of the projection beam, caught in a handheld moveable object.

Live colour separation portraiture generating ‘Golding-colour’– an experimental and punk film colour reproduction system of the artist’s own experiments. Three projectors each with red, green and 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.