Sally Golding

Sally Golding, Matt Spendlove
VR headset, digital projection, 4.1 audio, translucent screen. Variable duration and scale.

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.


COMMISSION
Commissioned by the Museum of the Moving Image, New York City, for ‘Cinema of Sensations: The Never-Ending Screen of Val del Omar’, March - October 2023.


SUPPORTED BY
Generously supported by Australia Council for the Arts, ArtsACT, and the Australian Consulate-General, New York.


CURATED BY
Almudena Escobar López, for Museum of the Moving Image, NYC


COLLABORATOR
Matt Spendlove
mattspendlove.com
www.cenatus.org


TECHNICAL CREDITS
Tim Cowlishaw - Co-Creative Technologist
James Backhouse - Systems Solution Architecture

Cinema 4K projector & sound system; RGB LED lighting; light sensitive sonified screen; VDMX software; audience’s own smartphone devices

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 sound system-driven beats, to the monument of the screen glowing with RGB sound-sensitive lights, to frenzied colour fields and a distributed synthesiser on the audience’s own mobile phone devices – Intra Protocol plays with anticipation and the unexpected in which the theatre itself becomes a creative and social tool.


PREMIERE
Created to accompany the Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s exhibition Light: Works from Tate's Collection, and programmed in partnership with Liquid Architecture, in response to Lis Rhodes' influential film installation, Light Music (1975), for a live performance event.


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


MEDIA
Listen to a podcast with Sally Golding hosted and produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger for Liquid Architecture.

Assembly Now [onsite] is an in-gallery participatory installation, and Assembly Now [online] is an interactive virtual experience.


Assembly Now [onsite] repositions the viewer within the context of contemporary portraiture, creating an ephemeral space where images become transient and transformative. Building on Walter Benjamin’s theory of mechanical reproduction, which suggests that technological reproduction strips an image of its unique "aura"—its presence tied to time and place—the installation considers how the networked or algorithmic image, with its endless generation of content and the intervention of a third, algorithmic gaze, further impacts the viewer/subject’s sense of agency.

In the gallery’s darkened chamber, a sound composition activates responsive lighting, guiding participants toward reflective surfaces. A two-way mirror engages with the viewer’s presence, merging their reflection with endlessly recombined spoken word soundscapes, creating a layered, sensory experience that blurs the boundaries between self-perception and external observation. This blend of psychology and technology immerses participants in a space where they become part of the image, undergoing unexpected interventions.

Extending on Golding’s earlier work Your Double My Double Our Ghost, which explored heautoscopy—a psychological phenomenon where individuals experience a confused perception of their double—Assembly Now [onsite] examines how ubiquitous photographic technologies influence this altered self-awareness. Much like in folklore, where the image holds a mysterious power over its subject, this unfolding installation uses information flow to create new narratives, turning the image into an active presence that reflects and shapes the identity of those it represents.

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 are immersed in a work that plays with perception, interactivity and unexpected encounters – including the viewer’s own reflection captured and integrated within the artwork.


EXHIBITIONS
Premiere inaugurating Metro Arts’ new main gallery at West Village, in partnership with Brisbane Festival 2020.

Online experience supported by the Resilience Fund, Creative Australia.


EXHIBITON CATALOGUE
A discussion between artist, Sally Golding, and writer and researcher, Kate Warren can be read here.

COLLABORATORS
Assembly Now [onsite]:
Matt Spendlove (Spatial)
mattspendlove.com
www.cenatus.org

Assembly Now [online] :
Matt Spendlove (Spatial)
mattspendlove.com
www.cenatus.org

Tim Cowlishaw
www.timcowlishaw.co.uk