December 2023 - January 2024
A series of Workshops At SPECTRAL Artist-led Spaces in Europe
Crater-Lab, Barcelona -16 Dec 2023
Challenging the Cinema Room (LAIA), Porto - 20 Dec 2023
Baltic analog Lab, Riga - 13 & 14 Jan 2023
A creative-critical workshop to investigate the practice of expanded cinema using speculative design to explore intangible properties and compositional methods which underpin sensory and participatory artist-audience experiences.
Connecting the physical darkroom with networked space through hybrid analogue and digital tooling, participants will experiment with 16mm optical sound and coded sound-vision patches to evaluate audiovisual relationships through performative techniques by linking sonic and visual parameters.
Expanded cinema is a concept and practice that extends the traditional understanding of cinema, incorporating a variety of media, sensory experiences, interactive elements, and usually, the audience themselves. As an artform, expanded cinema broke boundaries across the film and art worlds to combine social, technological and artistic ingenuity, drawing rich lineage from movements including, but certainly not limited to, proto-cinema, visual music, Happenings and Fluxus, light art and immersive environments, early computational art, and now, the continued exploration of experimental film and emergent digital processes. Constantly defying delineation, it has emerged afresh through a collective history which continues to evolve through critical revision and the proliferation of new works. This workshop leaps off the expanded cinema map to invite reflection and collective responses to these potential machine-body-space interfaces.
Led by the collaborative artist duo of Sally Golding and Matt Spendlove, the artists will draw upon their longstanding and interlocated practices in expanded cinema across experimental film, audiovisual performance, participatory installation, handcrafted software, sound art and electronic music production to articulate creative frameworks from celluloid to code.
WORKSHOP FORMAT
Delivered through presentations, demonstrations and hands-on practical sessions, the workshop focuses on the interplay between analogue and digital techniques, the immersive nature of expanded cinema, and the exploration of psychophysical perception through art. Creative frameworks have been applied to each method of working with the aim to foster conversation and enquiry around creativity, innovation, and forward-thinking artistic practices. Workshop participants will draw conclusions about the properties and parameters of selected analogue and digital tooling, as applied to the construction of sensory and participatory spaces.
MODULES
Module 1: Introduction to Expanded Cinema
Module 2: Creative Framework 1 – Evocation with Optical Sound & The Practice of Light
Module 3: Introduction to Digital Audiovisual Compositions with Unreal Engine, Metasounds, and Blueprints
Module 4: Creative Framework 2 – Perceptual Hacking with Unreal Engine
EXPERIENCE LEVEL & TOOLS
No prior experience required, however workshop participants who do have experience may also benefit from the participation in group activities and the critique of creative frameworks.
Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptop (PC or Mac) for the second half of the workshop when working with Unreal Engine. Instructions will be sent in advance to load the free software onto your computer. However, this should not be a barrier to attendance if you do not have a laptop to bring, as there will be a demonstration laptop always present, and participants are encouraged to share resources where possible.
Participants are advised that at times there may be stroboscopic light or high pitched sounds, and darkness when working in laboratory environments. Participants are encouraged to freely take a break or move to a comfortable part of the venue as necessary.
ABOUT THE ARTIST PRESENTERS
Sally Golding is an Australian-British-Estonian artist creating immersive audiovisual performances, participatory installations and creative-critical writing. Her work considers participation and liveness in immersive environments; art as a mechanism for shared experiences; and dialogues examining the role of the artist, audience and gallery within new technological contexts.
An inaugural recipient of the Oram Award (New BBC Radiophonic Workshop/PRS Foundation) for women innovating in sound and creative technologies; she has been part of the roster for the prestigious SHAPE platform for innovative music and audiovisual art in Europe, and her work has been recognised in publications including Millennium Film Journal, The Wire, Senses of Cinema, Tate Modern, Oxford University Press, I.B Tauris/Bloomsbury and Palgrave Macmillan. Exhibitions and performances have included: Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Museum of the Moving Image (US), Serralves Museum (PT), Digital Culture Centre (MX), CA2M: Contemporary Art Madrid, Whitstable Biennale (UK), Institute of Modern Art (AU), Sound of Stockholm, Abandon Normal Devices (UK), San Francisco Cinematheque, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Contemporary Art Centre (LT), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Contemporary Art Tasmania, South London Gallery and Tromsø Center for Contemporary Art (NO).
Her curatorial work as OtherFilm (AU) and Unconscious Archives (UK) has seen the delivery hundreds of innovative programs across moving image, sound and digital art, and her interest in the evolution and influence of technological art on society is demonstrated by her publication ‘Parsing Digital: Conversations in digital art by practitioners and curators’ (Austrian Cultural Forum London).
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 has been commissioned internationally.
He is the director of Cenatus, a company operating at the intersection of art, technology and networked culture that research and develop technological innovations through the lens of speculative design practice. He collaborates with clients on the creative direction, production and technology for live events, art installations, online media projects and immersive experiences.
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.
COLLABORATIVE PRACTICE
Commissions have included a large-scale immersive surround sound/VR experience for Museum of the Moving Image (USA); sound design for children’s accessible and inclusive theatre, Oily Cart (UK); a club-to-cinema experience for Tyneside Cinema (UK); an immersive film performance for Melbourne International Film Festival; performing the space of the gallery for Serralves Museum, Porto; and an IRL and online installation experience for Metro Arts, Brisbane.