Output details

‘Act of Drawing’ was an event that included ‘Light Drawings: Interventionist Acts’ alongside other works by Stuart Brisley, Valie Export, Dryden Goodwin, Milan Grygar, Mark Lawrence Stafford, Rachel Lowe, Nancy Murphy Spicer and Jennifer West. Light Drawings was a time-based performance, installation and workshop produced in collaboration with Vicky Smith, presented over the period from 1-7 November 2009

‘Light Drawings’ was a phenomenological enquiry into the impact that tools and materials have on the artist, artwork and audience perception in real time. As an expanded cinematic, performative and sculptural realization, it was the first attempt to control mark-making and sound generation directly onto film as it runs through the projectors. It was initially developed from exploratory workshops as part of ‘KINOPIXEL/ Exploding the image, Reel #1: Structuralist/Materialist Experiments’ at the Herbert Art Gallery in 2008, but became a timely re-appraisal of the environments of film and its inherent obsolescence in relation to the theoretical understanding of the ubiquity of digital moving image. The event elicited a hybridity uncommon to conventional film practice.

The installation and performance comprised a column of 3 x16mm projectors, which threw their beams in different directions onto screens responding to the architecture of the space. Images were generated through interventions onto the moving film stock, with sound created by the action of tools on the celluloid picture and an optical sound track hovering on the edge of recognition. The performance interrogated the tactile interventions directly onto celluloid film. Each artist utilized selected tools: a prosthetic finger, a needle, sandpaper and soldering iron, to intervene, make marks and sound, gradually revealing the projected but camera-less moving image.

A series of workshops involved audiences in ‘interventionist acts’, developing their own manifestations on celluloid, which were spliced into the original projected loops. Smith and Saxon presented camera-less film workshops for 30 11-16 year-old students from four Birmingham schools funded by First Light Movies. Over 1000 visitors saw the performance. The work was published by Smith in Journal of Media Practice, V.11, 2, pp.191-193, Aug2010. Saxon was invited to screen a work developed from ‘Light Drawings’, Living Film, at no.w.here Film Lab, Bethnal Green, London, 16th Oct 2013.