installation

{ v-frown }

Response work for 'Networked Art Forms: Tactical Magick Faerie Circuits' @ CAST gallery

From program: "in response to the 'networked' part of the title for this event, I originally began to construct a circuit bent colour organ comprising of various hacked toy instruments and old tv -games. I interconnected the hacked circuits so that they were responding to each other to create a domino glitch effect; playing a note on a keyboard would produce a visual glitch in a tv game which would in turn cause a glitch in another circuit etc resulting in a gloriously glitchy cacophony of colour and sound. and it was all working wonderfully until, very recently, it blew up.

This work is the dying remains of that colour organ. One of the last remaining circuits (a V - Smile) still powers up and continues to send out rapid and irregular rhythmic pulses. I have installed a button next to the work which allows the viewer to control the fate of this last circuit - pushing it increases voltage which intensifies sound and visuals, but my drastically reduces its life span. Push with care."

{ at the top of a ladder a dream recurs }

created for Salamanca Arts Centre's 35th birthday event SAC35, 2012

There is a space only accessible via ladder which the audience climb, one by one. The trap door at the top is open only enough so that they can see into the space but not enter. Inside, a dream recurs over and over. The space is full of grass and a broken brick wall and sound and mist and at the back there is an elephant person (me) with a lantern, looking for something important.

{ The Green Room }

A site specific performance (Collaboration with Jane Longhurst)

Program Notes:
A Green Room is used to refer to the space in a theatre which accommodates performers before and after a performance, and during the show when they are not engaged onstage. What we wanted to take from the idea of a green room was this idea of waiting in a space between events and moments.

When we first entered the gunpowder magazine we were impressed by the chamber’s stillness, its cold solemnity, and the reverence that it inspired. There was a quality of timelessness that prompted us to contemplate the fact that this building was built 163 years ago with the purpose of waiting for a war which never came.

The Green Room is a site specific work in that nearly everything you will hear and see is derived directly from the extraordinary architectural features Magazine. Through light, sound and performance, Dylan and Jane hope to inspire a curiosity in this remarkable building, its complex architecture and extraordinary history.

{ between attraction & monstration }

Collaboration with Laura Hindmarsh, Sound to Light - Crossing Borders, DARK MOFO 2013

"I can’t escape the feeling that the you who lives here is an image, and what moves in the film is your true substance. If I may stretch the point, could it be that the entire universe and all the phenomena of this world are like film, from moment to moment everything continues to change, yet the past remains spooled up somewhere? And so we here are but images, soon to vanish without a trace, while our true substance lives properly within the film of the universe?" - Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Nikkai (trans. A Lump of Flesh) 1923
Referencing the techniques of early animation and pre-cinema optical devices this work explores the presence and otherness of the shadow. Here Sheridan, composer, sound and installation artist and Hindmarsh a visual artist working in video projection and performance merge their interests ranging from experimental music, philosophy surrounding memory and perception to the luminous darkness of Japanese theatre, cinema and aesthetics.
The work combines modern technology and software such as pure data with the mechanism of a 17th century magic lantern; an optical projection produced via a box, mirrored light source, an aperture and a convex lens. These early projections made not only images seen but seen through, an odd synthesising of Cartesian mechanism (eye, mirror, lens) with supernatural spectator experience (phantasmagoria).
This sound and light installation is an echo of a performance, initiated by the viewer who within the work has the opportunity to experience multiple senses of time. Similar to these initial encounters with the projected image here the artists aim to structure a sensory experience addressing the relation between time and space, spirit and matter, transcendence and immanence, attraction and monstration.*

*Tom Gunning and Andre Gaudreault, notion of attraction and monstration suggest a different paradigm for imagining space/time relations in film.

text by Laura Hindmarsh