Vivid Projects
Saturday 24 February 2018
This event was a collaboration between us and Lighttouch Festival. It consisted of panel talks and performances about VJing, live cinema and audio-visual performance. The symposium brought together academics, artists and VJs to discuss the role of projection in their work, and the current state of AV performance in the UK. A number of thematically focussed panel talks were followed by an evening of AV performances and ending with a VJ Jam until late. Running in parallel at Vivid Projects were a number of projection-based installations.
Speakers/artists included: Holotronica (Stuart Warren-Hill of Hexstatic) Toby Harris (*spark), Rebecca Smith (Urbanprojections), Miri Kat, Antonio Roberts, Raquel Meyers, Rod Maclachlan, Guy Edmonds, Blanca Regina, Richard Wallace, Flatpack Film Festival, Sean Clarke (Test Card Manchester).
SCMS 2017 Chicago, 22-26 March 2017
Saturday 25 March 2017
Members of the Project team convened a panel with international scholars Haidee Wasson and Lucie Cesalkova at this academic conference. The panel included the following papers.
Jon Burrows: Film Mutilation: Reading the Material Traces of the Projectionist’s Labor.
Lucie Cesalkova: Feel the Film: Materiality of Film Screening in Projectionists’ Memories.
Michael Pigott: Sounds of the Projection Box.
Haidee Wasson: Portability and Projectability: Notes Towards Cinema’s Expanded Apparatus.
The 10th NECS conference Potsdam, 28–30 July 2016
Friday 29 July 2016
Members of the Project team convened a panel at this academic conference including the following papers.
Richard Wallace: ‘I thought digital was a load of bunkum, but it’s not just good, it’s better’: The Introduction of UK Digital Cinema projection.
Claire Jesson: The Mediations of the Projectionist.
Michael Pigott: The Angel and the Baguette: Projection Mapping and Advertising in Britain.
Gas Hall: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
Wednesday 20-Sunday 24 April 2016
This exhibition, which opened 2016’s Flatpack Festival, was the culmination of photographer Richard Nicholson’s travelling the country and gaining privileged access to the projection box and was work we commissioned as part of the Project. Richard’s beautifully detailed images capture the pivotal moment of film making way for digital and the fundamental changes to both the projectionist’s job and work-place.
MAC (Midlands Arts Centre) Birmingham
Saturday 21-Sunday 22 November 2015
We took part in the Flatpack Festival’s ongoing ‘Celluloid City’ season including talks, activities and screenings at the MAC in Birmingham. Jon Burrows presented material on the origins of cinematic projection with fairground showmen and those who established cinemas in Britain up to the First World War. Skipping most of the intervening century, Michael Pigott’s talk drew parallels between these showmen and today’s VJs (video jockeys), and looked at how present-day digital projection is used in all manner of indoor and outdoor public spaces. Claire Jesson introduced a screening of Wim Wenders’ Kings of the Road (1976). Drawing on research done as part of her thesis on the representation of the projectionist in film, Claire briefly highlighted how the film references contemporary crises around cinema attendance and questions about film culture that are repeated in many of the projectionist movies her thesis considers.
Flatpack Hub, Birmingham
Sunday 9 April 2017, 2-3.30pm
From the ‘projectionettes’ of the two world wars right up to the present day, this audio-visual talk by Rebecca Harrison (University of Glasgow) and Richard Wallace was part of 2017’s Flatpack Festival and revealed the hidden history of the women who have worked in this typically masculine space.
Location: Gas Hall: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
Time: Sunday 24 April 2016, 3.45pm
Link: Flatpack Website
Hair in the gate. Cigarette burns. The Maltese Cross. Projectionists inhabit a parallel universe with its own lexicon and rituals. At this event, which was part of 2016’s Flatpack Festival, we shared some of the stories, sights and sounds discovered in our research. Claire Jesson was interested in the projectionist as represented onscreen and showed a selection of clips from different movies. Richard Wallace shared material from his interviews with film technicians about their work, while Michael Pigott played excerpts capturing the unique auditory environment of the box. Finally, projectionist and artist Alexa Raisbeck talked about how her work is informed by analogue film technologies.
Lifting the veil on cinema’s secrets
Location: Warwick Arts Centre Cinema
Time: Saturday 7 May 2016, 11am-3pm
Web link: Warwick Arts Centre
This event included an illustrated talk by Claire Jesson who looked at how the movies imagine the projectionist, and Richard Wallace talked about the projectionists’ memories spanning over 50 years of cinema history he recorded and the transformation from celluloid to digital exhibition. Event included a screening of Cinema Paradiso (1988) and a chance for the audience to glimpse inside Warwick Arts Centre’s own projection box.