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.

Germany 2018

In 2016 and 2017 our team member Michael Pigott (as Michael Lightborne) recorded and documented the shifting sonic texture of the cinema projection box. Few cinemas retained the capacity to project 35mm film alongside digital, and it was in some of these remaining boxes that Lightborne captured the persistent sounds of analogue projection.

The album was developed as part of The Projection Project. A special issue of the Journal of British Cinema and Television (Vol 15, No 1, 2018), edited by members of The Projection Project includes an article entitled Sounds of the Projection Box: Liner Notes for a Phonographic Method , which augments this album, and elaborates upon the theoretical and methodological rationale for the use of sonic field recording as a mode of enquiry.

To order a vinyl or digital copy of Sounds of the Projection Box or to read reviews, visit Gruenrekorder's website.

Sounds of the Projection Box

Side A

1. The thing
2. Making up the thing
3. Breaking down the thing
4. Lacing and Rolling Rear Window (error correction)

Side B

1. Hyde Park electromagnetic
2. The noise
3. Manual rewind
4. The Electric
5. The tower (death rattle)
6. Digital light

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).

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.

The latest issue of the Journal of British Cinema and Television (Vol. 15 No. 1), edited by Charlotte Brunsdon, Jon Burrows and Richard Wallace of The Projection Project has been published Edinburgh University Press and can be accessed here.

The issue contains a number of articles written by project team members and other experts in the field. The full table of contents is reproduced below:

Introduction
(Charlotte Brunsdon, Jon Burrows and Richard Wallace)

Going Digital: The Experience of the Transition to Digital Projection in UK Cinemas
(Richard Wallace)

Sounds of the Projection Box: Liner Notes for a Phonographic Method
(Michael Pigott)

Women in the Box: Female Projectionists in Post-war British Cinemas
(Richard Wallace, Rebecca Harrison and Charlotte Brunsdon)

Projection and Domestic Space: A Photo Essay
(Alexa Raisbeck)

‘Certificated Operators’ versus ‘Handle-Turners’: The British Film Industry’s First Trade Union
(Jon Burrows)

Disabled Operators: Training Disabled Ex-servicemen as Projectionists during the Great War
(Lawrence Napper)

'We shall really have to do something about your equipment’: The Projectionist’s Negotiation of Obsolescence in The Smallest Show on Earth and Coming Up Roses
(Claire Jesson)

A Cinema without Walls: An Interview with Ian Francis, Director of the Flatpack Film Festival
(Charlotte Brunsdon and Richard Wallace for The Projection Project)