Digital Light Processing

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A set of prepared digital projectors present floating, rotating rocks on freestanding and wall-mounted screens. Motorised lenses and crumpled plastic send images flying around the room like poltergeists.

Digital Light Processing explores the objecthood of the projected image, the imagehood of the object, the thinginess of the projection screen, and the spatio-temporal presence of projected light. Combining now antiquated home movie and slide projection screens with contemporary DLP projectors that have been prepared or augmented in various ways, this piece situates digital projection within a long history of the moving, reflected and radiant image, proposing questions about our imagined relationship with the digital image, with virtual and real spaces, analogue and digital media, materiality and intangibility, the important and inconsequential, the singular and the multiple, work and art, blinky lights and loud noises.

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This collection of works was commissioned by Vivid Projects for Mediafest, 5 – 27 October, 2018

 

On october 20th I performed a live manipulation of the system of projectors, screens and sound that made up installation, ‘Digital Light Processing’. Using induction coil microphones the electromagnetic fields produced by the individual projectors are amplified, processed and mixed, while the digital video flowing through the projectors is gradually altered to produce radical shifts and rhythmic patterns of image and sound. This contemporary mode of expanded cinema interrogates the technology and medium of digital moving image projection, in the spirit of Filmaktion and others, by listening to the hidden sounds of digital projection, and improvising a live composition of the processed electromagnetic fields of multiple projectors, while they display an evolving quasi-synchronised remix of one of the floating rocks.