The Chimera Project:

In 2002 The Light Surgeons played two sell-out shows of their documentary performance All Points Between at the Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. The events generated a lot of interest, and the Tyneside Cinema invited The Light Surgeons to do a residency project in Newcastle.

TLS sought to apply their self-sampling aesthetic to a different kind of filmmaking. Taking inspiration from the Surrealist palour game of exquisite corpse, their idea was to create a portrait of a city through a creative collaboration with its local inhabitants – artists, musicians, writers, photographers and animators observing and commenting on their own city.

The films structure would then evolve through a process of mass observation - each participating artist creating elements of the final collage that would represented a chimera of the city. The finished films were also remixed and performed live alongside the original musical scores composed for each film.

The Chimera Project_Newcastle & Gateshead:

The first experiment brought together Newcastle based artists: Christo Wallers, Jackie Scollen, Steve Bird, Laura Reid, James Postlethwaite, Huw Thomas, Michael Jeffries, Peter Clark, David McClure, Alex McGregor, and Tom Bland.

The resulting film is a psycheo-geographical map of the city through interviews, field recording, animations and audiovisual tracks. It reflects the city’s people: their hopes and cynicism towards their bid to become European city of culture, their military and seafaring heritage, and their love of football - capturing its fast changing architectural landscape.

The project was run over a six month period through a series of workshops and was edited by Chris Allen, James Price, and Jude Greenaway.

more info:
lightsurgeons.com