Works in moving image and sound

Exploring what we perceive to be reality then presenting it as something completely different

Video artist, short film and music maker

After working on several narrative-based short films, including the “Spellbound” trilogy and “metroscopic”, I began to explore how the moving image works to complement music. These short films take the form of multi-layered, reality-distorted voyages - illusory displacements of time and place - atmospheric, harmonious, fractious and chaotic.

Example Festival screenings:

The New York, Paris, Leeds & Brussels Film Festivals
The St Petersburg Festival of Arts
Britspotting Berlin, Zurich & Stuttgart
Cinem@tic Film Festival, IMAX, Birmingham
Visionaria, Siena, Italy
Darklight, Dublin
Sensoria, Sheffield

Other screenings:

Tate Britain
Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York
BBC Big Screens nationwide
Big Screen Project Manhattan
Tenderpixel Gallery, London
BBC Electric Proms
MTV

Film

Having started my creative life as a painter, my desire is to be able to stop any one of my films at any point and for that single frame to be good enough to stand on it’s own as a still image that wouldn’t look out of place exhibited in a gallery.

I film what I find, and in doing so, I tend not to direct any action. Who people are is generally not of interest - what they do and how they move is mostly what concerns me; so except for the odd occasion, the people in my films are anonymous shapes rather than recognisable beings. When working in such a guerrilla fashion there is an arbitrary nature to the accumulated footage, therefore I tend not to film with a specific goal in mind, but to collect and then use the stored footage whenever I think it suits a particular composition. There is a real freedom using this method of working that allows you to be uninhibited and spontaneous. There are no rules. Making films this way is like dreaming - you can let your imagination wander wherever it wants, and do whatever it wants when it’s there, which opens up many more possibilities for expressiveness.

For a few years now my work has included mirrored symmetry - from the Greek word symmetria, meaning balance and harmony in proportions. Symmetries abound in nature from sub-atomic particles to anything as big as you care to imagine. A mirrored moving image is perfectly balanced, but can also drastically alter the perception of space and time; either turning the action in on itself, or outwards away from itself, depending on the placement of the mirroring. The viewer knows they are being taken on a journey but the focal point is often where the mirrors meet rather than the reality as it was originally filmed. This can bring to mind the ‘tunnel of consciousness’ that people say they feel drawn down during near-death experiences.

When the stereoscopic mirrored images are re-inverted to become quadroscopic and other angled mirrored images are added to make kaleidoscopic, the ‘real’ action is abstracted and distorted more and more, and reality as we know it becomes something completely different. The use of symmetry in all its forms opens up a multitude of new possibilities for interpretation, and with the addition of other atmospheric layers, the many combinations turn everyday action into mesmeric multi dimensional filmic universes.

The other specific area that fascinates me is the ‘sublime’. In Classical terms it was the human being dwarfed by the vastness of nature, heaven-sent storms, the immense power of the ocean, or the supernatural. In my work, the ‘sublime’ still involves nature but is combined with other layers to produce dreamlike and occasionally, surreal juxtapositions that interpret imaginary worlds. For me, the ‘sublime’ is taking a journey through landscapes and turning it into a completely new sensory experience that challenges our perceptions of what is real and what is not.

Music

The music of my alter ego, 00 Newchair, is powerfully rhythmic and atmospheric. It drifts on electronic seas of layered beats mixing hybrid synthetic sound with original sound bites recorded from everyday life. It immerses you in a schizophrenic adventure which reverberates through an alternative sonic world. On occasions I am joined by Sujatha Menon, from Satsangi, who has free reign to write her own vocals to compliment my work.