This project built on the practical investigation of moving image medium specificity conducted during my previous experiment Camera/Projector (2014). After exposing the distinctions between analogue and digital in this initial work, I felt that a more useful method of addressing my research questions would be to combine and intersect these moving image formats. Specifically, I felt that creating work which required audiences to engage with the two formats simultaneously, rather than in sequence, would help to understand better how each technology shapes and controls light.

Taking cue from a previous limitation, I felt it was necessary to create a project that would display these different formats in their original medium, rather than undergo a telecine process to digitise the analogue material as in the case of Camera/Projector. While considering how I could interpose two moving image formats in this way, Anthony McCall’s work became a key point of inspiration, particularly Line Describing a Cone (1971), which foregrounds the beam of light emitted from the projector and in so doing prompts an audience to turn their back on the projection screen. McCall achieves this by exhibiting his work in intentionally hazy environments where particulates around the exhibition space emphasise and make visible the throw of light emitted from a projector, encouraging audiences to move around the space. 

In a manner similar to McCall’s, I wanted to question an audience’s interaction with moving imagery as a form of light and decided that placing two projectors opposite one another within a space, by projecting digital onto one side of a screen and film onto the other side, would help to metaphorically suggest my underlying investigation of these forms. 

To give audiences a greater understanding of the technical background of this project, I felt that the subject matter depicted across the two formats should reflect an aspect of the changing moving image technologies that were being investigated. To achieve this, I started researching sites with a high volume of photographic activity and found Alex Kachkaev and Jo Wood’s (2013) data visualisation, showing the most captured areas of London based on their volume of location tags in the online photography platform Flickr. Piccadilly Circus appeared to be one of the most densely populated points of the map. In conjunction with this, I felt it would be a suitable location due to the pervasive digital advertising displays that dominate surrounding buildings and highlight the ubiquity of moving images throughout our daily lives.

After creating Camera/Projector, I began using an updated iPhone with a slightly different camera and hence also changed to Super-8mm film, working with a Braun Nizo camera in order to maintain the image-area consistency across formats. This also assisted in the projection of the work. In addition to this, disparities in colour rendition became a noticeable visual feature of my previous experiment. Because this work aimed to explore the intersection of formats, rather than their distinction, I decided to desaturate the digital imagery and chose monochromatic Kodak Tri-X film to remove these distracting colour differences in order to help the resulting installation be more consistent as a whole.

The capture process for this installation took place at Piccadilly Circus during one afternoon in March 2015. The content for each format was designed to offer a different perspective on the space, a perspective which would then be intersected during the exhibition of the work. This approach was inspired by conventional approaches to filmmaking, which often cut between close character shots and wider compositions that establish a scene. I framed the Super-8mm material to show people taking photographs around the space in close detail, while the digital iPhone material was framed to include a much wider view of the environment.

Finally, I researched the technical properties of projectors to inform the dimensions of the resulting installation, and constructed a freestanding screen using rear projection fabric with equal front and back light transmission, so that both formats could be projected onto one central surface. During projection, the frame was divided so that the close Super-8mm shots appeared in the centre while the wider iPhone shots appeared in the surrounding area of the screen. This was intended to encourage audiences to look between formats, so they could only get a sense of the entire picture by examining both digital and analogue.