Speculating Cinematic Spaces

This creative-critical workshop will investigate the practice of expanded cinema using speculative design to explore intangible properties and compositional methods which underpin sensory and participatory artist-audience experiences.

Connecting the physical darkroom with networked space through hybrid analogue and digital tooling, participants will experiment with 16mm optical sound and coded sound-vision patches to evaluate audiovisual relationships through performative techniques by linking sonic and visual parameters.

Expanded cinema is a concept and practice that extends the traditional understanding of cinema, incorporating a variety of media, sensory experiences, interactive elements, and frequently, situates the audience within the work. As an artform, expanded cinema broke boundaries across the film and art worlds to combine social, technological and artistic ingenuity, drawing rich lineage from movements including, but certainly not limited to, proto-cinema, visual music, Happenings and Fluxus, light art and immersive environments, early computational art, and now, the continued exploration of experimental film and emergent digital processes.

Led by the collaborative artist duo of Sally Golding and Matt Spendlove, the artists will draw upon their longstanding and interlocated practices in expanded cinema across experimental film, audiovisual performance, participatory installation, handcrafted software, sound art and electronic music production to articulate creative frameworks from chemical to code.

FORMAT
An intensive workshop delivered through presentations, demonstrations and hands-on practical sessions, the workshop focuses on the interplay between analogue and digital techniques, the immersive nature of expanded cinema, and the exploration of psychophysical perception through art. Creative frameworks have been applied to each method of working with the aim to foster conversation and enquiry around creativity, innovation, and forward-thinking artistic practices.

DAY 1
Module 1: Introduction to Ways of Thinking in Expanded Cinema

• Selective Overview of the History and Evolution of Expanded Cinema

• Mapping expanded cinema – from countercultural movements to the subversion of emergent technologies

• Speculative design to envision future forms and impacts of cinema

• Activating spaces

• Consider the role of audience interaction and participation in expanded cinema (e.g. spatial dynamics, temporality, and multisensory experiences)

Module 2: Creative Framework 1 – Evoking Sensory Spaces with Optical Sound

• Optical Sound Composition As Experimental Practice

• Historical and contemporary examples of composing with optical sound

• Artist-led example of composing for optical sound

• Optical Sound Compositions and Sources

• Hands-on demonstration of creating own abstract optical sound strip components using photogramming technique and a template, to experiment with visual rhythms and patterns that influence auditory perception

• Sensory Spaces

• Demonstration or participation in spatialising expanded cinema compositions, incorporating light and sound devices

DAY 2

Module 3: Introduction to Digital Audiovisual Compositions with Unreal Engine

• Expanded Cinema in the Digital Domain

• Consider how tools like Unreal Engine and Metasounds contribute to the evolution of expanded cinema, focusing on their potential for creating immersive and psychophysically engaging artworks

• Overview of Unreal Engine

• Brief introduction to Unreal Engine focusing on its capabilities for audiovisual art

• Hello Unreal World

• Participants play the “Hello World” patch in UE5

• Procedural audio with MetaSounds

• Understanding the capabilities of real time generated sound

Module 4: Creative Framework 2 – Perceptual Hacking with Unreal Engine

• Introduction to Materials & Shaders

• Introduction to the concept of shaders in computer graphics and their role in visual effects

• Introduction to Blueprints

• Using Blueprint Scripting – the default visual, node based programming environment in UE5, or the central brain of our patches

• Introduction to Shaders

• Basic shader techniques to manipulate visuals in real-time

• Waveform Materiality
  Participants edit/extend a preexisting patch to explore audiovisual relationships

ABOUT THE ARTISTS - FACILITATORS

Sally Golding
Sally Golding is an Australian-British-Estonian artist creating immersive audiovisual performances, participatory installations and creative-critical writing. Her work considers participation and liveness in immersive environments; art as a mechanism for shared experiences; and dialogues examining the role of the artist, audience and gallery within new technological contexts.

An inaugural recipient of the Oram Award (New BBC Radiophonic Workshop/PRS Foundation) for women innovating in sound and creative technologies; she has been part of the roster for the prestigious SHAPE platform for innovative music and audiovisual art in Europe, and her work has been recognised in publications including Millennium Film Journal, The Wire, Senses of Cinema, Tate Modern, Oxford University Press, I.B Tauris/Bloomsbury and Palgrave Macmillan. Exhibitions and performances have included: Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Museum of the Moving Image (US), Serralves Museum (PT), Digital Culture Centre (MX), CA2M: Contemporary Art Madrid, Whitstable Biennale (UK), Institute of Modern Art (AU), Sound of Stockholm, Abandon Normal Devices (UK), San Francisco Cinematheque, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Contemporary Art Centre (LT), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Contemporary Art Tasmania, South London Gallery and Tromsø Center for Contemporary Art (NO).
https://sallygolding.com/

Matt Spendlove

Matt Spendlove is an artist from London who creates immersive installations, audiovisual performances and sonic artefacts. Across these situations he explores spatial ambiguity, structural form, waveform materiality and the illusory contours of psychophysics. His work has been commissioned internationally.

International commissions, recordings and performances have included Mutek, Montreal; High Zero, Baltimore; Unsound Festival, NYC/Krakow; Club Transmediale, Berlin; Filmwinter, Stuttgart; Algorithmic Art Assembly; San Francisco; E-FEST, Tunisia; MoTA Gallery, Ljubljana; Cafe OTO, London.
https://mattspendlove.com/
https://www.cenatus.org/

Limited amount of participants - 10 people

Participate by sending us an email to: balticanaloglab@gmail.com

Participation fee: 60 EUR

Supported by Creative Europe, Latvian Ministry of Culture