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

Play Movie | Quicktime 7 required | Duration 28 minutes

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 psycheogeogrphical 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.

The Chimera Project: Middlesborough

Play Movie | Quicktime 7 required | Duration 28 minutes

This film was produced in 2003 as the flagship commission of the first North East AV Festival that brought together the three regional cities of Newcastle, Middlesborough and Sunderland. The project was directed from a production space in the city over that autumn by TLS member James Price as artist in residence, and was then edited by The Light Surgeons at their London base.

The local contributing artists were Jamie Macdonald, Nicky Peacock, Clive Tonge, Lindsay Roe, Liz McCormack, Sam Harrison, Rayees Rashid, Robert Page, Russell Smith, Marni Henderson, Katherine O’Connor, Imogen Busby, and Marty Collantine.

The film charts a day in the life of this troubled but proud North East town. The industry that gave birth to the urban area is still very present in the town, but large scale unemployment and misguided governance have given the area terrible problems with deriliction, drugs, and prostitution, and a bad image problem in the country at large. The film looks at the people who choose to live there, and how a sense of community, love, home, and hope keep them there.