The Consensual Hallucination is a highly improvised, analog audio-visual experiment. An assemblage of sound and light that is crafted in real-time through the manipulation of tactile, hands-on physical media.

It explores the affordances of an archive of 16mm film loops that the studio built up in the 1990s doing analog light shows in clubs and for various bands. This is a treasure trove of abstract footage and sampled moments from cult cinema that were painstakingly recorded to 16mm from various VHS video tapes. This performance weaves together a fragmented, hallucinatory narrative with this material that explores the themes of media, language, consciousness, altered states, and the artifice of cinema.

This visual assault is scored live with an equally surreal sonic journey through a collage of samples drawn from a range of classic psychedelia, jazz, film soundtracks, early electronica, and library music. Fragments of this music have been recorded onto cassette tape loops and played back from a 4 track. These short audio loops are full of pops, clicks, and warbles, creating the perfect accompaniment to the film loops. The music is then punctuated with spoken word samples evoking the Beatnik generation’s embrace of psychedelic culture in the 1960s.

This is a show that celebrates the materiality of analog media and sets out to embrace the happy accidents, happenstance, and collision of sound and image implicit in working with this material in this way. It is a live cinema collaboration between composer Tim Cowie and The Light Surgeons’ founding partners, Christopher Thomas Allen and Andy Flywheel.

Equipment:

6 x 16mm Film Projectors
1 x 4 Track Tape Player
1 x Laptop, Digital Effects
1 x Sound Desk

Duration: 45-50 min approx

Credits:

Touring:

Unpredictable Series presents: “In Dreams”, Iklectik Art Lab, London, 2023
Flatpack Film Festival, Birmingham, 2024