The Light Surgeons

The Light Surgeons Interview

'The Light Surgeons operates as a multi media production company from a base in east London, producing a wide variety of creative projects from the commercial to artist lead. Their work spans many diverse mediums; print, photography, motion graphics, short films, exhibitions and installations. Over the past ten years they have helped to pioneer new forms of cross platform practice, particularly with their audio visual performances, expanded cinema projects and installations.' - The Light Surgeons

- Can you tell us about yourself, as a moving-image artist? Also, could you give us a brief rundown as to who and what The Light Surgeons are?

C: My name is Chris Allen and I'm the director and founder of the Light Surgeons. We are a multi-disciplinary company, based in East London that has been running for about 12 years. Basically, it brings together different groups of artists and film-makers as well as crossing different disciplines like graphic design and photography to collaborate on projects; from installations to exhibitions, to VJ-ing to short-films. The Light Surgeons has had many people work under this name over the years and we really don't want to pigeon-hole ourselves into one specific type of art or visuals company. We try to cover a variety of roles and tasks and try to offer a wide range of creative services.

My role within the company is the director, but I also help to produce projects and I'm also an artist and will collaborate with other artists on projects. My actual background lies in photography and graphic design.

- Tell us about some of the highlight projects you have worked on.

C: It probably has to be some of our performance based work which encompasses some of our film making as well. We did a lot of nightclub work in the early to mid 90's, from working with clubs like the Blue Note and also working with independent labels like Mo Wax and Ninja Tune.

Our early work was based around a lot of film and used many different analogue sources like slide projection, 16mm film and Super 8 and it was fun trying to work within the limitations of these mediums. We sampled and re-sampled a lot of film and tried to put them together with graphic design and as we started to work with more bands, we started to create more original performance based work. Musicians we have worked with include the Propellerheads, Herbaliser, Sneaker Pimps and Cornershop. It allowed us to work on projects that were more linear, time-based and in synch with the music.

youtube : The Herbaliser / Wall Crawling Giant Insect Breaks

Moving away from sampling gave us more scope to try out more installation based work, using field recordings and original film that we had shot. We did an exhibition in 2006 at the ICA in London, called ''Stealing Beauty'' and this inspired us to try out more music-driven documentary type film and led to us working with One Dot Zero on a show and several short films. One of the projects was called ''All Points Between'' and we were able to take this on tour to many film festivals and museums around the world.

youtube : All Points Between

- You have such a rich library of film and images. Where do you find all of them?

C: Originally, we just sampled things that we loved and were inspired by, so a lot of it was taken from cult cinema and classic films. In those days, we didn't have Final Cut Pro or digital cameras. We would hire out the video from a rental shop and then play the video frame by frame whilst filming the TV screen using a 16mm camera at one second exposures. Through that process, we could distort and grade the colour; something that computers allow us to do today very easily. Nowadays we concentrate more on gathering material that we have already shot ourselves and using sound samples that we have recorded, like field recordings and interviews we have done.

I still think sampling is relevant to this day and age but as we have matured, we feel that sampling should be used for a reason and not just because it may be aesthetically pleasing; it should try and help to make a point and communicate ideas.

- What Software/Hardware are you using when playing live Audio-Visual performance?

C: Currently, we are touring a project called ''True Fictions'', which is a commissioned Audio-Visual piece that was made last year in America.

youtube : True Fictions / New Adventures in Folklore

It aimed to explore the truths and myths through a series of interviews with the people of New York state as well as native Americans. Technically, we used slides and 16mm film and on stage there is a thin sheet that goes across the whole stage with three separate sources of video. Two video sources join up at the front of the screen which are back-projected and then one screen that is projected at the back of the stage. By doing this, it enables us to create a very three-dimensional effect on stage by moving images from one screen to another. We use Ableton Live to trigger our sounds, live musicians, Pioneer DVJ's & Edirol V4. We don't like to only use laptops and prefer to use a load of different things as we feel it makes it more of a performance and more like a live band might be.

- Any future plans that you are allowed to tell us about?

C: We want to get our work published more, so it can be seen by more people and develop this large cinema type of work that we have been making. So we are hoping to publish the ''True Fictions'' project as a DVD and try to make innovative projects out of that with other artists doing re-mixes of our original video. There will be an interactive website going live sometime soon that will allow members of the public to access certain parts of the project to remix themselves.

youtube : Moion Grahics Stich Up

We want to work out in Iran next year which I think will be fascinating as well as trying to do more feature length documentary film work. As we are starting to be taken more seriously by institutions around the world, there seems to be more and more scope to do work outside of the UK and this means that the next few years will be really exciting!

Website : http://lightsurgeons.com/

Written by Selph