Blinded by the light

The British Council is proving, slowly, that they’re not just interested in teaching English.
 Tonight, thanks to a collaboration with “World Performances @ Drama Chula”, lighting, sound and graphics designers, media artists, film makers as well as museum curators, performance artists, museum buffs and performance enthusiasts will gather under the same roof, as the Light Surgeons make their Bangkok debut.
Founded in 1995 by artist and filmmaker Christopher Thomas Allen, the Light Surgeons describe themselves as “a boutique production company that specialises in creative content for live performance, video production and installation based projects”.
Since they’re surgeons – and apparently very efficient ones – their patients vary from Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to Fat Boy Slim, and from the BBC to Alexander McQueen.
“Each project we undertake has its own unique challenges so I can’t really say that one project was the most difficult, but I’d say the ‘Voyagers’ installation at the National Maritime Museum was particularly challenging on several levels,” says Allen via e-mail.
“We won the commission to create the audio-visual content for the gallery, which had a very complex piece of exhibition design by a company called Real Studios,” he explains. “Our job was to video map a triangulated wave structure with seven projectors to present a collection of audio visual content that represented the whole museum’s collections as different themes, as well as bringing a sense of the ocean into the space.”
Realising they’d need “special custom software” to pull this off, they invited on board James George from New York studio Flightphase. He was able to design the “perfect system” using the programming platform openFrameworks, which allow the use of ocean simulation plug-ins to create an “ocean of text”.
“This project is something we will be discussing in depth during our talk,” Allen says.
In addition to Allen’s lecture, we’ll get to watch “LDN-Redux” live on stage.
“A lot of our work blurs the boundaries between art and design,” says Allen. “‘LDN-Redux’ is a live cinema performance that has been developed from the film-making aspect of an installation [‘LDN24’] we made for the new space in the Museum of London called Sackler Hall. The installation was a real combination of art and design.
“In a similar way to the ‘Voyagers’ project, we had to respond to the architectural space and the equipment that had already been designed by another company. We chose to turn the space into a giant RGB clock that displayed data about the city in response to a film that shows a 24-hour cycle of life in the city. So some of these choices where influenced by the space, the context and the audience, and the rest of it was more of an artistic vision of what the piece should be.”
Allen also explains how “LDN24” became “LDN-Redux”.
“The performance is a live audio visual remix of the film component. We had so much great material from making the installation that we really wanted to be able to further explore the material we’d gathered. We spent around six months filming all around the city at different times of day and captured something really special.
“We want the piece not just to make people look at London in a new way, but to contemplate the organic nature of cities in general. I think we tend to not view ourselves and our complex systems as part of nature so I wanted this piece to reveal the biorhythm of the city. It makes people think a bit about our collective relationship with the urban environment, something I’m sure a Bangkok audience will be able to relate to!”
As with their other works, “LDN-Redux” shows how the Light Surgeons are pushing the boundaries between art and design and among different disciplines of arts.
Allen notes, “This work combines electronic music compositions we have created, hours of documentary film studies of the city, graphic design and motion graphics along with some very powerful software to control and mixes it all live. We are using film-making and design tools to transport our audiences somewhere new.
“Digital tools in music, film and animation are converging to allow for new hybrid forms of culture to evolve. It’s a really exciting time for artists and designers now.”
Last year, “LDN-Redux” was staged at the ON_OFF Festival in Sao Paolo as well as the Jakarta Biennale. Brazil’s Eye magazine wrote, “The London’s colour palette was beautifully observed, its particularly yellow tinge quite different from the colour profile of Sao Paolo.”
As for Jakarta, Allen recalls, “It was a great trip and people loved the show. We really liked Indonesia but the traffic in Jakarta was a killer!” In case you wonder, he’s been to Bangkok a few times on a personal trip.
Allen has a few final remarks for his first professional trip to Bangkok, “We’d love to meet people while we are here so please come to our talk and show and say hello. We hope to return soon and would love to create a new project here.
“After Bangkok, we are off to New Zealand to present another live cinema performance that we created in Malaysia last year called ‘SuperEverything’ We’d love to develop a new project like this in Thailand so it would be great to hear people’s ideas on themes and subject matter that could be interesting to explore.”

NO TICKETS REQUIRED
The Light Surgeons’ public lecture and performance of “LDN-Redux” starts at 7pm at the Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts, Faculty of Arts at Chulalongkorn University on Henri Dunant Road.
There’s on-site parking or you can make the 15-minute hike from Siam Skytrain station.
The show is in English, with a Thai summary.
Admission is free. No reservations are necessary.
For more details, visit www.LightSurgeons.com.