It was a great success. We had an audience of art enthusiasts and interested passers by who came to see what was going on at this relatively ‘underground’ event in the woods at the festival. The word soon spread that this was an event not to miss.
During the day the Film Gallery show-cased experimental expanded cinema by James Holcombe, Adam Asnan, Zoe Brown, Jim Hobbs and Rie Nakajima and Nick Collins. These live performances were mostly improvised and transformed the normally quiet retreat of the gallery space into more of an audio-visual workshop. The events worked well in the chapel-like gallery situated next to the big screen in the woods, the intimate nature of the space concentrated the intensity of the activities within it. The audience enjoyed being able to get close to the work and experience the mechanisms of the analogue apparatus.
All the videos shown on the Big Screen at dusk and into the night looked amazing, there were beautiful, thought provoking, mesmerising and amusing pieces by Saskia Olde Wolbers, Sebastian Buerkner, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, David Blandy, Benedict Drew, Semiconductor, Vicki Thornton, Graham dolphin and the late great Jeff Kean, to name a few.
Although The Big Screen had less publicity than some other, more established events, we still managed to draw a good crowd and as the night progressed the Dj’s and Vj’s attracted even more people and with the combination of a cinematic screen and good sound system we ended up with a full-on rave! This was all down to the excellent work of David Wilson, Dennis (DJ) McNanny (all the way from Brooklyn), the legendary Don Letts and the resident DJ Harry K.
Also, this was all possible because of excellent technical assistance from two lovely, helpful, down to earth and good humoured assistants Emily Ballard and Alex Duckworth.
