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My name is Chris Allen. I'm the founder and director of the Light Surgeons,
and the Light Surgeons started life almost 15 years ago now in,
well, Portsmouth of all places in England, when I was studying graphic design
and we kind of got together with a bunch of mates and we started messing around
with projections and working with music. It evolved into a multimedia and production company.
We produce films, installations, live performances.
It's really quite a mixed group of different people from different backgrounds: animation,
fine art and audio production.
There are three main categories of work that we create, which would be like: film production,
that's sort of standalone video, art pieces or short films.
And installations and performances and, so I guess, in reverse order
from a performance perspective, we've really kind of pioneered this live cinema type of work,
which combines kind of, I guess what you would call some kind of VJing
with a kind of narrative and original music
to create a sort of fragmented documentary-based performances.
And that really started with a project called All Points Between,
which we developed with Onedotzero Festival in the UK
and then toured it internationally.
And it was really a kind of interweave of narratives
that were taken from a lot of audio interviews that we did with people, mainly in America,
and it kind of came together over a couple years of developing it and doing it
as a kind of club night and it really became a much bigger kind of number thing.
A lot of the work that was developed in that actually turned into sort of films as well,
so that it sort of became a way of exploring narrative and testing things out
and experimenting, and some of that work ended up in short films.
I guess I'll talk about films, actually. We've done a number of digital films now
and had our work shown in Sundance and South by Southwest
and documentary film festivals internationally. Yeah, and I guess highlights...
The last film I've made, which is screening at a couple of festivals today
and is what is showing in London today, is a film called Schlimazel Tov,
and it's about a group of Jewish people discussing the idea of luck, and kind of touches on philosophy
and theology and belief and determinism and stuff like that.
I'm particularly interested in using my art to explore themes
that make people think about their lives and consider the world around them.
You know, talk about social issues, politics. I think these are all really relevant
and interesting things to explore with this medium.
The other thing is installations, which is something we've started to do more and more.
I guess the biggest project that we've done to date \ has been a commission for the Museum of London,
which is an installation called LDN24 and it's basically a par program
to kind of live huge LED installation, which is drawing lots of RSS feeds
and information and statistics to do with London from a massive database that we've created,
and it sort of synchronizes them with a film that we made,
which is like a 24 hour cycle of the life of the city, basically.
These two sort of elements communicate and as the film changes
and scenes in the film cut from different parts of the city and look at different things,
there's this kind of big LED elliptical kind of ring or ribbon that goes round the museum
and it prints different statistics.
And it's actually a massive RGB clock, so we've taken a red, green and blue
and turned it into seconds, minutes and hours.
So it's quite an interesting piece and took a long time to make,
and is going to be there for two years.
It's kind of nice to have work that is there for a while.
Our work has kind of always evolved into different areas.
Our balance of work is more towards arts than it is to do with commercial work.
We do commercial work and we work on projects for clients
and we respond sometimes in a more of a design way,
and at other times it's our own kind of self-generating projects.
I guess we've sort of naturally moved away from doing clubs and visuals and VJing
just because, I guess of getting older
and kind of just wanting to do things in a slightly different context
and have more of a critical audience
and go into subjects that maybe aren't quite so relevant to that kind of entertainment environment.
And that led us into doing these more permanent installations, which is really interesting and fun.
But financially speaking I can't really say what's better. None of them are good really.
We might need to keep a balance between these 3 different areas: installations, performances and
we also produce video content and video visuals for bands.
We did Chase and Status last year.
It's like being a farmer. You keep turning the field, you know, growing something else
and going back and trying not to just become a sausage factory.
And that's why we've remained very small. We've kind of kept ourselves tiny
and allowed ourselves to collaborate with lots of different artists.
It has sort of allowed us to pick and choose and do projects that are constantly different.
Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming.
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet waves
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
We decided that we wanted to do the form first.
We knew how we wanted it to look and how we wanted to be able to play it, so that was our starting point.
And then we had to figure out how that would work technically. Essentially we came to the conclusion
that we needed to have a locked backing track. So we had this 3-screen setup. We had a locked backing
track, which was the easiest and best way, which we then add to and take away from. So that's sort of
a 3-screen composite video that's all sort of glued together that gets spread out over
3 projections. And then we can add to it, take away from it, add sound boards, audio triggers.
Some of the narrative pieces are more fluid and they're faded separately from the backing track
if the backing is just audio. All the audio is run through Ableton as well, so that adds sort of
a multitrack to it, so if a venue needs more space or more drums, or whatever we've got control over that too,
which is also really helpful with the narrative, because sometimes you can't hear the words and
and all the other skills, which are essential to quickly reach a high level of professionalism.
rebuild everything from scratch every time. I suppose that the narrative and spoken word
pieces dictate a structure and they have to be sort of be glued together and locked. That was our reasoning
for having these locked sections. I think this show, we've talked about some finer show, and to an
extent we have, but it is what it is and it's tough to make changes now. Moving into the future,
we're in the very early stages of developing something new, and one of the things we've talked about
is having something that's even more flexible or requires less kit because it's been prohibited
in some venues to stake half of the setup. It takes a long time to set up. It's meant that we've had
to turn things down, because of budget of the equipment, so something which is either more modular or
at least simpler, so we can either scale it down or set it up with a couple of laptops. Particularly when flying
to different countries, different continents. We've turned up with about 17 flight cases to the
airport, which is just ridiculous and it's expensive. So yeah, moving forward - simpler setup, definitely.
It's still a complicated concept, as it needs to be, but 2 or 3, or 5 cases will be good. �