A version of my film Scriptych (a collaboration with Simon Valastro at the Paris Opera) will be playing tonight after the Bartlett’s Film Making Space symposium. The event looks great (Penelope Haralambidou, Richard Martin, Clara Jo, Kreider & O’Leary and Liam Young are on the line-up. It’s organised by the Bartlett‘s Film + Place + Architecture group.
The French Audiovisual Archives (INA) made a lovely short film about the collaborative process Simon Valastro and myself used to make Scriptych, a performance at the Opéra National de Paris earlier this year, as part of my residency at the Palais de Tokyo.
Pavillon Neuflize OBC / INA #9 Scriptych / Ollie Palmer – Simon Valastro – VA from Institut national audiovisuel on Vimeo.
Thank you Franck Podguszer and the INA team!
A couple attempt to communicate from afar using an interface which translates their movements into words.
Structured across three micro-acts, Scriptych takes precision in choreography to an extreme, embedding sensors on dancers which measure their movements and control both the music and the words spoken aloud, in real time. The couples’ communication becomes increasingly fragmented as the piece develops, posing questions about the location of meaning in messages and movements, and the impossibility of communicating true intent.
3 x 3-minute choreographed sequences for 2 dancers.
Custom computer interface with machine-learnt three-dimensional word database.
Ina, the French Audiovisual Institute, made a video about the collaboration between myself and Simon Valastro below. More information about this project can be found in Chapter 2 of my PhD thesis.
Pavillon Neuflize OBC / INA #9 Scriptych / Ollie Palmer – Simon Valastro – VA from Institut national audiovisuel on Vimeo.
Photo © copyright Justine Emard / Pavillon 2016.
A limited number of signed prints of this performance are available for purchase. Please get in touch for details.
La Rumeur des Naufrages
Opera Garnier, Paris
18 June 2016
Arctic Moving Image and Film Festival
Harstad, Norway
October 2017
Architecture Film Festival London
Institute of Contemporary Arts / Oxo Bargehouse
June 2017
Film | Making | Space
Royal Academy, London
February 2017
A palindromic film about the production of fake news and fake profits, and the impacts they have on the people who produce them.
W and M see the world differently. For W, a low-level government propagandist, objective reality is an illusion. Truth exists on a gradient and can be manipulated and distored. For M, a financial executive, the world of business is a large image-making machine. Every business deal is just another set of mirrors or lenses to position. These abstract worldviews creep into the lived experiences of both characters, with unexpected consequences.
This is the first film to be made using a process called Reflexive Scripted Design, developed as part of my doctorate thesis work at the Bartlett School of Architecture. The entire film was created using a set of four rules ensuring that the final form reflects the film’s subject.
More information about this project and the Reflexive Scripted Design process that was used to develop it can be found in Chapter 4 of my PhD thesis.
512-second loop on dual-projectors.
Urban Legends
Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA)
5 April – 29 May 2016
Architecture Film Festival LondonOxo Bargehouse
7-8 June 2017
I will be showing my film 86400 and performing 24fps Psycho at the Do Disturb Festival at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in a couple of weeks. This is very exciting, as both works have never been shown before.
86400 is a real-time film made from Google Image searches for the time right now. It will be running throughout the festival.
24fps Psycho is an experimental performance remixing the film Psycho (1960) with footage from the French National Audiovisual Institute. It will be chaotic and confusing, but also highly enjoyable. I will be performing twice, once on the Saturday and once on the Sunday (9 + 10 April).
There are over 50 artists and performers participating this year, so it looks like a great way to spend a weekend – if I wasn’t performing, I would be in the crowd!
Tickets are avaialble through the Digitick website or at the Palais de Tokyo ticket office.
A performance visually remixing and reinterpreting Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho (1960).
Working with footage from the Institute National Audiovisuel (France), the Prelinger Archives (USA) and my own material, I have built software to analyse the visual and audio content of each frame in Psycho. The frames are then compared to a database of archival footage, and replaced with ‘matching’ stills and video clips.
The rate of frame-replacement varies according to the volume of the film’s iconic soundtrack – so that the audial freneticism is reflected on the screen. The result is a mesmerising, chaotic experience, and a reworking of a highly memorable film.
This is part of an ongoing body of work examining the technology of cinema.
L’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel made a short film about the making of 24fps Psycho:
Pavillon Neuflize OBC / INA #2 Taking “Psycho” to Pieces from Institut national audiovisuel on Vimeo.
More information about this project can be found in Chapter 3 of my PhD thesis.
Do Disturb Festival
Palais de Tokyo
9 + 10 April 2016 (full performance)
Lundi du Pavillon
Palais de Tokyo
18 April 2016 (short performance and talk)
Footage provided for experimental purposes by L’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel
Made during my residency at Pavillon Neuflize OBC, the Research Lab of the Palais de Tokyo 2015-16
I will be presenting two projects at the Tokyo Arts Club in the Palais de Tokyo on the 25th November as part of the launch of the Pavillon Neuflize OBC artist residency programme.
The projects I will be talking about are the Godot Machine and a new project in development, currently titled Spatial Cinema. Test videos from Spatial Cinema are here: