Time, space, surgery, urgency

Interview with The Light Surgeons’ Christopher Thomas Allen

Excerpt from Atemporal by The Light Surgeons. Used with permission of the artist.

This is an edited transcript of our interview. Read a condensed version here.

Q

There seem to be a few themes running through the work. One I noticed is about time. You’ve got this project called Atemporal, and then there’s the Japanese one — Tokinokawa. Is that a deliberate focus on time or did it just sort of happen?

A

Temporal stuff comes into the work if you’re making moving image work, or work that’s time-based anyway.

The Atemporal project I developed with Tim Cowie, who’s a musician and composer and another audiovisual artist I collaborate a lot with. We were asked to do a kind of improvised, experimental audiovisual set. We do these live cinema performances. A lot of those projects are very ethnographic and involve a lot of filming and interviewing people, and developing these tapestries that we then present as live audiovisual performances.

That particular project, we didn’t have any funding, and we were asked to just experiment with something. It was around the time that John Berger had died, and me and Tim both studied on the same degree course in Portsmouth. There’s about a ten-year gap between when we studied, but we both had been given his Ways of Seeing book.

And we were reminiscing about that as a quite influential book on criticism and feminism and Marxist theory, and all the sort of stuff that we caught when we went to university. We were remembering his documentaries too, and we thought that he had such an amazing voice — an interesting, poetic sort of speaker. We thought he would be an interesting voice to bring to a performance.

And so we really just did it, very, you know, instinctually. We did a little bit of research, dug around, found some of the Ways of Seeing documentaries. And then we discovered he’d done this series for Channel 4, called About Time. Which I’d never come across, and I’ve subsequently found the book that he did along with it.

So that fed into a narrative that went into that particular show, around the idea of time and storytelling. It touches on memory and media and dreaming. The show itself is a mixture of different bits of work that we’ve made for different things.

We did a lot of work with a band called the Cinematic Orchestra. We did a big show for them in Sydney Opera House in Australia for this thing called Graphic Festival. And that material never really ended up being shown again. Sometimes we do these big projects — like we did a load of work for the BFI for a fundraising event, and we shot all this material in the archives and looking at all the processes.

When I became a parent, which is over ten years ago now, I had this kind of reflective period, thinking about my own upbringing and my family. My mum lost her dad when she was quite young. And her father, who I never knew, was quite an early adopter of tech and stuff. He worked on radar, and he built TV sets and all this sort of stuff. So I grew up with all these cine films, and so I’ve got this massive collection of 8mm films that go right back to the 1920s.

So all of that also features in Atemporal as well. There’s a family history, and a telescopic sense of going through generations. That comes up in the piece through these different portraits and archival things.

Still from Tokinokawa by The Light Surgeons. Image courtesy of the artist, used with permission.

Digging the archives

And then Tokinokawa. It’s about time because it’s also looking at archival film. It was commissioned by the British Film Institute, originally was meant to be a performance with a woman called Midori Takada, who’s a contemporary Japanese pioneer of ambient, minimal music — a bit like Steve Reich. She’s a marimba player, doing very beautiful stuff for many years. We were meant to perform live with her.

She talked about this tripartite state of being — the fact that we’re living in this triangulated state between past, present and future. When we were watching these archival films together, there’s this sort of circularity to it. And so that piece is kind of a conversation between these archival films that relate to the Meiji period, which is, like, 1886, I think the earliest film is. So it’s the beginning of cinema, really. Up until, like, the 1920s or 30s. I researched all the films, and I went and filmed all this material in Japan.

Tokinokawa also includes some of my own archive, as well stuff that I filmed there in the 90s and 2000s. I’ve spent quite a lot of time in Japan over the course of about 20 years, going there every other year or so.

And then the future is represented by this question about artificial intelligence, and how maybe these entities might sort of mine and try to understand the past, in the future. It’s inspired by Kazuo Ishiguro’s book Klara and the Sun, that came out when I was working on that project.

It was a difficult project because it started off as a performance, and then I filmed it all, then came back. But then because of COVID, the whole thing got put in this weird kind of limbo.

Overview of [Re]entanglements exhibition, video courtesy of The Light Surgeons

Marks of time

And during that period, I was working on another project that also ended up incorporating some AI and archives — [Re]entanglements, which is a collaboration with Paul Basu. He’s an anthropologist, now at Oxford. That project was about decolonizing this collection of stuff from Sierra Leone and Nigeria.

So there was, for me personally, thinking about my ethnicity and my relationship to these collections, and the externalities of the collections, and the archives in Nigeria. We ended up making a film there. But also like with the Japanese material, this western gaze, if you like.

I was thinking about that, and also thinking about the biases of AI — the parallels with colonialism and extraction that is implicit in AI as a technology.

Another one is Ichi: Marks in Time.

Yeah, Ichi. That’s co-directed with Paul Basu — a feature documentary that came out of his [Re]entanglements project. It came out of some research into the scarification marks that appear in a lot of these photographs.

It’s a tradition across West Africa, particularly in the Anambra state in Nigeria. It would be done on quite young boys, mainly. It’s a sort of mark of nobility — it sets you out as someone who has a certain status. And then apparently it would also protect you from being sold into slavery.

But it was also extremely painful, dangerous. It involved quite skilled — they call them tattooists, but they’re more like surgeons to be honest. They, like, cut your face. They cut your temple in diagonal lines right up to your eyelids. And round the sides.

And so the film is about the people that did this, who are called Umudioka. It’s a community that’s celebrated. It’s not practiced anymore. Catholicism and British rule crushed a lot of these traditions and ideas out. But the photographs that were taken by the anthropologists under colonial rule have been a bit buried and forgotten, because of their violence. But they give a window into this tradition and history that these people would never have had.

That was a very interesting project, fascinating to make. It took about two and a half years.

Still from Unspoken Stories by The Light Surgeons. Image courtesy of the artist, used with permission.

And Unspoken Stories is related to that too.

Yeah, another film we made as part of that [Re]entanglements project. That was about voicing the particular characters in some of these photographs. And working with a group of storytellers who all had connections to West Africa, but were based in the UK. Paul invited them to write fictionalized monologues based on these images.

We filmed actors vocalizing these monologues. And then we did these transitions from the archival images. You kind of flick through hundreds and hundreds of images of different faces, and then it slowly stops on one, and then you get this story.

I used AI in that, as a means of exploring the sort of homogeneity of it, using StyleGANs. I trained my own model on all of these portrait photos, and I used it to create these slightly weird, morphing sequences that I wanted to represent the colonial gaze on the population — how they became slightly scary and weird. Early StyleGANs weren’t perfect — they created these sort of Francis Bacon-y images.

As AI has gotten more and more accurate and polished, I find myself less interested in it. I mean, I follow the tech and what’s happening with it. But I think it’s also important to ask questions about it as well, and to challenge what it represents.

Collectivity

What are you working on now ,and how’s the studio going generally?

I have a research fellowship up in Norwich. It’s a tricky time at the moment — a lot of higher education places are struggling. At Norwich University of the Arts, I’m trying to create a new piece of work. They built this immersive lab. I started developing a work looking at climate change, looking specifically at intergenerational conversations around climate.

Norfolk is probably the part of the UK that’s going to be impacted most by climate change, with sea level erosion and the water table and the Broads and the fens and all. So I started looking into that and thinking about landscape.

I’ve been flying aerial drones for a while now, and I’ve been gathering a lot of footage over the last two or three years from travelling around the UK and getting footage. Then finding ways to generate music from video.

There was this really good book from MIT Press called Collective Wisdom that was really inspiring to me. And that made me think about collaborating, creating an immersive audiovisual work that’s more collaborative. So the plan is to form this group of eight people based on age — a 10-year-old, a 20-year-old, and so on — all of them from different parts of Norfolk.

And the idea is to go on walks with them, and also to invite other people related to them. Intersecting with this idea of age, make this piece exploring the past, present and future of Norfolk, thinking about the landscape and how it’s changed. And then trying to bring that together into this immersive space in Norwich, using 360 cameras, and Unreal Engine to develop some predictions of what the future might look like. But from these people’s perspectives — it’s about them.

Still from Tokinokawa by The Light Surgeons. Image courtesy of the artist, used with permission

On AI

I wanted to ask you about AI. You mentioned you’ve done a few things. So where do you stand on at the moment? Things have changed like crazy. It’s moving so fast.

I think we have to engage with it, it’s like any technology. It’s got great power to be extremely disruptive and dangerous, and can be used in many good ways, so for me it’s about the ethics of it. It’s a question of what we value — what are our values and how do we let what we believe in guide the technology?

My worry at the moment is that I don’t think that’s really happening. It’s been driven by neo-industrialists. Their ideology isn’t mine, and I worry that it can destroy a lot of people’s creative work. It is already having an impact. I think we do need regulation.

It’s a bit like the motor. When the motor car was invented, we had to have road signs and guardrails. There’s always going to be people who are going to not follow that. But it’s just a ridiculous arms race at the moment.

I’m excited by what it could potentially do, and how to use it creatively, and how it can speed things up and allow me to do labor-intensive things easier. Sometimes things going slowly is good, though. I like some slowing down, having time to contemplate things.

Some of the stuff that’s potentially really interesting is cryptocurrencies — the decentralization of them and the way they can network people together. These “smart contracts” — you’ve got ways to distribute and share and collaborate. How do we collaborate with AI? How do we find ways to make AI more equitable, something that we all have a stake in? Let’s create automated systems that support human beings.

I’m not quite sure how such a system might produce a film. Because there’s a point at which you have to acknowledge your positionality as an artist or an editor, or even as a camera person. The sorts of things you choose to look at, and the things you don’t look at, are implicit in whatever you do.

There’s a sense of people looking for AI to be this almost subjective thing. Almost as this parental, God-like thing that’s outside of us, that can create this kind of objectivity. And I don’t know whether it will ever do that.

It’s almost impossible to keep up with it, but as someone with two quite young kids, I’m constantly thinking, “What’s their relationship going to be with these things?” It’s a big question.

I really enjoyed those Reith lectures by Stuart Russell a couple of years ago, on AI. That was a really good series, because he touched on all the different ethical issues.

But it’s not directly impacting your practice? Some people say it will change filmmaking. But you’re still going to go out and film stuff, I guess?

Yeah, hopefully. I mean, there is this question of post-lens. What happens when you don’t need to go and film something, and everything is prompted? It will spawn its own genre of filmmaking.

Some of that will be just horrific and awful. But then there’s the liminal, surreal, Lynchian stuff, that could be quite interesting. A kind of dream logic I can imagine.

When any new technology comes along, there’s always a rush to use it, and then there’s a cultural reaction against it. It will become so apparent that things are fake, and I think people might rediscover authenticity through older forms of technology. Maybe, in a weird way, film will have a revival because it’s not digital.

It’s really quite worrying how people make a living culturally. I mean I’m struggling, and most people I know are. These technologies aren’t ushering in an era of sustainable culture. Things like Spotify and all these algorithmic things, they’re just extracting cultural value and centralizing money in the hands of very rich people who don’t pay tax.

When you add in what’s happening in America with Trump 2.0, and Elon Musk’s “Dark Maga”, you can see a worrying intersection between those ideas and technology where, like, “We’ll just replace this government department with Grok.” It’s a corporate takeover. They’re breaking up the federal government and going to privatize it. I don’t know if you’ve read any of the stuff about “Dark Enlightenment”. That’s terrifying. If that is actually the agenda of these Project 2025 people, we’re in for a pretty rough old ride.

Image courtesy of The Light Surgeons, used with permission

Going analog

I’ve got a whole wall of film canisters over there. I’ve kept all of that. And I’ve got loads of analog photography stuff as well. Doing these archival projects and working with Paul made me go back to some of that early stuff.

We’ve got a show that we developed last year, of 16mm film loops. It’s like 200 film loops, performed with audio cassette tape loops. One of my collaborators works with a four-track cassette tape thing, and he’s built all these looping cassette tapes. It’s called The Consensual Hallucination, and it’s all made with analog stuff.

But at the other end, one of the other artists I’ve been working with is a research fellow up in Norwich, working with Stable Diffusion. They’ve got that running in real time in Touch Designer, so you can have a live camera, and it sort of hallucinates on the live camera feed. So some cool things going on with real time stuff.

Image courtesy of The Light Surgeons, used with permission.

And you make vinyl records too.

Yeah, there’s the whole music side of it. Musicians are terrified because, for a long time, they had a revenue stream that a lot of other artists haven’t had. But now that’s becoming more and more eroded.

And I’m not really down with the way that the Labour government are going with it — that all we can do is opt in or opt out. The tech is moving so quickly that institutions just don’t have the time to put laws in place because they think, “Well in six months time, there’s going to be something else.” A sort of enforced libertarianism — “The technology is moving too quick for us, so we’ll just have to go with it.”

The vinyl records… this one [reaches behind him] True Fictions, was a live cinema project commissioned by a place called MPAC, which is in upstate New York. It’s actually about truth and myth in America — a dialogue between Native Americans and native New Yorkers. We did tours around the whole of New York State talking to different Native American communities, and then different people — historical re-enactors, people who believed in 9/11 conspiracies — talking about myths. We made that in 2006 and then toured it quite a lot. And so then it came out as a vinyl record.

The last one we did was a project called SuperEverything, commissioned by the British Council in Malaysia. It’s about rituals, identity. It took some inspiration from a guy called Farish Noor, a Malaysian writer who wrote a book about British colonial rule, and how they used the census as a way to divide the population. And so the project took this idea of a survey, and tried to use it as a way to reveal our collective commonalities rather than our differences.

Nine audiovisual tracks travel across the landscape of Malaysia, looking at tradition, development, manufacturing, religion, shopping — different elements of society. Tradition and modernity. That toured a lot too.

We developed the music with the composers and artists we worked with in Malaysia, working with string musicians from the UK Heritage Orchestra. We worked with a gamelan orchestra from Kuala Lumpur, and this Chinese drumming group, and it’s got contemporary classical elements in it. It’s got a lot of electronic stuff that Tim makes using modular synthesis. So it’s an interesting record that — yeah, I’m really proud of that. We released it just last year. We had some friends who have a label who wanted to put the music out. One of the biggest projects we’ve done.

There’s a full length video of the show we did at the Barbican Centre in London. We documented the whole thing and we put that online as when the release came out. You can see that on our website.

Chris Allen and Tim Cowie in performance. Image courtesy of the artist, used with permission.

Last question: You do these live cinema performances. How does that work exactly?

How does it work? Well, it’s somewhere between a film and installation and a gig or performance. The live cinema shows we’ve done are all quite informed by the documentary filmmaking. There’s always a story or a structure that the piece hangs off of. So there’s part of it that’s edited and just plays back. And then there are layers of things that are more interpretive, that we perform live.

We pioneered VJ’ing in the UK, along with people like D-Fuse, in the 90s. Visual displays in clubs using analog equipment and film and slideshows. We developed our practice from that background.

I’ve always been interested in mixing things live, and what comes into the situation, rather than editing it all. And now the software and the technology has evolved to the point where you can run multiple streams of video in real time, and control it with a MIDI controller.

So you’re performing video in a way very similar to how people will perform electronic music using Ableton — you just create layers. You’ve got things that can subtract from the image, so you can have two layers of video mixed together. And then you might have a graphical layer that’s feeding into that. It’s a sort of live compositing.

In our shows, we tend to use two screens. We have a screen that covers the front of the stage. You can see through that. And then a screen at the back of the stage. And sometimes that screen at the back is a split screen — it’s a collage or a mosaic.

So films are being mixed in real time, and there’s an element within that that’s telling you a story. It’s playing around with documentary film, and essay film. Artists like Patrick Keeler inspired my work.

It’s also what you call “soft cinema,” as Lev Manovich calls it. It changes over time. You present it, you perform it. We like working with live musicians.

In True Fictions, we mixed a lot of stuff. We had a lot of live cameras on stage that were filming musicians, and then we had musicians that we’d filmed and edited and sampled — who weren’t on stage. So there was this ambiguity, like what was real and what wasn’t?

We also use audience interaction. In SuperEverything, we used Twitter as a means for the audience to answer, and their text became part of the performance and part of the piece.

It’s hard to tour. It’s hard to make it pay. Even though we’ve been doing it for almost 20 years, finding venues and spaces to do it is hard. But now, there’s a lot of work that I would consider live cinema coming from gaming engines and this intersection with real-time computing.

Not all live cinema has to be narrative-based. We adopted the name “live cinema” partly because our work was more narrative — we weren’t just doing audiovisual shows in clubs with people dancing. We were showing our work in theatre spaces, to seated audiences. We like the critical relationship with an audience that that gives us.

One of the beginnings of that is shadow puppet theatre from Southeast Asia. It originates in India, actually. And that is arguably the earliest form of cinema. It’s like a proto-cinema that told these epic Hindu mythologies. And they were performed with shadow puppets and live music. The puppet masters would adapt the stories and add local elements to them.

It’s this sort of cinema that’s alive and that responds to things, and that’s telling stories, but also allowing us to critique society and do things outside of conventional cinema. Like, who gets to make a film for the cinema? Who owns the projector?

Now that film and digital media is something everyone has in their pocket, there’s an opportunity to make films that go back to that concept of making cinema local. And because it’s live, people pay to go and see it, and we get paid to be there. That’s something that the Internet hasn’t given us — being part of something, being part of a community, making something — I think that’s also a big part of the live cinema aesthetic.

We’ll be doing a show in Norwich in this 360 space in May. We’re doing the John Berger piece, over two days, we do three shows a day. So it’s like a little theatrical run.