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There was a film department at Ravensbourne, but I didn't have much to do with it, except for a bit during my last year (I was there for four years19641968). For two years after leaving art school, I worked collaboratively with a friend (John McNulty) who was a computer scientist. Our work culminated in an exhibit for an international computer exhibition, which involved an interactive game and a 360-degree slide presentation. It might seem strange to be working with a scientist, but at that time we were quite captivated with the possibility of marrying art and technology. It was happening in New York [City], too: there were those nine evenings of Rauschenberg, Billy Klüver, and the Bell Telephone Labs. It's also around the time of Expo '67 in Montreal and the love affair there with mixed media.
Having completed work on this two-year project, I made my first film, a very short piece to open Bob Cohan's
Stages,
a dance performance at the London Contemporary Dance Theatre. That hooked me. I began to do photographic pieces based on performances, or, really, actions made to be photographed. One of those was an elaborate landscape event that took place in the middle of the countryside. It was too big to be still photographed, so I made a film, and with the aid of friends taught myself how to edit it. That was
Landscape for Fire
[1972]. Increasinglyd partly because of my interest in the work at the Coop [The London Film-makers' Co-operative]I got more and more interested in film itself, and less and less in the events I was making to be photographed. I began to think about the possibility of a film that was only a film. What were the irreducible elements for a film? My interest in that question was certainly influenced by Peter Gidal's early writing about the films of Andy Warhol. Also, during the early seventies there was a stress on the idea of process and on the implications of the medium itself.
The specific question that interested me was, how does an audience look at a film? How does an audience relate to a film? Was sitting and looking at a conventional narrative film a passive or an active experience? At the time it seemed as if a conventional Hollywood film could be faulted for the way in which it constructed a passive audience. That position, of course, was later discredited, but at the time it did lend some justification to the quite pared-down films we were making. In any case, the question of how an audience relates to a film was one which I felt could be explored through the film object, with an audience. My particular circumstances, and those of friends, made it a given that this work had to be cheap, which tended to mean that the films were silent (8mm was not used a great deal at that time; we were mostly working in 16mm). The specific idea that I was working on was that the projector's light beam was not only visible, but physical and space-occupying, and it