CIPHER SCREEN

collage, document stills

Cipher Screen is a live art piece using 2 prepared 16mm film projectors with black film loops and a live sound feed. This work harnesses the mechanisms of film and cinema; the projector, the film material, the darkened room and synchronized sound – creating a live score and a visual and sonic interaction.
The constant, reductive physical process applied to the surface of the film loops results in a slow transformation on the screen surface; out of aural and visual darkness builds a cacophonous crescendo of sound and image.

Review of Greg Pope and Jazkamer (Cafe Oto, London 8.11.12) here.
full event list, see CV

description by Dave Griffith, curator, AND Festival, Manchester, Oct 2010 :
‘At the heart of Greg Pope’s Cipher Screen is a process of erasure, and a test of resilience. Three simple elements combine: two overlapping projector beams forming a square cross on the screen; two short loops of 16mm black leader; and a set of scratch machines. As the loops roll across a workbench seemingly borrowed from De Beers, Pope lightly pokes and grazes the emulsion with precision-cutting tools, until finally expunging the surface with a hobby grinder.
This pure act of live cinema visually and aurally moves us from darkness to light, unifying the projector, film material, screen, space and audience in ways both controlled and random. The image evolves through abstract three-dimensional patterns of holes and ornamental scratches to flashes of spectral colour, to searing dense Planck epoch-like imagery of pure texture and energy.
The visual development is echoed in the sonic sphere; contact mics amplify the projectors internal workings and the optical cracks and bursts are manipulated into a huge unfolding live synchronized score’.