With Theo Botschuijver, Sean Wellesley-Miller and Tjebbe van Tijen.

This expanded cinema performance was specially created for the Experimental Film Festival in Knokke-le-Zoute. Three performers - Jeffrey Shaw, Theo Botschuyver, and Sean Wellesley-Miller - dressed in white overalls, first carried in the inflatable structure and unrolled it on the floor. While it was being gradually inflated, film, slides and liquid-light show effects were projected onto its surface. Its fully inflated shape was a 7m diameter and 10m high cone with an outer transparent membrane and an inner white surface. The projected imagery first impinged lightly on the outer envelope and then appeared on the semi-inflated inner surface; in the intermediate space various material actions were performed.

The intention of this work was to transmute the conventional flat cinema projection screen into a three dimensional kinetic and architectonic space of visualisation. The multiple projection surfaces allowed the images to materialise in many layers, and the bodies of the performers and then of the audience (many of whom spontaneously took off all their clothes) became part of the cinematic spectacle. In this way the immersive space of cinematic fiction included the literal and interactive immersion of the viewers who modulating the changing shapes of the pneumatic architecture which in turn modulated the shifting deformations of the projected imagery. With speakers placed both outside and inside the structure, its acoustic environment was also modulated in this way.

Credits:

Production: Sigma Projects, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Music: Musica Ellettronica Viva, Rome, Italy
Lightshow: The Overheads

Exhibitions:

1967: 4th International Experimental Film Festival, Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium.

1969: St. George's Arts Centre, Liverpool, UK.