Sally Golding is a multimedia artist combining film projection, lighting and sonic composition to create expanded cinema performances and participatory installations. Golding’s audiovisual performance work focuses on the experience of the audience, pushing the boundaries of visual and auditory perception through the breakdown of the cinematic system into flicker, waveforms and colour fields; while her installations have harnessed the presence of the audience themselves by incorporating their reflected image into projections within immersive spaces.
Golding’s performances are overdriven audiovisual transmissions of light, form, colour and sound. Utilising a custom system of contact-printed waveforms on torchlight-exposed, hand-processed 16mm film, Golding creates sonic compositions from vinyl library music, which interweave musings across science and superstition, philosophy and pulp. Using hacked devices such as sewing machine motors and laboratory strobe lights, Golding generates throbbing, hallucinogenic visual distortions, which are also outputted as sonic signals. Cacophonic in form and content, performances transcend chaos and enter a hypnotic zone.
Un-Time
2014 (AUS/UK) 2x16mm projectors with hand processed film loop & reel; Strobotac; rotating shutter; contact mic; photoresistors; oscillator synth; camera flash units & telephone pick ups, 5 mins approx.
Shutters and flash rates coalesce in a performance of random un-timing between a Strobotac variable speed strobe light (present both filmed and live), the shutter of a Bolex film camera, and an external variable rotating shutter. The shutter of the camera trained on the bulb of the strobe light is randomly revealed as a diagonal shape of interference - a subversion of the strobe light’s industrial purpose to slow and stop mechanical mechanisms for analysis. The sound is the sum of amplified projector mechanics and the throbbing pulse of the strobe light itself as it send an electrical signal through the mixer.
Light At The End Of The Tunnel
2013 (AUS/UK) 2x16mm optical sound hand contact printed film loop & reel; voice - phrases of the near undead; optical devices - laboratory strobe, rotating colour filter wheel; bodily interference, 10 mins approx.
Live lines typical of the most common phrases about near death experiences are spoken and decayed over a cacophonic disruption of plundered library horror sound effects and music samples hand printed as optical sound on film. On screen a hand creeps around some classic TV fuzz captured by a process of digital and analogue refilming. The performance is overdriven by a rotating cyan and yellow colour filter wheel and a sonically and visually pulsing strobe light. A disjunctive experience – the media is embodied, haunted.
Ghost - Loud + Strong
2012 (AUS/UK) 2x16mm projectors, contact printed optical sound film & loop from original flexi disc recording & sound effects, rotating shutter, laboratory strobe, oscillator synth 10 mins approx.
Sound recordings taken from a flexi disc containing a dialogue about past life regression, and vinyl library sound effects, were reformatted as optical sound waveforms by recording into a 16mm sound camera, hand processing the film, and contact printing the resulting waveforms into a composition for live performance.
Sounds surface and regress, male voices ‘authorise’ and female voices ‘characterise’, as an uncannily obscured field of light and dark unfolds on screen. Created by the texture of the clear sticky tape used to hold down the composition during printing, the flickering film frames compel the viewer to hallucinate a non-existent visual subtext complemented by the alternating in/audibility. Sound and light weave into a disorienting cacophony, intensified and punctuated by an antique laboratory strobe light and an anti-syncopating rotating shutter intervening before the projector’s light beam. Indicated in the repetition of the sound sample, ‘To find a memory in the vastness of time…’ Ghosts - Loud + Strong explores the experience of sensations that threaten to exceed our capacity to perceive them.
Super Grotesquerie
2009 (AUS/UK) 2x16mm film reel and film loops, original 16mm & Super8mm images, made & found waveforms, refracting lenses & filters, 10 mins approx.
A form of disjunctive archiving, images and sounds were contact printed from 16mm science educational films Voice of the Insect and Photons, and Golding’s home archive of classic Super8mm horror and sci-fi films. Projected images are further manipulated with refracting lenses during the performance, shifting the locked rectangle of the screen. The soundtrack was made by manually sampling contacted printed waveforms and made sound graphics - a darkroom composition.