Dr Lighthouse is an AV artist and filmmaker who situates the audience experience in a multi-sensory domain employing aleatoric techniques and live remixing to juxtapose the didactic narrative practices of filmmaking with the real-time narrative of AV performance.
He started making experimental films during the early 1980s while working with industrial noise artists Test Department, exploring the cut-up politics of scratch video, paralleling the rise of sampling culture. Inspired by situationist détournement he developed a technique for multi-layering images, remixing sampled imagery as one of the in house VJs for Europe’s largest video installation of the time at the Fridge Night Club in Brixton, London (1987).
Simultaneous film production activities included screen-dance films for choreographer Lea Anderson. His creative energies also focused on work as a curator, arts promoter, and co-director of live arts platforms such as The Plunge Club; and initiating large-scale live art installations in unusual locations such as Nunhead Cemetery in South London (1993-98).
At the turn of the century, his interest in internet technologies led to the fusing of dadaist live performance and web-casting through a series of collaborations with Smart Lab, UAL. He founded arts collective Kino-Kult in 2003 and set about building full immersion audiovisual installations, curating VisionClash AV ‘shares’, engaging in architectural projection bombing and delivering live performances in the UK and abroad.
Now focusing his energies on creating immersive audio-visual experiences he has collaborated with The Front Room to combine video, spoken word and performance for events such as Cure or Be Cured (2017), develop AR components for a heritage walking tour Dark Side Portside (2020), and has experimented with immersive theatre, transmedia and experiential storytelling. He has produced a series of ACE-funded projects including the transmedia Cursed City Dark Tide (2019), the large-scale audiovisual installation Octopuses and Other Sea Creatures (2022) as part of the We Shine Portsmouth Festival of Light, and continues to curate the audiovisual performance platform Imaginarium of Dreams (2021, 2023).
