Weekend 25th & 26th September Siting Cinema will be performed in the auditorium at Regent Street Cinema before each film screening.
Siting Cinema is a research project that explores the cinema space as site through a film installation made and performed in Regent Street Cinema. The project is led by artist Julie Marsh, a researcher at CREAM (Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media), University of Westminster. Her research practice ‘site-integrity’ performs site through artistic devices operating in temporal relations with space and place, situating the audience at the centre of the artwork.
The cinema is first filmed using a 360-degree rig, recording every detail of the architectural site. The pre-recorded film of the auditorium is then projected onto the cinema screen and the same rig is used to track the movement of the recording device. The projected image has two roles: one to locate (anchor the audience within the cinema space) and the other to disorientate (see the cinema space in a new way).
Traditionally the cinema audience is lost in narrative time as Malcolm Le Grice states, “Everything possible is done to reduce awareness of the actuality of the screening time and space … the seats are soft, the sound surrounds, the screen fills the visual fields, all reducing awareness of our actual physical presence to the minimum”. (Le Grice, 2001, p.67). Siting cinema reverses this priority, forcing the viewer to actively look, engage and experience the physical site of the cinema auditorium.
“I became part of the cinema and film through a machine that recorded the space in the past and acted in the present. The space was no longer a motionless entity that I could explore or passively inhabit, but it became ‘activated'”.
(Audience feedback)
Siting Cinema will be performed in the auditorium at Regents Street Cinema before each film screening. Please check regentstreetcinema.com for film times.
