Abstract

The critical commentary presents and contextualizes a film and video making practice
spanning three decades. It locates a contemporary visual music practice within current
and emerging critical and theoretical contexts and tracks back the history of this
practice to the artist’s initial screenings of work as part of the 1980’s British Scratch
video art movement.
At the heart of the body of work presented here is an exploration and examination of
methods and working practices in the encounter of music, sound and moving image.
Central to this is an examination of the affective levels that sound and image can
operate on, in a transsensorial fusion, and political and cultural applications of such
encounters, whilst examining the epistemological regimes such work operates in.
A combination of factors has meant that work such as this, arising in the UK
provinces, can fall below the historicizing and critical radar – these include the
ephemeral and transitory nature of live performance work; the difficulties of
documenting such work; the fragility and degeneration of emerging and quickly
obsolescent formats; and a predominance of a London–centric focus on curating,
screening and historicizing of experimental film and video art practices.
My film and video practice has been screened nationally and internationally over
three decades, and has been recognized as exemplary practice both in the early 1980s
at the inception of the Scratch movement and in more recent retrospectives. The
critical commentary argues that this work contributes new knowledge of the history,
contexts and practices of film and video art and audiovisual and visual music
practices.