BENEDICT DREW

EMMA HART AND BENEDICT DREW

Emma Hart and Benedict Drew began their collaboration in 2005 at the invitation of the Lux for the "Soundtrack" event in London. Their work explores and destabilizes moving image, sound and performance. Central to their work is the inverting of technologies to create anarchic systems, making their processes explicit and their performances electric.

They have performed often in the UK and internationally including at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Kill Your Timid Notion, Dundee Contemporary Arts Centre and most recently at the ICA, part of the Nought to Sixty season.

Emma Hart's website :::::::HERE::::::::::

UNTITLED FIVE.
live video and film and sound

For the Nought to Sixty event at the ICA, we assembled a variety of projectors and equipment and got them to play instruments whilst projecting an image.

We had a slide projector playing wind chimes, a beater was attached to it's carousel and the chimes were struck as it travelled around. 16mm projectors played the cymbals, and a snare drum - a piece of film struck a drum as it spun on the projector. DVD players played an organ, the dvd drawer would strike the keys as they opened and closed. A moving head disco light played the electric guitar. A 16mm projector pulled a film which was laid on it's side on a record deck and played as a record. A slide projector's fan blew and played a harmonica.

In the centre of this Emma Hart and Benedict Drew played the high hat and kick drum, both had small video cameras attached to them. The camera was inside the high hat and on the pedal of the kick drum. These cameras captured and projected video of the audience.

(photos of "untitled five"s at ica by harriet poole )

FRIEZE online review of "untitled 5" by Emma hart and Benedict Drew performed at the ICA as part of Nought to Sixty

Published on 20/07/08
by Jonathan Griffin

"On Monday night shows opened by Mike Cooter and Alexander Heim, accompanied by a performance by Emma Hart and Benedict Drew. Hart and Drew used projectors of all kinds to throw light out from the central stage over and between the heads of the audience. Each machine was ingeniously adapted to become a semi-automatic musical instrument – producing sounds through the whipping of a loose end of film against a drum skin, for example, or the amplified clicking of a slide changer. The result was a gleeful cacophony of noise coupled with extremely delicate light effects, at the centre of which Hart and Drew pounded a bass drum and a hi-hat to which were fixed tiny closed-circuit video cameras. What was so refreshing about the event was the artists’ clear delight in experimentation: the work’s playful intelligence was quite unlike the humourless self-seriousness of much work in this vein that has preceded it. "

read full article ::::::here::::::

UNTITLED FOUR.

live film and sound

Two 16mm have a tug of war with a piece of film, that snakes through a table of cups, dislodging them and knocking the cups to the floor.

UNTITLED THREE.

live video and sound

A projector on a swing with a knife attached, swings at a screen from behind whilst projecting on to it and eventually destroying the screen

UNTITLED TWO.

live film and sound

A film made of different lengths of black and clear leader spliced together is threaded through the strings of an electric guitar.

From Art Review

" Technical aspects of the work were neither hidden nor visible, creating an effect that was stark and yet lyrical limited yet expanding. Hypnotic, tense and utterly entrancing, at once magical and technically astute, a brilliantly restrained drama between a projector and a guitar, between a man and a woman."
Ian White - "Art Review"

Review of Rotterdam film festival on www.villagevoice.com :

.....Also present were a new generation of cinema expanders. Bruce McClure, operating a bank of 16mm projectors customized with guitar pedals and electrical transformers, conjured a one-man, multi-hour symphony of psychoactive strobes, geometric light patterns, and mind-blasting machine music. Duo Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder used similar equipment to very different ends, evoking minimalist configurations of dancing vertical lines or creating a choreographed shadow play with subtly mystical overtones. These American artists have been notables within the avant-garde circuit for years, but all three reach new heights in real-time format, turning 16mm projectors into formidable audio-visual instruments. Such a transformation was succinctly captured by U.K. artists Emma Hart and Benedict Drew, who threaded a long 16mm reel of black and white leader through an electric guitar, each splice creating its own robotic kerrang. With nods to both Fluxus conceptualism and punk-rock punch, the untitled performance distilled the essence of 16mm's late-life artistic explorations. ::::see full review::::

UNTITLED ONE.

live video and sound

A bass cone speaker filled with white powder is connected to a video projector. The noise from the projector fan is played through the speaker, moving the powder. The volume is varied. A DV camera records the powder lit by the projector beam and the image is projected. The louder the noise, the more white is seen.

Excert of Untitled 1. by Emma Hart and Benedict Drew (quicktime)

Part of a review about our performances at Kill Your Timid Notion in Dundee posted on the film london website. You can read all of it here

A key element to the performances, and an intention of the festival, was to create opportunities for people to explore and experience work first hand and expose and illuminate the processes behind the work. This intention forms the central element of Emma Hart and Benedict Drews' collaborations. Their work develops from their collaboration as film-maker and musician and revolves around the way image and sound interacts. The first piece they presented consisted of a live projected image generated by filming particles vibrating on top of a speaker playing the soundtrack to the film. The question of which comes first, whether sound accompanies image or visa versa is drawn into debate throughout the festival.
Their second performance involved running 16mm film through Ben’s guitar strings before feeding it back into the projector. The film consisted solely of clear and black leader. The joins between the two film materials worked to 'pluck' the strings of the guitar and generate the works sound track. Miraculously, the film withstood the projection and only broke at the end, a brilliant chance conclusion to a work that will always produce something different......