In the wake of ‘October’ (2013) at 55 Sydenham Rd, I continue to interrogate the material base of pre-digital cinema.

For the last two years I’ve been focussing the sun through a magnifying glass onto the figures of ice skaters in the consecutive frames of two 16mm films. One is from the late 1930’s and the other from the 1970’s. Acetate film resembles ice.

This iconoclastic tally of burnt cells, (at 24 frames per second), is the result of an obsessive attempt to recapture that rare moment when a figure in motion on the cinema screen would abruptly freeze. For a split second, the blink of an eye, a flood of obtuse meanings was ignited that bore no relation to the prior narrative trajectory of the movie. Then the image, caught in the film gate of the broken projector, melted under the intense heat of the lamp.  The audience, suddenly released from their screen-trance, would awake en masse in the enormous room.

The liberating potential of this event, this disruption to the visual flow, (its afterimage burnt into my memory), is without ground in the era of the touch screen: i.e. is on ice. Here I offer work to give a taste of this burn.