Soup Collective in Manchester will be projecting their latest work onto the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank.
It was commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices to make the film as part of the Watch The Skies! BFI sci-fi season.
“Having created a film for Elbow’s Jodrell Bank gig a few years back, we jumped at the chance to further explore Lovell’s legacy. Some amazing resource material to work with and a chance to break out of the YouTube windows and onto the super structure that is the Lovell Telescope via some heavyweight projectors,” said Mark Thomas.
“The commission has provided an opportunity to re-ignite a few creative collaborations from within Soup and draw on numerous imaging techniques that we’ve only really scratched the surface with prior to this project.”
The music has been done by Graham Massey (he of 808 State), who’s taken the sounds and data sourced from the Lovell telescope and reinterpreted them into a soundtrack.
The film is based on the transcript of an interview between Bernard Lovell, the creator of Jodrell Bank and Roger Caras, vice president of Stanley Kubrick’s production company. Caras spoke to Lovell during the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“The aim of this piece is to encompass the science, history and personality of Jodrell Bank, working with individuals from Jodrell in the re-interpretation of the Lovell interview,” continued Thomas.
“A point of reference for us has been the work of video artists Woody Vasulka and Brian O’Reilly. Their Rutt Etra visual synthesiser was designed to manipulate a live video signal, controlling waveform and voltage to manipulate an image and convert sound into image and vice versa. Having spent the last year devising an analogue synthesiser based on the principles of the Rutt Etra, it felt like the perfect opportunity to utilise it, interpreting the content through original analogue synthesis, right through to modern digital visualisation techniques, using infra-red sensors to build 3D images.”
The film will play ahead of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ridley Scott’s Alien on Friday 3rd and Saturday 4th October.
