We have made a new film for improvising musicians and artists titled Objects In The Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear. This is part of our project The Mirror, which initially was and is an audiovisual performance by People Like Us, and the umbrella project also includes 3 new artist commissions and this film.
This is not the first film we have made of this type. Previous to this was Notations (which included a national tour in the UK (followed by further dates internationally) with a fantastic roster of improvisers, supported by Sound and Music), as well as some collaborations where we have made the film then made sections available to other artists and musicians to respond (Gesture Piece and CCCitations).
Much like the other movies, you can enquire about performing with this movie by way of our Contact Page. Our first performance will be in Newcastle, UK in June 2019, as part of a collaboration with Newcastle University Department of Music.
Performances: 14 June 2019 – Culture Lab, Newcastle 18 July 2019 – 7th Syros International Film Festival – Overexposure
Working under the moniker People Like Us, British artist Vicki Bennett has been creating audio-visual collage since 1991. Her extensive output spans music releases, radio broadcasts, films, live performances, gallery installations, 360° immersive environments and online media. Vicki treats collage as a form of contemporary folk art, rooted in the shared materials of mass media and technology. Central to her work is the belief that everything is interconnected, making the notion of absolute originality or isolated artistic ownership both questionable and unnecessary. Through collage, familiar sounds and images are brought into new relationships, producing unexpected meanings that extend beyond the sum of their parts.
Throughout her practice, Vicki has explored how we make sense of the world through the material already around us. Films, music, television, radio and archives provide a collective vocabulary, full of associations that change according to how they are encountered and rearranged. Sampling allows these existing fragments to take on different meanings, often revealing connections that were not apparent in their original contexts. Rather than treating the archive as a repository of fixed objects, her work approaches it as something continually being made and remade through use.
Since 2002, the majority of the People Like Us back catalogue has been freely accessible online. Vicki is a long-standing advocate of the gift economy and open access to cultural archives, demonstrating how self-distribution can create greater reach and longevity than conventional publishing channels. The discography and filmography of People Like Us have been generously hosted by UbuWeb, reflecting a commitment to sharing and cultural circulation that extends throughout her practice. In 2006, she became the first artist granted unrestricted access to the BBC archives.
Radio has been particularly important to Vicki’s exploration of how material can be collected, juxtaposed and experienced collectively. Her long-running programme DO or DIY has been broadcast on New York’s independent WFMU since 2003, continuing a practice of experimental broadcasting that began in the 1990s. Her large-scale radio projects have frequently challenged the boundaries of the medium itself. Radio Boredcast (AV Festival, 2012) was a 744-hour online radio station featuring new commissions and archival material, while Optimized! Expanded Radio (2016) transformed WFMU’s Monty Hall into a week-long online audiovisual radio station, combining live broadcasts, films, performances and audience participation. Later works include the crowdsourced radio project No One Is An Island (2016), the 22-hour commission 108 for Radio Art Zone (2022), and Changing Your Mind for Deutschlandradio. These projects investigate radio not only as a means of transmission but as a shared space in which unexpected relationships can emerge.
Vicki’s work in radio also extends to curation. In 2016 she co-curated Optimized! Expanded Radio with John Kilduff at WFMU’s Monty Hall, an experimental week-long online audiovisual station and artist residency funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. The project brought commissioned works, live broadcasts, an interactive AccuPlaylist and audience participation together across physical and online spaces.
The same approach extends to her film and performance work, where familiar images and narratives are separated from their original contexts and made to interact. Notations (2013), a touring film created for live musical improvisation, opened up the relationship between the fixed image and its changing musical accompaniment. Citation City (2015), drawing on Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, reconstructed London through its appearances in feature films, using cinematic fragments to create an alternative geography of the city. Other works include the documentary Nothing Can Turn Into A Void (2015) and The Library of Babel, developed from 2023 onwards as a live audiovisual performance inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ story of the same name. Developed through an Indiegogo campaign, The Library of Babel was first previewed during a three-day People Like Us residency curated by Vicki at Café OTO, London, in October 2023. Alongside its solo presentation, the programme brought together Maggie Nicols, Ergo Phizmiz, Gwilly Edmondez, Porest, Irene Moon, Erik Bünger and Hearty White in a mixture of performances, collaborations and conversation. The work has since travelled internationally, including presentations at the Vostell Museum, donaufestival, WFMU’s Monty Hall, Other Cinema in San Francisco and wildpop in Newcastle.
Vicki’s interest in the relationships between images, sound and their surroundings has increasingly taken her work beyond the conventional single screen. Her solo exhibition First Person, Fourth Wall (2020) at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, formed part of the Hallwalls Artist in Residence Project. Gone, Gone Beyond (2021), developed for Recombinant Media Labs’ CineChamber, used ten screens and eight speakers to create an immersive audiovisual environment surrounding the audience. Rather than directing attention towards a single image, the work allowed viewers to encounter multiple simultaneous perspectives while sharing the same physical space. The installation toured internationally, including presentations at nyMusikk Oslo, SPILL Festival, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts and London’s Barbican. This exploration continued with Mise en Abyme (2024), a widescreen, multispeaker audiovisual installation presented at Museu de Aveiro/Santa Joana in Portugal as part of Aveiro’s year as Portuguese Capital of Culture.
The processes of collecting, arranging and making associations are also visible in the structures through which Vicki develops her work. Her mind maps, lists and networks of references form a parallel visual practice, allowing ideas and materials to remain connected without necessarily imposing a fixed hierarchy. In 2022, she presented MIND MAPS: The Art of Vicki Bennett at Sheehan Gallery in the USA and Orfeó Lleidatà in Spain. The exhibition brought aspects of this associative approach into the gallery, revealing relationships between the finished works and the processes through which they emerge.
Music remains central to People Like Us, with more than 50 audio recordings released on labels including Illegal Art, Rough Trade, Soleilmoon Recordings, Discrepant, Sonic Arts Network and Touch. Her 2018 album The Mirror, accompanied by an audiovisual performance, was ranked No. 8 in The Wire‘s Albums of the Year. The retrospective double CD Sharity! Selected Works of People Like Us followed in 2023, and COPIA, the first new studio album since The Mirror, was released in 2024 and subsequently issued on vinyl by Discrepant in 2025. In 2026, Vicki began preparing THE RHiZOME in association with the relaunch of Illegal Art, continuing her exploration of musical recombination, association and transformation.
Alongside her own releases and performances, Vicki has produced an extensive body of commissioned moving-image work for other musicians. This includes films for The The, working with director Tim Pope, and videos for Marc Almond, The Soft Pink Truth and Soft Cell. During 2025 and 2026, her collaboration with Soft Cell expanded considerably, encompassing films for live performances and music videos associated with Danceteria, including Out Come The Freaks, In Heaven (When I Dance With You) and The Rainbow Room, as well as work with JG Thirlwell. These collaborations extend her approach to sampling into dialogue with other artists’ music, finding visual correspondences through association rather than literal illustration.
Over more than three decades, People Like Us has been presented internationally at venues including Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, BFI, Barbican, ICA, V&A, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Sónar (Barcelona), MAXXI (Rome), Venice Biennale, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Sydney Opera House and Centro de Cultura Digital (Mexico City). Vicki’s films have been broadcast on Channel 4, while her radio work has included sessions for John Peel and Mixing It, alongside commissions for WDR and Deutschlandradio. Her work has been commissioned by organisations including Arts Council England, Barbican, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, BBC, PRS Foundation, Great North Run, Sound and Music, AV Festival, Recombinant Media Labs, Sonic Arts Network, Animate Projects, Forma, LUX and Lovebytes. She has held numerous solo exhibitions and participated in international group exhibitions at institutions including HMKV (Dortmund), Hatton Gallery (Newcastle), Sheehan Gallery (Walla Walla), Hallwalls (New York), Edinburgh Printmakers and Pallant House (Chichester). Earlier moving-image commissions included Parade (2009), created for the Great North Run Cultural Programme using footage from the event’s archive.
In 2014 Vicki co-authored The Fundamental Questions with Gregor Weichbrodt (second edition, 2020). She was featured on the cover of The Wire in May 2021 (issue 447, interview by Abi Bliss), and appointed George A. Miller Visiting Artist at the University of Illinois for 2024–25.
Vicki is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD, where her research extends the ideas developed through more than thirty years of sampling and collage. Questions of memory, association, authorship and interconnectedness, long present in her artistic work, are now also explored through writing and research. Her interest in the relationship between human creativity and technological systems reflects a continuing engagement with the tools and conditions through which culture is produced, circulated and transformed.
Her writing has appeared in The Wire, including the 2026 essay Authorship Under Automation?, which examines the changing boundaries between human and machine creativity and their implications for artistic authorship. Her work has also been discussed in publications including Cutting Across Media (Duke University Press), Sensations of History (University of Minnesota Press), Kenneth Goldsmith’s Duchamp Is My Lawyer (Columbia University Press) and Carl Abrahamsson’s Different People (Trapart). People Like Us has been reviewed or profiled in The Wire, Rolling Stone, Frieze, The Guardian, NME, Sight & Sound, Film Comment, The Independent, Record Collector and numerous other publications.
A film by Vicki Bennett [2013] Soundtracks by : Andrew Sharpley [00:06] | Matmos [01:02] | Wobbly [05:08] | Gwilly Edmondez [07:48] | Dave Soldier [09:38] | Jason Willett [11:02] | Ergo Phizmiz [13:23]
A film by Vicki Bennett [2013] Soundtracks by : Andrew Sharpley [00:06] | Matmos [01:02] | Wobbly [05:08] | Gwilly Edmondez [07:48] | Dave Soldier [09:38] | Jason Willett [11:02] | Ergo Phizmiz [13:23]
The completed film stitches back together the seven chapters with their individual soundtracks, creating new connections between apparently unrelated film sequences. The result is a fascinating and witty reinterpretation of familiar film footage, with scenes arranged in surprising and often very funny combinations.
The title of “Gesture Piece” is partly self-explanatory – within human communication it is part of our hard circuitry that for instance we use hand gestures to articulate our speech, which is essentially graphically describing/enforcing audio or spoken discourse. Even when spoken language is not present, a whole series of hand and facial gestures are available to us to communicate expressions. By making a film that both contains human gestures (hands, facial, movement) as well as gestures made by natural and mechanical occurrences we are setting up the conditions for a dialogue between the graphical elements on the films and the improvisers, both with the film as well as with each other.
Diagram of subjects – created in the development of the film by Vicki BennettStill from Gesture Piece by Vicki Bennett
Gesture Piece has a sister project, Notations – a film created for live performance by selected improvising musicians and artists. When these two projects began, they shared the same umbrella name of Gesture Piece (the live performance was tested at Tectonics Festival in Reykjavik and Tel Aviv), but as the work developed it felt natural to separate them out into different names as they became two unique and separate entities.
In the weeks leading up to the online launch of Gesture Piece, Pixel Palace’s Curator for Digital media Arts, Dominic Smith spoke to Vicki Bennett about the development of this film.
The project Gesture Piece has now flowered into two unique and separate yet related artworks. It feels natural at this stage to rename these strands accordingly.
The title of Gesture Piecenow is held by the sister project of Notations – a film with new soundtracks from 7 invited artist/musicians. These will go online in September 2013.
Gesture Piece was commissioned by Pixel Palace, the digital art programme at Tyneside Cinema (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK) and supported using public funds by Arts Council England.
Tonight – 10 June 2013, Gesture Piece* will be performed at Uganda, Jerusalem this time around by Eyvind Kang, Jessika Kenney, Robbie Avenaim, Christoph Heemann and special guests.
*Update: Gesture Piece has now changed its name to Notations – info here
Gesture Piece* will be performed by an entirely new set of improvisers at another edition of Tectonics Festival, this time on 8 June 2013 in Tel Aviv at the venue Levontin 7. The performers this time around will be Alex Drool, Assif Tsahar, Robbie Avenaim, Christoph Heemann, Eyvind Kang and Jessika Kenney.
*Please note: The film for live improvisers Gesture Piece has now changed its name to Notations
Curated by Ilan Volkov, Tectonics brings together musicians from different worlds and backgrounds for an audience that’s open and ready for new experiences and surprises. The festival will include young composers and pioneering figures, chamber music, orchestral music and electronic performances.
People Like Us are currently creating a new work entitled GESTURE PIECE*, which will premiere at Tectonics Festival in Reykjavik. This is a film created for accompaniment by live improv musicians, who in this case will be the following performers: Skúli Sverrisson, Davíð Þór Jónsson, Kristín Þóra Haraldsdóttir, Hlynur Aðils.
