Artist talk added to screening of Gone, Gone Beyond

May 25 2022 – 6:30 PM, Gray Area, San Francisco | Get Tickets

Join us for this special showing of Gone, Gone Beyond and go behind the screen with creator Vicki Bennett (People Join us for an Artist Talk followed by a special showing of Gone, Gone Beyond with creator Vicki Bennett (People Like Us)!

6:30PM Doors open | 7:00PM Presentation by Vicki Bennett | 8:00PM Screening of Gone, Gone Beyond

$10 Presentation only
$30 Presentation + screening

Proof of vaccination is required for all attendees over the age of 12 years old. Read more.

Using collage as a compositional tool opens up endless opportunities to experience results that are more than the sum of the parts, opening doors (and windows) to let light in from outside of our own limited and sometimes repetitive ways of thinking. Since 2016 Vicki Bennett has been creating “Gone, Gone Beyond” for RML CineChamber, an immersive 360 surround cinema environment, is now an hour long.

In this presentation Vicki tells us about her creative process, expanding her aesthetics from 2D to 3D to create audiovisual content which breaks the rectangle, smashing the thin screen into tiny fragments, looking beyond the frame, climbing through to see what’s behind.

Gone, Gone Beyond

This special screening is part of a limited run showing of Gone, Gone Beyond, an immersive audio-visual spatial cinema work by People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett). This is Gone, Gone, Beyond‘s US premiere, following its European debut tour last fall with screenings at nyMusikk in Oslo, the Barbican in London, and more. See showtimes

Gone, Gone Beyond in San Francisco!

We are very pleased to announce that Gone, Gone Beyond will be screening in it’s home town San Francisco in May 2022 at Gray Area. We say it’s the “home town” because although we live in London, the piece was originally commissioned by Recombinant Media Labs for CineChamber, the structure which we then built a replica of in 2021 and have existing in the UK.

TICKETS: https://grayarea.org/gonegonebeyond/

All press inquiries should go to Gray Area, and if you have questions for People Like Us or Gone, Gone Beyond you can directly ask us.

Gone, Gone Beyond will screen at 6.30pm and 8.30pm each night.
On the 25th there will be an artist talk followed by one screening – tickets can be bought combined or separately: https://grayarea.org/event/vicki-bennett/

SCREENING DATES:

12, 13, 14, 19, 20 & 21 May 2022 (two screenings per night)
—- these screenings will be introduced by Naut Humon, original commissioner of Gone, Gone Beyond and creator of the CineChamber that houses our work.
25, 26 & 27 May 2022 (two screenings per night)
—- we will be present for these screenings and therefore will introduce the the 26th/27th, and it will be an artist presentation on the 25th.

All screenings are at Gray Area, Grand Theater, 2665 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA 94110 | info@grayarea.org | 415.843.1423

Covid policy: Full vaccination (no booster) | Masks strongly encouraged but not required 

Gone, Gone Beyond 360 Real-Space Immersive Cinema

“Hey, hey, have you ever tried… reaching out to the other side?”

Gone, Gone Beyond is an immersive a/v spatial cinema work by People Like Us (Vicki Bennett), which breaks the rectangle, smashing the thin screen into tiny fragments, looking beyond the frame, climbing through to see what’s behind.  

The initial work was commissioned by Naut Humon, the founder of immersive theatre project RML CineChamber, Gone, Gone Beyond is a 10 screen / 6 or 8 speaker piece, with seamless wrap around projection and surround sound where the audience sit inside. It comprises of movie and musical compositions, animated and sample-based/musique concrète collage juxtaposed with content filmed/recorded by the artist, all sewn together in a giant patchwork. Pull on a thread and watch whole new narratives expand and unravel all at once on a 360º palette. The project has been a work in progress since 2017, and showed for the first time in Autumn 2021 in feature length format.  

The work’s title and underlying concepts come from the Heart Sutra, a key Buddhist text, describing how all phenomena are empty in form yet ultimately interconnected. The last lines of the Heart Sutra say ‘gate gate pāragate pārasamgate bodhi svāhā’, which means “gone, gone beyond, gone beyond that a bit more, and then beyond that a bit further”. This reflects perfectly the action of going beyond the frame to where there are no edges to the narrative – just emptiness.

In this 360º format, time and space becomes elasticated, with the use of collaged video furthering the reflection on how information comes to us as fragments and that nothing is fixed. A new narrative-thread is woven in the mind of each viewer every time the work is seen, limited only to that exact time and space – just as the Heart Sutra reminds us that the only constant is change, and everything is related with no fixed source.

The initial in-process tester movie screened in San Francisco in October 2017 at RML’s own Recombinant Festival at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. Since then the work has been in development, with a private screening event in April 2019 Goldsmiths SIML for potential partners. The work will screen at nyMusikk, Oslo; SPILL Festival, Ipswich; Attenborough Centre (ACCA), Brighton; and London Barbican, in Autumn 2021. Version 2 of GGB screened in San Francisco’s Gray Area in May 2022 to great critical acclaim.

PAST:

SAN FRANCISCO Gray Area
12-27 May 2022 https://grayarea.org/gonegonebeyond/

OSLO Black Box Teater present KinoKammer with nyMusikk
13-16 October 2021 https://blackbox.no/en/e5115e56-702e-41a2-badb-cb21d1626082/

IPSWICH DanceEast as part of SPILL FESTIVAL
28-30 October 2021 https://www.danceeast.co.uk/performances/gone-gone-beyond-au21/

BRIGHTON Attenborough Centre (ACCA)
4-6 November 2021 https://www.attenboroughcentre.com/events/4028/gone-gone-beyond/

LONDON Barbican Centre
10-13 November 2021 https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2021/event/people-like-us-gone-gone-beyond

Review in scenekunst.no of Gone, Gone Beyond in OSLO,

http://www.scenekunst.no/sak/psykedelisk-meditasjon/
KRITIKK 15.10.2021 Mariken Lauvstad
KinoKammer
Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) / Lasse Marhaug:
Gone, Gone Beyond + For My Abandoned Left Eye
Black Box Teater / nyMusikk / Double premieres October 13, 2021

Review as pdf

The art event Kinokammer consists of two works made by noise artist Lasse Marhaug and the British video artist Vicki Bennett, better known under the artist name ‘People Like Us’. Both works are world premieres and are shown as a collaboration between Black Box theater and nyMusikk. CineChamber is a cross-genre format based on a concept developed by San Francisco-based Recombinant Media Labs, called CineChamber . The format frames the audience in a 360-degree moving audio and video landscape.

At the Black Box theater, Kinokammer is a so-called double ticket . First Marhaug’s work For My Abandoned Left Eye (2021) and then Bennett’s Gone, Gone Beyond (2021). The public can bring the wine glasses from the foyer into the exhibition hall. Rows of chairs are set up along three of the room’s four walls, while scattered seat cushions are placed on the floor. Thus, the audience will consider other spectators’ eyes and reactions as part of the art experience. Before the screening of Marhaug’s work really begins, an atmosphere is established where small talk and wine drinking are buzzed in the room for several minutes. Whether this is intentional or not, it creates a kind of ‘we’ in the room, an experience of sharing something. This sets a precedent that adds an extra dimension to the art event that will grow and develop throughout the screenings.

Marhaug describes his work as a ‘post-capitalist-science-fiction-noise film’. It is so far a decent genre description, but I experience in a way the work as more ordinary than that, at least visually. We are in a world that is preferably in black and white. We see images and fragments of forest and nature against hard building structures and remains and traces of man-made objects. Garbage, a sneaker, a sofa, an animal foot. The totality appears raw, wet, cool and hard, not only visually, but also acoustically. Occasionally, the film material is contrasted by abstract images, such as massively pulsating black spots, close together against a white background.

A mass bombardment that challenges the senses
Each projected movie sequence apparently has its own and ever-changing soundtrack. This constantly creates new and different layer-on-layer effects. The soundscape gives, among other things, associations to machine repetitions and massive metal grinders against crackling and crackling in various qualities, auditory textures that for a few moments remind me of the feeling of stinging icy rain or penetrating intense wheezing in the ears. Suddenly, small interruptions occur with the absence of noise before new images and sounds are fired at us like projectiles. It is a mass bombardment that challenges the senses and the distinction between impression and disturbance. Finally, I’m not sure if I actually hear sampled cries, the noise of a full room of screaming people, or if it’s just my brain that tricks me into thinking I sense these cries through the noise. I go out filled with a kind of unpleasant dizziness and with aching retinas. The work leaves an eco-deterministic turmoil in me that I need far more than thirty minutes to digest and reset myself from, and this also constitutes my objection to two such different works being put together.

After the break, we are thrown out on a completely different journey. This time, some have lain down on their backs, some close their eyes, some just sit relaxed and sip on the evening’s second or third glass of wine. All four walls are projected close together with flaming candles. The picture is obviously strikingly kitsch, almost ironic. Gradually we can hear sounds reminiscent of a crowd of stomping boot steps mixed with an indefinable hiss from insects and crickets, and a diffuse hum from distant, manipulated choruses. It is difficult to interpret and place the soundscape, and I also do not have time to get very far before the whole room is almost sucked through a kind of visual tunnel. The bass makes the floor below us vibrate, and we are pulled at breakneck speed through countless projected doors. This estimate reinforces the illusion of being in a simulator. It is as if a virtual wind has suddenly blown us away and we are suddenly sitting on a flying carpet, traveling through the artist’s subconscious, where playful pop cultural references are replaced by nightmarish and disturbing images. The audience looks in all possible directions as if to orientate themselves in constantly new places.

As if David Lynch were to take ayahuasca in the desert
The editing technique is extremely good, and the dramaturgy has a kind of kaleidoscopic associative form at the same time as each picture is just so easy to interpret that you can get caught in a new hook that throws you in the head. new associations before being torn loose and thrown into the next. This is as if David Lynch had taken ayahuasca in the desert and made a film of what he hallucinated afterwards. We are constantly somewhere between dream and nightmare, for example when we see Julie Andrews dancing carefree between tree trunks while war helicopters thunder across the sky while the world goes up in flames and explodes around her. We see prairie pictures with saguaro cacti and hear the sound of unpleasant radio signals. The chimney sweep from Singing in the Rain disappears into animated pipes, we see oil barrels burning and growing nebulae, barely hearing the sound of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both sides now’, glimpsing the globe from space (or is it a disco ball?), being drawn to the sound of lyre boxes and suddenly surrounded by giant funfair horses.

In the popular cultural references, a darker contemporary commentary is hidden. Most of the references are from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and in contrast to beautiful images of the universe’s darkness, celestial bodies and galaxy fog, an experience is created that time flows through space and pulls us through the cosmos at relentless speed. The work opens the gaze to the paradoxical and random of our popular cultural history, the powerless and merciless in that we have created what we have created, and nothing else.

The work also makes me philosophize about what can be called a performance. There are no actors or actors here, but I experience in return that we audiences become part of it. At one point a man rushes out of the room, a woman overturns a bottle, some get up from their chairs and walk around smiling or looking. None of this bothers me as it would in many other contexts. At one point there is one who laughs, and after this it is as if something in the room dissolves, the reactions become freer and more expressive. People respond and come up with small exclamations. The work would therefore not have been the same if I experienced it alone, and then maybe it’s a performance anyway?

In sum, I still think the two parts of tonight’s double ticket should have been shown separately. They are both so strong and intense works that they leave different resonances and reflections it would have been nice to have time to dwell on separately.

The Mirror on Vinyl!

Courtesy of our friends Discrepant, our album The Mirror is now out on vinyl!
Buy direct from us through bandcamp
Click on the link below and scroll to “The Mirror Vinyl LP” in the left hand column and click on that to buy. Shipping date is expected for 18 October 2019.
Includes digital album of The Mirror.
Also available on CD from the same bandcamp page.

No.8 in The Wire Magazine’s releases of 2019
Cover art for The Mirror by People Like Us

Tracks on the vinyl version of The Mirror:
A1 The Mirror
A2 Do You See What I Hear
A3 Step Inside
B1 Free My Prayer
B2 The Other Side
B3 Forever
B4 Till The End of Time


Previously released on CD accompanied by “Gone, Gone Beyond”, “The Mirror” is the dreamy soundtrack of an a/v project from collage artist extraordinaire Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us. With ‘’The Mirror’’ Bennett continues her eternal disassembling of popular music by exploring how the narrative of familiar sounds/songs can change dramatically under a new context, with that context always changing, in a never-ending flow. Each song is singular. And each song is a collage of and undefined number of other songs from other artists. It sounds familiar because that has been the modus operandi of People Like Us since the early 1990s. But “The Mirror” plays with the notion of familiar, driving around a collection of famous pop songs/artists, messing around with the memory of the listener and, of course, his unique comprehension of those specific songs applied in a new context. Because of the use of familiar pop sounds, “The Mirror” is often grandiose. Like an epic film only with highs, never letting the listener down or letting him doubt the power of pop. Even, of course, when the coordinates are twisted, mixed, over or underrepresented. Each moment feels like something that could only happen in a parallel universe. Although that may sound naïve, it’s just a lost thought of reaction to the beautiful collages of People Like Us in “The Mirror”. This mirror doesn’t reflect an image of ourselves or an image of pop. But an image on the way memories drift and are being constant rebuilt. An unfinished collage. — Discrepant

Pressing Information
One time pressing of 500 units
Mastered by Mark Gergis
Cut by Rashad Becker

Listen With Your Eyes

We’ve just made available a new track from the hour-long Gone, Gone Beyond (work still in progress)… click above ^^^

Still from Gone, Gone Beyond (hour-long version)