Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett has been working across the field of audio-visual collage, repurposing pre-existing footage to craft audio and video collages with an equally dark and witty take on popular culture. She sees collage as folk art sourced from the palette of contemporary media and technology, with all of the sharing and cross-referencing incumbent to a populist form. Using collage as a compositional tool, Vicki Bennett opens up endless opportunities to experience results that are more than the sum of the parts. Embedded in her work is the premise that all is interconnected and that claiming ownership of an “original” or isolated concept is both preposterous and redundant.
In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, The Barbican, Centro de Cultura Digital, V&A, Sydney Opera House, Royal Albert Hall, Pompidou Centre, Venice Biennale, Maxxi and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show ‘DO or DIY’ on WFMU has had over a million “listen again” downloads. since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.
ALL COMMISSION ENQUIRIES OR BOOKINGS FOR GONE, GONE BEYOND ARE TO BE DONE DIRECTLY WITH US THROUGH OUR CONTACT PAGE.
Working under the moniker People Like Us, artist Vicki Bennett has been creating and distributing audio-visual work across multiple platforms since 1992. Her extensive output spans CD, DVD and vinyl releases, radio broadcasts, live performances, gallery installations, 360° immersive environments and online media. Vicki treats collage as a form of contemporary folk art—rooted in mass media and technology—championing its democratic, shared nature. Central to her work is the belief that everything is interconnected, rendering the notion of artistic ownership or originality both absurd and unnecessary. Through the act of collage, she opens up expansive, unexpected outcomes that exceed the sum of their parts.
Since 2002, the majority of the People Like Us back catalogue has been freely accessible online. Vicki is an advocate of the gift economy, highlighting that for many artists, free self-distribution can generate greater reach and impact than traditional publishing channels. This approach alleviates the pressures of production costs, while ensuring long-term availability. The discography and filmography of People Like Us are generously hosted by UbuWeb.
Over her career, Vicki has produced over 50 audio recordings and more than 40 video works, released on labels including Illegal Art, Rough Trade, Soleilmoon Recordings, Discrepant, Sonic Arts Network and Touch. Her long-running radio show DO or DIY has been broadcast on New York’s fiercely independent WFMU since 2003. Her video work has been shown internationally at venues such as Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, BFI, Barbican, ICA, V&A, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Sonar (Barcelona), MAXXI (Rome), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) and Centro de Cultura Digital (Mexico City). Works have also been broadcast on Channel 4 and featured in sessions for John Peel and Mixing It.
People Like Us has been commissioned by organisations including Arts Council England, Barbican, ACCA, BBC, WDR, Deutschlandradio, PRS Foundation, a-n, Great North Run, Sound and Music, Animate Projects, AV Festival, RML, Sonic Arts Network, Forma, LUX and Lovebytes.
Vicki has held seven solo exhibitions and participated in over 20 group shows across prominent international venues, including the Venice Biennale, MAXXI (Rome), HMKV (Dortmund), Hatton Gallery (Newcastle), Sheehan Gallery (Walla Walla), La Scatola Gallery (London), alt.gallery (Newcastle), Vitrine (London), Engramme (Quebec), University of Greenwich Galleries, Edinburgh Printmakers, Pallant House (Chichester), Millennium Gallery (Sheffield), and Hallwalls (New York), among others.
Her work has been discussed in numerous publications such as Sounds Like Silence – 4’33’’ Today (Spectre Books), The Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Cutting Across Media (Duke University Press), The Fundamentals of Sonic Art and Design, Incredible Machines, Sensations of History (University of Minnesota Press), and Here To Go – Art, Counter-Culture and the Esoteric. She has also contributed to The Wire, including a feature in their “Collateral Damage” column (2012), and has entire chapters devoted to her in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Duchamp Is My Lawyer (Columbia University Press) and Carl Abrahamsson’s Different People (Trapart, 2021).
People Like Us has been reviewed or profiled in The Wire, Rolling Stone, Frieze, The Guardian, NME, Time Out, Sight & Sound, Film Comment, The Scotsman, The Independent, BBC Online, Bizarre, Record Collector, Metro, XLR8R, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Baltimore City Paper, and more. Interviews include The Observer, Filmmaker Magazine, Found Footage Magazine, Wired, a-n Magazine, RadioWeb MACBA, Sound and Music, and multiple features in The Wire.
Her radio interviews include Late Junction, Soundproof (ABC), WDR 3 Open Sounds, Cutting Up The Cut Up (BBC Radio 4), PM and Twenty Minutes (BBC Radio 3), and North by Southwest (British Council).
She has also curated a variety of events and publications, including First Person, Fourth Wall (2020), Optimized! (WFMU, 2016), Concert of Collage (Encounters Festival, 2015), Radio Boredcast (AV Festival, 2012), and Nothing is New, Everything is Permitted (2010).
Notable works include Notations, a touring film for live improvisation (TUSK/Sound and Music, 2013); two films for Channel 4’s Random Acts; Citation City (2015), an AV performance inspired by Walter Benjamin; Nothing Can Turn Into A Void, a documentary (2015); No One Is An Island (WDR, 2016); and The Mirror (2018), an AV performance and album ranked No.8 in The Wire’s Albums of the Year. Vicki also produced video content for The The’s 2018 comeback tour, and was part of the New Voices programme from Sound and Music, and received an a-n Artist Bursary in 2019. Her radio commission I Can Fly aired on WDR in 2020.
In 2020, she premiered two new works at her solo exhibition First Person, Fourth Wall, as Hallwalls Artist in Residence (HARP). The following year saw the touring of Gone, Gone Beyond, an immersive multi-screen and multi-speaker AV installation across venues including nyMusikk Oslo, SPILL Festival, ACCA Brighton, and London’s Barbican.
In 2022, she presented MIND MAPS: The Art of Vicki Bennett at Sheehan Gallery (USA) and Orfeó Lleidatà (Spain), and Gone, Gone Beyond was screened at Gray Area, San Francisco. Her 22-hour radio piece 108 aired via Radio Arts Zone, and she performed with Ergo Phizmiz and Gwilly Edmondez at The Wire‘s 40th Anniversary. She also produced a new radio work Changing Your Mind for Deutschlandradio and a mixtape for BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction. The lathe-cut vinyl Rhapsody in Glue (with Ergo Phizmiz) was released in November 2022.
In 2023, she launched a successful IndieGoGo campaign for the new live AV performance and album The Library of Babel, premiering at a three-day residency at Café OTO, London. A retrospective 2-CD set Sharity! Selected Works of People Like Us followed in April.
In 2024, People Like Us released a new album COPIA, created music videos for The The, Soft Cell and Marc Almond, and debuted a widescreen AV installation Mise en Abyme at Museu de Aveiro/Santa Joana in Portugal. Currently in development is Khroma, a new 360-degree work for RML CineChamber.
So far in 2025, People Like Us continues work on Khroma, alongside creating live visuals for Soft Cell’s performances of “Torch” and “Purple Zone”. Vicki is also collaborating with Kevin Hamilton (University of Illinois) on a text-based media project.
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Citation City is a 42 minute audiovisual performance work which sources, collages and edits 300 major feature films where content is either filmed or set in London – creating a story within a story, of the film world, living its life, through extraordinary times of change, to see what happens when these multiple narratives are combined… what will the story tell us that one story alone could never tell?
“The result is a sweeping panorama of London, a London as represented through cinema – not the real city at all, but one that exists in the collective imagination of moviegoers throughout the decades.” Filmmaker Magazine
Please note: this is now retired. However, we occasionally make edits available as stand-alone movies for cinema screening.
A time-travelling voyage through one city, assembled from hundreds of movie clips and inspired by the wanderings of Walter Benjamin. A patchwork of over 300 features either filmed or set in London, Citation City combines multiple narratives to create the story of one city in a period of enormous change. Pieced together by audiovisual artist Vicki Bennett (aka People Like Us), this beguiling, labyrinthine work takes its cue from Benjamin’s Arcades Project, an ambitious attempt to map out Paris in fragments which was cut short by the author’s death in 1940. Flatpack Film Festival
Background: Inspired by The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, this audiovisual performance work by People Like Us is created from 1000s of clippings of text and visual media, collaged using a system of “convolutes”, collated around subjects of key motifs, historical figures, social types, cultural objects from the time. By gathering and assembling such groups of similar yet unrelated, he revealed a hidden, magical encyclopaedia of affinities, a massive and labyrinthine architecture of a collective dream city. On reading Benjamin, his approach to editing astonished Vicki Bennett, and the similarity of their creative processes of cutting and collating extensive lists of subject matter by context.
As a side project, Vicki also invited selected sound artists to create distinct soundtracks to the work in order to produce two new films.
Performances: 9 December 2014 Cafe Oto preview http://www.cafeoto.co.uk/jennifer-walshe-sharon-gal-andie-brown-people-like-us.shtm 29 January 2015 World Premiere attransmediale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 28 March 2015 UK Premiere at Flatpack Film Festival, Birmingham, as part of a larger WFMU and Walter Benjamin-themed programme 17 April 2015 Parede, Portugal 18 September 2015 Bristol Encounters Short Film Festival 26 September 2015Whitechapel Gallery at Walter Benjamin Now Symposium (at 5pm), London 15 October 2015 Leeds Art Gallery (private screening for students only) 24 October 2015 Monty Hall, WFMU 28 October 2015 Red Room, Baltimore 21 November 2015Brighton Cinecity Festival 12 April 2016 Sonic Protest Festival, Paris 7 May 2016 Delco Festival, Nimes 23 November 2016 Dundee Contemporary Arts March 2017 Hull UK City of Culture/ReROOTed Citation City is now retired. However we now make it available for movie screenings. October 2017Other Cinema, San Francisco (20-minute stand alone movie edit) December 2019 Dare Conference, Ghent (screening)
Vicki’s working process
A portion of Citation City previewed at London’s Cafe Oto on 9 December 2014 then World Premiered in full at transmediale, Berlin on 29 January 2015. It’s UK Premiere was at Flatpack Film Festival on 28 March 2015, and London Premiere at Whitechapel Gallery on 26 September 2015 as part of the Walter Benjamin Now Symposium.
Vicki’s working process
Citation City education/teaching pack PDF download: citation city teaching pack We thought it may be useful to make a document explaining the process of making this work. This pdf is intended as a companion to the audiovisual work, giving examples of the process one might undertake to create new work when sourcing from a large media database. This particular example relates to moving image and musical composition, but the methods can translate to other platforms that use composition, directing, editing, creative narratives and story telling.
SELECTION: Layout in paper form of descriptions of selected film content and possible subject headings (convolutes/citations) – August 2014
Vicki’s working processThe first stage after selecting footage is to type out descriptions of hundreds of segments then cut them out, and make arrangements of subjects, content, “convolutes”Citation CityVicki’s working process
Vicki Bennett/People Like Us Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett has been working across the field of audio-visual collage, and is recognised as an influential and pioneering figure in the still growing area of sampling, appropriation and cutting up of found footage and archives. Working under the name People Like Us, Vicki specialises in the manipulation and reworking of original sources from both the experimental and popular worlds of music, film and radio. People Like Us believe in open access to archives for creative use. In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, The Barbican, Centro de Cultura Digital, V&A, Sydney Opera House, Royal Albert Hall, Pompidou Centre, Venice Biennale, Maxxi and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show ‘DO or DIY’ on WFMU has had over a million “listen again” downloads. since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb. Longer Biography Filmography Exhibitions and Editions Selected Performances and Screenings Commissions and Awards Discography https://peoplelikeus.org/2014/artist-statement-for-people-like-us/
