I stumbled across The Light Surgeons the other day… I first saw these guys at a masterclass at the This Is Not Art festival in Newcastle 2002 and was instantly struck be their dedication beautiful (often complex) narrative video, most often performed live using a multitude of various projectors (super 8, digital, slide etc).

From their website:  A collective of pioneering multimedia artists founded in 1995 by creative director Christopher Thomas Allen, TLS functions as an experimental production company which seeks to develop new forms of audio visual experiments outside the established art and design institutions. TLS’ work spans many diverse mediums; print, photography, motion graphics, digital film production, exhibitions, installations and ground breaking live audio visual performances.

from on .

An abstract from one of the prints from our upcoming show ‘Our Own Particular Truth’….

The Image Fulgurator is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards.

In principle, the Fulgurator can be used anywhere where there is another camera nearby that is being used with a flash. It operates via a kind of reactive flash projection that enables an image to be projected on an object exactly at the moment when someone else is photographing it. The intervention is unobtrusive because it takes only a few milliseconds. Every photo another photographer takes of an object at which the Fulgurator is also aimed is affected by the manipulation. Hence visual information can be smuggled unnoticed into the images of others.