A mix of open-source infomercials from the 50s and 60s. I cut this selection from many hours of footage from the Prelinger Archive as content for an audiovisual set at Bestival 2006, along with Pussy Cat Palace (a portable soundsystem built by the legendary DJ Wheeliebag).
I built a portable projector system running from a 12V battery and we set up at random points around the site and played. It was a pretty chaotic affair, and all footage from the festival was lost, apart from these videos, which I used to play between songs. During the songs, I projected mixes of silent footage of rocknroll dancing and lovely B/W footage of strippers.
I wanted it to seem to people as if they’d stumbled across a berzerk public information broadcasting service from the universe next door. New narratives can be semi-randomly built up from the way clips are placed next to each other, mirroring Burroughs’ cut-up technique for literature.
The set-up I built uses a 12V Deep Cycle battery, going into a Pure Sine-Wave Invertor, to switch the flow yo, which I attach a 4 plug strip to. The laptop, projector, and my Edirol V4 video mixer are all powered up from that. I hired a rear-projectable fast-fold screen for Bestival, and we found a patch of grass and set up each night, playing ska and rocknroll to lunatics, and I beamed out footage of strippers from the 20s fondling pythons, along with snippets of the infomercials between songs. No footage from the festival remains, as it was a chaotic affair to say the least. This is the video we sent to them to get the gig though, it was shot in London Fields one Saturday night. We made a screen out of a fence wrapped in fabric. Local kids came and boogied, whilst warning us that if their older brothers come down here, all our gear would definitely be nicked..
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