Search for the Disco King, The Bowie Lounge, Rock n Roll Suicide

The context for the project are live shows by The Bowie Lounge, entitled ‘Rock n Roll Suicide’ at Port Eliot Festival 2017 and the Exeter Phoenix, in September 2017.

The Bowie Lounge is an artistic response to the work of David Bowie, a re-staging of songs, readings, poems and art happenings inspired by those of the early Beckingham Art Lab.

The project takes place within this setting as the band perform their live set, and consists of real-time re-filming /remixing of Bowie video with several cameras fed across multiple screens. Images from the original videos, through re-filming, analogue processing, and circuit bending become distorted, blurred and fractured – the images stutter, glitch and are overwhelmed by noise. This process of reshooting, and post producing creates a space between the earlier form, a rupture of sorts, breaking from well known, iconic imagery towards distant refrains, partially remembered glimpses and fleeting patterns.

The imagery from the earlier videos is all but lost, no longer iconic representations but now worn out, bent, damaged, wibbly wobbly, degraded, collapsed, distorted forms. Occasional but peripheral glimpses of Bowie flicker and quickly dissolve – instability, contingency, temporary instances of things dominate. Through this process the iconic and familiar breaks down, nothing is permanent and fixed – all of the back catalogue is in transit, subject to review, restaging, reanimation – a low fi, future mystic rewiring.