Guy Sherwin

There is something exhilarating about observing an artistic star that shines at the edge of the cosmos, and steadfastly refuses to move to the centre, that even seems to vanish beyond the periphery as time and fashion move on, only for it to become visible again”. Tim Cawkwell.

Sherwin’s 1975 performance 'Paper Landscape' is a live interaction with his on-screen presence, filmed on super 8mm in Epping, London. Forty years later he has re-worked the idea for digital video and sound – recorded in the rice fields of Itoshima, Japan.

Made during an artist residency in the rural Nijomasue district of Fukuoka, south Japan. The film features the public information system used to alert residents of earthquakes and other possible dangers

Guy Sherwin's SHORT FILM SERIES was made between 1976 and 2014. Eventually he issued 34 films. Some are single studies of light, focused on the reflections in an eye shot in close-up. Others are domestic, as in the PORTRAIT WITH PARENTS or BREATHING .... Many deal with two rates of time measurement, as in CLOCK AND CANDLE, or construct visual paradoxes, as in the shuddering stasis of METRONOME - an illusion caused by the clash between the spring-wound mechanisms of the Bolex camera and of the metronome itself. In BARN DOOR the semi-strobe effect of light pulsations flattens the distant landscape. ... Interestingly, Sherwin has recently returned to the series after almost twenty years, with studies of animals and insects which in part recall the fascination with the 'invisible' side of nature felt by the surrealists, and seen in the scientific writing of Roger Caillois and the films of Jean Painleve during the 1930s.

An expanded film performance by Guy Sherwin using a transparent screen and white paint

An expanded film performance by Guy Sherwin using a transparent screen and white paint

Optical sound film by Guy Sherwin

Film by Guy Sherwin

Optical sound film by Guy Sherwin

Optical sound film by Guy Sherwin

A performance work for multiple projectors in which the starting point is my sound & image experiments of the 70s. The film and sound material was prepared in one simple action by bleaching away the side of a length of black leader, leaving a clear strip running along its length. The film has two sets of perforations and is twisted into a loop, known as a Mobius Loop. On projection, the strip of projected light switches from side to side, followed by a change in tone of the sprocket holes. Three 16mm projectors lie on their sides, and the loops are projected onto the screen as stacked blocks of light, gradually coloured by gels. The performance also makes use of the sound tone controls of the three projectors. First performed at Star & Shadow Cinema, Newcastle 2007 with sound mix by Lynn Loo. G.S.

“Black film stock is repeatedly cut and rejoined. The cuts are made with the angled blade of a splicer normally used for joining sound film. At each cut we see an angled flash of light followed by a thud of sound. The film combines rhythmic intervals from one cut per second to twenty-four cuts per second, spread across 6 projectors”.

9 mins b/w Silent 16 mm for 3x16 mm projectors, or 2x16mm projectors, overlapping; can be shown as a performance or installation. Similar views of the same urban scene combined in projection.

I had rooms at the front and back of the house and I recorded sunlight passing through them in the course of the day, as well as across the buildings seen from the windows. Sometimes I would set the time-lapse camera running and go off to work, leaving it to record the sunlight in the empty rooms. Another room in the flat was used for rehearsal by the saxophone player Alan Wilkinson. The soundtrack comes from recordings I made while walking from room to room as he was playing. This is mixed with a variety of music from the street, reflecting the multi-ethnicity of the location - Greek music, reggae, country & western. G.S. (LUXONLINE)

A film collaboration using six projectors that evolved from Lynn Loo's film o and Guy Sherwin's printer installation bdpq. The images were produced by printing letterforms directly onto raw 16mm film, and their shapes make sounds as they pass through the projectors' optical sound heads. These optical sounds may at times resemble the uttered sound of the letterforms. The work is sometimes performed as a live interaction with musicians.

A performance for two projectionists using two 16mm projectors with freeze-frame. This performance version further animates the newspaper text by using intermittent projection, pausing and re-starting the film on its way through the projector. The pauses allow us to read chance fragments of the newspaper. In performing the work two identical prints are shown superimposed with a slight difference in image size, which varies throughout the performance. The projectionists attempt to bring the two films into synchronisation with each other by alternately freezing and running the films. During these brief periods of synchronisation something unexpected happens as a result of the slight misregistration of the two identical images and of their accompanying sounds.

This is a live projection event for two 16mm projectors and two loudspeakers. The material in Cycles (1972/77) is recycled for two screens and two soundtracks, with one screen set inside another, giving rise to a surprising induced colours and rhythmic patterns.

Bachs Prelude No. 24 in B-minor from Das wohltemporierte Klavier, performed by various pianists, is juxtaposed with pictures of a moving train.

short by Guy Sherwin

short film by Guy Sherwin

An ongoing set of films of inconsequential animal movements which are hand-printed in a variety of ways, using changes of light, geometry, time. These processes reveal what might be hidden in the frames and photographic depths of the material, as well as constructing a way of looking in relation to their subject.

short by Guy Sherwin

Street-life at a busy intersection beneath a freeway in San Francisco. An urban landscape film with an underlying formal structure.

Mile End Purgatorio is Guy Sherwin and Martin Doyle’s one minute hymn to the London road via its shop signs. A heady rapid-fire brew of Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible and William Blake, its visual text is storefront correlated, its theme the crisis on the journey, its rhythms all of daily life, and celebratory in its observations of the seemingly known.

Reflections in fish tanks in the windows of restaurants in Chinatown, San Francisco, accompanied by sounds of foghorns, passers-by, dining and breaking waves. Shot on Super 8, the images oscillate between abstraction, documentary portrait and poetry, with the fish coming in and out of focus, whilst the sound provides a grounding in the setting of San Francisco’s harbour and nearby Chinatown.

Made during my daughter’s early childhood. It’s not about her, but it’s a response to her questions about the world that implicitly challenge things we take for granted – the visual appearance of the world, ambiguities in language, the ways we communicate. – Guy Sherwin

Made while on a visit to Connemara in Ireland, the film is partly a response to the sense of time that the landscape evoked.

Optical sound film by Guy Sherwin

Made using a super 8 sound camera. The microphone is attached to a stick protruding from the camera, and kept just out of sight. This image-and-sound-gathering device is used to 'play' the open strings of a piano.

The sound of lights passing through a darkened landscape seen from a moving train.

Part of Sherwin's short film series. "...In the shuddering stasis of METRONOME– an illusion caused by the clash between the spring-wound mechanisms of the Bolex camera and of the metronome itself." -Film-Makers' Co-Op

"One of a series of films that investigates qualities of sound that can be generated directly from the image track. The images that you see are simultaneously scanned by the optical sound reader in the projector, which converts the into sound. This particular film makes use of the aural effect of visual perspective; the steeper the perspective on the railings, the closer the intervals of black and white, and the higher the frequency of sound. I also wanted to find out what freeze frames and visual strobe would 'sound' like. Visual strobe is created both in the camera (camera shutter v. railings) and in the printer (printer shutter v. slipping frames)." -G.S.

One of a series of films that uses soundtracks generated directly from their own imagery. I shot the images of a staircase specifically for the range of sounds they would produce. I used a fixed lens to film from a fixed position at the bottom of the stairs. Tilting the camera up increases the number of steps that are included in the frame. The more steps that are included the higher the pitch of sound. A simple procedure gave rise to a musical scale (in eleven steps which is based on the laws of visual perspective. A range of volume is introduced by varying the exposure. The darker the image the louder the sound (it can be the other way round, but Musical Stairs uses a soundtrack made from the negative of the image.) The fact that the staircase is neither a synthetic image, nor a particularly clean one (there happened to be leaves on the stairs when I shot the film) means that the sound is not pure, but dense with strange harmonics. – G.S.

Railway tracks seen from a speeding train are converted into optical sounds.

A live film performance by Guy Sherwin.

A film made without a camera in which both image and sound are the result of the same chemical process. Raw film was spooled onto a spiral and partially submerged in developer, so that only half the film is developed, leaving the trace of a time spiral in the image and (optical) sound. The film can be projected in either direction. Outwards, from the centre of the spiral, we hear a decelerating sound like someone regaining their breath. G.S.

Optical sound by Guy Sherwin

A found-footage film made entirely from Academy leader, which is normally used to cue the start of films. The film was hand-printed on a home-made contact printer. It was rolled back and re-printed several times over, to create a complex layering of both image and sound.

A film made without a camera: A newspaper glued onto clear film is projected as audio-visual typography. "For NEWSPRINT I glued a newspaper onto clear 16mm film then punched out the sprocket holes to enable the film to run through the projector. Using a strong light I printed ‘newspaper-film’ to copy it onto another strip of film. This shows up the letters and words clearly, which can also be heard as they pass over the sound-head in the projector. Newsprint #2 is a live projection event for two 16mm projectors and two loudspeakers [...] Two identical prints are shown superimposed onto the same screen." -GS.

One of my first 16mm films, made without a camera as an experiment in how to visualize rhythm. It equates four simple shapes with four simple sounds, made by punching shapes into black film and scratching into the film's optical sound track. The film uses a bar structure similar to a music score. Each bar lasts one second (24 frames of film) and is divided into 2, 3, 4 or 6 aural and visual beats per second (bps). These are used in alternating patterns such as: 2/3, 3/4, 3/4/6, 2/3/6 In each section of the film an arbitrary relationship is established between image, sound and beats per second, for example: circle = 12 scratches per frame (high pitch sound) at 6 bps rhombus = 6 scratches per frame (mid pitch sound) at 4 bps triangle = 3 scratches per frame (low pitch sound) at 3 bps rectangle = 1 scratch per frame (percussive sound) at 6 bps A print of the film was hand-painted in 2006 G.S.

A hand-made film of a circular form that fluctuates in rhythms of light and sound.Cycles 1 is made by sticking paper dots onto the surface of the film and to its (optical) sound track. On projection these separate instants are converted simultaneously into picture and sound.The gaps between the dots gradually decrease until a fusion of the material occurs; the separate image-moments coalesce into a pulsating ball of light; simultaneously we hear rhythmic sounds fusing into a continuous rising drone.These transformations are taking place in our perceptual systems, for if we examine the physical strip of film, no such change is seen. Apparently we register time through our optical and our aural senses in very different ways, one chemical, the other mechanical.

Optical sound film by Guy Sherwin