Pitkethly and Cutler’s RAVINE/MACHINE performs ritual acts of projection while simultaneously offering an autopsy of those acts of projection – the paths of light through the apparatus that conjure unfixed places, and the sonic illuminations of these atmospheres.
Summoning landscape and projection rituals with toy harp and rotary candles, RAVINE/MACHINE is an audio-visual fieldtrip like no other. As a duo (sound designer and DIY instrument maker Scott Pitkethly and live cinema artist and geographer Amy Cutler) they play wires, zithers, and holograms. Their audio-visual tools include homemade music boxes, 35mm slide carousels, frosted screens, 16mm reels, floating chiffon, adapted torches, toy harps, shock blankets, the flicker of light shutters, and palettes of micro loops and granular synthesis. Reminiscent of the do-it-yourself style of early projections, their hacked instruments are both lulling and surreal, inspired by reworking forgotten traditions of ‘the live geography show’ for the end of the world. Recent performances include their set for the Vortex stage at Supernormal Festival 2022, which included specific light-and-sound-and-costume homage to traditions of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift and their links to Braziers Estate.
Drawing on Barthes’ concept of shimmering images, Cutler’s fieldwork and macrophotography processes include anagylph 3D moving image, Velvia 50 slide film, adapted torches and flashes, and homemade projection booths using holographic paint. Pitkethly eschews the oscillators of a traditional synthesiser for the resonances of the autoharp, with sound created by homemade noise boxes and contact mics, heavily processed with granular synthesis and micro looping using a palette of effects he has designed and built. Together, these soundscapes, night lights and projections combine as suspended landscapes, where the cycling mechanics of a slide carousel carousel can be lulling or can descend into surreal worlds. The constant presence of the projection apparatus itself is reminiscent of early film projections and their “phantasmagoria” (literally, assembly of spectres).
