It has just turned midnight in east Berlin. The Light Surgeons, a group of UK filmmakers, graphic designers and DJs are delighting a large crowd of young, fashionable (mostly) west Berliners at the former state bank of the GDR.
The group is dazzling its audience with an audio-visual extravaganza that marked the end of a seven-day digital film festival in the city last Saturday night.
The festival, the work of onedotzero, claims to be the largest of its kind in the world. Onedotzero showcases the best of new media, computer games and digital film. The festival drags cutting-edge work created for PCs and consoles and launches it onto the cinema screen. And in the case of the Light Surgeons, it is completely live.
The Light Surgeons mix bits of film, computer graphics, music and photography in the way DJs mix dance records. They have grown up in clubs in London, providing the visuals for chill out rooms, but now they want to take their work to another level and have started including bits of narrative in their latest work, Electronic Manoeuvres. Although most of the audience in Berlin stood up and talked freely during last Saturday's performance, Electronic Manoeuvres is a kind of documentary - albeit one that you are unlikely to have seen the likes of before.
Part road movie, part critique on consumerism, the new work moves from the London Underground to Vegas and then into outer space. The Light Surgeons were let loose with digital camcorders in the US earlier this year. They recorded stories told by the homeless and began weaving them into the mix. It is a new style of film, they say, one they refer to as 'exploded documentary'.
"We're like a media circus," says Chris Allen, the group's founder member. "We use a digital camcorder, Super 8, photography and bits of audio we've recorded ourselves. I think digital film has given people like us a way of approaching film that is different from traditional ways."
Like much of the onedotzero programme, Electronic Maneuvers is digital film - but it's not the kind that you find on the web. Even though the festival features much of the best work by the UK's up-and-coming new media practitioners, it has so far shied away from producing an online version. Rather, the festival is a showcase for the visual landscape we can expect on the net in the coming months and years.
Matt Hanson and Shane Walter founded the festival in 1996. A former film critic and theatre producer respectively, they have taken onedotzero to 25 cities worldwide, including Taipei, Melbourne, Barcelona and Nottingham. In addition to the festival, the pair are currently curating a TV series for Channel 4 and planning something called a 'remixable film' to be distributed over the net sometime next year. The Berlin festival also included presentation from two of the UK's leading new media design agencies, State and recent Bafta winner Digit. Other highlights include the screening of introductory sequences from computer games such as Munch and Tekken Tag Tournament 3.
"As well as commissioning and producing work we have developed an audience that didn't exist before," says Walter. "In the first couple of years of the festival, people would ask us how we could programme TV advertising alongside graphic designers and architects and illustrators. Now I think people are really understanding what convergence means and understand that there is a need for a festival like this."
Co-founder Matt Hanson concurs: "What a lot of people have tried to do is take a traditional film and squeeze it into a narrow bandwidth. What we've done is go the other way, and taken non-traditional film into the cinema."
The Light Surgeons are all in their mid-20s, but it is not just the young who are taking to new forms of moving image. More experienced designers are finding a new lease of life by moving across into so-called 'time based' work. Andy Martin, a 40-something illustrator, showed his work at the first onedotzero, and has been a feature of the festival ever since.
"As the tools have been arriving there has been almost a stampede in the design world of people picking them up and looking to experiment with them," says Martin. "Some are looking purely at the commercial potential of digital film. "Others, including myself, are just looking to find new ways of expressing ourselves."
Apple, for one, hopes desktop editing will do for it what desktop publishing did for the company the 1980s. Each Apple computer now comes with iMovie, a basic desktop editing application that has been used to produce work for onedotzero.
Hanson and Walter say that they are now inundated with offers of work to show at their festival. And they expect much more as designers, filmmakers, photographers and budding Light Surgeons move across many different forms of new media. Exploding documentary might just be the start of it.
• Onedotzero4_reprise will be at the ICA, London from November 24-30
Useful addresses
Onedotzero
www.onedotzero.com
Digit
www.digital-experiences.com
Eidos
www.eidos.co.uk
Netbaby
www.netbaby.com
Shynola
www.shynola.co.uk
State
www.statedesign.com
Tomato
www.tomato.co.uk
