Artisan of light and sound ephemera, Bruce McClure performs in a conditioned cinematic setting, which includes one to four film projectors and concomitant emulsions both technical and animal. Variously coated, erased, bleached, or abraded, film is the technological substrate used in the service of the projector to seek reciprocal motions in the brain. Cinematic presuppositions such as the intensity of projector lamplight, the plane of focus, and the hegemony of film’s emulsion are challenged on the spot and to the syncopated rhythms of asynchronous optical sound.

Searching the projective boundaries of theater space while harnessing the structural and lavish offerings of film and its mechanical counterpart result in unique performance events. As with early kinetic experiments in perception, and protocinema, these performances excite the mutual action of the eye and the mind anticipating a longer future for the 16mm projector in the spectacle of discarded but cherished technologies. Perhaps more important, however, is the testimony of these performances to the essential need to withdraw under the cover of the big roof and darkened recesses of a theater, emerging later physically spangled and a little shocked by perceptual brisance.