Colourful Skies, Burnt Lands

Colourful Skies, Burnt Lands by Maxime Corbeil-Perron is an audiovisual performance for three analog film projectors, played live. The movement of colours is tightly connected to sampled and synthetic sonic components. The performance generates landscapes of blazing colour, oscillating between abstraction and analog artefacts, underpinned by mechanical, syncopated rhythms.

This is achieved through precise real-time editing using a custom-made light-control system. The modulated light of three analog film projectors is interrupted with speed and precision by hand-built obturators, electronics, and software.

The projected images have gone through an array of transformations: beginning on Super 8 film, then transferred into a digital image, converted back into analog video, digitized once more, and finally printed onto 16 mm film. This layered circulation between photochemical, analog, and digital formats became an essential part of the work, allowing the image to carry “paleontological” traces of each transformation.

The work seeks to create allegories around the accelerating race towards technological progress, its impact on the environment, and our relationship with technology and its inevitable obsolescence.