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The concept of live cinema is still a fairly new and developing genre within media art that brings together experimental approaches to narrative and non-narrative film making, with live music and the performing arts.

Rather than screening a traditional, linear edited film, a live cinema performance allows artists the freedom to experiment and improvise within a selection of different material, prepared video clips, audio visual samples or more generative code based plugins that can be run in VJ software such as VDMX.

This freedom allows the artist to present their work as a fully live and interactive performance, adding different audio and visual effects to their material on-the-fly. These different feeds of video can be distributed across multiple screens, layered, looped and edited to create immersive, three dimensional works that are very different to a traditional cinema experience.

Although live cinema works such as SuperEverything* rely on cutting edge technology, this project is also consciously looking back to its roots in cinema and the tradition of shadow puppet theatre, or Wayang Kulit as it is known in Malaysia. This ancient tradition is the original live cinema and is very familiar to millions of people across the world.

Wayang Kulit was brought to South East Asia by Hindu traders from India and utilises very ornate shadow puppets made from animal skins to tell the mythical tales from the Hindu Ramayana epics. These performances can last for many hours and are normally accompanied by a Gamelan orchestra who play alongside the “Dhalang” or puppet master who animates the puppets and provides all the voices and sound effects in each story.

This tradition of shadow puppet theatre is still very vibrant and alive in many cultures around the world today and its roots undoubtedly represent the beginning of  the cinema as we know it today. We hope collaborative, live media projects like SuperEverything* can harness some of the same energy of these ancient traditions and help to develop new forms of storytelling for today.

SuperEverything* poses many questions about how people form a sense of identity in a world increasingly dominated by information networks and fast changing social and economic landscapes.

To explore this question of identity and our search for belonging in this brave new world, we invite you to interact with the project by exploring our social media channels on Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, Soundcloud and following us on our Tumblr blog. We like to hear your thoughts and comments so please let us get involved!

We have also developed a custom piece of software that enables us to integrate live Twitter feeds into the visual aspect of the performance. This creates a unique way for the audience to comment and interact with both each other and the artists before and after the show.

At the start of each performance we present a twitter wall which displays live updates of the  #SuperEverything hash tag and ask our audiencea and online followers to engage in a conversation about these issues explored in the project or to just give us their “status” at that time.

So, if you use twitter in particular, please use the #SuperEverything in your tweets to become part of this conversation and this evolving digital arts project.

The musical aspect of the project was created through a collaboration between The Light Surgeons and four different Malaysian composers and musicians.

After two live recording sessions with a KL based contemporary Gamelan and Chinese drumming group, various samples and fragments of these sessions were redistributed to three different electronic composers. These composers then electronically collaborated on the final compositions that are presented in the show. The post production for the project was completed in London, where the music went through a continued development alongside the visual post-production, with each creatively informing the other.

After its sell-out premier performances in KL in September 2011, the show has been musically and visually developed through a series of international touring dates. In 2012 SuperEverything* was presented in India, New Zealand and in Houston Texas.  After being awarded a grant for the arts by the Arts Council England, the project continues to evolve in 2013 with a new musical collaboration with string players from the UK’s Heritage Orchestra.