All That Scratching is Making Me Itch - Scratch Video Revisited

BACKGROUND This live Audio-Visual performance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, with electronic musicians Wrangler and VJ Dan Conway contributes to history and contexts of Video Art as the 2019 London Short Film Festival explored the cultural ‘subversions’ of the 1980s. I was one of the original generation of Scratch Video artists to screen work at the ICA in 1983, and have written subsequently addressing the history and contexts of that work. Scratch was considered forgotten but in recent years has come in for re-appraisals. The Opening Night special event curated by Stephen Mallinder sought to ‘excavate’ Scratch aesthetics, and bring them to a contemporary setting and audience. CONTRIBUTION Emerging in the early 1980s in the UK as a new generation of young video artists explored the potentials of affordable domestic video recording technologies Scratch re-contetxualised broadcast television narratives and practices. For this LSSF opening night Mallinder invited me to collaborate on a blend of my Scratch video material re-imagined and re-mixed into a hybrid analog/digital multi-screen projection presentation. SIGNIFICANCE This was the highlight event of the opening night of the internationally renowned Film Festival, in this prestigious venue, with an audience of several hundred. The festival featured work by Cosey Fanni Tutti, and Derek Jarman, and recognised Mallinder’s role as a founder member of pioneering music group Cabaret Voltaire. Our collaboration brings contemporary re-appraisals of Scratch into a live audio-visual performance, complimenting the night-club contexts of original scratch screenings, and the academic contexts of recent reappraisals.