About

People Like Us: Gone, Gone Beyond

Unexpected narratives expand and unravel around you, in this immersive, 360-degree cinematic installation. Fragments of familiar and experimental films interact with song and audio clips in ever-changing, kaleidoscopic and kinetic collages.

Gone, Gone Beyond is an immersive, audiovisual, spatial cinema work by People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett), which breaks the rectangle, smashing the thin screen into tiny fragments, looking beyond the frame, climbing through to see what’s behind.

It comprises movie and musical compositions: animated and sample-based music concrète collage, juxtaposed with content filmed and recorded by the artist, sewn together in a giant patchwork. Pull on a thread and watch whole new narratives expand and unravel all at once on a 360º palette.

Under her artist name, People Like Us, Vicki Bennett has been evolving the field of audiovisual collage since the early 1990s, cutting up and layering found footage and archives.

Commissioned by Naut Humon, the founder of immersive theatre project RML CineChamber, Gone, Gone Beyond is a ten screen / six speaker piece, with seamless wraparound projection and surround-sound enveloping the audience. The project has been a work in progress since 2017, and is showing for the first time in 2021 in feature-length format.

The work's title and underlying concepts come from the Heart Sutra, a key Buddhist text, describing how all phenomena are empty in form yet ultimately interconnected. The last lines of the Heart Sutra say ‘gate gate pāragate pārasamgate bodhi svāhā’, which means “gone, gone beyond, gone beyond that a bit more, and then beyond that a bit further”. This reflects perfectly the action of going beyond the frame to where there are no edges to the narrative - just emptiness.

In this 360º format, time and space becomes elasticated, with the use of collaged video furthering the reflection on how information comes to us as fragments and that nothing is fixed. A new narrative-thread is woven in the mind of each viewer every time the work is seen, limited only to that exact time and space - just as the Heart Sutra reminds us that the only constant is change, and everything is related with no fixed source.

Click below to hear this listing in audio format

Credits

Commissioned by SPILL Festival of Performance, presented in partnership with Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (ACCA) and Barbican. Supported by Recombinant Media Labs (RML), DanceEast, Avolites, nyMusikk, Gulbenkian, PRS Foundation’s The Open Fund and Arts Council England. Developed as part of Sound and Music’s New Voices Programme.

The initial in-process tester movie screened in San Francisco in October 2017 at RML’s own Recombinant Festival at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. Since then the work has been in development, with a private screening event in April 2019 Goldsmiths SIML for potential partners. The work will screen at nyMusikk, Oslo; SPILL Festival, Ipswich; Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (ACCA), Brighton; and London Barbican, in Autumn 2021.

The Brighton performances are presented by Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts as part of CINECITY (Brighton’s film festival) and Brighton Digital Festival.

Show Information

Under 14’s to be accompanied by an adult.

Contains surround sound, loud noises, flashes and fast-moving images.

As an immersive 360 degree presentation, this work may cause some disorientation.

Venue Information

Access

If you have access requirements that you would like to discuss with us or would like to book a ticket for a Personal Assistant please contact the box office on 01273 678 822 or email boxoffice@attenboroughcentre.com.

Box Office Opening Times

The box office is open one hour before the advertised show start time, and can be contacted in advance by emailing boxoffice@attenboroughcentre.com