In 2002 The Light Surgeons played two sell-out shows of their live cinema performance All Points Between at the Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. The events generated such interest that the Tyneside Cinema invited The Light Surgeons to do a residency project in Newcastle.

TLS applied their self-sampling aesthetic to a different kind of filmmaking and took inspiration from the Surrealist parlour game of exquisite corpse. Their idea was to create a portrait of a city through a creative collaboration with its local inhabitants – artists, musicians, writers, photographers and animators observing and commenting on their own city. The films structure would then evolve through a process of mass observation – each participating artist creating elements of the final collage that would represented a chimera of the city. The finished films were also remixed and performed live alongside the original musical scores composed for each film.

The Chimera Project: Newcastle & Gateshead (Duration 28 minutes)

The first experiment brought together Newcastle based artists: Christo Wallers, Jackie Scollen, Steve Bird, Laura Reid, James Postlethwaite, Huw Thomas, Michael Jeffries, Peter Clark, David McClure, Alex McGregor, and Tom Bland. The project was run over a six month period through a series of workshops.

The resulting film is a psychogeographical map of the city through interviews, field recordings, animations and audiovisual tracks. It reflects the city’s people: their hopes and cynicism towards their bid to become European city of culture, their military and seafaring heritage, and their love of football – capturing its fast changing architectural landscape.

Edited by Chris Allen, James Price, and Jude Greenaway