A screening of Anne-Marie Copestake's film A Blemished Code with an extended performance and live score sets of music and narrative vocal by Stevie Jones and Anne-Marie.
The programme was formed of three main parts with interspersed segueing stages, placing emphasis on the interconnection between the audio and visual, live and pre-recorded experience, and the artists roles and responsibility. The programme structure expanded on Anne-Marie's previous enquiries into performance and screening strategies within cinematic environments.
The narrative vocal written by Anne-Marie formed a fictionalised account, based on historical record and oral history, of a female scientists' working day and considered the balance between her home domestic life and laboratory life.
A Blemished Code
HD / 57 minutes / Scotland / 2017
Poetic study of the life and work of artist Margaret Benyon, pioneer in the artistic use of holography. Giving voice to the unsung legacy of a pioneering woman artist, A Blemished Code is an impassioned mediation on the representation of female artists, the balancing of creative and domestic life, and the inherent tensions of being a woman working with new technology. The inner life of the subject is represented throughout by a brilliant musical score featuring a sung script, and compositions by Stevie Jones, Mai Mai, and Leigh Ferguson.
Benjamin Cook