Sensual Laboratories

An innovate counter-history that places the liquid light show at the heart of a new understanding of experimental audio-visual art in the 1960s.

Throughout the 1960s the liquid light show was the quintessential mode of countercultural expression: live, interactive, collaborative, acid-bright, and ephemeral. Flowering in coffee bars and discotheques, they quickly became synonymous with the wildest excesses of psychedelic art and popular music. But light shows also crucially inspired avant-garde artists and filmmakers to experiment with the performative elements of projection, taking film projection—along with hand-painted glass slides, colored inks, bodily fluids—outside of its traditional site of exhibition, and onto walls, inflatables, and skin. 

<Sensual Laboratories< traces the influence of light shows into the worlds of underground film and expanded cinema, exploring how these luminous attractions fundamentally altered perceptions surrounding the event of projection. Tackling a long-neglected subject with a broad and bracing comprehension of inter-media influence, this important book illuminates the vital yet long-occluded role that light shows played in the development of experimental art throughout the 1960s and beyond.

Auteur

Sophia Satchell-Baeza; foreword by Jarvis Cocker