Sam Smith

Hollywood Burn

Sam Smith, Soda_Jerk

Mimicking the hyperbolic rhetoric of today’s copyright cops, Hollywood Burn pits a righteous league of video pirates against the evil tyrant Moses and his Copyright Commandments. Determined to alter the present by changing the past, the pirates travel back to 1955 to construct the ultimate weapon: an Elvis Presley video-clone. Part sci-fi + rom com + biblical epic + action movie, this free-culture manifesto adopts the tactical responses of the parasite, feeding off the body of Hollywood and inhabiting its cinematic structures and codes. The unwitting all-star cast includes Elvis Presley, Charlton Heston, Monkey, Batman, Bette Davis, Jaws, Jesus, The Hulk, The Hoff and the Ghostbusters.

Lithic Coda

Sam Smith

Thibault Lac

Filmed on the volcanic island of Gotland, Sweden, the work unites myth, body and landscape when a raincoated dancer is stunned by an encounter with a floating, living, rotating rock.

E.1027

Sam Smith

E.1027 is a performance based on the complex history and imagined future of Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray’s eponymous villa. A history of conflict, etched within the building’s material structure, plays out in episodes of companionship, obsession, murder and destruction. The work actively seeks to diminish the importance of Le Corbusier within this narrative, whose obsessive relationship with Gray’s villa is encaptured in his vandalistic murals that were painted directly onto the walls of the house.

Lithic Choreographies

Sam Smith

Thibault Lac

An experimental documentary shot on the Swedish island of Gotland. It mines historical data, mingling it with speculative fictions, to chronicle different chapters embedded to the island's geological strata. Working with locals to ground the film's investigations within the myriad communities of Gotland, Smith seeks to re-imagine our modes of engagement with and contributions to ecological assemblages. Scanning the landscape characterised by palaeo-sea-stacks, fossil coastlines, concrete production plants and limestone quarries, the film focuses a lens on minerals circulated in economic, cultural and agricultural contexts.

The Horizontal Window

Sam Smith

Glass occupies a position between fluidity and stasis – an amorphous element, integral in the production of moving images and architectural vistas, that actively distorts and transforms light. Filmed in a glass blowing factory, the interiors of Le Corbusier’s 1923 Villa Le Lac, and the surrounds of southwest Switzerland, The Horizontal Window intercuts two contrasting aspect ratios that parallel the primary apertures of Villa Le Lac: an 11-meter ribbon window facing Lake Geneva and a smaller, squarer unglazed frame cut into the exterior garden wall.