Sonica: Laser Show @ Glue Factory

Following a four-week on-site residency, audiovisual performance artist Robin Fox brings his candidly titled Laser Show to the Glue Factory’s tank room. For anyone wondering, the latter is still a gloomy, freezing cold affair with a leaking roof. It’s pitch black inside too, apart from the otherworldly green laser hanging over the heads of the audience, like a luminous wound in space-time.

The speakers unleash a low, deafening buzz, and a set of motors begin to deflect the laser across an x/y axis, flooding the room with its eerie, undead glow. The same electricity used to power the speaker cones is used to power these motors, the intention being to synchronize the sound and visuals, and evoke within audience members a synaesthetic experience.     

The effects are truly startling, even frightening. At certain points, the sheer distortion of space via the lasers’ movements, the smoke arrangements and audio stimulus are such that the proverbial rug is whipped out from underneath the sad reality of the Glue Factory, leaving the viewer disembodied and lost.

Fox’s manipulations transport us to a variety of different settings. The opening sequence somehow suspends us over a series of wide, spiralling gateways, as majestic as they are unsettling. Later on, things are clearer, and the audience finds itself racing down a pristine corridor of neon green geometric conformity - made possible by the rapid imposition of four separate walls of light. Accompanying each wall is a single tone. As Fox speeds up the sequence, the audience is swept up in an atonal flurry of jarring bleeps and blips. Before long, you get the impression that you’re completely out of control.

A remarkable effort, Fox’s work is a raw, unfiltered audiovisual experience that you perceive and make sense of physically as much as you do sensually. [Jean-Xavier Boucherat]