Flickers – Outshift: Rachel Henson and Neil Manuell

A young woman leaps unfeasibly high between two flint stone walls in a woodland
Still from Flickers: Off the Path for Brighton Festival. Credit: Rachel Henson, Neil Manuall
A young woman leaps unfeasibly high between two flint stone walls in a woodland
Still from Flickers: Off the Path for Brighton Festival. Credit: Rachel Henson, Neil Manuall

Site specific commissions where the audience explored an outdoor location on foot using a set of “street view” paper flick books, portraying real and fantastical affordances of public spaces.  

​Commissioned by ANTI Festival, Finland, Brighton Festival, Up the Wall Festival, Chester, Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, Cairo Downtown Arts Festival (R&D), Undercurrent Weekend, Shoreham-by-Sea, National Trust Box Hill and White Night, Brighton. 

“It’s like a treasure hunt where the treasure is all around you and in your hand.” 

“You put me in a magical place somewhere between reality, your fiction and my imagination. I also loved the fact that I had to ‘walk’ to move and ‘do’ in order to discover the story …” 

‘I will see ships and water floating every time I walk there.’

https://www.outshift.org.uk/work.html

Henson explores how walking gives rise to altered states of attention. Using animation and moving image, she makes work about experiences of specific locations, showing the work immersively in situ, or in a way that involves the viewer’s physicality. With creative technologist Neil Manuell she invents lo-fi devices and ways of using AR and VR to create experiences that build on, rather than disrupt, the perceptive ‘flow’ of walking. 

Outshift has been commissioned by festivals in the UK and abroad, and for natural and heritage organisations. Several projects have involved working with communities to communicate experiences of particular locations.