Sensual Laboratories

An innovative 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.

Sophia Satchell Baeza is a film scholar, critic, programmer, and Associate Lecturer at the University of the Arts, London.