Gone, Gone Beyond

Gone, Gone Beyond is an immersive audio-visual spatial cinema work by People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett), which breaks the rectangle, smashing the thin screen into tiny fragments, looking beyond the frame, climbing through to see what's behind.

Using edited collage, sewn together in a giant patchwork, Gone, Gone Beyond creates a seamless wrap-around audiovisual experience on the RML CineChamber's 10 screens and 8-channel speaker system. Pull on a thread and watch whole new narratives expand and unravel all at once on a 360° palette.

The work's title and underlying concepts come from the Heart Sutra, a key Buddhist text, describing how all phenomena are empty in form yet ultimately interconnected. The last lines of the Heart Sutra say ‘gate gate pāragate pārasamgate bodhi svāhā’, which can be translated as “gone, gone beyond, gone beyond that a bit more, and then beyond that a bit further”. This reflects perfectly the action of going beyond the frame to where there are no edges to the narrative – just emptiness.

Commissioned by Naut Humon, the founder of the RML CineChamber, the initial in-process tester movie for Gone, Gone, Beyond, was screened in San Francisco in October 2017 at RML’s own Recombinant Festival at Gray Area.

This is Gone, Gone, Beyond's US premiere, following its European debut tour last fall with screenings at nyMusikk, Oslo; SPILL Festival, Ipswich; Attenborough Centre (ACCA), Brighton; and London Barbican.

"Alternately – often simultaneously – irreverent and unsettling, celebratory and questioning, [People Like Us]'s work sparks outward curiosity and inner journeying."

—Wire Magazine

Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett (People Like Us) has been working across the field of audio-visual collage, repurposing pre-existing footage to craft audio and video collages with an equally dark and witty take on popular culture. She sees sampling and collage as folk art sourced from the palette of contemporary media and technology, with all of the sharing and cross-referencing incumbent to a populist form. In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, The Barbican, Venice Biennale, Sonar, and more.