Printworks Nods to Its Printing Heritage for New Season Line Up

Since its opening in 2017 iconic London venue Printworks has hosted an abundance of big names in electronic music culture such as Aphex Twin, Chemical Brothers and Bicep. Formerly the largest printing factory in Western Europe, the venue has arranged an epic line up of music events for its 22/23 season. To promote that line-up, they collaborated with production studio 1stAveMachine to create ‘Nothing Stays the Same’, a film which not only nods to the building’s printworks heritage, but also announces the season gig line-up.

A feat of analogue and digital craftsmanship, an eighteen-metre track was designed and built by spacial design and experience studio The Experience Machine (TEM) in the Printworks space. Created uniquely for this space, the structure was made to look and operate like the inner workings of a printing facility of yesteryear,. In the same way a traditional printer would output ink, this kinetic LED printhead emits light, in a seemingly random series of flickers. These undeveloped sequences of flickers are then digitally processed through long exposure to create the final composition.

Partly kinetic light printer and partly post-production, the results are a ‘printed’ artist line up of the season.

Christopher Davenport, TEM, commented, “As Printworks moves to its next phase, we wanted to create a site-specific installation that honoured the history of the building as a printworks, and celebrated its legacy to live music culture. When you enter the space, you can feel its inherent history, it's everywhere. The idea that we could reimagine the printing heritage but through temporary digital echoes felt like a compelling and honest response.”

Co-director, Tim Brown said, “Listening to the sound of our motion control light printer on repeat for three days harked back to the times when this space was a functioning print factory. I'm genuinely excited for the upcoming events here, it was a real pleasure to capture this piece in such a historic location.”

Co-director, Anthony Dickenson added, “The full imagery being fed through the device is invisible to the human eye until captured on camera and this produces such a unique way of working. You’re capturing the imperceptible, the flickers of light that add up to make a bigger composition, like notes in music. And somehow this felt so right for this epic venue.”

‘Nothing Stays the Same’ will be promoted on Printworks social and digital channels from today.

Printworks London represents many spheres of music, from electronic, techno, hip-hop, disco and much more, accompanied by a peerless sound and lighting production and audience experience.

The final line up is here.