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Malcolm was aware of the work we had been doing with his London Film Makers Co-op colleague Guy Sherwin. The output of our work with Guy was (Wo)Man With Mirror a user’s manual (2009), a fold out paper guide that steps the user through making a performance of Guy’s Man With Mirror. 

Malcolm’s Horror Film 1 has been seen by many people and as Malcolm has described it, it’s a crowd pleaser. I recall him saying he always programmed it last because he found works that followed it had a hard time making an impact. Over the past several years, Lucas and I, our data science friend in France, Raja Appuswamy, and Malcolm and his son Oliver have spent lots of time on video calls, talking about the evolving manual for Horror Film 1. We have been so lucky to roadtest this while Malcolm has been about. Performances using the evolving manual have been created by Cinzia Nistico in Europe. There have also been some in Canberra. 

Our Horror Film 1 community has gathered together around transmitting the work, making sure it can continue beyond Malcolm. He has been at the centre but other people have also been important to Lucas and I in our Le Grice history endeavours. Of course, David Curtis and Steven Ball. Also on this non-exhaustive list are Mike Leggett, Mark Williams and Mark Webber. My own view is that Mark Webber’s work in the 2000s was crucial to the visibility of these British film artists.

So fast forward to 2013, here you see Malcolm, Lucas, me and our families having dinner in Loddiswell near the Le Grices’ village in Devon. 

Enthusiastic hospitality is a quality I associate with Malcolm. That’s also a quality Lucas and I hold dear, I believe. Some qualities of enthusiastic hospitality are getting really caught up in the work and wanting to share the experience of getting caught up in the work with others.  All this adds up to empowerment – participation is a political, and therefore, vital action. Making work is one way to participate but experiencing work, being part of its audience, is another. This is quite a generous way to think about work, it factors in a relationship with an audience or a viewer from the start. This evens out the power relationships in what I think is a productive way. 

We had the good fortune to get to know Malcolm when he was thinking about legacies and how to pass them along. Of course, we have been interested in that for some time so our relationship was positive in every way. And this has been helped along greatly by Oliver, Malcolm’s son.

And here we are having lunch with Judith and Malcolm at their home in Devon. Note the impromptu furnishing of hats for everyone and a glass of wine. And in the image above at Loddiswell, you can see us with all of both our families. The Le Grice hospitality was extended not just to us but to our entourages! 

So that’s enthusiastic hospitality.

The other quality I associate with Malcolm is radical sharing. In talking through how to pass Horror Film 1 on to others over 2022-24, it’s been crystal clear that the state Malcolm wants for his work is that it circulates. The words of Malcolm’s we’ve included in the Horror Film 1 instructions are these:

“I think of [Horror Film 1] like jazz. You can have a tune and when you start to play it and improvise on it, it’s something new and it belongs to you, the performer. It’s like a skeleton around which something can happen. And I’m not precious about the copyright of it. Once you’ve performed it, it belongs in the world, right? It belongs to the world.

And there’s also the fact that what I did was very random, really, and it was very influenced by all kinds of stuff in the situation. It wasn’t just me. William Raban, Gill Eatherly, Annabel [Nicolson], we were all working together, we were messing about doing stuff together. 

And also the Film Co-op itself [the London Film Makers’ Co-op] … something that’s very different, particular, about the London Film Co-op – [is that] people were not precious about ideas … The ideas were thrashed around, they were shared, they were inter-influenced …it’s a different sort of culture that is in a discourse like jazz and improvisation. It can change and things don’t belong quite simply to one person. For me my work is part of a public discourse really. I’m not precious about it, if somebody wants to preserve it and work on it or be influenced by it or modify it, change it.

…

I should do what I need to do [to write down instructions for the work or a letter to a future user as Louise put it] to make it possible for you but after that, it’s up to you, if you want to do something different with it … – I leave that to you, it’s not up to me.” 

So now’s the time to share your Le Grices with audiences. If you have some, organise a screening. Paddy Hay at the Artist Film Workshop in Melbourne is going to do this in late Jan, using the Australian National Film and Sound Archive’s Non-Theatrical Lending Collection. Berlin Horse (1970) is not available (why is that, we wonder) but Little Dog for Roger (1967), Witchurch Down (1972) and Blind White Duration (1967) are all on Paddy’s list. 

If you do make a screening, it would be kind to share what you do on the internet and make it findable. Be a bit of a librarian and use some hashtags and include Malcolm’s name in the title. That way the Le Grice family can find what you do – I know they will be delighted to know about this activity. 

I am hoping to do more with a recent work of Malcolm’s, Eye of the Dragon. The soundtrack is by his grandson Benjamin. This is a three screen work but it does have a single channel iteration. I showed that single channel work in Canberra in May 2024 to a warm response from our small but enthusiastic audience.

For me personally as a creative person, I felt quite connected to Malcolm. He was always making work – using his phone or his iPad or drawing. When we visited in 2013, I recall he had been holidaying in Greece making iPad drawings. He’d also just made a new video work on his phone during a train trip with Mark Webber. Over this time 2022-24 when we’ve been talking regularly, Malcolm’s often been showing us new images and of course, he shared Eye of the Dragon. The conjecture I put on this and that I connect to myself is that for some of us the day is not done without a new piece of art in it. Art might be the wrong word, but some sort of creative output.

The final thing I want to say about Malcolm was that he was capable across so many fields of endeavour – he didn’t just make work, he built the early developing equipment for the London Film Makers’ Co-op, literally timber rotating tanks. (My favourite account is in Mark Webber’s Shoot Shoot Shoot published by Lux for the LFMC 50^th in 2016, check out Malcolm in his own words on page 104. Malcolm also explains his role in bringing into existence the LFMC as an organisation that did more than screenings.) He also acquired the very important Debrie printer. Those who have experience in film preservation know how precious these printers are because they can cope with shrinkage and other kinds of damage. I did have a photo of the printer taken at Now.here in 2013 in London but I can’t find that one. 

And alongside his creative and engineering feats, Malcolm was also a writer. Real TIME/SPACE (1972) is still an article Lucas and I refer to often. And many bookshelves of experimental film people have a copy of his compilation Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (2001). It was also plain to Lucas and me that Malcolm is much loved by his family, we’ve learnt this from our time spent with his son Oliver. Thank you, Malcolm, for your generous art and your generous sharing.

Here is the media release about TLC’s work for the exhibition.

Our users manual for Horror Film 1 was encoded on synthetic DNA in collaboration with Associate Professor Raja Appuswamy of Eurecom. The DNA was enclosed in a stainless steel capsule.

This was displayed in the exhibition on a small velour cushion under a perspex box, together with the media release. (Click on the image below to see larger size):

This DNA capsule was displayed upon a plinth, with the Horror Film 1 timeline poster print mounted on the side:

To see the full size poster print, click here. (The graphic design for this poster is by John Causley).

Here is an online exhibition catalogue produced by Velarde Gallery, which includes our DNA capsule (scroll about half way down that web page).

here are a few notes:

We have a few academic papers:

this is from before we made the user manual for horror film 1:

Performance Matters Journal: Re-enactment of Malcolm Le Grice’s “Horror Film 1”

This is more recent and explicitly discusses the HF1 user manual (briefly)

Re-enactment, Users Manuals and DNA Storage: methods for media art preservation

recent blog post about the HF1 manual

Horror Film 1 – Users Manual (version 1.0)

you can also see our 2009 user manual for (wo)Man With Mirror

(Wo)man with Mirror

louise’s phd thesis (see chapter 4 on user manuals)
https://researchoutput.csu.edu.au/en/publications/tending-the-archive-how-re-use-of-ephemeral-artworks-contributes-

some key ideas:

• building trust through socialising with the artist
• oral history interviews
• explicit learning about choreography and technical things
• research on / with the artist in archives if available
• trying out the re-enactment for ourselves
• checking back with the artist to fill in gaps
• writing a manual FOR OURSELVES so we remember what we did (make it easier next time)
• writing a manual with the view to pass it on to someone else (technical stuff, contextual stuff, and stuff about the ‘spirit of the work’
• trying the draft manual out with someone else
• noting what needs changing based on that
• make the changes that need to be made
• when another person tries it out, documenting their attempt and including it in the next iteration of the user manual
  etc (ad infinitum, never finished…)

Louise adds:

I used the insights Lucas and I have gained to work with an Australian artist to do something just like you’re planning – to make a manual herself. I wrote a blog post about that:
https://nga.gov.au/stories-ideas/manual-making-for-ephemeral-art/

I think the keys are:

• you need to observe yourself making the work and keep notes about that. That’s what becomes the manual.
• You need to try to be ‘true’ to the work, that’s your job.
• You need to find your way to capture your observations that make sense to you as a record of that experience.
• As Lucas says ‘writing a manual FOR OURSELVES so we remember what we did (make it easier next time)’.
• For me, the letter (or some communication) to a future user from the original artist is crucial, a key finding in my PhD is that without that permission, people feel awkward to just go ahead and use the manual.
• We’re still working on a way to really make it do the ‘ad infinitum’ bit, ie to get users to make a contribution back to the manual, that’s what really strengthens it.

Fast forward to Feb 2023 and Raja was ready to actually encode some content on DNA. What went in there? Here’s a screenshot from the Dropbox that Raja used to store all the final content

The document ‘Abstract’ explains more. Here’s what it says:

What’s contained in this DNA archive is a test of the capabilities of DNA storage focusing on the transmission of an artwork from the 1970s to future audiences. This artwork involves some moving image and a performer. It is considered a landmark of this kind of practice, known as expanded cinema. The work, Horror Film 1, was made by a leading artist of the London Film Makers’ Co-op Malcolm Le Grice in 1971. What’s in this package is

1. a text document, background and instructions to make a performance of Horror Film 1

2. a video explaining the work of Australian artists Louise Curham and Lucas Ihlein who have carried out this work with Malcolm’s blessing to find a way to transmit Malcolm’s artwork to future performers.

3. a video documenting performances by Lucas, artist Nicci Haynes using the instructions; a performance by Louise from 2014 and a performance by Malcolm.

4. a video transfer of the 16mm film loos, crucial for the re-staging of Horror Film 1.

This experiment was ideated when researcher Raja Appuswamy and archivist, artist, researcher Louise Curham met at the International Conference for Digital Preservation (iPRES) in 2019. This work was finalized as a pilot experiment in Horison Europe FET project Oligoarchive.

Funds from project OligoArchive, the Canberra Art Biennial and the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research at the University of Canberra made this work possible.

How does this connect to the items in Raja’s file:

   I did try to update that title of that last file – that is an example of what not to do in digital preservation!

Here’s that correspondence with Raja.

HF1 Curham Appuswamy PDF of manual for DNA, here’s the bit where I talk about re-titling:

And here’s the bit where I spell out what’s going in the capsule.

HF1 Curham Appuswamy early 2023 preparing final files for DNA storage 10 Feb to 7 March

More info

Item 2 the video explainer – you can see a longer version of that here on Vimeo https://vimeo.com/774945752

Item 3 performance documentation – you can see some of Lucas’s performance here (CBR 2022, in the Canberra Art Biennial) https://vimeo.com/775641088 and some of Nicci’s performance here (2022, Canberra Art Biennial) https://vimeo.com/775994398

Re Item 4, I have very high res DPX files made from loops that Lucas and I had. They were quite scratched. I felt it was super important to do that transfer as that’s a bit that could potentially confuse future users. It’s important to check in the manual (item 1) about the source for the loops, Love Story another of Malcolm’s films.

I’m Thinking about the provocation of sending info 1000 years into the future in the synthetic DNA capsule.

This provocation emerges from our collaboration with Raja Appuswamy, a data scientist at Eurecom in France, who is storing our Horror Film 1 Users Manual and associated documentation materials on synthetic DNA.

Raja is working with our project as a demonstration of a ‘use case’ for synthetic DNA storage – the idea is that items of intangible cultural heritage (like Horror Film 1) can be sent into the future as an act of preservation, or archiving.

Synthetic DNA, it is suggested, can survive for 1000 years without loss or corruption of data. Compare this to magnetic media (like computer disks) which require transfer and backups every 20-30 years.

The idea is to store data using the four components of DNA (A, T, C, G), rather than binary (ones and zeros). Later on, when you want to retrieve the data, you can use DNA sequencing equipment, as is used in medical facilities.

The idea is that we will always need such equipment, because DNA research is integral to human health. So it’s likely that 1000 years into the future, humanoids will be able to retrieve the data on the synthetic DNA.

The problem this poses is delicious! We will be sending a message to people who may not read our language, or even understand our culture. It’s a bit like laying down a really long-term Time Capsule. (In fact, the Synthetic DNA does come in a tiny stainless steel capsule, which looks like something out of a sci-fi movie).

All this got me thinking about the Voyager spacecraft’s Golden Record, which was launched into space in 1977.

The records contain sounds (cultural greetings and typical Earth noises) and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form who may find them. The records are a time capsule. (wikipedia)

The people who made the record had to think through these problems:

• What to include, and what to exclude (because of finite storage capacity on the record)
• How to communicate meta-information ABOUT what is included
• How to let the aliens know how to even access the data on the record (assuming that record players and our kinds of audio encoding technologies may not be available in other galaxies)

It seems that that NASA actually encoded images using the audio grooves of the record – (which is like an experimental piece of music) https://soundcloud.com/user-482195982/voyager-golden-record-encoded-images

This wonderfully nerdy blog post by Ron Barry goes through the process of decoding / reverse engineering the audio file and turning it back into images (including of the moon!):
https://boingboing.net/2017/09/05/how-to-decode-the-images-on-th.html

With our Horror Film 1 Synthetic DNA capsule, we have some similar problems to tackle.

It’s called “Re-enactment, Users Manuals and DNA Storage: methods for media art preservation”, co-authored by Louise Curham, Lucas Ihlein, Raja Appuswamy.

About the authors:
Louise and Lucas are Teaching and Learning Cinema (TLC), and Raja is a data scientist in France at Eurecom.

The paper is really just a brief intro to the project we’re working on at the moment.

Abstract

This paper discusses a novel approach to media art preservation led by Australian artist-archivist group Teaching and Learning Cinema, using the field of expanded cinema as a case study.Works of 1970s expanded cinema (which combine celluloid film projection with live performance) are typical of the inherent “lossiness” of much 20th and 21st century media art. While offering richly embodied experiences in their moment of enactment, expanded cinema’s ephemerality means that it risks falling out of circulation and thus becoming unavailable for future experience. Teaching and Learning Cinema, over the past 20 years, has evolved a methodology for preserving works of expanded cinema, featuring three overlapping approaches. First, intergenerational transfer is attempted: in this phase, younger artists learn about the work from its originators, and produce live re-enactments. During the second phase, a users manual is assembled, encoding the artwork as a set of instructions with the intention of making it available for future generations of performers and audiences. Thirdly, the archived material from phases one and two is stored on synthetic DNA, with a view to transmission into the deep future (perhaps 1000 years). While the first two phases are urgent, preventing the work’s immediate extinction, the third phase is speculative, broadening the enquiry to explore the question of cultural heritage across much longer
timeframes.

Keywords

Media art preservation; time-based art preservation; archival practice; preservation; DNA storage; manual making; expanded cinema; re-enactment; media art history.

This week we lost a VIP in the experimental cinema community. Peter Mudie was a teacher at University of Western Australia, where I studied fine arts in the mid-1990s. Shortly after he arrived in Perth (from Canada via London) he set up a Super-VHS editing suite, and began teaching the history and practice of experimental film and video. It was a revelation.

Each week we would watch films from the canon, dating back 100 years, right up to the present. Often Peter had obtained celluloid prints on 16mm, and he would lace the projector up in front of us, cigarette dangling from his lips. His drawling, chuckling style of teaching, infused with marxist politics, was infectious.

Peter gave us access to works by Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneeman, Michael Snow, Maya Deren… at that time there was no YouTube where you could find this stuff. The films themselves were beautiful moving image artworks. Through him, a bunch of kids from Perth learned that making movies didn’t require characters, plots, stories, and conventional themes. Peter broke it wide open for us, and a strong culture of experimental filmmaking (including the incorporation of moving image into performance and installation) emerged from that art (and architecture!) school because of him.

Peter treated us like adults. He was involved in setting up a studio in an empty office building on St George’s Terrace, in the middle of Perth CBD, where some of the students in our course could work 24/7. It felt like a “proper” artist community, and the students who worked there worked big. This big scale was as much due to the fact that the studio was “in town” – this tied it to the great traditions of artists’ lofts and warehouses – breaking free of the classroom. He was always a champion of self-directed initiatives by students – like our film and photography club “Dust the Image”, or anarchic performance nights like “Cat Flap” in the architecture building, which got us into trouble because of the messes we left behind.

* * *

Peter ran an incredibly ambitious screening program at the Film and Television Institute (FTI) in 1993. The program was called Dusting off the Other and every Thursday we’d car-pool to the very uncomfortable seats in the FTI and sit together in that properly fusty cinema to watch some properly experimental films.

A memory from Dusting off the Other … Peter shows Michael Snow’s Back and Forth, 52 minutes of continual panning left and right in a room. We strap ourselves in for this formative structural film experience – it’s almost a right of passage to survive it. Back and Forth has a direct visceral imprint on the body – for some, this means sea-sickness. At some point our classmate, Josh, yells out Make it stop! Peter, please, MAKE IT STOP!.

Another memory… I bring my new girlfriend Josie along to a screening at the FTI. I must be thinking I’ll impress her with my avant-garde credentials. We sit right up the front. Maybe it’s Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man, over 80 minutes long. After about 10 minutes, Josie gets up and leaves without saying anything. I don’t take in much of that film, cursing myself for taking a punt on Brakhage rather than playing it safe at the Hoyts. But Josie’s just gone to the back row because the wildly moving images are giving her a migraine. She’d been too embarrassed to say anything because the movie was silent.

* * *

Before coming to Australia, Peter had spent time in the 1980s in London, working with the London Film Makers Co-op (LFMC). Later in 2003, when I made my own pilgrimage to learn about the experimental film scene in London, I met some of the protagonists from the 1960s LFMC – including Malcolm Le Grice and David Curtis. I told David that I was interested to find out more about the LFMC and its history. He thought for a minute and said, “hmm, you know, the person who has done the most research on the co-op lives in Perth: Peter Mudie – you should look him up when you go home”.

I believe that Peter’s PhD was a study of the LFMC. I haven’t read it – I think it’s unpublished – but I remember seeing a set of bound volumes on his shelf about a foot wide – the appendix to the thesis, filled with archival documents and evidence, probably extensive interviews. I hope that this, and Peter’s whole body of research is going to be available publicly somewhere, in a library or an archive.

Peter dedicated his time in Australia to studying the counterculture scene here, with particular focus on the Sydney Filmmakers Co-op and UBU films, artists like Albie Thoms, David Perry, and Aggy Read. Peter made a valuable contribution to the documentation of the history and significance of this scene. A glimpse is transmitted in his tribute to Albie Thoms, written shortly after Thoms’ death at the end of 2012.

I think that Peter was very proud of the students he had taught. It always seemed to me that he cherished that period in the mid-late 1990s as a special moment in Perth’s local art culture – which was all the more special because of his own contribution to making it happen.

I’ve learnt that making procedures is called ‘procedural discourse’. David Farkas writes about this back in 1999. It is about ‘written and spoken discourse that guides people in performing a task-in other words, it is “how to” communication.’ His article aims to set out what makes a procedure a procedure, he sets out the relationships, and persistent logic in making procedures, as he describes it. Here’s a short summary – we’re in the territory of purposeful human behaviour – people wanting to get stuff done, usually around a quite clearly defined goal. He defines getting stuff done more eloquently – he calls it accomplishing tasks and he clarifies that actually means changing things.

He has desired states, prerequisite states, interim states and unwanted states. The domain in which you’re going to use the procedures influences them eg knot tying needs lots of detail because you don’t replicate it elsewhere in life so you don’t have prior knowledge you can use – this is how he puts it: ‘Procedures for tasks in which the interface is confusing including tasks (like tying knots) for which there is no human-engineered interface-will require longer, more explanatory steps to specify actions and more frequent and careful descriptions of interim states to provide feedback. ‘

Procedures are rhetorical – they must fit the user’s background and information need. They must sell themselves and establish credibility and they must sell the domain eg sewing patterns must persuade the user they can achieve this at home. They sell themselves and they dramatize and entertain. An intriguing reference from this article is to a 1993 book published in Canberra, ‘Practical Playscript, writing procedure manuals that people can use’. It looks like manual making really hotted up with the introduction of personal computers. A quick look at Robert Barnett’s book leads me to Leslie Matthies, and it looks like that might be where this all starts, back in 1977 with ‘The new playscript procedure’. These references get really intriguing – I’ll have to save this one for another day: Beverly Sauer’s  “Sense and sensibility in technical documentation: How feminist interpretation strategies can save lives in the nation’s mines.”  in the business and tech comms literature in 1993. There’s another on postmodernism and procedures.

Where did this dive into Farkas begin? With Van Der Meij and Gellavij’s article from 2004 ‘The four components of a procedure’ in the IEEE literature. They’ve been tracking manual development. This study tested 104 manuals. What they add to Farkas’s desired states, prerequisite states, interim states and unwanted states is problem solving.

We started this process in 2013, when we first visited Malcolm Le Grice in Devon, UK. Malcolm had invited us to become next-generation custodians (or “stand-ins”) for the performative enactment of this important piece of Expanded Cinema. The time was nigh when he would be too old to perform it himself any more – and he recognised that the TLC re-enactment method could be useful in order to keep Horror Film 1 alive – ie, able to be experienced by audiences.

On that 2013 visit, we learned about the “choreography” of the piece, as well as the technical set up using 16mm projectors. We also learned about the 16mm colour film loops that are central to Horror Film 1. With this knowledge on board, in 2014 we were able to present our first re-enactment of Horror Film 1 in Canberra, with Louise performing. This was the first time anyone beyond Malcolm had presented the work in public. You can see a video document of this event here.

In 2022, we decided it was time to formalise our embodied knowledge into a sort of users manual. This would enable us to pass on what we know about Horror Film 1 to others. This was spurred by contact with Jed Rapfogel, a film programmer at Anthology Film Archives in New York. Jed wanted to present Horror Film 1, and Malcolm was unable to travel. Nor were Louise and I (it’s crazy expensive to fly to New York from Australia, plus COVID). At that point, we realised that the best solution would be to teach somebody on the ground in New York to set up and perform the piece.

This would have three benefits – first, it would spread the knowledge more broadly (making it less vulnerable to loss). Second, it would mean that Horror Film 1 could become mobile – free of the constraints of Malcolm’s body, or of the bodies of Louise and Lucas. More mobility means more accessibility – thus the work could be performed more often, in more places – thus helping to keep it alive in performed repertoire. And thirdly, the work could travel around the world without the carbon footprint of aeroplane flights.

In the end, we didn’t meet the short deadline for Anthology’s program in New York, but we did start work on the manual.

What form should a users manual take? We’re not really sure. For (Wo)man with Mirror (our re-enactment of Guy Sherwin’s Man with Mirror), we produced a paper manual which doubles as a limited edition printed artwork. We would hand these out to audience members who came along to performances of this work. However, the limitations of “real estate” on the printed page mean that it’s not possible to have a comprehensive manual in this form. Also, the printed page can’t show videos – and since the work is based on performance and moving image, it seemed to us that video would be an ideal space for a users manual focused on expanded cinema re-enactment. YouTube is full of short video tutorials which attempt to share know-how on all manner of complex embodied things, from fixing the brakes on your bike, to new dance moves – so it makes sense for us to work with that cultural form.

Our video tutorial is still in the works, and we’ll share it here when we have a draft. In the meantime, here are two versions of a text-based manual.

The first version is a google doc, which starts with a brief context to Malcolm’s Horror Film 1, as well as context around our re-enactment of it. It then presents a basic set of instructions – given to us by Malcolm in April 2022. Having performed the work ourselves, we knew that some things were missing in Malcolm’s instructions, so we added our own annotations, as well as some notes reflecting on the instructions. Finally, we tried out the proto-users-manual with Nicci Haynes, an artist from Canberra, and have included Nicci’s reflections on what worked, and what extras might be needed.

The second version of the users manual contains the same material, laid out as a PDF. We call this the “school project” version – it could, for example, be printed out on A2 paper and pinned to the wall to accompany a public enactment of Horror Film 1. This would give the audience a bit of essential context about the experience of the work, and about the contribution of the re-enacters in keeping the work alive.

In the future, we’d like to experiment with more dynamic formats for our users manual. For example, we have begun collaborating with Raja Appuswamy, a data engineer in France. Raja has proposed that future users of Horror Film 1 might benefit from being able to interact with an artificial intelligence engine. The AI could be “trained up” on the cultural context, and technical details about the work. It could then respond to questions from whoever would like to present a re-enactment, providing answers dynamically as they are required. In many ways, this dynamic, interactive model for a users manual corresponds more closely to what Louise and Lucas experienced in 2013, when we visited Malcolm at his studio in Devon – we quizzed him incessantly about aspects of the piece which interested us. (One big difference is that the AI cannot provide wine!)