The inspirational seeds for the Bardo Light Show are the pioneers of the 1960s psychedelic light show – Bill Ham, the Brotherhood of Light, the Joshua Light Show, and UK artists Mark Boyle and Joan Hills. I began collecting projectors of various types and experimenting (e.g. by hand painting transparent leader film) in the 1990s. My experimentation was very much sporadic and private until 2007 when I provided lighting as the ‘house light show’ at the George Tavern (Whitechapel), lighting the Acid Gallery nights (organised by Phil Moore) and the land lady’s own ‘Moth Ball’ etc.
The light show expanded through the inclusion of digital effects and the Bardo Light Show provided the lighting for the Amorphous Androgynous’ ‘A Psychedelic Bubble Exploding in Your Mind’ extravaganza at the Green Man festival in 2009. The Bardo Light Show also provided the lighting for Hawkwind’s 40th Anniversary weekend celebration at Porchester Hall (Notting Hill), an outside screening of ‘Blow Up’ (1966) in the film’s original location at Maryon Park, and lighting of performances by Circulus, Wolf People, DJ Food and ROSCO in the same year.
We were proud to provide lighting for the opening of John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins photographic exhibition at the Idea Generation Gallery (Whitechapel) and multi-instrumentalist Bishi Bhattacharya’s live SHOWstudio webcast ‘The Power of Projection’. Key collaborators (and friends) throughout the years have been Kimberly Heaney – IMDb and Sophia Satchell Baeza.
Other projects have included…
* Offset Festival 2010
* Breaking Convention – A Multi-disciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness (University of Canterbury, 2011 and University of Greenwich, 2013)
* Regeneration Festival – An interactive weekend of exploring altered states of experience (Notting Hill, 2012)
* Special effects lighting for a Vogue Magazine photographic shoot
* Chemical effects for a short film by British film director Lorna Tucker
* Lighting for a live performance of the seminal 1968 psychedelic album ‘July’ by the British band of the same name
* Summer of Love Revisited (Royal Albert Hall, 2017)
* 1968 and its Legacies Symposium (King’s College, 2018)
* SPECTRAL/OLFACTORY – Performance Lecture with Sophia Satchell-Baeza (Mint Works/Arts Council England, 2018)
* At Home With The Boyle Family – documentary by Kim Heaney and Chris De Selincourt (2022)
Up next… assisting West Coast liquid lighting artist Mad Alchemy (Lance Gordon) at the Syd Barrett 80th Celebration event in Cambridge on the 10th October 2026!