Screening at Tate Britain — Late at Tate
- Ben Sheppee
- Jun 7, 2004
- 2 min read
Updated: 17 hours ago
In 2004, my work was screened at Tate Britain as part of the Late at Tate programme — the gallery's regular series of free evening events that opened the institution to performances, screenings, and live art after hours.
At the time, I was running Lightrhythm Visuals — a label I'd co-founded the previous year in San Francisco with Jon Schwark — and was part of a growing international movement that was taking audiovisual art out of club contexts and into galleries, cinemas, and institutional spaces. The screening at Tate was part of Nelco's AV Social, which gathered audiovisual artists working at the intersection of animation, live visuals, and digital art.
Context
The audiovisual art movement of the early 2000s was still finding its institutional footing. The work existed primarily in nightclub VJ booths and underground screening events, and showing it at Tate Britain — alongside other artists pushing the boundaries of what moving image could be — felt like a signal that the form was being taken seriously by the contemporary art world.
For me personally, it was the first time my work had been presented in a major national institution. I was in my mid-twenties, dividing my time between London and San Francisco, and the experience of seeing work screened in Tate's galleries — work that had originated in nightclub projections and experimental DVD releases — was a formative moment. It expanded my sense of where the practice could go.
Lightrhythm and the VJ Movement
Lightrhythm ran for just over ten years, publishing more than 240 works by over 70 artists from five continents. The label encouraged remixing between published artists — elements of original works were shared collaboratively, and releases used creative authoring techniques to present originals and remixed films side by side.
The Tate screening was part of a broader trajectory that took Lightrhythm's artists into venues including SFMOMA in San Francisco, the ICA in London, La Gaite Lyrique in Paris, and Hybrid Art in Moscow. What had started as a way of publishing my own work and that of other VJ artists became a decade-long curatorial project that mapped a global creative community.
Looking back, the Lightrhythm years were foundational for everything that followed — the comfort with large-scale projection, the international network, the understanding of how moving image occupies architectural space. All of it feeds directly into the immersive installation work I make now.
