Inventing A Liquid Hell: A Q&A With Doug Foster

Doug Foster is a filmmaker and artist who produces large scale digital film installations that often play with ideas of symmetry and optical illusion. His piece The Heretics’ Gate will shortly be on view at Daydreaming with… St. Michael’s, an exhibition taking place at St. Michael’s church in Camden, London which will also see Creators James Lavelle and Jonathan Glazer collaborating on another film installation called Red Clay. The exhibition is the latest installment in Lavelle’s curatorial and collaborative art venture, Daydreaming With….

Foster’s film will be projected in the church above a body of water. Inspired by Dante’s Inferno, it’s a beguiling vision of hell—a golden, whirling storm where amongst the twisting forms one can occasionally glimpse haunting faces, demonic entities, alien shapes, and ghostly apparitions. We briefly caught up with Foster to find out more about the exhibition and his innovative filmmaking technique.

The Creators Project: How did you come to feature in the Daydreaming With… St Michael’s exhibition?
Doug Foster: James Lavelle, who curated it, saw my installation [of The Heretic’s Gate] at the Hell’s Half Acre exhibition [at the Old Vic Tunnels in London] and was quite taken with it. He found it quite magical and we had a meeting and talked about doing something together for the “Daydreaming” project. So I asked him whether he would actually consider doing the soundtrack, to expand on what was there, and he was keen to do that and put it into this church show he’s doing in Camden quite soon. I had some music we put together for the Hell’s Half Acre show and he took that, remixed it all and changed it into a much more rounded and expanded soundtrack.

Can you tell us a little about the installation itself, as we’ve only seen a video of the piece?
I’ve seen quite a few things I’ve done in the past [displayed] at different scales and I was really surprised by how this one works at a large scale. It’s a bit hard to describe it really because in conjunction with the big 30ft pool of water that resides in front of it—which gives it an extra depth as you kind of look down on it, so you feel like you’re on the edge looking at a huge moving stained glass window—it’s quite slow moving and very, very abstract and you see all sorts of visions inside it. I expected these visions to happen but I didn’t really expect the scale to have such an effect. It seems to really magnify its power more than I thought, which is further heightened by being in a totally dark environment. In Hell’s Half Acre it fitted in an arch in the tunnels, but in St. Michael’s church we’re going to be having a free-standing version in a Gothic arch in a quiet area of the church, which will be projected onto, with the body of water underneath.

Would you say the piece is more suited to these environments than a gallery?
It does suit being in some kind of Gothic, old cathedral, architectural space, I think that’s the ideal place. It’s a vision of hell, all inspired by Dante’s Inferno; the heretics have their place in hell on the Sixth Circle of hell, they’re inside the walls of the City of Dis in tombs that are like flaming ovens that the heretics are lying in—it’s quite interesting that even the non-believers have got a space in hell reserved for them.

You mentioned earlier the shapes that are formed, they almost have a Rorschach effect…
Absolutely, people do see different things in it and it must be a sort of psychological test, but there seems to be a lot of agreement on the fact that you can see demons’ faces, alien babies, and lots of human anatomy. It’s quite regular that these images come up. Once you’ve been watching it for a while you get locked into just seeing the images that you see, and someone points something else out to you and suddenly you can see that—it’s because it’s symmetrical, bilaterally symmetrical, it’s got the potential to throw up these faces because our brains are always looking for faces. It’s one of the lizard brain primeval things that we do, we always have a part of our brain looking out for faces and patterns, it’s to do with our survival technique where we’re always looking out for possible faces that can be a danger and also faces that can be other people. I was surprised because the film’s only 9 min. 14 sec. long, but people were standing there looking at it for half an hour.

Do you find it works across different age groups as well?
Because it’s so abstract kids are kind of enthralled with it. Also having this lake of water in front of it, it makes it interesting because it can keep you away from it but also people are attracted to water. There’s something about being next to a body of water, you get some of that feeling of it being calming or slightly spiritual I suppose, I don’t know. People were sitting down low to get the best possible reflection on the water, people just feel like they can sit down next to water, it’s got that kind of subconscious attraction that you can’t really avoid. I suppose those two things combined, the symmetrical face generator and the body of water next to it, those two things make it captivating.

As a vision of hell it seems quite serene and calming…
Yes, it’s got this kind of cloudiness and these Renaissance painting type heavenly compositions coming up. In one place you can sort of see little people rising up into heaven, it’s half savage and half heavenly—that was a byproduct really, I didn’t design that, I was led by the technique of creating it because it’s all very organic. It’s produced with liquids and lights, dripping inks and things into water and then strips of light and that creates these material clouds which I can control to some extent, but I was certainly surprised by how much variation there was, along with how little I had to do to make different patterns.

Can you explain a bit more about the technique you used to create the kaleidoscopic patterns?
It’s done quite full scale, it’s a fish tank and then you put ink into the water and through a very, very narrow strip of light you can control how they swirl and billow to some extent, while some things you can’t control. It’s just the nature of the thing, these liquids flow in a certain way and you can agitate the water and you can change the temperature and you can do various other things to affect the pattern, but pretty much you’re in the hands of nature, really. Before it’s been made symmetrical when it’s just images of these clouds, it’s nice but it hasn’t got any of the intensity that it gets once you you make it symmetrical. That’s when it takes on a different structure which we recognise as faces or bodies or beasts, and the combination of those random shapes, plus the form that’s imposed on it by being made into a symmetrical image, and then the reflection you get from the water as well, make it into a kaleidoscopic pattern.

They look like they’ve been digitally generated…
A lot of people think that, but I think it would be very intensive to try and create the intricacies and the naturalism and lighting of the shapes on a computer. It’s one subject matter that’s easier to do for real than do on a computer. There’s so much stuff in feature films that’s done with computer graphics these days that you think it’s nice to try something for real, but in this case you get a lot back from a small amount of effort when you do it for real, just because of the subject matter, it’s part of what attracted to me to it. I’ve studied organic special effects and I knew it had a lot of potential to create fiery hellish imagery using the opposite, water and liquid.

Daydreaming with… St Michael’s is open Weds 27 April – Thurs 5 May, midday – 6pm every day. Entry is free.