If someone has a Super 8 film they want to install in a gallery I immediately try and discourage them in as much as that a Super 8 film is usually an original film, and you can’t duplicate it unless you refilm it, so there’s a durability issue. There’s also an issue of brightness with Super 8 so I always encourage people to blow up to 16mm because 16mm is a much more durable medium. If you’re duplicating it you have a negative made so you can make multiple prints from your original and you can save that as a master.

With 16mm projectors the temptation is that people think 'I have a 16mm projector, I’ll put that in the space and use that', but these projectors were never meant to run continually in exhibition spaces. I learnt very quickly when I first started to put equipment into galleries so that they would last for a certain number of hours but then you have to go into the projectors and rebuild them and do some quite high maintenance on them to make sure they’re going to run again for the next project. So those are a couple of issues to consider.

With 16mm the issues are mainly durability, brightness and reliability of equipment – you want to know that once you have a projector in a gallery that you’re not going to have to worry about it, that it will run for the period of time it’s meant to. If people do insist on using their own equipment in a gallery I’m quite happy for people to do it but I often find that I do get call outs to repair their equipment on site in the venue which is much more inconvienient than having the projectors prepared here in the workshop. You still get the back up for it but I know I’m not going to get a call nine times out of ten because they’re well looked after.

With work prints, especially when you’re looping, each splice acts like a brake pad and picks up dirt, which brings foreign material into the print, which then will actually deteriorate the print more quickly. These splices are the weak points on the film and they will wear out after a while, so if you can keep splices to a minimum or try and get a neg cut and a finished piece of work it’s always better. For student shows you can get away with it on a shorter run, but in a gallery or exhibition space you have to be fair to the work and try and finish off the print.

As I said the 16mm projectors are not meant to run continually in a space, they are designed for short runs, showing films in the classroom, etc, so they have a limited number of hours they’ll run before you start getting problems. A lot of this is due to overheating – that is the most common cause of things going wrong, which is why I try to encourage people to put a stop /start mechanism on the projector so the viewer presses a button and the film runs for a certain length of time and stops. Or a motion sensor so that as long as someone’s in the room the projector’s running but once they leave the room it stops and has a chance to cool down which saves wear and tear on the print and on the equipment.

I also stress that there should be movement of air around the projector. The projector should not be put in a sealed box – it has been known to happen for people to put projectors into a solid box with no ventilation, just with a little hole cut in and an on/ off switch on the outside, or they just turn it on at the mains! I was actually at a private view once where someone had encased a 16mm projector in a cardboard box as part of a sculpture, drinks were served all round and suddenly someone smelled some burning and a little plume of smoke was coming out the top of this person’s installation, which led to a lot of clattering glasses and thundering footsteps down the stairs. Luckily the projector actually froze up because it got so overheated. It was extraordinary that no ventilation, as provided. It was like putting an electic heater in a cardboard box and expecting nothing to happen.

Yes, film has a reasonably narrow margin of environments it likes to be projected in. If it’s too hot film doesn’t like that, and if there’s too much humidity projectors will actually time out and not work, or even worse the film will act almost like a litmus paper where it will collect the moisture and once the film starts to rehydrate it will start to get sticky and the rollers in the projectors and the gate can get sticky too.

I’ve actually had a situation where the humidity was so high the film would not pass through the gate because it was damp. We had to preheat the projectors before we could send film through them, just to dry them out. If a venue is really cold or heaters are put on suddenly, the moisture content of the air goes up and you’re going to get into problems where the film will not actually travel through the projector.

Yes. Dust is something that’s a classic hazard when you’re installing in a gallery space. There’s often a lot of building work and dust is the enemy of film in that it can settle on the surface and damage the print. Again, I’ve been in situations where I’ve left projectors neatly installed in a gallery and come back the next day to find that someone’s decided to cut a hole in the ceiling above the projector, showering it with plasterboard and they’re wondering why the film’s damaged and scratched? It seems kinda obvious to me but not to everyone!

With these projectors we’re using there’s only so much light – they’re halogen projectors. The Xenon projectors are a different story, but the halogen 240 volt, 250 watt have only a certain amount of light that they put out, and the further away you get and the bigger image you get its' like you only have a limited amount of light in your light pot that you can spread across the wall – and it will get very thin if you’re moving very far back and trying to get a very big image.

Obviously the ambient light will affect that image as well. You can go online and check out a chart to see the ratio of image to lens size. I try to encourage people to work within prime lenses, by that I mean lenses that aren’t zoom lenses, but rather fixed lenses, as they are the brightest so you’ll make the light work more efficiently. Bigger isn’t necessarily better. Fortunately people seem to be happy with smaller images now, whereas when I first started installing projectors people always wanted the biggest image. People seem to realise now that you do lose colour and intensity and you are limited somewhat with the size.

What you have to do is to project in that space or in a space like it to see what will look good rather than trying to imagine what it will be on the day and ultimately being disappointed and wondering why everything looks so dim. Four to six metres is an average distance in most smaller galleries now, and these projectors cope adequately with that kind of distance. As people aren’t doing floor to ceiling projections anymore, they seem to be doing a more reasonable size imagery which is 2m by 3m or less than that even, things are looking a lot better now!

Generally they’re used for when I need a much bigger image or the piece needs a high output of lamp. For example I used a Xenon at the Hayward for Anthony McCall’s ‘Line Describing a Cone’ (UK, 1973), because we were projecting through a hazy room and you needed as much light as possible in there. The halogen projector would probably get about half-way through the room and just stop whereas the Xenon would project through this cloudy mist and end up with an image on the other side of the wall and you need a minimum lumens to get through that.

It’s only recently I’ve started to put the Xenon into installation spaces just because of the amount of heat that they generate and the fact that they’re even less likely to run continually. I used to reserve them just for specific screenings, for outdoor screenings, like you said the forest screening where there’s some ambient light, outdoor light, or we do screenings at the Serpentine – most summers now they do the outdoor screenings there in the pavilion and we use a xenon projector there. You need that sort of brightness because we’re projecting quite big – a 9 ft x 12 ft image in an outdoor space that’s surrounded by street lights..