Mainbeam Virtual Redux
A short documentary for InGAME, on a virtual reconstruction of Charlie Hooker’s performance art
Client: InGAME
Year: 2024
Location: Dundee, with interviews shot at Abertay University’s ViPRE facility
Format: Short documentary, 13:47
Fort Film Services: Direction, cinematography, edit, colour
The Brief
InGAME commissioned Fort Film to make a short documentary about Mainbeam Virtual Redux — a project led by archivist and curator Adam Lockhart at DJCAD to reconstruct a 1983 performance work by the British artist Charlie Hooker, originally staged in a multi-storey car park that no longer exists. The film was made for InGAME's Creative Research and Development programme, and screens at their events as a case study introducing the work and the wider applied games practice that produced it.
About the Project
Charlie Hooker's Mainbeam was a site-specific performance work, staged in 1983 inside the Trinity Square multi-storey car park in Gateshead — the same brutalist landmark that had appeared in Get Carter a decade earlier. The car park was demolished in 2010, leaving Hooker's performance accessible only through photographs and video documentation.
The reconstruction project, led by Adam Lockhart, used a game engine to re-establish the spatial and acoustic conditions of the original site from the available reference material — recovering not just the performance itself but the architectural environment it was made for. It's the kind of work that increasingly matters as more performance, site-specific and ephemeral art passes out of physical accessibility while remaining culturally significant.
The Approach
Fort Film's role was to document the reconstruction process and its relationship to the original performance — how a virtual environment can be used to revisit site-specific work when the physical conditions of its making no longer exist.
We shot in two environments, by design. The live-action sequences were filmed in Dundee, around the project itself. The interviews were captured inside the LED volume at Abertay University's ViPRE facility, with plate backgrounds chosen to sit in conversation with the project's themes — so the interview environment quietly mirrored the work being discussed, rather than sitting outside it.
The soundtrack picks up the building's other life. The film's score is built around a mix of Roy Budd's Get Carter theme, in quiet recognition of the car park's place in British film history — a layer of cultural memory the original performance was already responding to in 1983, and that the reconstruction inherits.
We shot on cinema lenses, edited with restraint, and let the contributors carry the story.
Credits
Director & Editor: Scott Dee
Cinematographer & Colourist: Alan McIlrath