Michael Denton and Anna McCrickard formed Overlap in 1999. The collaborative duo bring together innovative music and electronic art to create single-channel videos, live VJ sets, audiovisual performances and installations, which have been presented at numerous international festivals and exhibitions. Over fifteen years of experimental endeavour, Overlap have developed a unique style and method, beyond the conventional practices of film and television. They explore the relationship between stillness and movement through abstract imagery and sound, generating new visual configurations.
Through VJing, Overlap have developed a form of visual serialism, removing the asymmetries of narrative comparative to Schoenberg's equilateral 12 interval octave to create a sustained enquiry into substance and absence described by the artists as ‘wallpaper with conceits’. Their recent works explore still and moving imagery through systems of implied motion, uses of discrete picture planes and obscuration techniques. The resulting view unfolds along a timeline, but is simultaneously limited to flat photographic space, viewed through a perceptual keyhole resonant of the formation of memories and dreams. In their live performances, Overlap create a mesmerising dance of shifting shapes, lights and visuals, containing recycled and re-composited imagery. Remixed visual fragments are given space to illuminate the imagination. Overlap’s video works have been featured at the BFI, London; Tate Modern; the National Portrait Gallery; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Manchester International Festival. Performances and screenings at festivals include: GENERATE, Tubingen; FIBER, Amsterdam; and the STRP Biennale, Eindhoven. Overlap live and work just outside Hastings, UK.
