Guy was invited to present at "The New Projectionists: VJing, AV Perfromance and Post-Cinematic Projection" a conference which was a collaboration between The Projection Project and Light Touch AV Festival and took place in Birmingham on 24 February 2018. The Projection Project is a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council that investigates cinematic projection. It documents the projectionist's role as it passes into history, following the switch of most cinemas to digital projection between 2010 and 2012, and looks at the contemporary expansion of projected images outside of the cinema.
Guy talked about the experience of "Becoming an Archaeological Projectionist": Now that analogue film projection is more or less an historical practice, how has our understanding and experience of it changed? Guy suggested that its slide out of daily life and into an historical twilight has changed its contextual framework and may even help us to see it anew, with increased subtlety and fine detail. He outlined how one outcome of his research has led him to inhabit the role of a projectionist of early cinema and how for him, the concept of post-cinematic projection is actually an attempt to uncover and recover the shifting dimensions of the experience of cinematic projection across time. As part of his presentation, Guy demonstrated an early 35mm hand-cranked film projector and invited the audience to compare the projection with a digitised version of the same film presented via a digital projector. Aside from aesthetic differences, participants also noted distinct differences in their sensual response which correspond to the related but dissimilar modes of ‘image as experience’ and ‘image as evidence.’ This event was one of a number of live performances involving early cinema technology which Guy has used to re-enact, rework and continue the experimental investigations of his project.