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New-York-based artist Anthony McCall, a key figure in the history of avant-garde cinema, is giving a lecture. McCall is in the history books for his 1973 film-installation Line Describing a Cone, where he projected, through hazed air, a film of a white circle slowly forming on a black ground, in the process generating a spectral sculptural 'cone'. Through the 1970s, McCall developed this idea in a seies of 'solid light' films.

As he explained in 1974, a solid light film 'exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time. It contains no illusion. It is a primary experience, not secondary: i.e., the space is real, not referential; the time is real, not referential. No longer is one viewing position as good as any other ... every viewing position presents a different aspect. The viewer therefore has a participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she can, indeed needs, to move around relative to the slowly emerging light form.'

At the end of the 1970s, McCall withdrew from art, but, over twenty years later, he has returned to the idea, using digital projectors rather than film ones. Come hear him talk. Thursday 11 March at 6pm. A joint project with OtherFilm. Thanks to Adam Art Gallery, Wellington.