Liverpool Biennial 2016: FACT Liverpool.

"I am not a student of human nature. I am a professor of a far wider academy of which human nature is merely a part."

-- The Doctor, "The Evil of the Daleks"

Art Most of the time when visiting venues, I tend to start at the beginning and stay until it's done. But with the randomiser conveniently dropping me here on Picturehouse at FACT's cheap Monday and during the proper release week for nuGhostbusters, I paused in the middle for two hours of supernatural comedy.  nuGhostbusters is fine.  It passed the six laugh test within the first half hour and although it spends a bit too much time trying to please all the people including fans of the original who were going to hate it whatever and suffers from the CGI finale problem and some rough editing, the actors and their characters are excellent company. Indeed, Kate McKinnon's Holtzmann is such a unique creation she steals the film from under everyone and I probably spent most of the duration simply watching whatever she was doing even when the other actors were on screen.  Oh and she's quite clearly a Gallifreyan, but that's by the by, if quite apt for how I'm dealing with this year's Biennial.

FACT's hosting two of the official episodes, Flashback and Software.  In the entry hall is the third section of Yin-Ju Chen's Extrastellar Evaluations although in truth it's really just a reiteration of the sections also at Cains Brewery with the metal plates in formation on the ground and a projection of a nebula on the wall.  The additional pieces are a triangular mirror leaning against one corner and geometric shape in white light projected across another.  However intriguing this is, it simply doesn't make any sense if you haven't seen the sections at the Brewery despite the justification on the wall and more important doesn't add anything to it.  As with the multi-threaded approach to the display at the Old Blind School in 2014, there's a danger in splitting these sections in reducing their power, making their message less cohesive.  The otherworldliness of the installation at Cains isn't noticeable here.

Otherwise both of FACT's other displays are deeply impressive.  Extracting the feel good busting in the middle from the duration, I probably spent about two hours working my way through both displays, the Krzysztof Wodiczko retrospective on the ground floor and Lucy Beech's film show in Gallery 2.  As ever I'm bewildered how anyone can try and "do" the Biennial in a day or two and feel as though they've fully absorbed all the work on display.  Many of the press reviews published after the opening weekend will be from journalists who may have only been able to see what they could in that opening weekend or even just in the press days and I can't see how they can fairly pass judgement on this many displays with this variety of artwork, especially with the increase in venues on last time.  Granted it's not quite back at the peak, partly because City States is long gone, but neither of these artists appear in any of the major press reviews I could find.

Wodiczko's main interest is in utilising curious technology to magnify and project the voice of marginalised groups including the homeless, army veterans and immigrants.  Homeless Vehicle is a specially designed cart created in collaboration people living in the streets, covering their most basic needs whilst simultaneously not obscuring their problems.  Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection displays testimony from veterans and their families about their experiences surrounding war onto the statue of Lincoln in Union Square.  The Tijuana Projection offers exploited factory workers with a way of expressing their problems by recording their face utilising a special headset (not unlike the motion capture wonder beloved by Andy Serkis as used on The Hobbit) which then projects the results across the spherical surface of El Central Cultural.  In all of these cases, what we have is a video recording of each piece, captured in a similar way to performance art which means we often also have the reactions of passers-by to what's being shown.  There are many tears.

Although the centre piece is clearly supposed to be Guests, an atmospheric 2009 commission origination from the Venice Biennial in which the visitors finds themselves in a darkened room looking out through frosted windows at immigrants carrying out menial jobs or leaning longingly at us through the impenetrable glass, the piece I spent most time with is Alien Staff from way back in 1992.  Whilst staying in Paris, the artist became interested in the plight of non-EU migrants living in Europe and designed a pole with a monitor and speaker fixed to the top from which the recorded testimonial of the migrant carrying the pole could be played.  Again, this is represented by a recording (from VHS camcorders!) of each participant wandering shopping centres and tourist attractions, staff in hand,  their words filling the air and attracting the attention of passers-by, who stop, listen and ask questions, about the technology and about the person wielding it.

One of the staffs is also in the display in the gallery, but it wasn't until some way into the video that I even considered how much of a technical marvel this would have been in mid-nineties.  Now it could be accomplished by placing a cheap smart phone at the top with the video copied on the memory or through a bespoke app.  But in 1992 when the earliest of these recordings was made, although tiny LCD televisions were in existence, I can't quite understand how it was possible to project the recording into them.  A small video-cd and player?  A mini-disc?  Some kind of projection technology or broadcasting in from somewhere nearby?  Which is rather the trick, as I said, drawing people in who're curious about the technology and then engaging with them about the subject at hand.  As well as the video testimonial, each staff also has clear spaces within the tube where the migrant has placed personal objects, photographs, mementos, often a watch.

The ensuing conversations, some featured at length are fascinating as they include exactly the same rhetoric and discussions which became the currency of the EU referendum campaign and if only the audio survived, albeit with a translation, most of these conversations aren't in English, you could assume that they'd been recorded in the past few months.  One man voices his annoyance about how immigrants wear their own clothes rather than trying to blend in before admitting that yes, when he travels abroad he wears his own clothes too.  On the other side, another bloke who stops during a visit to the Centre Pompidou offers a passionate defense of migrants and immigration, outlining the divisive language of those who blame the problems in education and health on outsiders rather than a lack of investment and how they're stereotyped even if locals commits the same misdeeds.  We're still having these discussions two and half decades later.

In preparing her film, Pharmakon, Lucy Beech interviewed clinicians working in the field of delusional infestation, as well as visiting advocacy website and patients forums as she crafted a script about how support networks, as the Biennial booklet proposes, "can care for the individual whilst conversely intensifying symptoms."  Without giving too much away, we watch as a security person who suffers from panic attacks finds herself attracted to the message and the help provided by a guru like figure working in one of the buildings she's guarding.  Shot across Liverpool, most prominently in Concert Sq in the city centre and Sefton Park Palm House, it has a similar ambience to Yorgos Lanthimos's film The Lobster with its absurdities within a clinical atmosphere.  We're never quite sure if we're watching an expression of some near future society in which a disease is real or some kind of mass hallucination.

What both artists and their work share is the appreciation that the best way to attract people is through their natural curiosity and that although our usual attitude to the unlike is to run away from it, throw some rocks or begin deportation proceedings, we're otherwise always intrigued by something we don't understand.  Wodiczko could simply present his work in gallery spaces and to be fair in the end, as the FACT exhibitions shows, that's their ultimate demonstration, but if you confront people with these messages in the streets utilising, to some extent the language of advertising, but in such a way that they don't feel as though they're being sold to, you're more likely to get your message across.  In the protagonist of Beech's film we see someone being sucked in through similar means but for purposes which at least on the surface seem exploitative and nefarious.  Kind of makes you wonder what the end game might be with Pokemon Go.

A few suggestions if you are intending to visit.  The Lucy Beech piece lasts about 21 minutes and is on a loop but it does have a clear narrative, so like her other pieces notably Cannibals which appeared at Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2014 in the Horseshoe Gallery at World Museum and shared similar themes related to self help and female group dynamics, it's important to watch from the beginning to fully grok the meaning.  When I arrived it was about five minutes from the start but the invigilator was good enough to let me know after I waited outside, having presumably at least heard it a few times since opening, when the film was about to start again so I could enter then.  Krzysztof Wodiczko's display lacks chairs even though a few of the pieces are quite lengthy.  My option was to sit on the floor but that wasn't exactly ideal and led to some viewing of works at slightly odd angles.  But like I said, in most cases this was more than worth it.

Right then old girl, what have you got for me next time?  Oh hold on, the time space coordinates are drifting.  This could get rocky ...

Next Destination:
Saw Mi .. Blade Factory.

Then a phone rings.

Art In association with FACT Liverpool's Science Fiction: New Death exhibition, The Zone, the post-apocalyptic wilderness featured in Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker has been recreated at Bidston Moss. There are tours, but the places are limited or on days when I'm not available. C James Fagan has been though and writes for The Double Negative about the experience:

"The first stage of the journey, one that has some claim to reality, sees a liminal landscape of industrial estates and retail parks slip by and I find myself at a meeting place. Though there’s no clear indication that it is a meeting place — no A board, no hand written sign. Maybe I imagined this, conjured it up, fell into a slipstream of make believe.

"I’m at the right place. A small group of people are greeted, regulations explained, and another stage begins. A stage that feels like the one that preceded it; normal, almost tedious, and not what I was expected. As we pause at an underground station, our ‘leader,’ or The Visitor, hands members of the group tabards which proclaim individual professions. These will identify us.

"Only it’s not me, it’s someone else: an ‘Insectary Technician’. As this group undertakes another stage of the journey, I wonder if the only way to cope with these competing narratives is to become fiction myself. To be a simulation."

Vinyl Video.

Art Vinyl Video was an installation at FACT Liverpool in 2003. Vinyl Video was created by artists Gebhard Sengmuller, Penny Hoberman and Julia Scher and within the space resembled a boutique record shop. The premise was that in a parallel dimension, the home viewing format of choice was black and shiny and through a technological miracle, analogue moving images could be played from an LP. Miraculously it worked and in this moment between dvd and streaming had a real buzzy element as you took the disc from the shelf, cued it up on the turntable and watched the blurry faces of what resembled a pirated tenth generation copy of The Web of Fear: Episode One or at least something from the dawn of television. Ironically, a few years later, the creators uploaded this advert for their wares to YouTube and it offers a real flavour of what they accomplished.

Science Fiction: New Death.

Art Well, then.

"A major contemporary science fiction exhibition will be at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool between 27 March – 22 June 2014."

"Artists including James Bridle, Jon Rafman, Ryan Trecartin, Mark Leckey, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler and Larissa Sansour will present works which explore how technology is creating new ways of living (and dying), of fashioning identities and the growth of cult-like communities; making our everyday lives feel increasingly like science fiction."

"China Miéville award-winning British science fiction author (Perdido Street Station, The City & the City) has produced a new series of short texts which will be visualised in the galleries. These texts have inspired the narrative of the exhibition which is presented as a deconstructed movie set, with the curator as director, artists as actors, Miéville as scriptwriter and acclaimed artist collective The Kazimier as set designers."

My Intention.

Life Try and as I could (yes, I know, do or do not, there is no try, but nevertheless), I couldn't manage to work this into Review 2013. In the middle of the year, FACT Liverpool included an installation called "10 intentions" which asked visitors to select one or several of the philosophically or thematically offered keywords or "intentions" and asked visitors to free associate on the topic, either through the supplied microphone or keyboard. The results were combined and posted to a website and I'd entirely forgotten about it until I was ego searching a few weeks ago and stumbled upon what I'd written. Here it is:



Pessimistic soul, aren't I?

The Art of the Pop Video.

Art Like most other forms of advertising, it’s impossible for me to remember when I must have seen my first pop video. I do know when I began to pay attention to them, watching The Chart Show on Channel 4 then ITV each Saturday lunch time, which for those of us without Sky and so Mtv and multi-channel television, this was the only place to see promos for the latest songs in a block interrupted only by other adverts and the strange Commodore Amiga based desktop graphic in which a pointer would open folders to reveal information about the acts during instrumental sections.

Even then, I could detect that the difference between a video which had been knocked together from a live performance because a track had been a surprise hit (Black Box’s Ride on Time) and something created by an auteur with a seemingly infinite budget creating something that looked like a four minute movie (anything featuring Michael Jackson). But it’s fair to say that at that young age it didn’t occur to me that what I was watching could in any way be considered an art form. Mostly it was an opportunity to gaze longingly at Kylie as she grinned at me through the screen whilst dancing around random pieces of polystyrene.

It’s only later, when seeing the claymation videos for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer on an Ardman Animation compilation dvd or those Kylie videos projected onto the wall of an art gallery that it really sank in that pop videos are of those occasions when commerce and artistic expression intersect and that just as many so-called "fine" artists work in that industry as their own.  But that there remains a strange hierarchy of taste which means when Derek Jarman produces At Home With Duggie Fields it is deemed worthy of appearing in an art gallery.  When Derek Jarman works with the Pet Shop Boys it isn't.

FACT’s new exhibition, The Art of the Pop Video, as the title suggests, seeks to redress the balance. Curators by Michael P Aust (a film producer and director of SoundTrack… Cologne) and Daniel Kothenshulte (film academic), both of whom have made this idea their life, collect together examples of pop videos from across the years mixing the expected classics (Bohemian Rhapsody, Video Killed The Radio Star) with  an eclectic range of lesser known titles to investigate genres such as amateur, dance, politics, urbanism and filmic crossovers.

The genius of the exhibition is in the approach. As part of the press pack, I have a list of all the videos which are included and with half an hour to spare, could throw together a playlist in YouTube collecting them all together and it would give a sense of the exhibition and the careful curatorial decisions taken by Aust and Kothenshulte over the past eighteen months. Before the press view, that’s roughly what I was expecting, a giant projector in each of the galleries playing them in a loop for about an hour, just a tiled floor, cheap bar and speaker stack away from being a mid-90s student's union.

Instead, the curators have treated the pop videos with the same respect as other art. Entering the space we’re confronted with walls and walls of television screen each showing one or two of the videos. At first it's startling, bewildering and distracting but we quickly realise that what we’re seeing is a similar arrangement to most other art exhibitions, except the pictures are moving and thanks to the attached headphones we can be absorbed into each of their worlds.  Rather than fighting for our attention within a block of other content, they’re left to stand alone.

Almost, because within another couple of seconds you realise that in treating the videos with the same respect as other art, the curators have also carefully chosen how the videos will be juxtaposed. In the press tour, Kothenshulte spent some time explaining how the videos in the first, “history” room are interrelated despite the decision now to present them in production order.  There’s Fred Astaire in hoofing away in Top Hat, next to Spike Jonze’s Hollywood musical influenced piece for Bjork’s It’s Oh So Quiet whose technicolor seeps seamlessly into Oskar Fischinger’s block animation, Kompostion in Blau next door.

Those connections continue right around the room, making it possible for us to see that the found footage approach of the promo for Johnny Cash’s Hurt is at least spiritually in the same continent as the dayglo Soviet postmodernism of The Pet Shop Boys’s Go West and that all of them have a solid, artistic underpinning that reaches deep below the surface, even the slapdash montage of the trashy film for Brigette Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg’s Comic Strip and that unlike static, silent painting, each has duration which invites us to concentrate on it utterly.

Except because of the proximity of the screens it is possible to become fascinatingly distracted so that Fred Astaire is dancing to Bjork or The White Stripes are providing the soundtrack for a Len Lye’s Rainbow Dance. It replicates somewhat the experience of listening to music via headphones in "real" life, our chosen music soundtracking our exploits however mundane, the walk to work becoming a Bittersweet Symphony (though presumably without as many collisions).

The videos have different durations. Some visitors will be content to join a song in the middle but in the more narrative promos there’s nothing fun about missing the beginning. I quickly realised that there was always a gap and blank screen between the end and start of a video and it’s possible to skip across the room and quickly jam the headphones on for the beginning. Then, at the end, returning to the middle of the room and wait for the next in. How this will work when the gallery’s open to the public I’m not sure but it meant I could see everything in a relatively short segment of time.

Or everything in the first room. The reason I've been concentrating on the contents of that first room is because this is a massive exhibition and impossible to see in a few hours let alone even the normal opening hours of the gallery if you want to see and hear everything from start to finish and once you’ve started you will want to see and hear everything. It’s the kind of exhibition which appeals to my collector mentality so I’ll be dropping in for a bit each week for the duration of the show and seeing the next section.

Eventually I’ll reach the upper gallery, where the curators have position pieces which the makers very specifically suggest are art pieces but whose content is barely dissimilar to the work downstairs (at least from the glimpses I had). Such distinctions become important in the preparation of the exhibition. The pop videos are covered by a fairly bog-standard PRS music license, but the art pieces had to go through the usual channels and permissions of other art galleries and the artist’s themselves. It rather seems to depend on the purpose the work was commissioned for.

Is there a bias in the selections? Of course there is, all exhibitions to some extent express the tastes of their originators. Aust and Kothenshulte are most concerned in the intersection between art, pop and film and showing the best of the form so they’ve little interest in dedicating a screen to examples of the mediocre, the generic, the dull. In selecting the work of film directors, it’s the Finchers and Jonze’s who’re prioritised rather than Russell Mulcahy or McG.  Fans of the New Romantics and will be disappointed.

With my interest in film history, archiving and restoration something which did astound me was the difficulties the curators had in sourcing good quality prints of even the most famous pop videos. Aust explained that when this work is created, most often the master tapes reside with the given promotional company and very often if they’re having a clear out or closing, like much of television history before the 1970s it, the tapes would either be re-used or thrown in a skip. Some artists, when they want to release a greatest hits dvd rarely have access to the original masters, many of which have been destroyed.

Needless to day I was flabbergasted and said so. I had always assumed that the pop promos were treated with the same care as the music they’re advertising, stored in record company vaults (record companies often owned by the same media conglomorate as a movie studio) and yet it's true that there are greatest hits dvds in which classic videos are represented by obvious VHS recordings and this also explains why even on official artist YouTube channels, the quality of the image is barely standard definition. Part of the work of the curators is rescuing the tapes when disaster strikes like a two man BFI for pop promos.

However it was dragged together The Art of the Pop Video is an awesome exhibition to open FACT’s new two year project to include more shows with a pop cultural aspect intermingled with their usual programme. It’s early days, I’ve only properly seen one room, and yet to experience it with the rest of the public, but right now I can barely think of a criticism. Even the headphones are well chosen, Sennheisers with comfortable ear cushions and little leakage so that the visitor isn’t aurally distracted by the audio surroundings. Room Two next week then. Godley and Crème, The Prodigy and Nirvana…

Liverpool Biennial 2012: FACT (5)

Art  And so to FACT one of the Biennial’s main venues.  It’s difficult to remember a time when the FACT centre didn’t exist or what was in its place on Wood Street before all of this art and cinema took up residence here.  It’s only when compiling this tag for my blog that I realised just how regularly I’ve been a visitor even if it’s been to the cinema less and less.

Indeed it’s only on this visit that I noticed how some of the staff have FACT on their t-shirts and other Picturehouse.  As was explained to by an usher as I idled by the Box screen, there is an invisible demarcation line through the building, with everything on the left being owned and run by the arts organisation and everything on the right by the cinema chain.

*     *     *     *     *

In the area which used to be the Media Lounge, Pedro Reyes has installed Melodrama and Other Games, a kind of playground for existential angst in which strangers and friends are tasked with playing games which the artist believes can “foster new tools for collective problem solving”.  The walls are covered with brightly coloured posters in pastel shades, most eye-catchingly “Pillow Fight” next to a storage facility filled with all kinds of soft furnishings.

An invigilator approaches and explains some of the above and asks if I’d like to have a go.  I wonder if there are any solo items and I’m introduced to a map of the Great Britain filled with words, the aim of which is to read rhythmic poety out-loud as quickly as possible.  She says that because I’m on my own I’ll only need to go as far as Scotland but since that would seem like a job half finished I indicate that I’ll work my way through to Dover.

Shouting nonsense in public is surprisingly easy once you get started (which is presumably why politicians happen) and beginning with “Ingle Angle Golden Bangle” and finishing with “Iggle Oggle Black Bottle Out” I work my way through the Milliganesque mess of verse influenced by regional accents and sayings each indicated by a geographic location and arrow.  Liverpool has no arrow, but since Ipswich didn’t have The Beatles it probably balances out.

Reading unfamiliar verse is unsurprisingly difficult and I do trip over my words a couple of times and have to stop briefly around Birmingham because it's becoming increasingly difficult to read without bending over so I carry on with the indentical poster above.  I think I briefly have an audience too which serves me right though I’m not sure how much they are entertained.  But this is the kind of art I tend to like, with an interactive element, sometimes mental, sometimes mental and physical.

Reyes’s main game is Melodrama, a homage to Snakes and Ladders which forces the player through the ups and downs of a relationship.  The invigilator manages to corral a couple of other visitors, two girls, students I think, to play and the three of us sit around the table giggling our way through the various stages from meeting at a party to marriage to a party, the up arrows indicating emotional fulfilment, the down arrows signifying the pitfalls, the arguments, settling for less, that sort of thing.

The experience of playing with strangers is presumably different than with friends.  Friends tend to know all of your secrets and each circle is a potential reminder of some moment experienced.  Strangers are a blank slate and although there were a few knowing glances between the other two, none of us were prepared to say too much.  The simplicity of the game presumably means its own as enjoyable as the company and the three of us were never going to be fast friends.

Perhaps relationships are a form of "collective problem solving".  Even if the only people involved are the people involved, rather than the family and friends with their ears to listen, voices with advices and shoulders to cry on, the word "problem" so often used in relation to relationships suggests that there has to be something to solve.  Except, of course, some problems are crossword puzzles, some are campaigns in Portal and some are the Hadamard conjecture.

For the end of the experience Reyes has left prizes in the form of the posters of the games so we can enjoy them again at home and they’re now sitting next to me as I type.  The invigilator suggests I return when it’s busier and it's true this probably works best when there are more people to watch or enjoy the games with.  But Reyes has at least created workm that like of the best artwork, forces the visitor out of their comfort zone.

Fact Liverpool’s new show The Humble Market: Trade Secrets

Art My afternoon, or at least the second half of it, was spent at the press preview for Fact Liverpool’s new show The Humble Market: Trade Secrets, a collaboration with Abandon Normal Devices, Derry City of Culture and We Play Expo, created by contemporary theatre company Zecora Ura - a collaboration between the artists Persis-Jade Maravala, Alatair Eilbeck, Jorge Lopes Ramos and James Bailey and part of the London 2012 Festival.

If that opening paragraph seems long on exposition but strangely low on detail, it’s because like last September’s AND collaboration ZEE, it’s best experienced with as few preconceptions as possible so if you are planning to attend stop reading now. Or at least the end of this paragraph. Trust me, you’ll thank me. All I’ll say is that like ZEE, it’s an exciting, psychologically profound adventure during which we’re forced to question our entire state of being, what makes us who we are. Now, stop!

Delicacy

Film Unsurprisingly there have been few romantic comedies about grief. The tonal shift from the utter-devistation of the loss of one's loved one to the sharing of romantic witty banter with a potential partner near impossible to achieve. The most prominent example, Sleepless in Seattle managed the switch by having Hanks’s character externalising his the loss through a radio show, with Meg Ryan vocalising our reaction, and keeping the two separate for the duration. Most often, when this most tragic of events is brought in proximity with comedy it's in the horror genre but during Scream or Shaun of the Dead there’s little time to dwell before the next action set piece.

Delicacy dwells. When Parisian office worker Natalie (Audrey Tautou) loses her husband in the most brutally unexpected way, she’s unable to cope with the change in perspective that the rest of the world has of her. She just wants people to treat her the same, but none of them know quite what to say, and that awkwardness leads to loneliness and much like Hanks in Sleepless, Natalie finds herself consumed with work, desperately wanting to Vulcanise her emotions in case she lets the grief in. The wandering eyes of her boss don’t help and it's only until she unconsciously senses a similar emptiness in a co-worker that she’s able to articulate her feelings.

But for Markus (Francois Damiens), it’s the emptiness of the life not led, of a person overlooked by society and so whose overlooked his own potential, marinating in the juices of self-doubt and politeness. Having moved to Paris fifteen years before with hopes of becoming absorbed in a new culture, he finds himself continuing to be defined by his Swedish heritage, working for a company based in his homeland, living among IKEA furniture and still looked upon as an outsider. When Natalie gives him some attention, he’s brimming with excitement but having (we assume) spent so much of his life alone, how can he possibly trust that she’ll love him back?

Adapted with his brother Stephane from his own best selling novel, David Foenkinos’s film somehow manages to transform these melancholic nuances into something incredibly funny. Even before Amelie put her on the international map, Tautou was already enjoying some success in these tonally unusual stories and part of the fun, surprisingly, is watching her friends unable to cope with her emotional resilience, and that she’s best placed to decide on her emotional arc. It’s a part she was destined to play. Literally. In the book, a chapter was apparently written in the form of a screenplay with Tautou cast as Natalie in a fantasy version of her life.

But it's in the sequences in which Markus has to cope with her interest that the film really finds its comic heart. Perhaps it's the laughter of recognition from those of us introverts who’ve been in a similar situation, but Damiens impressively observes the constant state of worry inherent in being even friends with a beautiful woman, not knowing what to say or even when to speak, of hesitating throughout each encounter and finally reasoning that since this person is far too good for you and at some point will probably become bored, there’s little point in trying, even in the most obviously romantic of situations.

Like Sleepless, your tolerance for Delicacy ultimately depends on how willing you are to wallow in all this and allow yourself to drown in the overflow of sentiment. But not all of those emotions are explained. Natalie’s best friend is also “enjoying” her own emotional arc, but the Foenkinoses demonstrate the necessary self-absorption of grief by never quite explaining her moments of desolation. That ambiguity gives the film a weight missing from most modern romcoms and shows that this first time director is able to leave the requirements of his natural medium to one side and trust his audience’s imagination to fill the empty space.

DELICACY opened at Picturehouse @ FACT in Liverpool on 13th April.  Here are the screening times.  

Review screening attended.

Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be The Place

Film One of the best sketches to emanate from 80s comedy show The Mary Whitehouse Experience featured Rob Newman dolled up as Robert Smith from The Cure singing nursery rhymes or upbeat songs like Tie Me Kangeroo Down Sport attempting to parody the bands sudden lurch into happy material with Friday I'm Love.  In on the joke, Smith himself later appeared to sing "The Sun Has Got His Hat On" but I always wondered what would happen if they'd stretched the joke to show the otherwise depressive Smith in more mundane settings, such as on a date or at the bank.

Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be The Place initially seems as though it’s going to be a big screen version of that very idea. Cheyenne (Sean Penn) is a washed up 80s rock star who the director says is heavily influence by Smith who stumbles about Dublin seemingly without purpose. Dressed all in black, alabaster make-up contrasted by rouge lipstick, his fringe annoyingly falling across his face so that he has to blow it away from his eyes every few seconds, his eyes fixed ahead when they’re not covered by sun-glassed, he looks like an animated cut-out from Smash Hits Magazine, attracting stares from the locals, even those who don’t recognise him from his pop career.

With deadpan wit, Sorrentino places this figure in the antiseptic surroundings of shopping malls and suburban streets, approaching each action like an alien whose never had to buy pizza in a supermarket before, his monotone whisper just clear enough for him to function in a world that his childlike nature keeps him at odds with. It’s only in the company of people he’s familiar with like Mary, the daughter of a band mate (Eve Hewson) and his wife Jane (Frances McDormand) that he comes out of his shell a bit, largely because they force him to, the latter challenging him to ball games in the empty swimming pool in the grounds of him mansion.

As deliberately entertaining as this opening half hour is, there’s always a nagging sense that like his title character, writer and director Sorrentino isn’t entirely sure what to do next and the material won’t stretch much beyond showing us the incongruous sight of Cheyenne playing the stock market or nibbling through a pizza in a dining room below a neon sign that says “cuisine”. But then the film makes a magnificent leap which takes Cheyenne and us on a surprising and rather poignant journey which works best if the viewer knows as little about beforehand as possible. Ignore the synopses if you can. You’ll thank me.

What we can say is that this is strangely a comedy drama about guilt. Cheyenne’s guilt about a fan’s reaction turned sour, astonishingly enunciated by Penn in one of the film's key scenes, the guilt of not living up to his parent’s expectations, of finding oneself at odds with society’s expectations. But also for various reasons, the guilt of history and the extent to which humiliations inflicted and carried should be experienced and re-experienced across a life and whether it’s ever possible to let go. Cheyenne’s own baggage is given physical manifestation throughout, first as a shopping trolly then as a case on wheels, forever dragged along behind.

Sean Penn dissolves into personality of Cheyenne, and the funniest moments are when he allows this porcelain visage to shatter into more human expressions. In Thomas Vinterberg’s underrated futuristic meditation It’s All About Love, Penn plays a man who is medically incapable of living on land, spending his entire life orbiting the planet by plane.  Cheyenne’s feet are on terra firm but his mind is elsewhere and it’s to Penn’s credit that it never becomes the exaggerated parody of Newman’s Smith. He remains grounded enough and likeable enough for people to strangely warm to him, in spite of his appearance.

In a role which was written for her, McDormand catches the tone that’s required for the kind of woman who’d logically be wife to this kind of man, part groupie, part mother figure. How they became involved is never quite explained, but it’s clear she treats life with him as kind of fantasy adventure, her supplementary career as a fire fighter providing a much needed dose of reality. Another of my favourite but generally underused actors, Kerry Condon, appears in a small but pivotal role and provides some of the best screen tears I’ve seen a long time, her entire body distended and shaking.

As the title suggests, the other remarkable element of This Must Be The Place is the music of David Byrne and the Talking Heads which pulses from radios, televisions and in shopping malls throughout both in their original form and covered by other bands. Byrne himself wanders in at the halfway point playing a version of himself who’s an old friend and mentor to Cheyanne in a unforgettable incident in an old theatre, whose interior is crumbling in tandem with Penn's pop star’s personality. Unsurprisingly its Byrne’s music which aids in his psychological recovery and listening again to Little Creatures as I write, I can absolutely understand why.

I was lucky enough to be invited to a preview screening of This Must Be The Place at FACT Liverpool this morning. 

They'll be screening it as part of the Slackers Club at 9pm on Wednesday 28th March.

Then they will be showing the film on general release from Friday 13th April.

"I AM PUBLIC AVATAR"

Art As part of FACT Liverpool’s Robot and Avatars exhibition (which I'm hoping to visit shortly), artist Martin Bricelj Baraga created a Public Avatar project in which a human's free will is replaced by that of gallery visitors. One of the participants, C James Fagan has written for Double Negative about the experience. He's a brave man:

"My time as a Public Avatar is drawing near; as I walk through the crowds of people gathered in Liverpool to shop, celebrating St Patrick’s Day, I realise this is my audience. I wonder how they’ll react; I fear a negative/aggressive reaction. Time will tell.

I find myself at FACT, awaiting the arrival of the rest of the team; part of me hopes they won’t turn up. They do of course, and soon they are readying me for my Public Avatar experience. This is it. I am outside FACT, and one of my early instructions is to find a bar to shout out ‘I AM PUBLIC AVATAR’, and sing to a girl along similar lines. The reaction isn’t great; the woman flees fearing I am a suicide bomber.

I quickly leave."

It's probably a good thing I work at the weekend and missed this.  Power corrupts etc.

the British Animation British Animation Awards screenings at FACT.

Plug! I've had an email from FACT Liverpool:

"Hi Stuart,

Just wanted to let you know about the British Animation British Animation Awards screenings at FACT. They take place on the 23, 24, and 25 Jan with a different programme of shorts being shown on each. They have always been really popular in the past and the audience is invited to rate each short on a scale of one to five.  I have attached the Press Release and here are a few links to some of the shorts."

Thanks. Excellent. Find below links to the videos and the fuller press release:

"space exploration is often seen as a waste of money with no real benefits"

Science Inspired by the Republic of the Moon exhibition at FACT Liverpool, C. James Fagan writing for Liverpool's new culture blog The Double Negative ponders why we've lost the drive to return to our nearest celestial neighbour:

"There’s no real political drive; space exploration is often seen as a waste of money with no real benefits (though it’s much cheaper than a war). Perhaps there’s something darker in the human psyche holding us back. As much as we need to expand to explore and evolve, we need to avoid dangers to survive. The effects of this contradiction, the comedown from the Space Race as it where, are explored by J.G Ballard in his short story collection ‘Memories of the Space Age’, where rocket pads lay empty, inhabited by people filled with a desperate nostalgia, collecting Astronaut bones as fetishistic totems and generally contemplating the ‘moral and biological rightness of space exploration.’"

After reading this I had to fall back on my usual therapy space travel therapy, the opening credits to Enterprise.  Here's the version from the later series with the country beat and when they'd given up all attempts to pretend it wasn't Star Trek by missing that bit out of the title:



I always imagine in the Roddenberryverse the Space Shuttle Enterprise actually flew.

The Opinion Engine 2.0: 16/31:Republic of the Moon at FACT.

Press view invite from FACT in Liverpool.

Art When was the last time you looked at the Moon? Properly looked at it? Walking around Republic of the Moon it occurred to me how much I took for granted one of the most extraordinary examples of natural beauty, one which is accessible to our wonder every evening no matter our geographic location (depending on weather conditions) and which as the work demonstrates is almost unique in its ability to inspire both those who comprehend it with their imagination and those who strive to measure its properties, artists and scientists.

It’s apt that Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is still playing at FACT's cinema (just about) with its flashback sequences showing the production of Meliere's Le Voyage dans la lune. Like him, these artists seek to investigate humanities motivation in choosing to go to the moon through fantastical elements and fictions. The gallery guide mentions the recent Mars 500 ‘wood panelled spacecraft’ in Moscow, six men simulating a space mission on the ground. Through another prism that would be performance art.

In Enter At Own Risk, 2011 We Colonised the Moon, Hagen Betzwiser and Sue Corke imagines the work of lunar scientists on the moon’s surface, specifically the smell generated by moon dust as they re-entered the lunar module. They’ve attempted a recreation, which to my nasal cavity is somewhat like the Yankee Candle shop but through scratch and sniff postcards has been confirmed by one of the actual astronauts. One of the repeated elements of the exhibition is the revealing of little known facts about our natural satellite.

Beyond an airlock which reminds us of the preparatory processes from FACT’s previous success, ZEE, a room is set out like a mock up of the lunar surface and visitors at the weekend will be able to see the artist’s own astronaut recreating a moon mission, gardening the artificial rocks. We received a preview and its an eerie experience not least because as a group we were awed into silence presumably so as not to distract the performer from their task. We met the person behind the mask later but I won’t spoil their anonymity.

The last Apollo landing was by the Soviet Union, when in 1976, the Lunik 24, an unmanned probe stopped off for twenty-four hours and collected moon rocks. Leonid Tishkov cherishes that fact and in Private Moon he personalises it by presenting a series of photos illustrating the story of man who meets the moon and decides to spend the rest of his life with it. These are beautiful evocations of the city, illuminated by the moon itself carried about like the heart in the promo for Rodger Sanchez’s Another Chance, a reference he probably wasn’t intending.

Similarly its unlikely Sharon Houkema had the rippling moon of the surface of the water in the opening titles of Arena, the BBC’s arts strand when producing M3, but as it ebbs and flows on the wall above us, it replicates the same broken quality in a clever adaptation of an overhead projector. As the accompanying text describes: “The moon image – often surrounded with mysticism, romanticism and fantasy – is rendered (un)intelligible, yet the magic doesn’t disappear, it merely switches position.”

The point were science and art properly coexist is in Andy Gracie’s Drosophila Titanus a small display which gathers evidence of the artist’s attempt to breed a fruit fly capable of withstanding the extreme conditions on Titan (Saturn’s moon) (which you already knew) (sorry to insult your intelligence). When Gracie says the experiment could take many thousands of generation it gains an epic quality even on discovering the life cycle of the fly is nine days. One of the outcomes will be in seeing how mutant strains and deformities can speed up the process.

Liliane Lijn imagined in 1992 a moment when she’d behold it and see the word printed across it in block capitals, the celestial body becoming a metaphor for the female body which it already effects indirectly. He decades long project has resulted in a video piece representing her vision which shifts every twenty-six hours in time with its actuality, the natural lunar cycle suggestion a gender transformation as SHE becomes HE and back again. In the darkness of the media lounge, moonememe is accompanied by the voice of Lijn and a friend vocalising these shifts.

If you take my advice you will visit the media lounge then Gallery Two first because for once it’s Gallery One (opposite the box office) which provides the grand finale and perhaps one of the most original, astonishing, exciting art pieces these thirty-seven year old eyes has seen, a work which taps directly into my whimsy gene with its poignancy. Glimpsing at it through a window on an exterior wall as I arrived for the press view suggested this would be a simple reproduction of the control room for a moon mission.  I was wrong.

At which point the title does much of the work. Agnes Meyer-Brandis’s The Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Bird Facility takes it inspiration from Francis Goodwin’s Jacobian utopian fantasy novel The Man in the Moone, which recounts the diary of one Domingo Gonsales who’s carried to the moon in a chariot by geese and the artist has bred eleven of the fowl at an analogue for the moon in Italy, the secret success being that instead of simply faking these elements, we’re seeing their behaviour live.

None of which really describes the excitement of being in the room, the attention to detail of some of the elements, and it’s not supposed to. You have to visit, even for ten minutes, even if you’re primarily in the building to go the movies (though chances are whatever you’re seeing will have a tenth of the imagination of this). It’s rare that I become quite so evangelic about an art piece but along with the accompanying film which charts the development of the experiment, Meyer-Brandis captures the magic of Melieres through even more dimensions than Hugo.  Breathtaking.

The Opinion Engine 2.0:7/31:3D - do we actually need it this time around? And is it ever, EVER a good idea to convert a film into it?

Question asked by @Discodave75.

Film Usually when I’m asked for my opinion on 3D, a question which seems to crop up with a regularity second only to something Doctor Who related, I’ll usually say that film companies are desperate to find something to bring audiences back to cinemas and have fallen on the return of 3D with the same glee as sound, colour and letterbox. But that it would remain a gimmick until films are made whose stories or at the very least characters and themes are less comprehensible in 2D, just as some colour films are diminished in black and white, letterboxing is spoiled by cropping or panning and scanning and actually take advantage of format in the same way as sound, especially surround sound.

The problem has always been however that really all I’ve been doing is parroting out the views of Kermode, Ebert, Bordwell and a legion of internet commenters all of whom are firmly against 3D, essentially having, as some correspondents on This American Life suggested a couple of years ago, someone else’s argument. 3D to me has been either the two colour process, the experimental format employed for Doctor Who’s Dimensions In Time which required the camera to keep moving or in the present format an old style IMAX demonstration film from ten years ago and this admittedly positive Odeon preview of some trailers to really go on. I needed to see it employed in a narrative format at some point.

Which has meant, for the purposes of answering this question, I took a rare trip to the cinema this afternoon, to FACT Liverpool, for the 3D presentation of Martin Scorcese’s new film, Hugo. This wasn’t approached without some nerves. Thanks to so many horrible experiences with audiences, poor projection and immense ticket prices, I’ve gotten out of the habit of even attending the cinema, preferring instead the large television and comfy seating of my home, with the added plus of the pause button now that I’ve developed the bladder constitution of a pensioner at the age of thirty-seven. I’m pleased to report that this was an attentive albeit small audience, the film was beautifully projected and although the ticket price was £9, it included some reusable glasses.

The film itself is wonderful, magical and everything the less sniffy, more positive reviewers have led us to believe. The fictionalised story of an orphan who discovers the history of cinema and in particular pioneering director Georges Méliès in his bitter, penniless dotage working as a toy salesman in Montparnasse Station, it captures the magic of those earlier times through recreations of his film studio and working methods, as well as the simple pleasures of their stories through romances and chases in the station itself. Life affirming is a phrase ruined because of kitsch over-deployment, but in Scorsese’s love letter to the medium in which he's made his career, we’re reminded of cinema’s capacity to heal the soul.

All of which said, I’m disappointed to say that I’m not sure that any of those things wouldn’t be as true if I’d seen it in 2D. Hugo was shot using 3D cameras, and the director himself has also said that he’s still getting used to the format, suggesting it’s still in its infancy and should be judged as such. Certainly there’s a certainly breathless excitement as the camera cranes and zooms in and out of Hugo’s world, past trains (in homage to the early Lumiere film) and into the clock tower were he lives and hides, weaving between the cogs and mainsprings. Scorsese and his regular cinematographer Robert Richardson make full use of these new tools to dimensionalise the painterly Paris pioneered by Marcel Carné and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

But to some extent, as I expected, in the quieter moments, when the film isn’t putting images just in front of our faces, when two people are chatting in a room, I did wonder if I was tolerating the 3D, enjoying the film in spite of the format rather than because of it. Some of the most exciting moments are when clips are shown of  old films including the famous pink-tinted aerial shot of Babylon from Griffith’s Intolerance, during which I took my glasses of in order to marvel at them with my own eyes, especially since it’s the first time I’ve seen them projected at the intended scale with such a clean print. It’s not until you can see every figure on that ambitious set that you can fully understand the grandeur of what Griffith was trying to accomplish.

I'd also agree with Kermode et al, that 3D gives the image an extra layer of unreality beyond the CGI and artifice already inherent in cinema, thanks to how objects sit on the dimensional frame.  Some critics are suggested the effect is similar to a Viewmaster, in which figures seem rather flat, like cardboard creations in a child's table top theatre but the effect is also akin to the landscape sprites in early home computer racing games, just about acceptable as a car or in this case camera swoops past them, but without distractingly undimensional when caught with the corner of the eye.  Scorsese is also still employing focus with a two dimensional sensibility which means that very often an object fuzzily lurches out towards us drawing our vision away from the most important element of the shot.  Following the rapidly updating geography of the 3D picture is hard work.

There are also practical concerns. The glasses are uncomfortable and I spent most of the film fidgeting with them as they slide up and down my nose and made the side of my ears itchy. Although Scorsese makes it work to the film’s period, the glasses do make the image dimmer and the lenses were also reflecting visual information from behind and beside me, such as the light on the emergency exits. When instructed to put them on before the trailers, I also noticed a number thirteen floating in my peripheral vision. It wasn’t in any of the adverts and I feared I’d spend the whole of the film with it until I realised that the seat number had been screwed to the back of FACT’s comfy new seats. It went as soon as I hung my scarf over it.

All of which sadly confirmed everything I’d been hearing about the experience of watching a 3D film.  I am willing to admit that some of this might have to do with fulfilling pre-existing prejudices. Except, I’m a fan of cinema and was genuinely excited to see my first whole film in the format but there were just too many moments when I wanted to take the glasses off and simply watch the film without them, especially when shots were lost in a mist of hazing when the two images which make up the picture didn’t quite match (especially true of during one particularly important scene at the end). Scorsese’s tried his best, but the 3D’s distracting, the glasses are distracting and I can’t imagine why I’d ever want to go through this again.

So I’m back to watching everything in 2D again for a while. But 3D has changed the way films are constructed. Even when films are filmed flatly, it’s often with an eye to retrofitting which means the shot selection and pace of the thing changes. To some extent it’s helped action sequences especially amongst sympathetic directors and editors who seem pleased to be able to shift backwards from the punishingly fast shot durations which populated the thriller genre in the late noughties. But for technical reasons its also seen a vast increase in the medium close-up (heads and shoulders) and I do wonder if its had a knock on effect on tension in some character-based scenes. Would the Joker's interrogation in The Dark Knight have been as intense if shot for 3D?

When these films are retro-fitted such choices find their purpose, except if Hugo presents what a great director working at the top of his game with cutting edge technology achieves, I really hate to think what some of these faux-D films must look like. Hugo also highlights how Méliès himself indulged in a primitive form of retrofitting, shooting Le Voyage dans la Lune in black and white before hand-painting each frame in colour as part of his post-production process. Is this any different? Perhaps it isn’t. But having seen plenty of 2D presentations of these films over the past twelve months I can’t think of one which would have been benefited by an extra dimension, or at least may have become more entertaining.

But Méliès thought that by adding colour to his films, however crudely, he would enhance the magic of them and that’s been Scorsese’s thought in producing Hugo with the latest technology. But each time one of his directorial ancestors films appeared all I could think was how the Frenchman was able to produce what were then and are still visionary works in two-dimensions and how, in the few moments when that work is also retro-fitted during this work, it detracts from his achievement. Ultimately, then, from my meagre experience, I don’t think we need this form of 3D right now. Which isn’t to say when the technology moves on and we can watch them without glasses as has been hinted, my opinion won’t change.

"exciting experiment in radio history"

Plug! In Liverpool, on Monday ...

ROMEO ECHO DELTA interrupts the airwaves!

Watch the skies and stand by your smartphones this Halloween when AND festival invites you to become part of this exciting experiment in radio history. ROMEO ECHO DELTA is a brilliant new sound project by the artists Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard [www.iainandjane.com]. Produced especially for AND festival [www.andfestival.org.uk], it is inspired by a long line of hoax alien invasions and fake UFO scares......

Listen live on BBC Radio Merseyside 95.8fm, on their website www.bbc.co.uk/news/england/merseyside/ or in the FACT building (88 Wood Street), 31 October, 10.00pm – 11pm for an opportunity to meet the artists and find out the truth ...

"Again, the Beatles thing"

Music The AV Club has a nice interview with Susanna Hoffs. Here she is on the inevitable:

"“Going Down To Liverpool” was a Kimberley Rew song, and—I hope I’m getting this right—he was in the band The Soft Boys, I think, and then Katrina And The Waves. He’s just a great guy, a British guy who writes fantastic pop songs, in the best sense of “pop.” The best kind of pop songs, really catchy melodies but sort of offbeat in a way that always has appealed to The Bangles. I mean, we always seem to be attracted to that kind of thing, and we were just immediately struck by the fact that “Liverpool” was in the title. Again, the Beatles thing, but it was a reference that made us think of The Beatles and where our original inspiration came from, so it was kind of a natural choice for us."

instead of a big dark blur, we see a big bright blur

Art This lunch time I attended the press preview for the Abandon Normal Devices arts festival which is happening in Liverpool this weekend. Work commitments and other things will prevent me from attending anything so I couldn’t help but be disappointed that I won’t be able to see the Pigs Bladder Football (in which the sports implements are being cultivated organically) or the Primate Cinema in which is apparently a hospital drama designed especially for chimps and the dozens of other events which have been programmed.

What I was able to see was a preview of FACT Liverpool’s new show, run in conjunction with AND, and in particular installation artist Kurt Hentschlager’s ZEE 2008/2011 or ZEE for short. ZEE is, well ZEE’s um, to be honest ZEE’s almost impossible to describe without resorting to film references and cliché, apart from to say it’s one of the most exciting installations I’ve ever “seen”. Hentschlager favours “immersive and overwhelming experiences” which fits in well with the Abandon Normal Devices since in this case the normal devices abandoned are our senses, particularly our eyesight.

The pre-amble is pure Jurassic Park. Assuming the public iteration is similar, you’re first handed an information sheet which under normal circumstances might as well be described as a spoiler sheet which gives an impression of what ZEE will be like. We’re told that this is a gallery filled with fog, with zero visibility and a rope to keep us supported and orientated. The rope also has instructions for use. The general advice is to keep moving but there are also safety instructions on what to do in the case of an emergency, especially a personal emergency.

Which then leads to a disclaimer form with a list of disorders and diseases which discount entry to the space:

Photosensitive epilepsy
Asthma
Breathing of heart problems
Abnormal (high or low) Blood pressure
Migraine or headaches
Ear or eye diseases
Claustrophobia
Anxiety
And I am not pregnant.

As you can imagine by this stage I'm brimming with worry, fear, anxiety and genuine excitement, all of which are also printed on the faces of the press people in attendance. Even though we’ve been given a basic idea, there is still a genuine sense of curiosity about the fine mess we've gotten ourselves into. Seriously, if you want to visit and don’t want to have the process spoiled for you stop reading here because the movie references and clichés are about to start flying.

After the forms are signed we're led back into The Box screen were the original AND presentation took place for a further briefing and the creation of a register since during each session or visitation into the space the staff have to count us all in and count us back out again. Then Hentschlager himself also intones some further safety warnings in a manner that suggests he's something of a showman on the quiet, knowing that the best way to build up the tension is to give his audience every opportunity back out.  It works.  By now anxiety has turned to dread. I'm sitting with the palm of my hand over my mouth, my skin crawling.

The corridor at the side of the main space has been turned into a couple of white rooms or staging areas. In the first, the register is read out again, we agree that we’re all present again, and then we’re led into the next which is already filling up with the smog, though it resembles smoke more, as though the room next door is on fire. If this was Outbreak or some kind of space exploration piece this would be very much the decontamination chamber and the very last chance for us to walk away. But the temptation is too great. With this much build up, with all the forms, we have to know now whether any piece of art can live up to this hype.

The door opens and we’re led into main room which is filled with the fog and our hand is placed on the rope and told to walk forwards. Within seconds the world as we know it is gone, replaced by a white void. The 9/11 reference is inescapable, the moment in the streets of New York after the towers fell and the air was filled with dust, but also if we’re being less reductive, The Fog, The Mist, Silent Hill or the remake of The Fog. This initial sensation is similar to Gregor Schneider’s Kinderzimmer which was at the Whitworth in Manchester in 2009, but instead of a big dark blur, we see a big bright blur.

What I gather must be a light show then begins but this isn’t some pyrotechnic display. Somehow abstract images are being created by messing with the natural functions of our eyesight so that we effectively have a kaleidoscopic effect directly in the retina. It’s impossible to photograph because a machine can’t easily simulate the effect and the photograph in the gallery leaflet (see above) just looks like a scene from one of the aforementioned films with a street level weather pattern in the title.  Every now and then the ghostly figure of the person in front of me appears but they're turned into something other, frightening, in the chaos.

As I walk forward, my hands initially clasping the rope for dear life, the colours change, from one shade into a multitude, the full spectrum. I keep thinking about 2001: A Space Odyssey and wondered what Kubrick and Clarke would have made of what amounted to their stargate sequence turned into an "ultimate trip” (as the movie poster described it) which anyone (disclaimers accepted) could undergo. I imagine if a György Ligeti soundtrack had been applied with its monosyllabic minimalist chant the anxiety levels would have been even higher.  But the artist wants to calm us so simply offers a simple, almost imperceptible accompaniment.

The optimal length for a visit is apparently twelve minutes. I left after seven although it felt much longer, impossible as it was to time the circuits. Everyone in the group was smiling.  It was generally impossible to know what to say, so unlike anything else was the, yes, experience. Indeed the main topic of conversation was exactly how we would describe it, something I think I've entirely failed at here. If you are in Liverpool and don't suffer from any of those ailment and aren't pregnant, this is just something you're going to have to try for yourself.

Abandon Normal Devices is at FACT Liverpool until 27th November.

visually innocuous igneous rocks

Art One of the more thrilling memories I have of children’s television in the eighties was watching grainy 16mm footage of a Blue Peter presenter, who in my memory was Simon Groom, standing in the midst of a volcanic eruption, seemingly on the edge of death. As far as I could see, the whole steaming, streaming rock face could have potentially smothered him and yet all Groom was interested in was showing us just how hot these visually innocuous igneous rocks really were by attempting to kick them with his suede shoes, only skipping away when the menacing matter finally came just that bit too close.

That led to a life long fascination with volcanoes and so I’m predisposed to love Worlds in the Making, the new work from Semiconductor, the art duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt on display at FACT Liverpool from the 2nd July, the press preview for which I’ve just returned from. I can’t often accept such invitations because of work, but I'm on holiday at the moment so it was worth attending at least to see the hospitality professional reviewers enjoy. As I discovered, a chance to see the exhibition before/without the public, a short talk from curators and artists and (for the purposes of full disclosure) a very nice buffet lunch.

Semiconductor have been working together for fifteen years and Worlds in the Making is another of their artistic investigations into the natural world and how science changes our perception of it. The culmination of a three year project, the film in FACT’s Gallery 1 pulls together a mass of research collected and sent to them from vulcanologists studying globally and visits to the Smithsonian Institute’s natural history department. Effectively they carried out their own scientific exploration but are presenting their results artistically, utilising the data to produce a film that blurs fiction and reality, with us becoming their peer review community.

At first glance, probably no matter when that glance happens in its twenty-three minute duration, the viewer seems to be watching a kind of minimalist documentary about a volcanic eruption, from first observations of a potential catastrophe through to the moment when its best to get the hell out of the local town, the mountain with a hole in the top disappearing into the distance. To an extent, Worlds in the Making is a voyeuristic undertaking since we, through the artists, are watching the scientists at work, their labs, their equipment, we’re observing the observers, and on the soundtrack listening to their observations.

Interspersed with this, Semiconductor employ one of the richest of new art-forms, computer animation, to imagine what the scientists can’t observe. The formation of crystals below the surface forcing themselves into being (in shots reminiscent of the kryptonite effects in Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns) and the exterior landscape itself vibrating, with as the accompanying literature describes “sound functions as physical material, becoming a tool to introduce time and motion to the seemingly static world”. Throughout, real seismic data is used as the basis for an audio soundscape blasting from six channels placing us directly inside this formation’s deadly power.

World In The Making brings to mind another childhood television memory from when a pre-teen me was absent from school with chicken pox and was confronted with advanced chemistry for the first time through the scientific programmes broadcast on Granada in the morning (parodied later in Look Around You).  These too would intercut footage of scientific investigation with animations portraying the chemical reactions which with my young eyes could just as well have been fiction, a version of Clarke’s third law, that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I think that’s what Jarman and Gerhardt are also attempting here.

For its slender running time, as you can see, Semiconductors is rich in meaning and ripe for interpretation and I’m becoming very conscious that I’m reaching the point of spoiling the experience if you’re intending to visit (especially since the exhibition hasn’t opened yet). I’d stop reading this paragraph now and skip the next one too because there was just one more thing (Peter Falk RIP). There’s a moment when on one screen the metallic cylindrical seismometer flickers indicating the impending eruption and on another screen, a sculpture of a volcano is shown (in the local town which is called Volcano), as the speakers rumble ominously.

This is a classic film editing trick, often seen in Hitchcock, Spielberg and indeed most disaster films, a cutaway from whatever human drama is being conducted inside the mayhem to a subtle warning about the impending natural disaster. There might even have been a similar shot in Earthquake, just before the dam breaks. I congratulated the artists on this and asked them (in my usual rambling style) if they’d intended to produce a thriller.  Interestingly, although they’d shot unused footage of safety shelters and the like, and wanted to produce an uneasily feeling, it hadn’t cross their mind to go further. But they agreed that if it was a thriller, it was inadvertent rather than by design.

Upstairs in Gallery 2, the Inferno Observatory installation offers a lo-fi version of the “main” work. Whilst researching at the Mineral Science Lab at the Smithsonian, the artists stumbled upon an archive of 16mm footage of volcanologists in the field, including spectacular aeroplane footage of an eruption. The former appears on CRT televisions piled up throughout the space, the latter rightly given the big screen treatment it deserves and as the artists suggest despite the formal, cold, clean space, the visitor, now surrounded by the images and sound once again feels an eruption at a visceral level. I may even have sweated.

There’s an even greater sense of danger here. Whereas the predominantly young people in Worlds in the Making make their observations from a relatively safe distance, these older guys are, like Simon Groom, imperilling limbs as they take readings directly from the lava using very long sticks.  We’re always aware that the pilot and camera man had to have been risking their lives to get so close to the lip of the volcano, especially when the plane swoops heart-stoppingly closer to get a better shot.  The sounds we hear too are natural, taken from directly nearby, instead of the artificially generated noise that accompanies the work downstairs.

On your way out, don’t forget, as I almost did, to visit the ScienceFun Fair in the Media Lounge, in which kids from Pleasant Street Primary School in collaboration with artist Laura Pullig have created some objects/experiments exploring the themes of the exhibition. The seismometer is especially ingenious. It’s enough to make me ponder once again why, having watched Groom singeing his corduroys as he showed me the volcano, I still turned around and followed the educational art stream. Perhaps like Semiconductor, I’m just as interested in the presentation of the natural world, as the natural world itself.

Look11

Art Liverpool’s first International Photography Festival, Look11, opens 13 May until 26 June. A press release:

This spring, Liverpool will host the city’s first International Photography Festival, the largest in the North West. Featuring work by photographers including Simon Barber, Paul Trevor, John Davies, Ian Berry, Lisa Bernard and Mohamed Bourouissa.

Look11 will see work featured at Liverpool’s arts venues, including National Museums Liverpool, FACT, C.U.C, the bluecoat, LJMU, Tate Liverpool, RIBA and others.

The city-wide festival will explore photography and it features two key strands.

The first is a ‘call to action’. Sitting alongside Liverpool’s theme for 2011 ‘City of Radicals’, explores photography’s role in social justice, its ability as a tool to capture and present the world us to affect personal, political and social understandings.

Through the Capture Liverpool competition and by engaging with blogs, forums and social networks, Look11 invites members of the public to pick up a camera and photograph the city for themselves.

Key themes and exhibitions posted below: