Emma Hart
M20 Death drives 2012
Extended wing
mirrors reflect a concealed television playing a video describing a near-fatal
motorway crash. A leatherette booth that looks a bit like a slashed, fat car
seat conceals the screen. Protruding catering trays become service stations,
serving up products from the traumatised places the video slips down to
when the re-traced journey is broken by going into M20 service
stations. One turns out to be a cocktail bar, but I can’t get served. This is
the most recognisable station; the others journey to weirder places, maybe
inspired by a bad game of Dungeons and Dragons.
James Richards and
Steve Reinke
Disambiguation 2009
James Richards and
Steve Reinke exchanged disks of music, stray footage and fragments of existing
works for each other to remix, soundtrack and re-order. The result is somewhere
between a compilation, a new work and a curated programme, an exquisite corpse
forged from their attempt find a common voice.
Dissolution of self, dissolution of meaning, dissolution
of image, dissolution of the original, raw, disjointed, free, abstracted,
visceral, retinal, discordant, close, distant, disembodied, liquid, implacable,
democratic, dub.
Saskia Olde Wolbers
Pareidolia 2011
Pareidolia's
narrative is based on the events surrounding the creation of Eugen Herrigel's
book Zen in the Art of Archery, a popular book set in Japan in the 1930s that
created a cult following in Europe during the post-war years.
Referencing
computer-generated imagery, Saskia’s liquid visuals are entirely analogue, shot
in real-time in model sets. Skeletal objects, architecture and living forms are
given a ‘skin’ when dipped in paint and submerged underwater. These recordings
of sculptural and chemical lo-fi processes subvert the truth telling qualities
of filming reality.
Dara Birnbaum
Technology-Transformation:
Wonder Woman 1978
Explosive bursts of
fire open Technology/Transformation, an incendiary deconstruction of the
ideology embedded in television form and pop cultural iconography. Entrapped in
her magical metamorphosis by Birnbaum's stuttering edits, Wonder Woman spins
dizzily like a music-box doll. Through radical manipulation of this female Pop
icon, she subverts its meaning within the television text. Arresting the flow
of images through fragmentation and repetition, Birnbaum condenses the
comic-book narrative.
Sebastian Buerkner
Installation 2016
Cognitive behavior
studies, neuroscience and the contemporary discourse of media, result in the
conjuring of memory and association, subjectivity of experience and
multi-narrative possibilities.
Flashes
of abstracted imagery, representing a distilled essence of a family photo
album, are paired with a scrambled, rearranged and synthesized version of
Mozart’s Requiem.
This
installation offers a very distinct porous, unsettled rendition of a 3D film
using multiple layers
of projection surfaces, where the emitted visuals will attain a hazy volume.
Three projections will conjure into a single light sculpture.
Semiconductor
Band 9 2015
Band 9 is an installation that considers nature
within the framework of science. Nine light boxes show scientific cloud data,
which have been captured from space by a remote sensing satellite, orbiting the
Earth. Using optical sensors it collects reflected light in various wavelengths
of the electromagnetic spectrum. By focusing on very thin slices of these,
scientists can pinpoint individual phenomena such as the band we see here,
which is designed to reveal high-altitude clouds called Cirrus.
Charlotte
Gould and Paul Sermon
Screen
Machine 2016
‘Screen Machine’
offers public audience participants the opportunity to co-create chance
encounters and self direct spontaneous performances between two separate
installation locations. These unique transitory events will rely entirely on
the roles and performances the participants bring to these telepresent screens
and the experiences they choose to live out. Inspired by our urban and cultural
surroundings and re-contextualized in a diverse array of digital milieus, ‘Screen
Machine’ aims to allow these public audiences the agency and control over the
outcomes of this intervention, akin to a telepresent fluxus happening.
Jack Strange
Consciousness Combi 1 2011
Strange’s work
re-contextualizes and re-imagines the functions of everyday objects and ideas
in a manner that is humorous, clever, surprising and at times revelatory.
Strange invites new meanings and interpretations of their uses that challenge
human logic and the limits of human consciousness at large.
Vesna Petresin
Audiomorph 2011
Audiomorph [Can I
Wear My Song] explores the topology, boundaries, immersion through embodiment,
and the notion of gaze. It situates the space of the body in relation to its
environment, and the sound of human voice in relation to technology. Particle
fields informed by the body geometry interact with the space that surrounds the
body; their transformation is driven by acoustic parameters of the piece of
music performed by the artist.
The
pattern shaped by the body and the voice becomes a crystallised sonic pattern.
______________________________________________________________
The opening event:
Performances:
Stephen Mallinder
‘It was quite serendipitous really as shortly after being asked to participate in the Our Machines exhibition and series of events, Wrangler, the analogue electronic group I’m part of, had just completed a mix for a collection of electronic artists from Manchester called The Duke Street Workshop. The name of the track was ‘The Machine’. We kept the tempo and melody of the original and the simple voice sample repeating the phrase ‘the machine’ but everything else was composed by us. It seemed appropriate to build images, film clips and the sort of ‘retro’ aesthetic of the track into what I was doing for ‘Our Machines’. The idea was to expand the sense of movement and progression inherent in machines and lost idealism of technology, our often misplaced utopianism, that technology seems to infer'
Bea Haut
The 16mm films manifest and behave as sculpture, installation, projection, photography and printmaking. Multi dimensional in media and often site responsive, these works allude to perceptions of inter-related moments, spaces, and actions in between. Regarding the mutating dialogue between the self and the surroundings, using the stuff of the everyday as material and subject.
Guy Sherwin and Lynn Loo
Sherwin and Loo present a selection of 16mm films that explore sounds made from light, using either light-sensitive microphones or hand-made or photographed ‘optical’ soundtracks. Creating a clear distinction from the smooth predictability of HD projection and embracing film as material and projection as process - with all the glitchy sounds that film produces - the rough edges, the mechanical irregularities, the flare-outs.
David Leister and Lucy Harris
16mm film screening of Crèmer - an abstract document of a lost studio, not easily catagorised, occupying the spaces between a photograph, a document and a film. It is a collaborative record and examination of the fire and resulting smoke damage that took place in the studio in 2006. As film is exposed to light, the studio was exposed to smoke, leaving a shadow or imprint on all surfaces. These appear almost as ‘x-ray’ images, with the results also reflecting personal circumstance of the time.
Sarah Angliss
‘These days I rarely appear on stage without a robot by my side.
Fashioned from found objects, my robots have more the air of faded variety performers than high-tech machines. I’m aware this ragbag of automatic accompanists makes my act look out of place on the electronic music scene, where minimal movement, disembodied sound and deliberate anti-performance are very much in fashion. At first glance, the set seems to exist somewhere between experimental electronics and 1930s cabaret. Yet, when the robots move and become part of the performance, I hope any thoughts that this is a novelty act are dispelled.’
Matthew Noel-Tod
A Season in Hell explores the spectacle and its contemporary forms, from the whimsical innocence of childlike animation to the apocalyptic sci-fi blockbuster.
Caleb Madden and Bartosz Dylewski
Existing in an exiting new position at the intersection between gallery installation and live performance. Madden/Dylewski present an immersive audio-visual piece. Incorporating extreme audio noise, field recordings taken at working power stations, and heavily processed electromagnetic signals combined with intense, reactive projected visuals originated from self-authored, error based software. Expect machine rhythms & turbine noise in conversation with error-born colour & form.
