- Venue
- Various across Lincoln
- Location
- North East England
As a media artist, I had one of the first exhibitions of my career at the Usher Gallery in Lincoln back in 1986 or 1987. I’d not been back, until this weekend for the opening of Frequency 13 – Lincoln’s second biennial festival of ‘digital culture’. In some ways, not much has changed. Lincoln’s a really historic place, one of the oldest continuous settlements in Great Britain, with a 900-year-old gothic cathedral towering over cobbled Roman streets and Tudor buildings. From certain angles it looks more like a set from a Charles Dickens film than a real city. You can walk just about anywhere within 20 minutes. This scalability and topography really leans itself towards a very social experience of artworks and a communal experience of enjoying that space in time which we call a festival. It’s a great platform.
In terms of the particular types of art on display, with let’s call it for now a ‘digital’ focus, it really works. One of the best illustrations of this is ‘Where Are We Now?’ an exhibition exploring the location-based technologies at The Collection, the town’s new museum built in 2007 as a twin to the Usher Gallery over the road. The show is fairly understated, but it’s really clever in terms of exhibition making. All of the works have been effectively selected, installed and displayed via digital correspondence. Briefly talking to the curator, Ashley Gallant, he ended up making a call on deliberately not inviting the artists – Justin Blinder, Paulo Cirio, Brian House and Jon Rafman – to physically attend the show. Instead, he’s emailing pictures to Paolo Cirio of the site, and Paolo’s choosing his ‘Street Ghosts’ remotely from a set of images. All of the imagery within the exhibition, whether maps from the collection going back 600 years to the origins of the Ordinance Survey or stills from Google Street View, basically represent data sets and are machinic in some form or other, rather than being about literal experience. So, conceptually the exhibition really hangs together. It’s the first time I’ve seen The Collection and its drawn me into what is an extremely beautiful contemporary art space sitting next to an archaeological space, and I think that’s very strong.
Forgetting any nonsense discussion about ‘digital art’; in terms of artists who use digital systems and digital technologies, Rafman and Cirio are really key critical thinkers. In fact they’re part of a small group of artists – you could also include Oliver Laric and Michelle Teran – who are in a sense post-digital, but also somehow semantic in terms of where we are up to as a society. They’re coming to terms with a semantic knowledge base, grappling with our new sense and experience of the digital.
By calling this a ‘festival of digital culture’, Threshold Studios have picked on something which is highly contemporaneous, but I think it’s more about who’s using the definition and creating the context. All this work comes out of a history of Dadaism working with new media and flowing into new media and new media sculpture. So now what’s happened with the proliferation of digital mechanisms and digital devices, which are an aspect of technology, is that they’ve flooded everybody’s awareness. In terms of aestheticisation, there is some notion of a ‘digital’ aesthetic but it is largely is perceived by people as digitally produced traditional art (ie. 2 dimensional). For the best people in this context it’s neither subject nor conduit, it’s ontology and that’s really what makes great art, whatever the medium and whatever the period, whether it’s a 19th paint or a contemporary media work. The thinking is situated in coming to terms with being digital and learning what that means as humans. The art in this festival seems to involve the digital, but that is very distinct from the fetish that’s going on with technology arts.
A lot of the work’s quite ambient, rather than being representative or representational. On Saturday night in the cathedral Touch music presented a concert with Chris Watson, Hildur Guðnadóttir and Anna von Hausswolff, who played a work on the organ as listeners promenaded. What we heard in Chris Watson’s piece and the organ work were effectively drones. Even though Chris’s piece was composed out of the noises of marine mammals, birds and field recordings we were effectively listening to a drone. A little further down the hill at Chad Varah House I can also hear Tony Conrad’s music, a drone soundtrack to Tyler Hubby’s ‘Folding City’.
I think Frequency is actually a great title for this festival because that’s actually what I’m observing, and enjoying, lots of different frequencies. There’s quite a lot of work referring to archive, decay and archaeology, for example Dave Griffiths’ ‘Babel Fische’ or Tyler Hubby and Paul Williams work with Tony Conrad as a collective. If you think about history as a wavelength, that also has duration and of course it then has a frequency. So whether Tyler and Williams are resampling Tony Conrad’s work or working in collaboration, it’s not clear who is curator or producer. This goes back to this notion of the drone and of ambience, the ambience of being in this place.
So there’s something interesting going on thinking about place topography, especially in this place; more interesting than if it was in some other ubiquitous doing-quite-well city. As I walked from site to site my mind started to think about the layering of history, the layering of how I see things and of where the images come from. While I’ve been doing this I’ve also been tweeting about it, so I’m completely accepting of working in a digital space while I’m living in physical space, and I find that quite compelling.
Do we really need more festivals? Well, yes, people seemed to be enjoying themselves at Frequency, both participants in and visitors to the festival, but people from Lincoln were also clearly engaged. Isn’t this the in-depth cross fertilisation of ideas and culture that we all aim for?
For the future Frequency has potential to be a very good contemporary art festival which started with focus around technology and new media. It’s very well positioned geographically. A.V. happens on its year off just a little further up the East coast, and A.N.D. from Liverpool is devising a sustainable business model and likely to become a roving festival working in smaller towns around the Midlands and North. Lincoln is clearly a city on the rise, with the new University development and the apparent migration of the local art college from Hull, a place where I was very much part of growing Hull Time Based Arts and the annual ROOT Festival between 1990-2000. Looking back at the small beginnings of those efforts, you can recognise the impact they made in establishing Hull as a centre for experimental practice. This is not mainstream cultural regeneration, but a form of animation and deep artistic community building. It’s necessary to improve student retention, to making the city culturally attractive, and to keeping emerging artists going as they see their own practice alongside international artists’ work. Lincoln is a great place for this to happen.
The festival website is here: http://frequency.org.uk/
