“What I like about Abandon Normal Devices is the lack of a theme,” says festival manager, Gabrielle Jenks. The clue, she points out, is in the name. Since it began in 2009, AND has provided a platform for consistently interesting and innovative work, challenging artists and audiences alike.
Billing itself as a ‘festival of new cinema, digital culture and art’, many of the participating artists utilise new technologies in inquisitive and unexpected ways. Digital culture, then, is its forte, but within that apparent simplicity is also what makes it so compelling – that blurring of the boundaries between art and tech.
Alternating between Manchester and Liverpool, this year’s festival was hosted by FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool; a centrepiece of the three-day event was the venue’s new show, an installation by the American artist and ‘Marxist filmmaker’, Mark Boulos, presented alongside three existing video works. The new commission, Echo, (which continues until 21 November) is beguiling and somewhat uncanny: on entering a spotlight in the darkened gallery you appear in 3D in a sound-and-movement-responsive cityscape.
Developed in collaboration with Professor Olaf Blanke, director of the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Brain-Mind Institute in Lausanne, Echo utilises both neuroscientific and psychoanalytic theories, producing in the viewer/actor a strange sense of witnessing their doppelganger. It looks like you, but somehow it isn’t.
The work is in contrast to Boulos’ older video pieces: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, The Origin of the World and No Permanent Address (the latter a study of two guerrilla squads of the New People’s Army, a revolutionary force in the Philippines), which all belie his training in traditional documentary filmmaking.
For Boulos, however, it’s what the works have in common rather than their differences that is interesting – they each explore ideas around ‘self’ and ‘other’, he just happens to be using different technologies to investigate the ideas. “The older works are about the blurring of the boundary between self and other – they present a very radical ‘other’,” he says. “For Echo, I used multiple screens, charging the space. It’s about your own body space and how you relate to the image and how you feel split.”
Adding another layer
Caspar Stracke and Gabriela Monroy’s film, Cinemacity, which debuted at the festival, was reliant on audience participation via Twitter. Their work most comfortably occupies the area known as new cinema, and they are philosophical about incorporating new technologies. For Monroy, it’s about “anything you can use that can change your experience of film.” But, she continues: “It’s not about the technology, it’s the work; it has to mean something, add another layer. The film is different each time you have a different audience, and that’s really amazing.”
Dancer and performance artist Michelle Ellsworth’s ‘performable websites’ piece, Three Optimal Solutions, had technology very much to the fore, as she presented her take on the ubiquity of online culture, from Google to pornography – including a pastiche website that cast hamburgers as porn actors. But it’s Ellsworth herself, rather than the tech, that is the anchor to the work (not least her personality and charisma – she is both funny and awkward). What she brings to the performance is a centre the audience can relate to.
“What’s funny is that I’m a dancer,” she says. “Dance is my native language as an artist, but I’m a soloist and even in my earliest work I used slide projectors, videos.” Ellsworth has incorporated new technologies into her work for many years, augmenting what was already there – the dancer, the artist.
Avenues for the imagination
New cinema pioneers, Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF), describe themselves as “working at the intersection of art and technology”. Co-founder Memo Akten expresses his interest in new technologies simply and succintly: “We’re just guys trying to create things which we wish existed. That goes back to every child playing with Lego.”
For AND, MLF produced the results of a two-day closed residency at FACT in the form of New Cinema Lab, which they called ‘an investigation into the technological possibilities of cinema space.’ In practice, this amounted to a modest evolution in our understanding of virtual reality, employing Xbox Kinect technology to capture protagonists on screen who would wear a head set made up of headphones and an iPhone.
For Akten, this is about new and different technologies providing avenues for MLF to explore their imagination and inspirations. “In ‘ye olde days’,” he says, “someone might look out the window, see a beautiful sunset and paint it – they’re inspired by what they see.”
While the idea of a theme is anathema to this normality-abandoning festival, Akten’s comment in many ways sums up a shared approach to new technologies among AND’s artists, or at least those that we spoke to. They each consider themselves simply to be producing their work – the tools they are using just happen to be the one’s that enable them to best express the ideas and stories they want to share.
Abandon Normal Devices 2013 took place in Liverpool, 3-5 October. www.andfestival.org.uk
This article was co-commissioned with SyncTank
