FACT is the UK’s Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, based in Liverpool. The FACT blog is here to provide a whole load of features and goodies about art and creative technology, including up-to-the-minute articles, videos and links, as well as exclusive guest content.
FACT is presenting a special lecture and screening series beginning this Wednesday 1st July and running for 3 weeks to coincide with Bernie Lubell’s ‘A Theory of Entanglement’ exhibition.
The series explores the way in which technology has transformed concepts of the human body; looking at pre-cinematic visionaries such as Etienne-Jules Marey and the Lumiere Brothers, through to George Melies, Malcolm Le Grice, Pipilotti Rist, David Cronenburg to Stanley Kubrick.
Led by Ross Dalziel (who also curated FACT’s DING>>D0NG exhibition), kids and their familes took part in a family workshop creating a cardboard sofa! The workshop used Eliza Manders’ guide and was a reponse to Bernie Lubell’s ‘A Theory of Entanglement’ exhibition that opened at FACT last week. You can see the sofa on display in the foyer at FACT.
Courtesy of YouTube user manicsushichef, this video demonstrates the remarkable skill of a street-drummer in Boston using just pots and buckets. Great stuff!
As part of FACT’s education programme, Anna Kronenberg, Anthony Bennett, Catharine Davies, Caroline Armstrong and Nick Crawley have been working with local schools in the run up to the newly opened exhibition, creating our first flock of flying flappers and filming the instructional video for use in the Media Lounge…
Thursday 4 & Friday 5 June - Research and planning into flying flappers…
Using the flying flapper created by Bernie Lubell, we used two days as a trial run to see how to best create the flappers out of cardboard. Issues such as strengthening the wings and making the flappers weight distribution work, where all ironed out within these sessions, to make the construction as easy and effective as possible. Within these two days we also set about creating easy step-by-step instructions for everyone to follow, so everyone could build unaided. As a group we wrote down instructions, refining them down to the 12 simplest steps. This information was then translated into instructional diagrams, created in Illustrator, for use in the programme guides and to use as handouts on the day.
Monday 8 June – Filming the instructional video…
St Francis of Assisi came along to FACT and Introduced to the work of the artist Bernie Lubell. During this session Pupils where given an insight into Bernie’s work, and invited to start to create a Flying Flapper to be put into the exhibition workshop on the 18th. To accompany this workshop, pupils were filmed making the flappers for an instructional video to be shown within the ‘Theory of Entanglement show”. Pupils all had a great time making the flappers, taking them back to school to finish off decorating.
Wednesday 10 June – First edit of the video…
Using the editing suite in FACT, We began to break down the film and consider how to best piece all the information together.
Friday 12 June – Capturing the voice-over with St Francis of Assisi…
Pupils used the rest of the afternoon on this day to finish of Flapper from Monday. we further helped to sort out any technical problems as well as inspiration and ideas for pupils to finish their designs. Furthermore, within this afternoon, pupils Luke Ainscoough, and Catherine Coates, lent their talents to provide voice over’s for the step-by-step instructional video to accompany the show.
Tuesday 16 June - Bernie Lubell talks to St. Benedict’s College Catholic High School…
Pupils from St Benedict’s where invited in for the day, to be given a special interactive tour by Bernie Lubell. Pupils where encouraged to explore all the art works on display and ask any questions to Bernie about his work. After this session all students then created their own flying flappers to become part of the exhibition.
Thursday 18 June - Private View day…
A great success for everyone associated with the project. The overall show was a massive success, with Bernie Lubell encouraging everyone to explore his art works. The workshop space enjoyed a barrage of creativity form all ages making Flying Flappers. This was the perfect way for us to see everything we had helped plan come together to create a great exhibition.
This is a pretty great tool from Nikon. Aimed at helping us to understand the scales of the universe around us the Universcale makes use of some great design and technology to demonstrate the inconceivably large to the miniscule. Annotated with helpful notes the Unverscale is both an enlighting and uplifting use of the web..!
These two sites could provide hours of multicoloured fun! :-) Courtesy of zefrank.com, the first gives you shapes with which to generate kaleidoscopic images while the second lets you free-draw to generate the images. Fun toys to play around with and the pretty colours are just about all I can handle at this time on a Friday..!
I stumbled across this animation on YouTube (PersonaSama). Produced by Jonathan Kim, a student of the California Institute of the Arts, it tells the story of a chance meeting between one lucky girl and a monster!
The video’s blurb says, “Flying through the everlasting sky, euphoria awaits everyone who embarks on this journey with the happiest monster!”
FACT Curator Karen Newman looks forward to the Private View for Bernie Lubell’s ‘A Theory of Entanglement’ exhibition tonight and its public opening tomorrow…
It’s always exciting arriving at FACT on PV day first thing in the morning, but it’s especially exciting today as it’s been 6 weeks in the making to build Bernie’s amazing machines and the first show I’ve seen through since returning from maternity leave 9 months ago.
I have to say, I have never felt so calm on a preview morning, which is really down to the sterling work that the install team have done over these past weeks to make the show come alive. Chris Miller, Gabe Stones, Harry Lawson and Paddy Gould have worked through many nights while the building has been closed to install the new commission ‘A Theory of Entanglement’ in the atrium, and countless hours assembling the giant wooden sculptures that are now dazzling in directed light in Galleries 1 & 2 and taking over the atrium. They’ve come a long way - literally, in a 40 ft container from San Francisco - orchestrated by our very own Leon Seth who has played his usual vital role in making sure things come together exactly as they should.
Anna Kronenburg has taken on the Media Lounge with full force and boundless energy. Her attention to detail is everywhere, and kept her here until 9pm on Tuesday night as she insisted on trying to create a wood looking info folder because she couldn’t find one in the shops. Anna has worked with local school children from St. Francis of Assisi to make the first batch of Flying Flappers, model birds that people can have fun making over the summertime at FACT.
Anna has also been working with PGCE Art and Design trainee teachers Catherine Davies, Caroline Armstrong, Anthony Bennet and Nick Crowley who helped the children make an instructional video to guide people through the process, the teachers have also designed badges and stickers and helped put together the resource materials you will find in the media lounge.
Bernie is one of those artists that has an unstoppable mind. The ideas just keep coming and coming, and the research goes deeper the longer you work with him. He’s great fun to work with too. He just finished doing a second heart bypass on his work ‘Etiology of Innocence’ yesterday, and I think the hysteria finally got to him as he conducted the operation in a dust mask and a Dr Lubell alter ego. There will be a video of it somewhere which will most likely find its way to FACT TV at some point. Kevin Casey and Washington Buckley have documented Bernie’s almost every move over the last 6 weeks - until then, only Bernie held the magic key to how to put together these machines. Now thanks to Kev and Washington, we are editing step by step video guides for future galleries who want to show Bernie’s works, and how to fix them when things go wrong - which they will, undoubtedly with a show like this. Hopefully this documentation will make Bernie’s work an entirely more sustainable project.
This is such a fun show and I think people are going to love it. Just seeing the school children the other day fighting over who was going inside the coffin next (clutching their mobile phones as they wheeled themselves inside!) and screaming ‘oh my god!’ leaping off Cheek to Cheek as they experienced the strange sensations (I don’t think my mother in law has had such fun in years as she did when she sat on Cheek to Cheek).
With the launch of our new exhibition at FACT this Friday, you are invited to join us for breakfast with the artist, as Bernie Lubell discusses his work, ‘A Theory of Entanglement’ with Marta Braun from Ryerson University, a specialist in early cinema photography and visual anthropology.
Bernie has exhibited internationally including Ars Electonica in 2007 where he received the Award of Distinction for Interactive Art. This exhibition forms part of FACT’s year-long UNsustainable programme, debating the multiple issues currently facing the planet, as a response to Liverpool’s Year of the Environment.
Bernie takes particular inspiration from the work of French physiologist and chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey who was obsessed with understanding movement - and Marta Braun is superbly placed to provide an insight into Marey’s work. From horses and birds to human limbs and the heartbeat, Marey’s work was pioneering in cinematography, medical imaging, cardiology and aviation. After suffering cardio problems in 1995 Bernie adapted Marey’s pneumatic sensor technologies to explore the conflicted relationship we have with the machines we have become so dependent on.
Tickets are avaialbe from the box office at FACT. For more information, contact: 0151 707 4450.
This essay was originally written by Erkki Huhtamo for Bernie Lubell’s 2007 show at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, but it provides a great insight into Bernie’s work and his upcoming exhibition at FACT. Erkki is a media-archaeologist, writer and exhibition curator. He works as Professor of Media History and Theory at UCLA, Department of Design | Media Arts.
Those who encounter Bernie Lubell’s art for the first time, may take it as something playful, delightfully naive and light-hearted - as if the gallery had been turned into a playground for both grown-ups and children to have a moment of fun. Others may feel as if they had stepped into a magic circle with the power to transport them away from the dire realities of the everyday. These seemed common reactions among those who visited the Prix Ars Electronica exhibition 2007, where Lubell presented his Conservation of Intimacy, the winner of an Award of Distinction in the category of interactive art.
Lubell’s installation was an odd bird among the works on display. It was completely free from pressures to “prove itself” as media art, cyber art, bio art, or whatever the exhibition purported to be about. It wasn’t even electronic - its structures were wooden, and the users’ interactions were transmitted by springs, pneumatic tubes, moving balls and a pencil. For the visitors, with their minds saturated by zeros and ones, this felt like a breath of fresh air. It was also a revelation: Lubell demonstrated that meaningful interactive and participatory experiences can be created without the computer, the “not-yet-universal machine” of our time.
One of the intriguing aspects of Lubell’s works is their (deliberately) artisanal look. One immediately sees that they are products of a master carpenter, mechanist and bricoleur. One can only be amazed at their complexity and ingenuity that seems to testify of skills that belonged to another era, that of master craftsmen and apprentices, eclipsed by the creeping mechanization and automation and finally killed by the emergence of the ‘immaterial’ information economy. How Lubell was able to acquire such skills, and develop the persistence that has pushed him to build and test and build again his extraordinary creations for a quarter of a century, remains a mystery for most of us.
There would be no sense in trying to strip Lubell’s works of their ludic qualities (for they are irresistible), but their playfulness certainly represents only one layer of their potential meanings. Merely concentrating on the physical actions - cranking, rowing, cycling - one is invited to perform, would mean missing much of what they have to offer, including the invisible discursive ‘clouds’ surrounding them. In this essay I will point out some of the ways in which Lubell’s “interactive wood machines” (as the artist himself calls them) can be linked to clusters of artifacts, ideas and references, extending far beyond the self-centered realm of “art.”
In essence, many of Lubell’s works could be characterized as simulators. What is simulated can be one of many things: the ebbing and flowing of the ocean waves, a rain shower and thunderstorm, birdsong, the functions of the human body (breathing, heartbeat, blood circulation), and even death: in “ÉAnd the Synapse sweetly singing” the visitor, lying on his/her back, cranks oneself head first into a coffin to reflect on existential matter from the tomb-perspective. This voluntary ’staged suicide’ can be alarming, but also strangely soothing - burying oneself alive amidst the hussle and bussle of the gallery creates a peaceful feeling of isolation and disconnectedness; who hadn’t dreamt about leaving this world, if it isn’t for good?
As this example shows, Lubell’s artworks are not simulators in the usual sense. They don’t resemble a professional flight simulator, a driving game or even other interactive artworks like Jeffrey Shaw’s The Legible City (1989). Except perhaps in Synapse and the Aphasiogram, the user is not really “taking control,” or navigating through a make-believe world. S/he only gives the mechanism the motive power needed to keep it running; when the user stops, the simulation stops. In a sense the visitor is turned into a human steam engine or electric generator, a Primum Mobile. This clearly differs from the ‘leisure’ enjoyed by the customary gallery visitor who ‘does nothing,’ just observing things from the outside.
Why does the human have to act as the prime mover, when this role could be relegated to technology? There are many answers, the most obvious being participation and communication: the user is not just connected with curious feedback mechanisms, but brought in touch with other humans, or even with oneself, as in Cheek to Cheek, where the gyrating motions of the person’s butt, transmitted via pneumatic tubes, caress one’s own cheeks (an ‘intra-active’ experience?). Even from inside the coffin, an archaic voice line connects the living dead to the world ‘above the ground.’ In Making a Point of Inflection, a latex ‘curtain’ (an elastic air cushion stretched to a frame) is at first pumped up, and then becomes an interface for two people to touch each other; the latex ’skin’ in-between them both unites and separates. The participants’ roles also derive from Lubell’s passion for science and technology. His creations are deeply rooted in years-long media-archaeological explorations of scientific instruments and other pieces of machinery, including “talking machines,” and drawing instruments like the pantograph, that are now obsolete and forgotten. Like his good friend, another eminent media-archaeologist-artist Paul deMarinis, Lubell scavenges the junkpiles of history, salvaging ideas to be resurrected. What he discovers is not just abstract discursive knowledge, but concrete ideas that can be realized, combined and adapted, giving them astonishing new lives.
Lubell’s media-archaeological master is the French physiologist ƒtienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904), who is normally remembered, if remembered at all, for his chronophotographic experiments that anticipated the cinema. But as Lubell knows, these came at a late stage in his career, which was dedicated to the study of all kinds of physiological processes. To test and demonstrate his ideas, Marey created scores of instruments, from simulators, such as his hand-cranked model of the human heart, to wearable recording devices that produced graphic traces of bodies in motion, of humans running or pigeons flying in ‘harnesses’ connected by pneumatic tubes to an inscription device. Marey’s passion was to uncover the secrets of life; predictably, the knowledge he produced was used to produce both “perfect workers” and “killing machines.”
In Conservation of Intimacy, people are invited to sit on a suspended bench and rock their bodies. Although they are not physically harnessed, they resemble Marey’s test subjects, in that their motions are recorded as a graph by a pencil scribbling on a roll of paper (which is moved by another visitor pedaling a wooden ‘gym cycle’). One of Lubell’s major works to date, The Etiology of Innocence, is in its essence an original recreation of Marey’s artificial heart. Without making any efforts to achieve anthropomorphic verisimilitude, Lubell has built a room-sized machine, or rather a network of ’stations’ that include a pulsating latex heart in a glass jar and a device that produces the sound of the heartbeat. Like Marey’s artificial heart, everything is activated by a single hand-crank that makes the huge system of gears and cords (a mechanical circulatory system) run.
Marey was a positivist, and a mechanist in the tradition of La Mettrie (L’Homme Machine). God, soul or metaphysics had no place in his thinking. In the same way, we should probably see the humans operating Lubell’s machines just as humans, rather than as metaphors for some supreme metaphysical being keeping the universe in motion. Still, considering Lubell’s work merely as a modern-day reinterpretation of Marey would be a mistake. His creations, fragile-looking but sturdy, have a poetic and surreal side that is all their own. Conceptually, they are ’speaking machines.’ No matter how wacky, rube goldbergian or tinguelian they may look, they are all fragments of an idiosyncratic discourse, enounced by the machine parts. Its main theme, repeated over and over again in ever new variations, is the wonder of life, of being alive.
One of the tokens expressing this theme is the recurring presence of the bellows. They ‘breathe life’ to Lubell’s ingenious pneumatic systems; they even sound like somebody breathing. The air travelling in the tubes moves things, giving energy to the system, like blood. But the importance of life is also expressed by the telegraphic networks of wires and ‘lovers’ telephones’ Lubell constructs. They transmit voices that are sometimes barely audible, nearly drowned out by the ‘noise’ of the system itself (which of course is intentional). However weakly, as if from a great distance, the human presence emerges, somehow reminiscent of the telegrams On Kawara used to send to the people he knew, always with the same words: “I am still alive.”
Lubell’s creations don’t just ’speak’ through their machine parts; they also contain words - in their titles, but also inscribed on the works themselves. Here we enter the linguistic substratum of Lubell’s oeuvre. Lubell loves pseudo-scientific and quasi-medical titles that ’slip’ into other registers of discourse and experience. The Etiology of Innocence expresses this slippage beautifully, combining the medical search for causes with the bliss of innocence (ignorance?). Transactions in the Fields of Gravity sounds like the title of a scientific periodical, but one is, of course, challenged to compare it with the work itself and ponder on the meanings of the word gravity, which not only signifies the physical forces that determine the forms of life on earth, but also connotes “grave,” the bodies ‘drawn’ below the ground, the antidote of the world of the living.
The words printed on the wooden structures themselves may at first look like simple operating instructions (”PUMP”). However, when one discovers words like “FAITH” one begins to see their more metaphoric dimensions that may in fact have something to do with the cryptic puns Duchamp liked to associate with his ready-mades (in titles, but often inscribed on the objects themselves). Of course, instructions and warnings are routinely attached on machines, tools and products of all kinds. This situates the words used by Lubell and Duchamp in a wider context. Language normally interferes with the machinic, determined to control its uses. In Lubell’s and Duchamp’s case, it goes the other way, liberating potential meanings of the objects contructed by the artists.
One of Lubell’s most explicit “language games” is Aphasiogram, a table-mounted drawing instrument (inspired by the pantograph, a 17th century device used to copy drawings on a different scale). In Lubell’s version the user operates an arm to circle words from a ‘table’ and draw connections between them. The motions of the arm are transmitted to a drawing arm that produces a nonsensical graph. The machine makes the linguistic expressions disintegrate, or perhaps it automatically translates them into some universal language (a little like Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph was supposed to do for spoken words) that we are not able to decipher.
Aphasiogram clearly belongs to the tradition of the absurd language machines, imagined by authors like Jonathan Swift and Raymond Roussel. These, in turn, are part of the wider phenomenon of the bachelor machines, the non-productive and “de-rationalized” mechanisms, often with strong discursive overtones, built or imagined by artists and writers. Lubell’s machines seem to fit neatly under this label, although their ways of dealing with issues like sexuality and power may be more allusive and gentle that those of the predecessors (that include devices like the torturing machine imagined by Franz Kafka in his stort story “In the Penal Colony”).
When put into use, Lubell’s devices may seem strangely animated, as if permeated by some Žlan vital. They may creek and hum and sigh, but (most of the time) collaborate with their users humbly, performing tasks that lead our thoughts away from the prosaic struggles with machines in our daily lives. They may not be functional in the sense of the vacuum cleaner or the electric toothbrush (not to say anything about the computer), but they certainly have their own functionality that makes perfectly sense in the ‘zone’ they delineate. Whether we call it a ‘playground,’ a ‘magic circle,’ or just the ‘realm of art,’ it is open for anyone ready to leave one’s preconceptions and prejudices behind.
To accompany the opening of the magnificent Sleep Furiously, Picturehouse at FACT is delighted to welcome director Gideon Koppel to the cinema for a Q&A following the 6.30 screening. Tickets are available through the Picturehouse website.
The film is set in a small farming community in mid Wales about 50 miles north of Dylan Thomas’s fictional village of Llareggub, a place where the director’s parents – both refugees – found a home. It is a landscape and population that are changing rapidly as small-scale agriculture is disappearing and the generation who inhabited a pre-mechanised world is dying out.
Resisting any traditional documentary structure, Koppel’s camera very quietly observes this change as the population grows older, the local primary school faces closure, and the mobile library resists a move into the 21st century. Allied to a soundtrack by the Aphex Twin, Sleep Furiously is lyrical filmmaking at its very best.
Artefact is an opportunity for local artists and designers working in response to technology to exhibit their work at FACT.
Selected artists will present their work in a solo showcase in the Bar area of FACT for a 3 month period. Work will be seen by a huge number of visitors and run alongside shows by internationally renown artists in Gallery 1 & 2 and the Media Lounge. Work can be in any 2D medium (painting, drawing, print etc) and must have employed the use of technology at some stage of its production. The work also needs to have been made in the last 3 years in the Merseyside area
Deadline for submissions is 13 July 2009. To find out more, please contact: leon.seth@fact.co.uk
In the run up to the b.TWEEN Interactive Digital Media Forum at FACT on Thursday and Friday we’ve been posting a series of great videos from previous b.TWEEN events…
The speed of change in the Chinese digital media scape is not just revolutionary: it is explosive. With a quarter of a billion Internet users and half a billion mobile phone subscribers, the numbers alone make China extraordinarily tempting to western entrepreneurs and investors.
In the West, a distinct but poorly understood Chinese Internet culture is emerging. A familiarity with this culture is crucial to anyone trying to make their fortune or to understand the often contradictory messages coming out of China as it takes its place among the world’s digital powers.
Even as China emerges as a hothouse of disruptive innovation, Beijing’s often heavy-handed control of the Internet confounds western observers and presents western Internet companies with difficult ethical choices.
Kaiser Kuo, who has seen China’s Internet censorship regime up close from many different angles, will add shades of grey to an issue often painted in black and white. He will challenge western assumptions and explain why Chinese Netizens are less worried about censorship than Westerners think they are.
