FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) is a Liverpool-based cinema and art gallery, and is the UK's leading organisation for the commission, exhibition and support of new media art-forms.
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Winter Sparks
Dates:
Thu Dec 13, 2012 18:00 - Sun Feb 24, 2013
Location:
Liverpool,
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Winter Sparks
December 13 2012 – February 24 2013
FACT, Liverpool
Free entry
FACT’s final exhibition for 2012 and taking the gallery into the new year is Winter Sparks, an interactive programme of works that promises to be electric!
Visitors to FACT will be able to trigger a personal light and sound show with electric sparks, interact with the dramatic charges from Tesla coils, and explore the mysteries of the Wilberforce pendulum, with work from four exciting international new media artists being seen in the UK for the first time.
The idea behind Winter Sparks is to turn away from the traditional understanding of the art gallery as a contemplative and over-cerebral space, instead seeking to engage visitors on a journey through impressive large-scale reactive installations. The selection of works will take over FACT’s building to ensure an immersive experience where the visitor becomes part of the different environments, experimenting with light, sound, space and motion.
Curated by FACT’s director Mike Stubbs, Winter Sparks explores the relationship between art and science through the works of Canadian artist and composer Alexandre Burton, Dutch artist and academic Edwin van der Heide, and Spain-based Bosch & Simons, known for their complex ‘music machines’.
Edwin van der Heide’s Evolving Spark Network (Gallery 1) consists of a grid of electric spark bridges across the exhibition space. The movements of visitors are detected by motion sensors to trigger electric sparks producing both sound and light, generating patterns with distinct visual and sonic qualities. This network serves as a metaphor for the human nervous system. For the artist, electric sparks represent beauty, purity and simplicity.
Alexandre Burton’s interactive installation Impacts (Gallery 2) is a ‘live’ sculptural installation consisting of Tesla coils fitted with a glass pane and suspended from the ceiling, where the presence of the visitor activates an impressive audio and visual experience. The visitor’s proximity to the works engages arcs of electricity of variable intensities as well as a rhythmic articulation, generated by the impact of the electrical arc on the glass.
Impacts has only been shown previously at the PHI Centre in Montreal, and FACT is honoured to re-stage it for new local, national and international audiences.
Bosch & Simons’s Wilberforces (atrium) refers directly to a scientific phenomenon known as the Wilberforce Pendulum. This pendulum is nothing more than a hung spring with a central weight and two eccentric weights for calibration below it, but it works in such a way that once set in motion, its movement can change from vertical motion into rotation without adding energy from an external source.
In this previously unshown work, produced by FACT, Bosch & Simons use pendulum springs for generating and processing video and audio data. Hanging a video camera, a microphone, and loudspeakers from the springs, images captured by the camera are projected in real-time, and at the same time motion data is used as a source for live electronic sound production.
The main interest of the artists is to create a complex system in which various frequencies influence each other. Alongside unstable balances and order and chaos, another theme of the work is the mystery of signal processing. Wilberforces raises questions about what is ‘real’ and what is manipulated by ‘tricks’ - an issue they say cannot be questioned enough in the era of mass manipulation we live in.
A full programme of events around the Winter Sparks exhibition, including artist performance on the opening day, will be announced on www.fact.co.uk in the coming months.
Winter Sparks is supported by the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec; the Québec Government Office, London; and Mondriaan Fund.
December 13 2012 – February 24 2013
FACT, Liverpool
Free entry
FACT’s final exhibition for 2012 and taking the gallery into the new year is Winter Sparks, an interactive programme of works that promises to be electric!
Visitors to FACT will be able to trigger a personal light and sound show with electric sparks, interact with the dramatic charges from Tesla coils, and explore the mysteries of the Wilberforce pendulum, with work from four exciting international new media artists being seen in the UK for the first time.
The idea behind Winter Sparks is to turn away from the traditional understanding of the art gallery as a contemplative and over-cerebral space, instead seeking to engage visitors on a journey through impressive large-scale reactive installations. The selection of works will take over FACT’s building to ensure an immersive experience where the visitor becomes part of the different environments, experimenting with light, sound, space and motion.
Curated by FACT’s director Mike Stubbs, Winter Sparks explores the relationship between art and science through the works of Canadian artist and composer Alexandre Burton, Dutch artist and academic Edwin van der Heide, and Spain-based Bosch & Simons, known for their complex ‘music machines’.
Edwin van der Heide’s Evolving Spark Network (Gallery 1) consists of a grid of electric spark bridges across the exhibition space. The movements of visitors are detected by motion sensors to trigger electric sparks producing both sound and light, generating patterns with distinct visual and sonic qualities. This network serves as a metaphor for the human nervous system. For the artist, electric sparks represent beauty, purity and simplicity.
Alexandre Burton’s interactive installation Impacts (Gallery 2) is a ‘live’ sculptural installation consisting of Tesla coils fitted with a glass pane and suspended from the ceiling, where the presence of the visitor activates an impressive audio and visual experience. The visitor’s proximity to the works engages arcs of electricity of variable intensities as well as a rhythmic articulation, generated by the impact of the electrical arc on the glass.
Impacts has only been shown previously at the PHI Centre in Montreal, and FACT is honoured to re-stage it for new local, national and international audiences.
Bosch & Simons’s Wilberforces (atrium) refers directly to a scientific phenomenon known as the Wilberforce Pendulum. This pendulum is nothing more than a hung spring with a central weight and two eccentric weights for calibration below it, but it works in such a way that once set in motion, its movement can change from vertical motion into rotation without adding energy from an external source.
In this previously unshown work, produced by FACT, Bosch & Simons use pendulum springs for generating and processing video and audio data. Hanging a video camera, a microphone, and loudspeakers from the springs, images captured by the camera are projected in real-time, and at the same time motion data is used as a source for live electronic sound production.
The main interest of the artists is to create a complex system in which various frequencies influence each other. Alongside unstable balances and order and chaos, another theme of the work is the mystery of signal processing. Wilberforces raises questions about what is ‘real’ and what is manipulated by ‘tricks’ - an issue they say cannot be questioned enough in the era of mass manipulation we live in.
A full programme of events around the Winter Sparks exhibition, including artist performance on the opening day, will be announced on www.fact.co.uk in the coming months.
Winter Sparks is supported by the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec; the Québec Government Office, London; and Mondriaan Fund.
Random Acts: Artist Interventions into Broadcasting
Dates:
Fri Oct 26, 2012 11:00 - Fri Oct 26, 2012
Location:
Liverpool,
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
This forum celebrates the Random Acts series of commissions - including new commissions from FACT for the strand - and opens up a dialogue about the future of television as a shared space that has the potential to bridge new relationships between socially engaged audiences, curators, creative producers, and broadcasters.
Random Acts is a short form daily arts strand on Channel 4, late nights. It is television as art, rather than television about art. Created by established and emerging talent, without presenters, ignoring the clichés of the usual arts TV.
Using Random Acts as its starting point, this day long event will ask what is the future for TV as a shared space? How should artists use the medium? What should TV aim to be in the age of the Internet? How can television bridge new relationships between socially engaged audiences, curators, creative producers and broadcasters?
The forum will celebrate the Random Acts commissions (including 25 new films curated and co-commissioned by FACT) and discuss new models of broadcast and their dissemination in our increasingly networked culture.
Channel 4's Commissioning Editor for Arts, Tabitha Jackson, who is responsible for all arts programming on C4 and More4 as well as any cross platform and transmedia arts projects joins us to consider the future. She will discuss the potential impacts and opportunities for artist interventions in broadcasting with Director of FACT Mike Stubbs, and Lucky PDF, an artist collective from South East London.
International speakers include American performance, video, drawing and installation artist Marisa Olson, who in 2004 created 'Marisa's American Idol Audition Blog' where she documented and crowd sourced suggestions for her upcoming American Idol audition. Readers were asked to help choose her 'look', her song choice, whilst she practised walking in high heels, went tanning, campaigned in front of Fox HQ and took interview training classes with MTV presenter Tabitha Soren.
Chip Lord will be discussing histories of artist intervention with artist John Hill, of the ground breaking collective Lucky PDF. Chip Lord was a co-founder of Ant Farm, one of the most important and radical media collectives to come out of the United States.
Artist performances will take place including Jeremy Bailey's The Future of Television, a 'tele-presence augmented reality performance', and Roney Fraser Munro, who will be intervening throughout the day with a series of alternative personae that seek to create a DIY and punk aesthetic for the future of television.
Produced by FACT, and online with ArtPlayer TV, in partnership with Channel 4, Arts Council England and the Liverpool Biennial
Tickets cost £10/£8 (members/concessions) and are available online, from the Box Office or by phone on 0871 902 5737.
Random Acts is a short form daily arts strand on Channel 4, late nights. It is television as art, rather than television about art. Created by established and emerging talent, without presenters, ignoring the clichés of the usual arts TV.
Using Random Acts as its starting point, this day long event will ask what is the future for TV as a shared space? How should artists use the medium? What should TV aim to be in the age of the Internet? How can television bridge new relationships between socially engaged audiences, curators, creative producers and broadcasters?
The forum will celebrate the Random Acts commissions (including 25 new films curated and co-commissioned by FACT) and discuss new models of broadcast and their dissemination in our increasingly networked culture.
Channel 4's Commissioning Editor for Arts, Tabitha Jackson, who is responsible for all arts programming on C4 and More4 as well as any cross platform and transmedia arts projects joins us to consider the future. She will discuss the potential impacts and opportunities for artist interventions in broadcasting with Director of FACT Mike Stubbs, and Lucky PDF, an artist collective from South East London.
International speakers include American performance, video, drawing and installation artist Marisa Olson, who in 2004 created 'Marisa's American Idol Audition Blog' where she documented and crowd sourced suggestions for her upcoming American Idol audition. Readers were asked to help choose her 'look', her song choice, whilst she practised walking in high heels, went tanning, campaigned in front of Fox HQ and took interview training classes with MTV presenter Tabitha Soren.
Chip Lord will be discussing histories of artist intervention with artist John Hill, of the ground breaking collective Lucky PDF. Chip Lord was a co-founder of Ant Farm, one of the most important and radical media collectives to come out of the United States.
Artist performances will take place including Jeremy Bailey's The Future of Television, a 'tele-presence augmented reality performance', and Roney Fraser Munro, who will be intervening throughout the day with a series of alternative personae that seek to create a DIY and punk aesthetic for the future of television.
Produced by FACT, and online with ArtPlayer TV, in partnership with Channel 4, Arts Council England and the Liverpool Biennial
Tickets cost £10/£8 (members/concessions) and are available online, from the Box Office or by phone on 0871 902 5737.
Liverpool Biennial 2012: The Unexpected Guest at FACT
Dates:
Sat Sep 15, 2012 12:00 - Sun Nov 25, 2012
Location:
Liverpool,
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Liverpool Biennial 2012: The Unexpected Guest at FACT
Saturday 15 September - Sunday 25 November
The Unexpected Guest is part of Liverpool Biennial. It is an exhibition that brings over 60 artists together across 19 sites in the City including galleries, museums and the public realm.
The exhibition begins with the idea of hospitality. Hospitality is the welcome we extend to others, as well as a metaphor encompassing issues of the body, territory, politics and commerce. In an age of unprecedented movement between both people and knowledge, different cultures of hospitality confront one another as never before.
Whilst each artist has chosen to respond differently to this idea, at the heart of the exhibition at FACT is each artist's desire to critique social and political hierarchies and to re-imagine hidden or untold histories. Spanning collaborative and cross-disciplinary practices, the works study and address contemporary cultures of exchange, violence, and the romance we might feel for a world that seems to have adopted an increasingly inhospitable façade.
Saturday 15 September - Sunday 25 November
The Unexpected Guest is part of Liverpool Biennial. It is an exhibition that brings over 60 artists together across 19 sites in the City including galleries, museums and the public realm.
The exhibition begins with the idea of hospitality. Hospitality is the welcome we extend to others, as well as a metaphor encompassing issues of the body, territory, politics and commerce. In an age of unprecedented movement between both people and knowledge, different cultures of hospitality confront one another as never before.
Whilst each artist has chosen to respond differently to this idea, at the heart of the exhibition at FACT is each artist's desire to critique social and political hierarchies and to re-imagine hidden or untold histories. Spanning collaborative and cross-disciplinary practices, the works study and address contemporary cultures of exchange, violence, and the romance we might feel for a world that seems to have adopted an increasingly inhospitable façade.
The Humble Market: Trade Secrets
Dates:
Fri Jun 22, 2012 12:00 - Sun Aug 26, 2012
Location:
Liverpool,
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
The Humble Market: Trade Secrets
Friday 22nd June – Sunday 26th August 2012
Part performance, part experience, Trade Secrets presents us with an universe threatened with complete control. Using the lens of the marketplace to ask, "What do we really trade? What should be traded? And what cannot be bought?"
Trade Secrets is inspired by the spectacular rise of Brazil as an economic power and the trading cities of the Northwest in the UK and Southeast in Brazil. Through a choreographed journey of interactive vehicles expect intimate provocations that confront us with the follies of mass consumerism. The Humble Market: Trade Secrets is presented as part of the Abandon Normal Devices festival, which is taking place across the region in 2012.
For information about visiting Trade Secrets visit http://www.fact.co.uk/projects/the-humble-market-trade-secrets/.
The Humble Market is a co-production between Abandon Normal Devices, FACT and Derry - Londonderry - City of Culture 2013 and WE PLAY, commissioned by AND, FACT, WE PLAY Expo and Derry - Londonderry - City of Culture 2013 and London 2012 Festival funded by Legacy Trust UK and Arts Council England.
Friday 22nd June – Sunday 26th August 2012
Part performance, part experience, Trade Secrets presents us with an universe threatened with complete control. Using the lens of the marketplace to ask, "What do we really trade? What should be traded? And what cannot be bought?"
Trade Secrets is inspired by the spectacular rise of Brazil as an economic power and the trading cities of the Northwest in the UK and Southeast in Brazil. Through a choreographed journey of interactive vehicles expect intimate provocations that confront us with the follies of mass consumerism. The Humble Market: Trade Secrets is presented as part of the Abandon Normal Devices festival, which is taking place across the region in 2012.
For information about visiting Trade Secrets visit http://www.fact.co.uk/projects/the-humble-market-trade-secrets/.
The Humble Market is a co-production between Abandon Normal Devices, FACT and Derry - Londonderry - City of Culture 2013 and WE PLAY, commissioned by AND, FACT, WE PLAY Expo and Derry - Londonderry - City of Culture 2013 and London 2012 Festival funded by Legacy Trust UK and Arts Council England.
Robots and Avatars
Dates:
Fri Mar 16, 2012 12:00 - Sun May 27, 2012
Location:
Liverpool,
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Robots and Avatars
16 March – 27 May
Join us in a near future where robots, avatars and telepresence form part of an exciting new reality.
From pervasive networked gaming to robots that teach, touch, care or scare, Robots and Avatars are already co-habit the world in which we work and play.
Co-curated with interdisciplinary design collective body>data>space (London), this exhibition at FACT showcases some of the most exciting new ideas from international artists and technologists in the field. Expect playful post-industrial creatures, sensory virtual worlds, and responsive inflatable objects in this major new exhibition.
FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology)
88 Wood Street
Liverpool
L1 4DQ
www.fact.co.uk
16 March – 27 May
Join us in a near future where robots, avatars and telepresence form part of an exciting new reality.
From pervasive networked gaming to robots that teach, touch, care or scare, Robots and Avatars are already co-habit the world in which we work and play.
Co-curated with interdisciplinary design collective body>data>space (London), this exhibition at FACT showcases some of the most exciting new ideas from international artists and technologists in the field. Expect playful post-industrial creatures, sensory virtual worlds, and responsive inflatable objects in this major new exhibition.
FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology)
88 Wood Street
Liverpool
L1 4DQ
www.fact.co.uk
