Highlights from AV Festival 12: As Slow As Possible
Now I’ve been a little slow to post this since attending the fantastically well organized 24 hour launch of AV Festival back on the 1st of March… here’s a few of the marvellous things on offer at AV Festival 12 in Newcastle – there’s only a week left to experience them all, so hurry up!
1. Julien Maire at Hatton Gallery
The first solo exhibition in the UK by new media artist Julien Maire. Maire creates beautiful machines often using obsolete technology. The exhibition includes cabinets of curiosities that go some way to explaining the processes behind the work.
I particularly appreciated Diapositives, an in camera zoetrope made with tiny glass objects to create the illusion of falling water droplets. A brilliant mind generating imagery in fresh new ways. The exhibition continues till 19 May, so you can take a more leisurely time in getting round to seeing it.
2. Jonathan Schipper’s Slow Motion Car Crash
Nothing arouses my curiosity more than happening upon a car in a room. Moving at a speed of a mere 7mm per hour the car in question is imperceptibly being forced to collide with the gallery wall. Having only seen the car in one undamaged piece, it’s great to find that you can watch time-lapse footage of the crash here and see the daily progress of the car being compacted here.
3. James Benning: Milwaukee/Duisberg
The UK premiere of a new work by legendary avant-garde filmmaker, James Benning. A two-screen installation that brings together two industrial zones; one screen features real time footage shot in 2009 of a steelworks in Duisberg, the other features 14 seconds of footage shot in 1971 of a man leaving a Milwaukee factory that Benning has now slowed down 133 times stretching the 14 seconds to 31 minutes. The slowed down footage is particularly beautiful and moves in a strangely fluid way.
Discover it as Platform A Gallery, Middlesborough Railway Station.
4. Agnes Meyer-Brandis: The Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Bird Facility
Moon Goose Colony – episode 4: HATCHING from Agnes Meyer-Brandis on Vimeo.
This fantastic installation is worth searching out at the Hancock Museum. The project is inspired by the book The Man in the Moone by English bishop Francis Godwin (1638). The artist plays with the idea of flying to the moon in a chariot led by moon geese, and has nurtured 11 geese from birth, given them astronauts’ names and trained them to fly.
Meyer-Brandis has fashioned a space laboratory control room from which you can view live streaming footage of the geese at their moon colony in Italy, and the exhibition also includes a film documenting the process of hatching and training the moon geese astronauts. As well as being rigorously scientific, it’s really rather sweet.
5. Radio Boredcast
Curated by the uber talented Vicki Bennet (People Like Us), this collaborative online radio station features a staggering 744 hours of continuous broadcasts from 100 participants. With shows from the likes of Chris Watson, Matmos, Kenneth Goldsmith, Irene Moon and Kenny G it’s certainly can’t be considered boring. Listen to it here.
And as I’m running out of time to write this, just to quickly add: psychedelic delights with The Persuaders by Benedict Drew at Circa Site: Mirror Neurons, a thought provoking group show, curated by Sarah Cook at The National Glass Center at The University of Sunderland; the illusionary marvels of Torsten Lauschmann at Laing Art Gallery; and the doomy soundscapes of Jem Finer’s Slowplayer at The NewBridge Space.
Do also check out an extract of AV Festival’s Exhaustion commission on our website. Created by Richard Fenwick with sound by Chris Watson, the work explores the duress the body experiences in action, filmed at super slow speed of 1,000 frames per second.