ABANDON NORMAL
DEVICES (A.N.D.) FESTIVAL - LIVERPOOL.UK
FESTIVAL OF NEW CINEMA AND DIGITAL
CULTURE
1 OCTOBER 2009
Written by
ANNABEL FENN
Untitled (2009) Duane Hopkins
A monstrous hand came down into a
busy shopping area in north-west England last week
and was seen tickling and probing members of the
general public. One man raised both his middle
fingers in the air and kept walking, despite the
unwarranted prod under his arms by the mischievous
BFG. Artists welcome the bald responses of
‘interactive’ new media art by people who don’t
really give a toss. Chris O’Shea, the artist
responsible for the work Hand From Above, was
part of the UK’s newest art festival Abandon Normal
Devices. The AND festival featured 70 events
showcasing dazzling new film and media art in the
space of only 5 days. Cue massive intakes of
caffeine, jelly sweets and more teeth-grindingly
high-tech artwork than you could possibly hope to
see even if you became the master of time. The
annual festival is shared between Merseyside and
Cumbria and aims to challenge our everyday
perceptions, and question the way that we lead our
lives. Should we question physical and social
normality? How can we really incorporate these
ideas into our everyday lives? Will the giant hand
coming down to Kong mum on her way to Ice Land make
her stop in her tracks, or will she just think it’s
just another show on the BBC screen in Clayton
Square? And do people really, actually care…?
Lots of cash has been fed into the
arts and culture sector in Liverpool and it appears
to be paying off. Big names such as Carolee
Schneemann, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and the Yes
Men featured in the festival, which labeled them as
troublemakers, thought provokers and heroic
spiriters of truth. Schneemann is a very gracious
and charming lady who still knows how to rip up the
dance floor even though she’s been collecting a
pension for a decade. She showed a series of
overlapping video installation called Precarious
that further investigated themes of the body and
incarceration (a piece so good it, naturally, has
been housed in the Tate warehouse). Images of
manically bopping parrots and sychronised Asian
dancers lulled across the gallery walls to the
sounds of Crazy by Gnarls Barkley, demonstrating
Schneemann is still just Carolee from the block.
The darling of independent,
collaborative Thai filmmaking, Apichatpong
Weerasethakul (or ‘Joe’ to people who simply can’t
be arsed to learn his name) showed a fantastic
number of video installations entitled Primitive
at FACT. Weerasethakul is another deviant
championed by the festival for his clever and
sensitive films that challenge the Thai government
and sovereign power. Many moons ago [^] saw
Charlie’s Angels 2 in a cinema in Thailand and was
amused to discover that the national anthem was
played before the film started. People got to their
feet as the king masqueraded as the kid from Rainbow
Island while his image hopped about the screen over
waterfalls and fluffy bunnies. Embarrassingly little
did [^] know about the dark and violent past of the
nation that propaganda like this was covering up and
that Weerasethakul is intent on exposing.
Primitive
(2009) Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Weerasethakul explored the aftermath
of an assault of a nation by focusing on a small
village called Nabua in North East Thailand. From
the 1960s to 1980s the Thai jungle was witness to
fighting between the totalitarian government and
communist farmers. The women of the Nabua were
raped and the men either fled or were killed.
Through unconventional narrative, Weerasethakul told
the story of the village. In the first floor of the
exhibition, visitors sat in the middle of the room
under the cold iron legs of a watchtower and the eye
of a searching red light. A video loop of a walking
man falling under the gunfire of men referenced
Weerasethakul’s belief in reincarnation and concern
with survival and extinction. Lighting cracks; the
depiction of the special effects team behind the
pyrotechnics, broke the cinematic illusion and
questioned the authenticity of the nature of film.
On another screen the male villagers worked together
to make a spacecraft, which they then use to sleep
in, to talk, to dream and hallucinate; the
possibility of construction from destruction. In the
second room, the sensitive and haptic film,
A
Letter to Uncle Boonmee,
told the story of a man’s search for the
reincarnated spirit of his uncle. A man lay still
under a pink mosquito net, hypnotically blown by an
electric fan. The wind blew all the fat leaves of
the jungle in one direction. Bats sailed overhead
in the grey sky as the camera swept under trees,
like being carried relentlessly downstream on an
invisible river. All is menacing, silently
threatening, yet somehow still.
Primitive
(2009) Apichatpong Weerasethakul
The theme of young men’s searching
hearts and minds was carried over to the Open Eye
Galley, where British filmmaker Duane Hopkins
presented Sunday. Beautifully portrayed
images of lonely young men raised in the Cotswolds
were shown on multi-screen installations, all
reflecting in upon each other to overwhelm the
viewer with feelings of loneliness, despair and
spiraling madness. The landscape acted as an un-navigatable
hall of mirrors from which there was little hope of
escape for the rural lads who were depicted alone,
deriving their stimulation from inner thoughts or
hits of nicotine. For anyone having grown up in the
countryside, Sunday re-invoked the longing
for escape from both the unforgiving countryside and
the self.
On a lighter note, KMA’s interactive
installation Strange Attractors – The Anatomy of
Dr. Tulp in Arthouse Square used motion
responsive lasers to distill waves of compassion for
strangers and snow-storms of delight in
participants. The multicoloured lights created
connections between individuals, who moved their
bodies in response to these to create differing
organic shapes, becoming the willing subjects in
this mysterious doctor’s aerial experiment. This
work meant to question how we use our bodies as mode
of communication in the material world on the micro
and macro level. But most people were thrilled at
the cleverness, the elegance and humanizing aspects
of the work.
Bridge (2009) Duane Hopkins
An innovative and thought-provoking
performance at the Bluecoat, was Peader Kirk’s
And Counting…. This involved a drama-group
exclusively made up of wheelchair users to reenact
the Apollo 11 descent to the lunar surface in 1969.
Throughout the building, each performer moved around
their own circuits of orbit and relayed all the
collage of beeps, coughs and peeps they heard
through their i-pods, taken directly from the
recordings of the astronauts and mission control.
The routine was unnerving, as the performers spewed
out radio static and instructions from their silver
machines, mixing the subjective and objective with
equal measure. At points, two performers would meet
and face each other head-on but never quite coming
together, not communicating sufficiently with each
other. The performance finished with all six
members gathered in a room with sand on the floor,
the tracks of these black-and-white satellites being
etched out like waves of radiation on the lunar
surface. The disparate and confused speech settled,
the performers joined, the craft touched down. A
truly mind-blowing and esoteric performance that
focused on the nature of collaboration and the
situation of disabled people in contemporary
society, they received the longest applause of the
whole festival.
A technicolour, multilingual array of
films shown over the five days offered to swallow
viewers up and consume them in their own slightly
strange and warped ways. [^]LAND’s favorite was
Be Good (Sois Sage), a stunning post-romantic
thriller by the new French director Juliette Garcias.
The viewer followed a young girl called Eve who was
stalking a local family, as mounting sexual tensions
built and convulsed under a blanket of ominous dark
undertones. Set in the bucolic French countryside,
the old farmhouses and woodlands provided an
atavistic backdrop to one of humanities age-old
taboos. This tactile, cinematic, slow cooked film
was shot sensitively and incredibly beautifully and
there was an abundance of symbolism and metaphors to
pour over. Alternatively, you could ignore all this
and instead indulge in the optical pleasures
bouncing off the screen; a sensual look at colour
fields of ice cream, kneading doe and dripping
strawberry juice that ran down the back of Eve’s
hand. It awakened one to the visuality of foods,
and not just their tastes in a tender synesthetic
embrace. The leading actress, Anaїs Demoustier was
hot, captivating and totally convincing in her
unconventional bunny-boiling role and [^]LAND
expects big things from her and Garcias in the
future.
And Counting… (2009) Peader
Kirk
Zombie hunters creamed their pants
over Canadian film Pontypool, a black-biting comic
film where the viewer’s imagination was cranked up
to its zenith to construct its own nightmares. DJ
Grant Mazzy, a hard-drinking and cynical shock-jock,
arrived in the small-town of Pontypool and into the
very heart of a zombie shit-tornado during his very
first shift. His 50 Marlborough Red’s-a-day voice
took the viewer by the throat and the mind as the
usually tame and uneventful radio station began to
get some very alarming news reports…. The film
played with ideas of arbitrariness and language and
offered something to take away and contemplate, as
well as swaths of gore. Think a lecture given by de
Saussure wearing a Stetson in an abattoir.
Other highlights were Humpday,
a film about two reunited friends making a porn film
together, and Action Diana, a favorite with
Scoucers because it featured local non-professional
actors in a modern remake of the film classic
Darling. Like the 2004 film Palindromes
by Todd Solondz in which many actors play just one
character, the role of Julie Christie was portrayed
by a darling assortment of 5-70 year olds, just to
confuse and please you.
Rebirth of
a Nation (2009) DJ Spooky
Live music included DJ Spooky’s VjDj
extravaganza, where he put music to and ‘remixed’
Birth of a Nation, the infamous 1915 silent film
by D.W. Griffith that depicts the American Civil War
and the formation of the KKK. But to talk about all
the events, workshops and talks would be exhausting.
So, we won’t. But the first AND proved to be, not so
much delinquent than a cheeky, foot-stomping
alternative to other arts festivals which has a year
to scheme up some other deviant pieces for next year
in Manchester. Be there or be normal.
The Abandon Normal Devices Festival
was responsible for outbreaks of glee in Liverpool
from the 23rd-27th September.
www.andfestival.org.uk
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