Digital arts festival
A solid sense of location isn’t what you’d associate with a festival that, in large part, inhabits the abstract universe of pixels. Nevertheless Frequency, Lincoln’s flourishing digital arts festival, is greatly imbued with only that.
Inhabiting all accessible spaces, from vacant stores to fruit plantations and churches, the fifth iteration of this biennial festival entwines itself from the city’s chocolate-box architecture to explore this year’s theme of displacement — in a private, local and worldwide scale.
Nowhere is this more obvious than at the job Duet, placed inside the shell of that which until recently was one of Lincoln’s oldest family companies. Outwardly an unassuming blocky conglomeration of displays hosting momentary, disconnected answers to imperceptible inquiries, the actual workings of the cooperation between UK artists Invisible Flock and Indian performers Quicksand work beneath the surface.
A program to follow the job pairs consumers in India and the UK, that really get to know each other slowly by answering one prescribed query per day, carefully crafted to not evoke a straightforward yes or no response. Who knows if slow societal media will catch on, but there’s something decidedly intriguing about the possibility of being so attached and yet so distant — and I admit I’m currently waiting to figure out whether my spouse believes animals have spirits.
If not really a soul, Phonofolium et Lux by artists Scenocosme generates an eerie impression of sentience. This digital/arboreal hybrid motivates audiences to caress the leaves of a little shrub, which reacts to electrostatic power by creating a soundtrack which lurches from the natural to the mechanical at a remarkably hypnotic fashion.
Moving virtual
The advent of digital reality on the electronic arts scene was unavoidable, yet in an identical method to cinema’s recently awakened fervour for binaural sound, it’s simple to observe how excitement for the tech could overwhelm the storytelling itself.
Require WHIST, a work which combines movie and augmented reality within a bit inspired by Sigmund Freud. Regrettably, a gorgeous group of sculptures is seen only via a headset camera feed, in which they function as only bodily causes for a run of 360-degree recorded performances.
Losing the effectiveness of these actors’ physical closeness, and failing to capitalise on the headset’s claustrophobic possible, AΦE’s travel feels constrained by its own VR prison, and much more like a nightmare which David Lynch could once have had around live art.
In the opposite end of the scale, Empire Soldiers by Metro-Boulot-Dodo is a totally pitched utilization of this form. Content to permit audience members a chair during, the objective of the richly designed universe isn’t its own existence, but to concentrate you on this of its topic — a Caribbean soldier recruited to fight in the first world war. A deft usage of audio assembles a brief, poetic and moving encounter.
Tardigrades and nematodes
Hurtling outwards from our planetary house, the themes of Andy Gracie’s Deep Data Prototypes _1, _2 + _3 are not likely to create any sound whatsoever — together with microscopic tardigrades and nematodes playing starring roles in a number of busy astrobiology experiments. Assessing the parameters for life, Gracie exposes his test issues to the intense magnetic fields of their own gas giants as well as also the gravity of exoplanetary super-Earths, while seedlings try for life at the light conditions of both a real and literary Mars.
Gracie’s work perfectly embodies the intersection of calibrated experimentation and artwork, with every prototype representing a shocking variety of hours at the laboratory consulting with planetary scientists.
Ascending the aptly called Steep Hill into Lincoln’s famous palace feels just like a trip back in time in more ways than you. Proudly touted as Frequency’s many analogue offering, Assemble’s Log Book homes four real life hewers at the chapter house, gradually forming freshly felled trees to beams. Rhythmic and hypnotic, it would be simple to pass an whole day immersed in the odor of resin and the ocean of sprinkled woodchips. Frequency will require you to the farthest reaches of space, but it is going to always reach out to floor you again.
