Geoffrey Mann, ‘Flight - Take Off’. Photo: John Marshall.

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Geoffrey Mann, ‘Flight - Take Off’.
Photo: John Marshall.

FutureFactories, ‘Holy Ghost’. Photo: John Marshall.The back of a 'hard copy' of a 3D chair design outputted using Rapid Prototyping technology

[enlarge]
FutureFactories, ‘Holy Ghost’.
Photo: John Marshall.
The back of a 'hard copy' of a 3D chair design outputted using Rapid Prototyping technology

Gavin Baily, Tom Corby, ‘Cyclone.soc.’. Photo: John Marshall.A projected installation that merges live text from political and religious newsgroups with the isobars of hurricanes.

[enlarge]
Gavin Baily, Tom Corby, ‘Cyclone.soc.’.
Photo: John Marshall.
A projected installation that merges live text from political and religious newsgroups with the isobars of hurricanes.

ARTICLE

f.city

Various venues, Lancaster and folly.co.uk
29 September – 21 October

‘Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders’ is the main exhibition of Folly’s first f.city festival, an eclectic programme of artwork, events and activities looking at the use of technology within creative practice. Co-presented with Fast-uk, it’s an ambitious and inventive hybrid of an exhibition.

Language and communication are investigated in Cyclone.soc by Gavin Baily and Tom Corby, who map out the density of live online debate of the two greatest of global polarisers – religion and politics – onto the form of isobars of hurricanes. Chicken Soup from Mars is Ben Woodeson’s engaging sprawl of floor-based boxes and electro magnets, tapping out Morse code extracts of ‘inspirational’ and self-help books. Its persistence, obtuseness, and slight malevolence makes for a witty comment on the compulsion to interpret, improve, and transform.

The convergence of nature or the rural with technology is apparent in Geoffrey Mann’s Flight – Take Off, a sculpturally conventional work in appearance, which is the movement of a bird in flight, digitally mapped and made solid. In Brit Bunkley’s Sheep Jet Head, a jet plane crosses a pastoral sky and its path traces and burrows under a virtual sheep’s skin, like a parasite or invader.

Festival artwork in the public realm includes Germaine Koh’s Lancaster Relay, in which Morse code is used again to beam out text messages from a beacon on top of local landmark the Ashton Memorial. Jaygo Bloom’s «Bump...» sends sonic blasts via the web to venues around the city. The fun aspects of these works are underpinned by the thrill and power of anonymity. Knowing that you can say or do whatever you want and it probably won’t be deciphered, or that the perpetrator may not be discovered, is a potent reminder of the more insidious potential of digital technologies. This combination of seriousness and play is indicative of the festival’s breadth of investigation, aesthetic and activity.

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