Tales of Two Cities
With an OCD fury not seen since the woman in the Shake 'n Vac advert ground her Valium and mixed it with a glug of Bacardi, I've been plugging the cracks in this site and pasting up former production duties with a vengeance. My personal favourites A Wall is a Screen now have a page to themselves, as do the rapidly expanding MegaPhone team - flying the flag for those of us who see no reason why computer games should progress beyond the Atari era. Once upon a festival, The Light Surgeons conjured up a storm in a Gothic salon and The Royal Opera House treat us to no fewer than twelve outdoor relays in the past five years.
Into The Woods
You can never have enough magic capes, as I discovered earlier last year. Shamefully I have only just got around to documenting this particular project for the Big Screen Liverpool from Charlotte Gould in partnership with moves, although thanks are also due to my friend Mandy Tolley for creating the most intensely red cloak with the biggest button I have ever seen. Yes, even bigger than Kirsty Allsopp's secret cache.
Portrait of the Artist by Proxy
Alison Jones: Portrait of the Artist by Proxy
If you could never see your own reflection again, would you trust others to describe your appearance? Alison Jones has done just that for DaDaVisions with Portrait of the Artist by Proxy. Originally commissioned as a sonic artwork by the Bluecoat in Liverpool, we recruited the talents of Sparkle Media to create a deliberately offbeat approach to standard subtitles. The end result maintains a key emphasis upon the audio emitted via the screen speaker system.
Alison Jones: Portrait of the Artist by Proxy
In this way the viewer/listener has to switch sensory emphasis just as Alison must as it is impossible to follow the descriptive portrait by reading the text alone. The point-of-view dips, spins and curls across a landscape of 3-D typography, lingering upon key words as multiple voices share consensus, or becoming impossible to scan as the soundscape dissolves into whispers.
Pixie Dust
Gina Czarnecki: Pixie Dust
Gina Czarnecki's films and installations are informed by human relationships to image, disease, evolution, genetic research and by advanced technologies of image production. Pixie Dust blurs contemporary methods in scientific research – specifically, limb regrowth in salamanders and the harvesting of embryonic stem cells from pigs for use in human medicine.
Gina Czarnecki: Pixie Dust
Taking the form of a scientific televised report, observers will be drawn by the implicit ambiguity that appears to suggest the future has already arrived. What if those missing limbs through birth or accident were able to regrow, augment and fine-tune their bodies… becoming super-able? A DaDaVisions commission.
Who Do You Think You Are?
So Many Excuses: Who Do You Think You Are?
...here comes DaDaVisions, a brace of opinionated new screen commissions developed right here in the North West and soon to appear upon TWENTY giant outdoor screens across the UK. Launching as a new strand of DaDaFest, four new artist film and video projects will face-slap shoppers with subversive and alternate interpretations of disability. I'll be posting further information upon each as the week progresses.
So Many Excuses: Who Do You Think You Are?
First up is influential agit-prop trio No Excuses, once fond of chaining themselves to buses to chant "Piss on Pity" and now reformed as So Many Excuses. Mandy Colleran, Mandy Redvers-Rowe and Ali Briggs (who some may recognise as Freda in Coronation Street) have revisited the classic Frost Report sketch from the 1960s featuring the Two Ronnies and John Cleese.
Then a comment upon the British class system but now playfully adapted to explore the stereotypes and labels that the disabled place upon each other, Who Do You Think You Are? is written and performed by SME, produced by Asta Films with vintage styling expertise by Maria Lloyd.
Wave Your Hands In The Air
Thanks to friend and collaborator Sam Meech for riding to my rescue, a blonde knight upon his horse Isadora to deliver title animations for Unsilent Night tomorrow. I have blisters on my hand from carrying the 'portable' AnyCast vision mixing desk over from Manchester on the train (the approximate weight of a drowned man wearing flannel pyjamas) and just over 24 hours to remind myself how it works again.