Concrete Cannot Stop Them
Big Screen Liverpool, Clayton Square
Fri 9 - Thu 22 Nov 2007
Curated by Bren O'Callaghan
In association with the BBC Radio 3 Festival of Free Thinking, the Big Screen Liverpool presents an international selection of video and interactive work that responds to pervasive surveillance. Hail the rise of the all-seeing eye.
The Spectral Children
Manu Luksch
UK/AT 2006, 15'
Using CCTV images obtained over a 4-year period under the UK Data Protection Act, artist and filmmaker Manu Luksch replaces regular cameras with these preinstalled surveillance devices, a film crew with the data controllers, and a script with the law. An abridged interpretation of the feature-length project, Faceless.
Camouflage #1
Penelope Cain
AU, 2005, 4'20"
Stressed, anxious and alienated in his urban habitat, a white-collar worker attempts to camouflage himself within his city environment. By obsessively taping sheets of printed copy paper over his body, he mimics the chameleon instincts of small animals sensing danger through an act that makes him ironically conspicuous.
An Experimenta New Visions Commission.
Afterglow
Katy Connor
UK, 2007, 12'
This audio-visual piece fuses themes of urban surveillance with body memory as airborne cameras scan the arterial routes of a city grid. Suffused, pulsing with flesh and metal, the impersonal becomes intimate via a surgeon's gaze. But who wields the knife? Made in collaboration with Sound Artist Helena Gough.
Birds Over The White House
Michael Bell-Smith
USA, 2006, 5', excerpt
Lo-fi yet sharply relevant, this pixel-cute blueprint of the White House when transposed upon the Big Screen brings to mind the massive video walls of cold war blockbusters D.A.R.Y.L. and War Games. A generative algorithm maps the plane-like movement of birds as they encircle the President's sanctum.
Massive Attack: Protection
Dir. Michel Gondry
UK/FR, 1995, 6'38"
The camera as voyeur, free to roam, unseen, omniscient, unblinking. The guilt-free gaze is key to our visual interpretation of the world and never more beautifully realised than in this classic music video tracing the tiny lives of the residents in an apartment block. Observation unfettered.
www.michelgondry.com
www.massiveattack.co.uk
Interactive installation: Freedom of Information
Developed by ICDC: International Centre for Digital Content
Liverpool John Moore University
Are we really free? With 24 hour CCTV and vast databases of ‘customer profiles' being compiled about everyone in Britain, do we realise just how much information is stored about us? This interactive big screen display highlights some surprising details of the data captured in today's surveillance society.
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Big Screen Vote
Make your opinions known by interacting with the Big Screen and voting on Free Thinking topics, such as the perception of freedom and civil liberties in the UK, live in Clayton Square.