Simon Ings

“Ah, bankers, students, workers, officials, servants, you are the cock-suckers of the useful, the masturbators of necessity. I shall never work. My hands are pure.” — Louis Aragon

Recalling the Paris climate talks

Posted on December 11, 2015 by simonings

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Taking a look at the artwork around COP21, the Paris climate talks, for New Scientist, 11 December 2015.

In the failing winter light, in full view of Paris’s Cité des Sciences et de L’Industrie, the dead are rising from the Canal de l’Ourcq. Municipal bicycles; shopping trolleys; a filing cabinet. Volunteers have hauled up these unedifying objects and the artist has mounted them just above the water’s surface.

The point, probably, is that in our ever more crowded, ever more connected world, there is no longer any “away” in which to throw anything; we must live with our waste, as surely as we must live with our past. Something like that. In any event Breaking the Surface by Michael Pinsky is, well, recycled: it has been done before (indeed, dates back to the work of artist Marcel Duchamp around 1913-15), and it makes a point that is an unwinning combination of the necessary and the overdone, like a parent always telling you to eat your greens.

I came to Paris to cover what was billed as an unprecedented cultural ferment around COP21, the UN conference on climate change. I expected more than a few mud-encrusted chairs and bikes.

But as the hours went by, and the days, and the kilometres, two painful truths become evident. First, there will be no ferment. The most exciting public events have been cancelled, scaled back, or hurriedly relocated. The recent terror attacks on Paris have seen to that, and the subsequent city-wide ban on demonstrations, not to mention the controversial decision to place local climate activists under house arrest.

Even more painful is the realisation that our current cultural responses to the wicked problem of climate change look as narrow, as blinkered, and as hard to communicate as the scientific ones. Climate change is no longer a purely scientific problem: it is a political and social truth we must handle as best we can. And we aren’t handling it. We can’t handle it. We haven’t got a clue.

So why is there so little in the cultural bank? On the face of it, art and culture have enough of the right kind of lenses to focus on the wicked problem’s wickedness and to prompt new thoughts, forge new understandings and settlements – maybe even spur new actions.

However, in the absence of any fresh currency, the organisers of ArtCOP21 – the cultural programme surrounding the talks, and running on well after any deal is brokered – had a duty to see what could be done with art-culture’s existing toolkit.

Take visualisation, making the invisible visible. Like Breaking the Surface, this is a very old game. But in the right hands it can work well, and arguably, one of the best pieces in Paris is EXIT at the Palais de Tokyo, a full and quite scary updating of an immersive video installation first shown in 2008.

In a dark room, an Earth 2 metres across moves remorselessly around a 360-degree screen. A sound like the chattering of millions accompanies six animated maps as they move round the screen, with their all too respectable data showing how the connection between humans and their environment has fallen off a cliff over the past seven years.

The titles speak volumes: Population Shifts: Cities; Remittances: Sending Money Home; Political Refugees and Forced Migration; Natural Catastrophes; Rising Seas, Sinking Cities; Speechless and Deforestation.

The pixels making up each map represent human experiences, some dots standing in for thousands of people on the move: does attachment to a place now have more to do with moving across it than living on it?

The man who inspired the work, philosopher Paul Virilio, captured its spirit in a separate film: “It’s almost as though the sky, and the clouds in it and the pollution of it, were making their entry into history.”

EXIT is a chilling but effective call to action by design studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro, along with Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan, Ben Rubin and a host of others, exposing connections that would otherwise have been missed.

At the other end of the empathy spectrum is the deceptive work of Janet Laurence and Tania Kovats. On the face of things, both artists appear to be concerned more with aesthetic values rather than social and political ones. But in fact their exquisite, precise work is all about raw, tranformative emotion, the stuff that generates change without knowing how it does so.

Laurence’s Deep Breathing (Resuscitation for the Reef) at the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle looks glacial and cool, with glass containers showing pieces of broken coral, shells and the skeletons of marine animals.

But the glass is meant to represent a resuscitation unit for the Great Barrier Reef, full of bleached-out dead and dying creatures – including some units that suggest babies in intensive care.

For environmental artist Laurence, the reef is not a tourist object but all about fragility: it invokes our need to heal it, to pity it, to love it. Emotion. What a great gig!

And for Tania Kovats, too. Evaporation is one of ArtCOP21’s highlighted works outside Paris: it premiered during the Manchester Science Festival in October and will show until March next year at Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry.

As the recipient of a Lovelock Art Commission, which invites an artist to take inspiration from the work of independent scientist James Lovelock, her emotion is for water, for the planet’s seas as barometer of planetary health, for Gaia theory.

Kovats’s installation comprises three large, shallow, metal bowls made from the shapes of the world’s three major oceans: Atlantic, Pacific and Indian. A solution of salt and blue ink placed in each bowl gradually evaporates during the show, leaving crusts of salt crystals in concentric rings.

It is never the same again. It bears witness to the metaphorical movement of oceans, unlike the poem Dear Matafele Peinem, which is forced to bear witness to the real movement of water.

Waves of the future

Marshall Islander Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner first performed her poem at the 2014 UN climate meeting in New York. And she read it again – to a flash mob during a “cultural takeover” of London’s St Pancras International Station the day the conference opened.

The promises to her Buddha-fat baby that her generation would not let the waves of the future literally roll over the Marshall Islands should have been embarrassing:

And they’re marching for you, baby
they’re marching for us
because we deserve to do more than just
survive
we deserve
to thrive…
so just close those eyes, baby
and sleep in peace
because we won’t let you down
you’ll see.

but they are more than that, they are terrible. Because no one can make such promises.

You can dream up perfectly legitimate ways to fix the world. Indeed, you jolly well should. The now pudgy little toddler Matafele won’t thank us for not trying. Ultimately, while scientists measure problems, and technologists can build tools to deal with them, what we do and when and how is a political issue. It is up to us.

Alternatiba, the global village of alternatives, was one of those grass-roots, left-leaning outings that are very easy to satirise (there were a lot of polar bear suits about, a lot of singing) but not, ultimately, so very easy to dismiss.

“Change the system, not the climate”, was the festival’s motto, the point being that our entire global civilisation is built on fossil fuels, and we’re unlikely to be able to wean ourselves off them without asking a lot of hard questions about our society.

The problem for Alterniba was that it brought together a whole set of perfectly reasonable local practices, from organic gardening to straw-bale house construction, and – in a paroxysm of magical thinking – posited them as global solutions.

“Think global, act local” is one of those phrases whose euphony masks its fatuity. No local solution is globally applicable. The trick is surely for everyone to act local and think local: not to tilt at “the system” willy-nilly, but – in the teeth of serious political and legislative opposition – to operate outside it.

Outside or inside the system, is it worthwhile to simply play with climate change? Tomás Saraceno thinks so. An artist obsessed with weightlessness, the sky and the possibilities offered by floating utopias, Saraceno is spearheading a global effort to resettle humanity in the atmosphere inside habitable solar balloons. Or something.

Uncertainties around the scale of project, its aims and the degree of seriousness we should assign to it, are part of Saraceno’s game. He is an artist, after all: questions and speculations are his stock in trade. In launching a handful of balloons made out of plastic bags, Saraceno raises some very good questions: about who owns what in the environment; where our individual physical freedom comes from, and who grants it; about risk, and responsibility, and civics, and community.

His Aerocene movement achieves what Alterniba cannot: it extricates itself from the global agenda set by global agencies and pursues (or at any rate dreams up) a blank canvas – the air itself! – for its tiny, winning experiments in featherweight living. Revolutions have sprung from less.

And in a world that has very little space and patience for revolutions, Saraceno’s chutzpah – and in the proper sense of the word, his naiveté – are much to be commended.

Art reveals the fragile and devastating world of microbes

Posted on November 5, 2015 by simonings

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Visiting Impermanence: The art of microbiology at Gallery Elena Shchukina for New Scientist, 5 November 2015.

HALFWAY along a pleasant foot passage in London’s exclusive Mayfair district, death is waiting, clad in motley both rich and strange.

On the ground floor of Gallery Elena Shchukina, it’s gone gigantically viral. All around are deadly viruses blown into million-times-magnified life by a host of glassblowers under the close direction of UK artist Luke Jerram.

The academic and scientific community have been commissioning Jerram’s flus and fevers for nearly a decade, but it’s good to see them out of their scientific setting. Free from the sneaking suspicion that they illustrate some important medical point, these head-size viruses grow even more magnificently strange.

Jerram is the gallery’s entry drug: downstairs there’s something altogether darker – something that has festered for anywhere between a day and a year under the watchful eye of South Korean artist Seung-Hwan Oh.

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Oh, who studied film and photography in New York before returning to his native Seoul, has found a way to corrupt photographic portraits by soaking them in baths infested with microbes of one sort or another. Penicillin is his favourite. Each species of bacteria metabolises the chemicals of a photograph in a different way: the men and women in Oh’s solo portraits are variously cracked, bled, stained and ravaged – sometimes in beautiful ways.

More often they are ruined, their proportions and perspectives monstrously skewed. Beyond setting the initial conditions, Oh has no control over how his images will distort. Here, a man grows horns. There, some inner demon breaks through the tatters of a human face.

Quite what Oh means by all this isn’t made clear. One senses he is still enraptured by the experiment for its own sake, and looked at this way, as a very advanced work-in-progress, the show – his first in London – does very nicely.

Mendeleev’s revenge

Posted on October 27, 2015 by simonings

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Visiting the exhibition Periodic Tales at Compton Verney for New Scientist, 27 October 2015

The haunting, slightly bilious yellow-green of uranium glass fascinated Victorian interior designers. Uranium metal glows green in ultraviolet light, and this property lends uranium glass a subtle yet compelling inner fire.

The Victorians made any number of knick-knacks out of the stuff. The exhibition Periodic Tales at Compton Verney – a stately home near Stratford-upon-Avon, UK, best known for its collection of British folk art – boasts a piano foot, an ornamental castor fashioned to spread the weight of the parlour piano.

It is mildly radioactive, which triggers all manner of safety protocols. “We installed it using special gloves,” says Penelope Sexton, the exhibition’s curator. “I shudder to think what any passing Victorian would have made of us.”

Sexton is leading Compton Verney’s long-term campaign to become a contemporary arts venue as well as a “grand day out” for visitors from London and central England.

Periodic Tales combines simple objects made from different elements – a tiny lead figurine from the Aegean islands is the oldest, dating from around 2500 BC – with art that draws contemporary mischief from Mendeleev’s world-changing periodic table of the elements of 1869.

Before modern chemistry, it was assumed that the properties of fundamental materials were innate and could be combined. By that logic, blending sulphur’s yellow and mercury’s sheen ought to have made gold. Mendeleev, a Russian chemist and inventor, spoiled that happy dream, codifying the elements we recognise today in a table that reflects a profound atomic reality we know to be true but cannot directly see.

To read the periodic table is to be confronted by how baffling the world is.

Solids, liquids and gases nestle against each other for reasons that cannot be unpicked by simply resorting to an intuitive understanding of the human-scale world. The queer thing about calling this show Periodic Tales is that there are no tales to tell, only a stunned acknowledgement that one can, in the same moment, both be handed the keys to the material world, and firmly locked out of ever intuiting it.

The artworks Sexton has chosen struggle for purchase. Simon Patterson’s periodic tables of celebrity are facile. And Cornelia Parker‘s circle of crushed silver ornaments is almost as pretty as a well-lit silver object would have been had she not crushed it in the first place. Maria Lalic‘s chrome mirrors are pure Ikea (pictured below).

Periodic Tales: all the elements of a splendid failure

But there are some stunning successes, too. The frames of John Newling‘s wall-mounted Value; Coin, Note and Eclipse (pictured at the start of this story) capture the alchemical transformation of a living plant into gold coinage, by way of pressed kale leaves and the judicious application of gold leaf. It is a narrative piece, rooted firmly in the safe ground of material production, value and exchange.

It is significant, I think, that other standout pieces also explore the way some elements are more or less effortlessly turned into cultural signs – quite literally in the case of Fiona Banner‘s neon Brackets (An Aside).

There is much else in the show worth seeing: Danny Lane‘s Blue Moon makes cobalt positively drinkable. And there’s plenty to think about: another work by Parker, Stolen Thunder, is a display of handkerchiefs stained by the tarnish rubbed off famous objects.

But the real draw – counter-intuitive though this is – is the necessary failure of the show. Mendeleev’s table is a masterpiece of objectivity. Its truth refuses to be anthropomorphised, moralised upon, or otherwise domesticated. Undaunted, Sexton brings us right to the edge of what art can do to communicate science.

“I’m not alone in here”

Posted on October 20, 2015 by simonings

Exploring Yellowbluepink at Wellcome Collection in London

Three bands of light – one pink, one yellow, one blue – illumine the obliterating smog that artist Ann Veronica Janssens has used to fill the Wellcome Collection’s first-floor gallery. This white-floored, white-walled, white-ceilinged room is trying very hard to disappear.

There’s no directionality to the light here, so there is no sense of up or down. Your first sensation is not so much of falling as of leaning, or rather, of being leant, like a roll of carpet propped against a wall. This sensation, that you are suddenly operating out of kilter with the real geometry of the world, does not go away.

I’m not alone in here. The other explorers are just about visible as they come within braking distance of me. The walls are another matter. The light reflected off the smog and the light reflected off the walls are indistinguishable. The walls may as well be made of glass for all that you can see them. Hitting one, I turn and move forward, running a finger along the hard surface to keep my orientation – and promptly bump my nose on another wall.

All the time I’ve been thinking I’m staring into the void, I’ve actually been staring into a corner. I turn around to face into the room. At least, I think I do.

The room is a rainbow of mist. You step through an airlock arrangement into pink mist. If you walk straight ahead you will shortly pass through a yellow murk and into a blue cloud.

Those loose synonyms – mist, murk and cloud – aren’t just there to get what might have been a repetitive sentence past the subeditor. They have significance.

Ann Veronica Janssen's room of fog bumps you through the rainbow

The pink zone is a true smog, the one that most obviously messes with your perceptions. It feels profoundly, viscerally wrong – faux psychoanalytical explanations of being trapped in a womb seem irresistible.

The pink zone robs me of things to see, and also of the actual sensation of seeing. I am made painfully aware of the floaters scudding over my eyeball. It’s probably best to avoid this show when you’re recovering from the night before.

The yellow middle zone is a queasy, transitional space, that seems to shift depending on whether I approach it from the blue end of the room or the pink end. I find it hard to stop here.

In the blue zone, in contrast to the pink zone, it is virtually impossible for me to imagine that I cannot see. There’s still nothing around me, but the nothing feels familiar and natural. I’m walking on air. What could possibly go wrong? As I think this, I stub my toe: another wall.

Wild, silly and enlightening

Posted on September 23, 2015 by simonings

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Visiting Lofoten’s International Art Festival and the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria, for New Scientist, 23 September 2015

SITTING on a driftwood sculpture in the middle of a large paddling pool, a man in silver face paint and bodysuit – I think he is supposed to be a fish – is shouting his lungs up. He is attempting to express the emotions of the sea.

There’s a lot of this sort of thing on the Scandinavian arts scene, and it’s spreading. More often than not it doesn’t work, but how other than by wild, ugly and very silly experiments will we work out how to express, in human terms rather than in figures, the enormity of climate change, mass extinction and the epochal depletion we are learning to call the Anthropocene?

“Disappearing Acts” was the theme of this year’s Lofoten International Art Festival. A 24-year-old institution, it is held every other year on a cluster of islands off Norway’s north-west coast, just above the Arctic circle. This year’s festival explored several kinds of disappearance: people are leaving the countryside for the cities, while globally, the countryside itself is dying off in unexpected and unnerving ways.

There’s paranoia in this vision, and a millennial impulse that has nothing to do with science. As the UN climate conference in Paris nears, however, and with Syrian refugees being spotted entering Norway from Arctic Russia by bike, some response beyond blind panic would surely be welcome.

At the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria, a behemoth of the art, science and design scene now 36 years old, discrete “problems” find technical “solutions” in a distinctly dated manner. For example, it featured a “Future Mobility” expo, the star of which was the Mercedes-Benz F 015 Luxury in Motion self-driving car.

The F 015 is meant to exemplify a future “when there are more robots than people working in factories, everything is intelligently interlinked, autos drive autonomously and drones deliver the mail”. Don’t let the automobile styling fool you, this “car” is the size of a truck, and stuffed with exotic materials. Nearby, the curators have undercut it quite brilliantly by placing a “Fahrradi Farfalla FFX”, Austrian artist Hannes Langeder’s absurdly overstyled “sports car”, made from bicycle parts and gaffer tape, and sprayed with bright red lacquer.

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Ars Electronica is full of such arch gestures. This year it also featured PSX Consultancy, an international collaboration to produce “sex toys for plants”. Information boards explain each plant’s reproductive “problem” and then propose a “solution”. For turmeric, an infertile plant that reproduces only via its rhizomes, weather balloons will carry the plants to the stratosphere, where, it is hoped, the increased solar radiation will introduce some variety to its genome. Alas this is not true: turmeric is not infertile – it is another flowering ginger, which happens to have the option of reproducing via rhizomes besides producing seed.

This kind of intervention used to seem ingenious, then cute, but now it’s irritating. Even when the premise is right, if our deteriorating ecology has taught us anything, it’s that our solutions to discrete problems only breed more problems down the road.

Why don’t we just pay attention to what is happening to our world, and speak about that as honestly as we can? This is the idea behind SALT, a refreshingly low-key festival whose run on the Norwegian island of Sandhornøy has just ended. Over the coming years, it will circumnavigate Earth’s most northerly settlements, from Greenland to the Faroes, from Scotland to Spitsbergen.

It has staged music concerts attended by thousands, but is most itself when a handful of visitors huddle in a shack made of driftwood and shipping containers to contemplate Glimt, an installation of moving lights by Norwegian artist HC Gilje that evokes the fleeting passage of living things across the landscape.

SALT’s co-founder Helga-Marie Nordby apologised when I visited this September: it was so warm, you could bathe in the ocean and dry off in the sun. “It’s not usually like this,” she said. A long and eloquent silence followed.Lofotens

Andrew Krasnow: skin in the climate game

Posted on August 21, 2015 by simonings

Interviewing the artist Andrew Krasnow for New Scientist

It’s part walrus, part human. This is the first picture released of a controversial sculpture made from human skin combined with leather, complete with tusks made from animal bone from the 1960s. “Whiskers” of human hair are also attached near its nose.

Created by US artist Andrew Krasnow, Walrus Souvenir, which is based on a pattern from a leather craft hobby kit, incorporates some of the artist’s own skin. “The rest was obtained from skin donors in the 1980s who gave their living consent,” he says.

Completed in 2000, the walrus was first exhibited in the US in response to then president George W. Bush’s recommendation to start exploratory oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The recently released photo allows the piece to be seen by the rest of the world for the first time.

Although Krasnow was originally targeting the Bush administration’s obsession with uncertainties around climate change, he now hopes Walrus Souvenir will serve to highlight the global scale of the problem. His sculpture alludes to the interconnection between human and other animal life, raising the possibility that human handiwork may one day lead to the extinction not only of the walrus, but of humanity itself, he says.

Over the years, Krasnow’s bleak and uncompromising view of US political history has landed him in just as much trouble as the human skin used in his artwork. The irony of having exhibitions rejected in the 1980s, when prior to the NAGPRA Act the US government held about 15,000 indigenous human remains without the communities’ permission, isn’t lost on him. “In terms of purposeful intent, the only agenda I have in mind for this piece is that it does some good,” he says.

The GV Art gallery in London is hoping to exhibit the walrus later this year, once they obtain permission from the UK’s Human Tissue Authority.

How we see now

Posted on August 21, 2015 by simonings

For New Scientist, a review of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s book How to See the World

NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF, a media, culture and communication professor at New York University, wants to justify the study of visual culture by describing, accessibly, how strange our visual world has become.

This has been done before. In 1972 artist and writer John Berger made Ways of Seeing, a UK TV series and a book. This was also the year that astronaut Harrison Schmitt took the Blue Marble picture of Earth from Apollo 17, arguably the most reproduced photograph ever.

By contrast, in How to See the World, Mirzoeff’s mascot shot is the selfie taken by astronaut Akihiko Hoshide during his 2012 spacewalk. This time, Earth is reflected in Hoshide’s visor: the planet is physically different and changing fast. Transformations that would have been invisible to humans because they took place so slowly now occur in a single life. “We have to learn to see the Anthropocene,” writes Mirzoeff.

Images are ubiquitous, and we have learned to read them as frames in a giant, self-assembling graphic novel. Visual meaning is found in the connections we make between those images. We used to flock to the cinema for that sort of peculiar dream logic, but now we struggle to awaken. Mirzoeff cites artist Clement Valla writing that “we are already in the Matrix”.

Simple iconography is in retreat. During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Soviet missile trailers were visible in photos shown to the media. By 2003, the photos that US general Colin Powell showed of supposed weapons-making kit were lathered in yellow labelling, claiming to show what we could not in fact see.

Tracing the political, social and environmental implications of our visual culture, in words and black and white images, is a job of work. Mirzoeff succeeds: this is a dizzying and delightful book.

Marc Quinn: spoiling the sunset

Posted on July 15, 2015 by simonings

Interviewing Marc Quinn about The Toxic Sublime at White Cube, Bermondsey for New Scientist, 15 July 2015

I HAVE always loved Turner and his paintings of the sublime, but we no longer have the pure relationship with nature he had. We can only understand nature by interacting with it, so there aren’t many landscapes untouched by humans.

I’m a city artist so I wanted to make an image of the sublime that was more urban, seen through the goggles of the environmental paradox that if you set off to see something, bit by bit your visit will ruin it. When people say we are going to destroy the planet, we aren’t: we are going to destroy ourselves. The planet will find a new equilibrium.

Each painting in my show uses the same photo I took of a sunrise on a Caribbean beach. I printed it on to canvas and then painted on top. The colours are absurd, of course. There are pinks like those in a sunset, but when you paint them you end up with ridiculous kitschification. Turner’s palette mattered to me, but I was much more influenced by the range of colours afforded by spray paints.

Next, I marked the horizon with tape, then ground lines into the canvas, like map lines or electrical wires or flight paths, and put more tape on. I painted on that, and then started grinding away the paint. You see colours coming through. It’s layered in a very natural way: erosion, if you like.

Then I took the canvases out on to the streets and hammered them into anything to do with water – drains, manhole covers. There’s “Thames Water” indented in one place. You have this image, this element, that’s wide and pure, and then you have what we have done to it. There is a sublime, but it’s one that you have to see through our relationship to it.

But I also wanted to reflect the paradox that if you looked at a nuclear explosion miles away, you would be terrified and horrified, but you would find beauty in it.

So once I bashed the canvas, I stuck it to aluminium, twisted and wrestled with it, kicked and folded it. I wanted it to look like a found object, from off the back of a truck, or the side of a plane that’s fallen out of the sky.

Alongside the paintings are Frozen Waves, sculptures based on the erosion of conch shells by waves, made from stainless steel or white concrete. When a conch erodes, the thickest bit is the last to go. It ends up looking like a wave, the thing that produced it – nature’s self-portrait. The shell’s purpose has become nebulous; it crosses the line between representational and abstract. One of the sculptures is over 7 metres long. The bigger they are, the more it is like being on a beach with a wave coming at you.

The shell is like a scientific demonstration of time. On the back face is the past, the circles made by the accretion of time as the shell gets bigger. And there are patterns: did nature, via erosion, cause dots like a scrimshaw, or maybe they are something people used to record time or make a map? The object’s front face is the present, polished because it’s always in immediate contact with the world.

I used a 3D scanner to make Frozen Waves. If they had been made by hand, they would have felt like a human artefact. This technology is going to change everything: what will matter is not what you have made, but how you have transformed it. If you change the material from which something is made, you look at it in a different way.

I’m working on a 3D scanner for people, to capture movement and print it exactly. In a hundred years, these prints will be like daguerreotypes at the beginning of photography.

Art should reflect the time in which it is made. But maybe some things can’t be understood in the time that you made them. Take the image I created of the genome scientist John Sulston, using his DNA. I like that although it appears abstract, it’s the most realistic portrait in the National Portrait Gallery because it includes instructions to remake the sitter. I like that irony, and the idea that something can be image and object at the same time.

The digital uncanny comes to Manchester’s International Festival

Posted on July 10, 2015 by simonings

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Visiting the Manchester International Festival for New Scientist, 10 July 2015

In a screening room in Manchester Art Gallery, the 1.5-metre-high shaven head of a white male in his mid-30s looms over the audience. His lips tremble. His eyes are moist and evasive. The star of Ed Atkins’s installation Performance Capture mumbles: “It often felt, to me, like my, um, body – its potential to pronounce itself, to perform and embody the possessive singular, in all its abjectly encumbered ways – is not ‘this’…”

He speaks without stopping, for hours. He is never very coherent – a condition brought on, perhaps, by the busy, bafflingly overconnected medium in which he lives. He is only digital, after all.

Don’t let the detail fool you: his stubble, day by day more visible; the bags that darken, hour by hour, under his eyes; the burst capillaries. The man is dead, as only a man who has never lived can be dead. “Something that can suffer without suffering, perform without performance, and be without being,” says Atkins.

Next door, in a room humming with half a million pounds’ worth of servers, modellers from the Manchester animation house Studio Distract work around the clock to make the head real. They will not succeed. “The technology’s failure is our victory,” says Atkins, whose international career has spiralled since he graduated from the Slade School of Art in 2009.

And next to the render farm, a steady stream of visitors arrive to have their performances captured with a 3D camera. Over the course of the festival, 104 people will each deliver a one-minute performance, reciting an addled, sometimes conspicuously nasty monologue composed by Atkins. Software will reduce and abstract their performances so that in the end, nothing of them will remain except their gestures, expressions and intonation. The head will replicate these faithfully. Bjork’s scowl. Damon Albarn’s smile. (The festival’s A-listers are all queuing up to be rendered.) Also the volunteer who hands out programmes in front of the gallery. Also the cleaner. “It’s a concentration, an essentialising,” says Atkins. “The essence that appears at the end requires a murder, more or less.”

Atkins imagines digital media as a realm of the dead. Damon Albarn and the makers of the new musical Wonder.land, at the Palace Theatre, disagree. The digital for them is Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, and Aly (the lead character, and a strong performance by Lois Chimimba) is swiftly dispatched there, sucked in through the glass maw of her mobile phone. (The conceit is a good one: Lewis Carroll did, after all, once try to buy the forerunner of the modern computer from Charles Babbage.) Alas, Aly’s reports from Wonder.land are hardly more coherent than those that Atkins’s head delivers from Hell, not least because of a script that reduces Wonderland’s polymorphous perversity – Carroll’s Alice could and did become whatever she wished – into something wearyingly close to a school counselling session.

Like Wonder.land, Mark Simpson’s oratorio The Immortal has a lot to say about wish fulfilment, and like Performance Capture, it has a great deal to do with death. Also, in an odd way, it shares with those other festival commissions a fascination with the digital uncanny – in this case of the early 1900s.

Half a century after its publication, society was still was reeling from the blow of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which dislodged our species from any privileged space in nature, and corroded any easy belief in divine providence. In 1901, Frederic Myers, president of the Society of Psychical Research, died. Some years later, mediums in Britain, the US and India all reported receiving spirit messages from him.

Simpson, a 26-year-old clarinettist whose extraordinary career has landed him the role of Composer in Association with the BBC Philharmonic, brilliantly evokes the fear of new technology at the turn of the 20th century. Together, the orchestra, the Manchester Chamber Choir and chamber choir EXAUDI recreate in frankly terrifying musical terms a world of invisible rays, radio and telegraphy – media through which it was sometimes supposed that the afterlife might be accessed. Across it all Myers himself, channelled by baritone Mark Stone, expresses, in narrow chromatic runs and glissandi laden with horror, the anguish of a man whose life, spent grieving a long dead sweetheart has convinced him that the material world is insufficient.

Manchester is deep in a programme of regeneration as fundamental and iconoclastic as any in the UK since the second world war. Whole vistas rise and vanish, streets disappear, unexpected sightlines emerge. It is an uncanny place, and the festival’s major commissions this year all acknowledge the fact. In The Skriker, Caryl Churchill’s malign, eponymous character cracks free of her hidden realm to entrap two sisters; Reggie “Roc” Gray’s shamanic troupe of flex dancers contort themselves into impossible avian shapes, the better to accommodate their human agony. This year’s festival is rich and strange: every new work has made a highway for faerie.

Barbara Hepworth at Tate Britain

Posted on June 24, 2015 by simonings

Let us begin, at least, with a glimmer of humour.

There you are. That’s your lot by way of larfs, should you visit this truly gimlet-faced retrospective of the art of British modernist sculptor Barbara Hepworth.

Tate Britain’s show, which runs from 24 June to 25 October, is billed as the first major Barbara Hepworth exhibition in London for almost 50 years, and features some key sculptures in wood, stone and bronze. These, then, are the treasures which languish under insipid ersatz daylight, against walls painted in the sort of bluish neutrals you find in the toilets at Heathrow.

The first room is the worst, incarcerating Hepworth’s early torsoes under cheap plexiglass vitrines like so much pick-n-mix. But it is not the conspicuous lack of budget that disconcerts, so much as the way the show struggles to establish the young artist’s identity. Every artist operates in some sort of social fluid. Hepworth appears to have damn-near drowned in hers.

Hepworth and her lover Ben Nicholson together evolved an atelier identity, exhibiting together in 1932 at the gallery Arthur Tooth & Sons. Photographs of that show suggest an energy that’s wholly missing here. Nicholson and Hepworth got under each others’ artistic skins, but for reasons I don’t know enough to unpick, the image we’re left with in this show is not so much of Hepworth growing as an artist, so much as being easily led (by Nicholson, by Moore, by Laslo, by political affiliations of one sort or another).

It seems unfair to blame the subject of this show, but I did begin to wonder whether Hepworth herself ought to take some responsibility for what’s gone wrong here. The wall texts several times refer to her determination to control her own image, and I wonder if there isn’t some curatorial frustration peeking through here. What do you do, after all, with an artist who parlayed her way into a most insipid type of celebrity, who fashioned art innocuous enough to grace the UN, and counted its director general Dag Hamarskjold as a friend: arguably the least interesting famous man in history?

Something has failed here; it could well be me. I took a couple of snaps. The photographs aren’t up to much, but just look at the work. That has to be worth a visit, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it? How is it my iPhone had a better time than I did?