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Visiting the Manchester International Festival for New Scientist<\/em><\/a>, 10 July 2015<\/p>\n 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\u2019s installation\u00a0Performance Capture<\/a><\/i>\u00a0mumbles: \u201cIt often felt, to me, like my, um, body \u2013 its potential to pronounce itself, to perform and embody the possessive singular, in all its abjectly encumbered ways \u2013 is not \u2018this\u2019\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n He speaks without stopping, for hours. He is never very coherent \u2013 a condition brought on, perhaps, by the busy, bafflingly overconnected medium in which he lives. He is only digital, after all.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t 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. \u201cSomething that can suffer without suffering, perform without performance, and be without being,\u201d says\u00a0Atkins<\/a>.<\/p>\n Next door, in a room humming with half a million pounds\u2019 worth of servers, modellers from the Manchester animation house Studio Distract work around the clock to make the head real. They will not succeed. \u201cThe technology\u2019s failure is our victory,\u201d says Atkins, whose international career has spiralled since he graduated from the Slade School of Art in 2009.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s scowl. Damon Albarn\u2019s smile. (The festival\u2019s A-listers are all queuing up to be rendered.) Also the volunteer who hands out programmes in front of the gallery. Also the cleaner. \u201cIt\u2019s a concentration, an essentialising,\u201d says Atkins. \u201cThe essence that appears at the end requires a murder, more or less.\u201d<\/p>\n Atkins imagines digital media as a realm of the dead. Damon Albarn and the makers of the new musical\u00a0Wonder.land<\/a><\/i>, at the Palace Theatre, disagree. The digital for them is Lewis Carroll\u2019s 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\u2019s reports from Wonder.land are hardly more coherent than those that Atkins\u2019s head delivers from Hell, not least because of a script that reduces Wonderland\u2019s polymorphous perversity \u2013 Carroll\u2019s Alice could and did become whatever she wished \u2013 into something wearyingly close to a school counselling session.<\/p>\n Like\u00a0Wonder.land<\/i>, Mark Simpson\u2019s oratorio\u00a0The Immortal<\/a><\/i>\u00a0has a lot to say about wish fulfilment, and like\u00a0Performance Capture<\/i>, 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 \u2013 in this case of the early 1900s.<\/p>\n Half a century after its publication, society was still was reeling from the blow of Darwin\u2019s\u00a0On the Origin of Species<\/i>, 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 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\u00a0glissandi<\/i>\u00a0laden with horror, the anguish of a man whose life, spent grieving a long dead sweetheart has convinced him that the material world is insufficient.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s major commissions this year all acknowledge the fact. In\u00a0The Skriker<\/i><\/a>, Caryl Churchill\u2019s malign, eponymous character cracks free of her hidden realm to entrap two sisters; Reggie \u201cRoc\u201d Gray\u2019s shamanic troupe of\u00a0flex dancers<\/a>\u00a0contort themselves into impossible avian shapes, the better to accommodate their human agony. This year\u2019s festival is rich and strange: every new work has made a highway for faerie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading