{"id":2491,"date":"2018-10-30T11:23:51","date_gmt":"2018-10-30T11:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simonings.com\/?p=2491"},"modified":"2018-10-30T11:39:37","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T11:39:37","slug":"york-mediale-2018-playing-with-shadows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=2491","title":{"rendered":"York Mediale 2018: Playing with shadows"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-2492\" src=\"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/strange-stranger-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"584\" height=\"390\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/strange-stranger-1024x683.jpg 1024w, http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/strange-stranger-300x200.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/strange-stranger-768x512.jpg 768w, http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/strange-stranger-450x300.jpg 450w, http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/strange-stranger.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 584px) 100vw, 584px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/2183085-art-an-impressive-new-festival-ushers-in-the-end-times\/\">Visiting York Mediale 2018 for New Scientist, 19 October 2018<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The dancers performing\u00a0<i>Strange Stranger<\/i>\u00a0at this year\u2019s inaugural\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.yorkmediale.com\/\">York Mediale<\/a>\u00a0(tagline: \u201cArt, Meet the Future\u201d) weren\u2019t just moving about in the shadows. They were leaving shadows behind them, thanks to wrist-worn tracking devices and a complex, computer-driven LED-lit set. And over the course of the festival, which ran from 27 September to 6 October this year, visitors were able to explore the set and leave their own shadows in the air.<\/p>\n<div class=\"video\"><iframe title=\"STRANGE STRANGER SHORT\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/291675585?app_id=122963\" width=\"500\" height=\"500\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>Alexander Whitley and his dance company have caught our eye before with<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/mg23431301-000-8-minutes-how-to-dance-the-speed-of-light\/\">\u00a08 Minutes<\/a>, a visceral and surprisingly true-to-fact dance about the internal processes of the sun. Their new piece is a play on the concept of the \u201cdata shadow\u201d \u2013 a digital profile formed from all the information we unintentionally leave behind through our routine use of technology. That Whitley has turned to the dark for\u00a0<i>Strange Stranger<\/i>\u00a0says something about\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/dn27881-the-digital-uncanny-comes-to-manchesters-international-festival\/\">the eeriness that\u2019s been slipping into contemporary art<\/a>\u00a0for some while.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a mordant piece, and perhaps technically not quite there yet, because the dancers aren\u2019t just leaving shadows; they\u2019re actually\u00a0<i>getting lost<\/i>\u00a0in shadows. The net effect of all this energetic movement, then, is a sense of creeping powerlessness.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Oil is the Devil's excrement\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/185122113?app_id=122963\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<div class=\"video\">The same mood \u2013 part melancholy, part anxious \u2013 also marks Strata Rock Dust Stars, the flagship exhibition at this new media arts festival, which, it\u2019s just been announced, is due to return in 2020.<\/div>\n<p>Curated by Mike Stubbs, director of Liverpool\u2019s FACT gallery, the exhibition runs until 25 November. Melancholy notes are struck by David Jacques, whose installation<i>\u00a0Oil is the Devil\u2019s Excrement<\/i>\u00a0(2017) reveals by degrees that we have never been in control of the oil that powers our civilisation: it\u2019s oil that has been in control of us. (You don\u2019t have to take his word for it, either: the title of the piece is actually a quote Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, the founder of OPEC.)<\/p>\n<p>Isaac Julien\u2019s\u00a0<i>Stones Against Diamonds<\/i>\u00a0is another powerful hymn to our fatal misreading of our own values. Shot in a remote region of south-east Iceland in 2015, it juxtaposes luxury goods with jewel-like icescapes and ice blocks and advertisement-shiny waterfalls. Ice, it transpires, is the ultimate luxury good being celebrated (or mourned) among these multiple video panels, by a glamorous isolated figure (Vanessa Myrie) who, we can only suppose, has consumed everything else there is to consume.<\/p>\n<p>Like every other living thing on this planet, humans are destined to expand to exploit all resources available to them, at which point they\u2019ll plunge off a demographic cliff. There\u2019s no tragedy in this. The tragedy is that we know it\u2019s happening. We know the destruction we\u2019re causing. We know what the consequences will be.<\/p>\n<p>Strata Rock Dust Stars offers the visitor various coping mechanisms by which we might deal with this realisation. Liz Orton\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.lizorton.co.uk\/photography\/the-longest-and-darkest-of-recollections-2\/\"><i>The Longest and Darkest of Recollections<\/i><\/a>\u00a0(2016) fuses geology, photography and memoir in a museum-like display that captures perfectly our poignant struggle to assign meaning to a world far older and bigger and dumber than ourselves. Agnes Meyer-Brandis\u2019s on-going obsession with moon-dwelling geese (the conceit of the 17th-century bishop and proto-sf author Francis Godwin) offers fancy and absurdity as a palliative for our tragic condition. In a delicious parody of all those Anthropocene maunderings, her latest venture,\u00a0<i>Moon Core<\/i>\u00a0(2018), asks whether the droppings and egg-shells of moon geese might not have entered the lunar geological record.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"Worlds in the Making - preview\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/21817061?app_id=122963\" width=\"500\" height=\"94\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<div class=\"video\">When fancy and imagination collide with the real world, however, the result is not always charming.\u00a0<i>Worlds in the Making<\/i>, an early video work by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, who make work under the name\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/2171235-cern-inspired-artwork-halo-will-make-the-invisible-visible\/\">Semiconductor<\/a>, creates, if you can picture such a thing, a sort of paranoid geology, perfectly false and perfectly believable, and a dreadful reminder of how much we rely on trust for our understanding of the world.<\/div>\n<p>Another way of coping with the tragedy of the human condition is to laugh at it. Away from the flagship exhibition, I stumbled across a new work by Rodrigo Lebrun, a young Brazilian-born artist who has very little patience with the seriousness of much contemporary art. \u201cIt\u2019s just another way of ostracising the public,\u201d he told me, as he unlocked the shipping container where his barely finished video installation,\u00a0<i>Green (Screen) Dreams<\/i>, advertises the apocalyptic charm of Sunthorpe \u2014 think grim Humber Valley Scunthorpe rebranded as a tropical holiday destination minutes before a collapsed ice shelf-triggered tsunami arrives, coincident with the entire planet bursting into flame.<\/p>\n<p>Hijacking the hyperbolic visuals of television advertising, Lebrun has created an advertisement for the future: a world in which the vagiaries of environmental collapse afford us little pockets of tremendous commercial opportunity in the seconds before Armageddon, and where all the difficult questions about population and pollution, environmental integrity and resource depletion, are breezily crammed into an eyeblink-fast on-screen reminder that \u201cTerms and Conditions Apply\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cInstead of creating solutions, we\u2019ve been creating these weird alternate realities,\u201d Lebrun says, \u201cCGI-driven entertainments to numb the senses.\u201d His installation blows the gaffe on this confidence trick. It\u2019s frightening, and funny, and above all it\u2019s energising. Commissioned by Invisible Dust, an environmental arts charity we last encountered\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/mg23931910-800-how-a-tiny-festival-could-save-scotlands-coastal-culture\/\">driving a gigantic mobile cinema around the Scottish coast<\/a>,\u00a0<i>Green (Screen) Dreams<\/i>\u00a0gets its next outing At North Lincolnshire Museum from 19 January next year. But that\u2019s surely only the beginning for the piece and for Lebrun himself, whose combination of wit and savagery seems as rare, these days, as a moon-goose\u2019s teeth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Visiting York Mediale 2018 for New Scientist, 19 October 2018 The dancers performing\u00a0Strange Stranger\u00a0at this year\u2019s inaugural\u00a0York Mediale\u00a0(tagline: \u201cArt, Meet the Future\u201d) weren\u2019t just moving about in the shadows. They were leaving shadows behind them, thanks to wrist-worn tracking devices &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=2491\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[616,78,622],"tags":[402,628,499,232,629],"class_list":["post-2491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-reviews-and-opinion","category-stage","tag-art-science","tag-enviropnment","tag-media-art","tag-new-scientist","tag-polemic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2491"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2503,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2491\/revisions\/2503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}