Abandon Normal Devices

Category: Film & Cinema, Festivals, Exhibitions, Art, Lectures & Talks.

Abandon Normal Devices (AND) is a festival of new cinema and digital culture taking place across the Northwest. This October it hits Manchester for a week of electronic art, film and debate, as a horde of designers, artists, filmmakers and thinkers get together to figure out what's 'normal'.

So what will you see this year at AND? In Cornerhouse, video and installation artist Phil Collins presents Marxism Today, a project that tries to introduce Marxism into secondary schools in Manchester. Collins worked with ex-Marxist teachers from Russia and East Germany to make a video piece which you'll be able to see in the Cornerhose gallery during the festival.

If that's too political for you, how about Lawrence Malstaff's Shrink, where the artist will - if you want - shrink-wrap you. You'll get vacuum-packed between two giant sheets of plastic, with a transparent tube inserted so you'll be able to breathe, and all in front of an audience. It'll be an extreme sensory experience, there's no doubt about that - the artist says it'll make you think about how your body can be simltaneously protected and threatened.

There's also Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s People On People, a new commission that's part of the artist's solo show in Manchester Art Gallery. People On People will turn the gallery space into one of the world’s most advanced scanners, using high-resolution surveillance cameras with face recognition and 3D tracking to compile a databsae of the behaviours of the audience as they pass through the show.

If you're a film buff, check out the European premiere of drag queen Peaches Christ's new flick, the black comedy All About Evil, or Chen Chieh-jen's Empire's Borders II, which is based on the artist's difficulty getting a US visa, and looks at borders, boundaries, geopolitics and the legacy of the Cold War upon China. Tuner Prize winner Gillian Wearing presents her first feature film, Self-Made, filmed on location in Newcastle, for which she placed ads in the local papers asking people 'If you were to play a part in a film, would you be yourself or a fictional character?'. AND is also hosting Unspooling, a group exhibition across various Manchester venues that explores both cinema and art - in Cornerhouse, you'll see a guerrilla-style re-enactment of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice and a remix of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Abandon Normal Devices forms part of WE PLAY, the Northwest cultural legacy programme for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. AND is driven by a new collaborative partnership between three of the UK’s leading institutions dealing with art and digital culture; folly in Lancaster, FACT (Foundation Of Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool and Cornerhouse in Manchester. It's sponsored by Manchester City Council.

Festival preview by Valerie O'Riordan

Learn More...

Lawrence Malstaff's website

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s website

This event is sponsored by Manchester City Council as part of its annual programme of events and festivals. For more information visit unmissablemanchester.com