Summer 2005 - Belfast: Visonic at Ormeau Baths Gallery
CIRCA 112 review Belfast: Visonic at Ormeau Baths Gallery A festival of music, art, film and technology, Visonic drew together a diverse range of practitioners from these fields in a series of events across Belfast, Coleraine and Derry. The Ormeau Baths was home to an exhibition that seemed to have no discernible theme other than to draw together a few disparate strands of audio-visual activity under one roof. The design of the exhibition title was the only 'clue' as such, with its clever highlighting of the letters 'ON' in the title to suggest being plugged in, switched on, clued up, etc., further enhanced by the letter 'O', half broken by a vertical line, forming the 'power up' icon so familiar to those comfortable with computer technology. On entering the gallery, one is accosted by Pierre Bastien's Mecanium orchestra , a jaunty array of traditional instruments from around the globe (Chinese lute, Moroccan bendir, Javanese saron, koto, violin), all activated by Meccano-limbed motors that play repeating patterns. "It's like a city, where all the different cultures blend: you get a richer palette of sounds," Bastien once remarked. As a double bass player in the '70s, he was part of the strong countercultural movement of the time in France, playing alongside like-minded musicians such as the oppositional maverick Jac Berrocal. "He used to have a band in which he played all kinds of (household) objects, and in one of his records I had to flick tea-towels in the air !" recalls Bastien. He built the first Mecanium in 1976, as a throwback to childhood, and has been developing various constructions since then, playing in different improvised music ensembles, most notably with Catalan composer and toy instrumentalist Pascal Comelade's Bel Canto Orchestra. The child-like simplicity of Bastien's orchestra, with its naïve melodies and rudimentary rhythms, draws you into a gently skewed world drenched in nostalgia. It creates an atmosphere at odds with the world around it, in refusal of it even, where the dominant sound is that of an ever-expanding menagerie of infuriating ringtones. Like something that stepped out of a Jan Svankmayer film, or some hugely expanded medieval clocktower chiming the hour, this Dadaist construction was hard to tear yourself away from, as it went through a number of instrumental combinations. Hypnotic. The Centre for Media Research (CMR) at the University of Ulster commissioned sound artist Jem Finer to produce a new work for Visonic , in collaboration with Paul Moore at CMR. Moore collected stories of those working and living on Lough Neagh, those on seasonal wages, waiting for 'The Dark' when eels migrate. As a child, Finer used to imagine everything in Australia was upside down, held by the adult concept of gravity. He decided recently that this still holds true, that there is no up or down. So he built a fulcrum for the world, to be viewed in the conditions of a camera obscura, "a sculpture to mark the position of the north and south poles, the hinges on which the earth spins." A garden-shed-type construction occupied the gallery. Inside was an inverted video projection of an aerial set into the lough, with stories related to the area woven in with field recordings and radio waves. There was a lot of material to contend with here, which could have benefitted from a bit of judicious editing, especially as some of the sound quality was poor. The rough-hewn nature of the construction distracted from the work, which needed a more immersive environment. Initiated in spring 2002, the Bulbes project , by French group Artificiel, is a series of experiments exploring the sonic and visual qualities of an array of large lightbulbs. Part installation, part instrument, the lightbulb set-up is played in order to generate acoustic resonances, as well as light. This ingenious installation was housed in a theatrically darkened space, where rows of enormous pendant bulbs were contact-miked, and linked to software that generated various patterns of brightening and dimming. This created rhythms very reminiscent, in part, of the music of Finnish group Pansonic, whose work has an innate feel for the purity of electricity. This element was made both visible and audible here, hardwiring the sonic and visual with elegant simplicity. In Gallery 2 a number of videos were showing. Amongst the most notable of these was the work of London-based Irish artist Paddy Jolley, whose film brought us into a world apart. In a decrepit domestic interior two people are attempting to go about mundane tasks while the furniture sprouts flames around them. A man nonchalantly whacks at the fire on his chair with a newspaper. A group of covered kneeling figures are crawling in the door while the fire increases its purchase on the house and things start collapsing. The bed of a sleeping figure is engulfed in flames. It begins to snow. The action has been rendered dream-like by slowing the film, and the colour has been bled in a manner quite reminiscent of Tarkovsky (the whole scenario is like a dream sequence in one of his films). An intriguing and memorable work. A video by Vincent O'Callaghan, Otto Schlindwein and Damien Duffy, called Exit , stalked similar territory, as the camera hovered around an attic space in a Victorian house prior to demolition. Inside the room were projections of what seemed to be shots of the same interior overlaid on walls and windows, in uneasy juxtaposition, as though time was collapsing in on itself. Vicki Bennet (aka long-running plunderphonic project People Like Us) has "combined audio and video to create something completely new with dadaist samplings and reshuffling of cultural oddities." A bit of an inflated claim, and very much the sum of its parts, this video played with a lot of B-movie footage from the '40s and '50s in a manner not far removed from the scratch-video technique popular in the '80s, which seemed to say little more than "hey ! aren't these people naff ?" Old hat. In an adjoining room, Brussels collective Foton showed a work called Chillout 3000 . "Using advanced vibration technology a suspended metal plate is turned into an interactive loudspeaker, creating an intimate futuristic chill-out experience." This kind of dated wording is pretty offputting. With pithy precision, JG Ballard summed up his attitude to the future by saying, "The future is boring." For all its 'advanced technology‚ this work shunted me back more than a decade, as I lay on a bean mattress inches from a drone-emitting curved metal plate, hemmed in by a six-foot-high, white lycra corral (not unlike the work of Ernesto Neto). Low-rent James Turell, without the sensory displacement. Amongst the videos showing upstairs, the work of Thomas Köner stood head and shoulders above the rest. Köner made a name for himself in the '90s by creating albums of incredibly pared down soundscapes based on recordings of close-miked gongs and cymbals. He had a fascination with the arctic, and evoked this landscape powerfully in his work. This was chillout in the most literal and profound sense. He also worked with UK sound sculptor Max Eastley and Australian composer Paul Schutze. The video on show was Banlieue du vide (2003). This remarkably understated work took static shots of snowbound streets at night and blended them in a series of incredibly mellifluous cross-fades, combined occasionally with acoustic passages of polyphonic white noise and the sounds of playing children. These are public spaces voided of human presence, save for the traces left behind in the form of tyre tracks, and the steady accumulation and thawing of snow which seems to erase and then reveal the landscape. Operating on the fringes of perceptible changes, Köner gives us a perspective on the landscape that is subtle to the point of almost disappearing, but is all the more powerful and engaging for it. "The mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible." (Wilde) Fergus Kelly is an artist living in Dublin. Visonic , Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast, February 2005
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