Interworld Media
As part of the Foodhall Lates Gallery Social Sculpture series in the latter half of 2019, we aimed to build on our previous events and try to take Interworld No. 4 a step further with the week-long Isolate / Incubate. This event was supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
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Photography: Rob West
A week-long installation from Zaron Mizmeras installed in the Foodhall basement, this was a maximalist response to our use of the Internet and its effect upon communication methods, delivered through twin audiovisual works.
“Presented in binary opposition, these two contrasting yet interrelated projections seek to illustrate the conflicting effect of extreme connectivity and cognitive dissonance. Increasingly, experience shows us this duality results in feelings of being intrinsically linked, yet socially isolated.”
On Saturday 16th November, we turned Foodhall into the Incubator, with performances, installations and showcases happening throughout the afternoon before descending (ascending?) into a late-night rave. Our aim was to provide a space for connection: opportunities to meet like-minded fans and creators of experimental electronic music and art, discuss ideas in the digital realm, and distribute knowledge and skills vital to realising ideas. We wanted to welcome people with little to no experience, with a focus on small / ‘bedroom’ producers (with an attempt to turn the stage into a literal bedroom for the week) and a rotating feature of mp3s of tracks and demos sourced from an online callout.
Our statement that we included as part of the event included a weirdly prescient prediction for 2020
“In our modern Internet, we see digital visual space being sold and controlled, playlists being curated anonymously, and an overall pressure to fight for attention on tiny, ever-present screens. It is clear that electronic music and other digital scenes have a tendency towards gatekeeping, chauvinism and other small-minded thinking. This results in artists who, while interested in bringing their work out into the ‘real world’, nevertheless face barriers to doing so. There may also be people interested in experimental digital art and have ideas that they want to try and get out of their heads, but who don’t currently have the tools/time/resources to produce these ideas alone. Collaboration and cooperation is therefore vital to battle against this fatiguing and often socially regressive digital world.
Thus, as 2020 beckons (an extremely futuristic year), we hope to carefully calibrate the parameters of our gloopy shared media – the Interworld Media – to achieve optimal conditions for growth of the creative microbiota within us all.”
An hour of swampy, frenetic live electronics, accompanied by a visual narrative as told through a vaguely paranoid selection of videos rhythmically triggered via MIDI.
DJ CyberSpice is the mythological 6th Spice Girl. VJ ClipConverter is a computer-human designed for data aggregation turned media junkie. They had such sights to show us.
“A selection of tracks to bump in a cosmic cadillac at the end of the world.”
Showcase of the full Gamble Proctor EP, plus ultra-fresh bonus tracks.
Live coding debut – the performance included printouts of stories that were distributed to the crowd beforehand.
A set of hardvapour, vaporwave and vapour musics revolving around the progression of post-Soviet Russia: “Russian youth, born after the dissolution of the USSR, are entering adulthood, and their country has changed in such a short amount of time. The set goes from the calmer, structured themed tracks relating to a Soviet era into eclectic, hard rave tracks relating to the rise of the Russian mafia, the spread of drugs and other horrors of capitalist society. Since the dissolution of the USSR, the internet has become much more widespread, allowing these issues to be shared across the world – not to mention the evolution of music in Russia with genres such as Hardbass, a parent-genre to hardvapour.”
“A synaesthetic neural network of sensors and adaptors feeding off of one another, emulating the buzz of a modern city and the mass of auditory and visual processing forced through the mind. This is a collaboration between dark new media artist and scientist Saffron Mackey; kinetic sculptor Sorcha Noble, who has been focusing on living aural landscapes; and Dominic Ewan, archaic tech fetishist & system designer. They met at Site Gallery’s ‘Society of Explorers’ five years ago and have been honing their crafts ever since. This installation expresses the long distance, instant messaging and busy nature of the artists’ lives and collaboration.”
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