STORMY WATERS FEATURE
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Angus Farquhar prepares for take-off
CASTING THE NET
Art on the Internet is already big news. Museums as mainstream as The Louvre are on-line and artists everywhere are throwing down paintbrushes in favour of pixels, hanging their work in virtual galleries, and bouncing constantly evolving images back and forth across the networks in feverish rounds of Chinese whisper-like creativity.
In theory this art is up there for the world to see. In practice it’s confined to those with access to an Internet connection. Come mid-July though and segments of this future-art will be bursting forth from the confines of the domestic monitor and spilling out onto the banks of the River Clyde as part of ilVA’s groundbreaking open-air multi-media show Stormy Waters.
For two evenings in a row the tall cranes of
Kavaerner Govan, the last working shipyard on the upper reaches of the Clyde, will act as backcloth as Sformy‘s originator Angus Farqhuar wakes Glasgow’s heavy industry past up to a glimpse of its high-tech post-industrial future. A history of the city’s mass labour and mass migration will be depicted via film and computer images projected onto ships, floating stages and the river itself; digitally altered images of Glasgow cityscapes will be broadcast live across the Internet onto giant screens hoisted above the river. In a finale of sweeping proportions, performers lining the banks will scatter white biodegradable dye across the river to form a liquid screen designed to carry a closing explosion of elaborate projected visuals. Suitable sounds will be provided by an army of Sativa drummers, Autechre, Plaid and cutting edge techno act Black Dog. The other cogs that go to make up the Stormy wheel include radical performance artist Ronald Fraser Munro as
narrator, hundreds of Beltane performers, award- winning design team Tomato, marine technologists, llet wizards Jim Mullen and Anne- Marie Fleming from Glasgow University, and of course, the various llet artists scattered in locations as far from Glasgow as Slovenia and Australia.
The final chapter in this epic multi-medla poem comes when the whole event is captured on video and beamed back to a global audience in a ground- breaking piece of live Internet broadcasting. Zlna Kaye the Aussie Net-artist whose images will be displayed over the Clyde explains why this use of the Net as a broadcast medium is so significant. ‘This mode of communication (the lntemet) is very popular, but you need cash to get into it. By broadcasting images/thoughts/ideas Stomy Wafers gets around some of these problems and allows a view through an albeit small hole into a big whole.’ (Ellie Carr)
The List 1427 Jul l99519