Pigs bladders, ape television and brain-scrambling fog

The Abandon Normal Devices (AND) festival is a myriad of digital, experiential and submersive art forms defined by these, and other, questionable buzzwords. During 48 hours at the arty get-together in Liverpool this weekend I touched a pig’s bladder, watched David Shrigley tattooing arms with biro, and, most abnormally, watched apes watching a television sitcom starring humans dressed as apes.

AND bills itself as a call to arms for “anarchists of the imagination to propose striking perspectives on technological, physical and social normality”. This basically meant that talks and question and answer sessions accompanied each installation, film or event, adding an intellectual, and sometimes bewildering, perspective on this year’s theme of belief.

The “experience” aspect of art is widely criticised by purists. However, the digital medium is one that increasingly takes the onlooker and brings them within the context of the art. To give you the most impressive example from AND, five minutes after I arrived in Liverpool I was whisked into a rather threatening installation called Zee for 12 minutes, during which time more than one person had to be led out screaming.

Zee was created by Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger and is the sort of installation you might come up with while off your head in a club. The doorman who ushered me in gave several melodramatic warnings about not entering if one has epilepsy, respiratory or heart problems, afterwards explaining that the artwork “basically scrambles your brain”. He wasn’t wrong.

It was so densely filled with fake fog that I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. After a few seconds of adjustment the brain scrambling began and, while desperately trying to remember to breathe through my nose not my mouth, I started seeing bright blue, green and yellow triangles and circles flashing briefly in front of my otherwise sightless eyes. This hallucinogenic effect was the result of mega-megawatt strobe lighting in thick smoke.  Minutes later some hysterical wailing began and one poor girl was taken shuddering in terror from the room. Finding the exit was no small feat when all sense of direction, perspective, size and shape is utterly distorted.

Having recovered from Zee with a nice cup of tea I trailed around the many art galleries which had either been transformed for the festival or had popped up in otherwise disused spaces around the city. The football was on so the pubs were teeming with early drinkers in blue shirts but every so often a bright green AND sign heralded a new venue to head into or a new performance to watch.

The cinema on offer included LA Zombie, Melancholia, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye. Melding a film festival with an

arts festival was inevitably going to result in the screening of some slightly too far left-of-field art house movies. The worst was Finisterrae, a movie which takes the notion of the absurd to its most tedious possible trajectory by putting it in the hands of two ghosts wearing sheets who do little other than veer abstractedly from one place to the next ostensibly on some kind of never-properly-explained quest.

The best was Piercing Brightness, a film about alien invasion in Preston which is apparently Britain’s UFO-sighting hotspot. A 40-minute rough cut of Shezad Darwood’s flick (which will eventually be feature-length) was screened for the first time ever at FACT, accompanied by a live soundtrack from silver-haired rockers Acid Mothers Temple. The psychedelic musicians rocked out and provided the perfect electronic zinging for the arrival of flying saucers and freaky hoodie aliens on BMX bikes.

And the pigs bladder? I helped make a football out of one with soccer fanatic and artist John O’Shea. Despite the slightly gross nature of handling swine entrails, it was rather fun. Some were painted gold and filled with beans. Not very usable, but trendy as footballs go.

Primate Cinema was an expression of how similar simians are to us humans. So similar in fact that they’d rather sit inside and watch telly than go outside and play. Three chimpanzees at Edinburgh zoo were observed by artist Rachel Mayeri who went on to make television shows specifically for them using humans dressed in surprisingly convincing monkey suits. Watching the film-for-chimps screened simultaneously with the film of the chimps’ reactions to the film-for-chimps is the sort of postmodern head twister that makes me wonder which species is more intelligent. Very entertaining nevertheless.

At AND there is too much going on to mention all of it but on a sunny weekend in October the city was buzzing with art seekers and those chatting about what they’d seen. The most frequent comment from passersby was “And then my eyes just went all weird and scrambled” which suggests that Zee, which will remain at FACT until late November, is this year’s biggest draw.

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