UFO Info Week-End

There’s something called The Toybox in the Tate a CD-Rom with work by 20 artists within it – said to

There’s something called The Toybox in the Tate, a CD-Rom with work by 20 artists within it – said to be very interesting, but I never got a clear shot at it. More than one terminal would be handy.But even when you do get your hands on something, big hopes and small frustrations set in. As you find your way round the work, your sense of discovery and decision, at first so strong, begins to feel illusory The choices turn out limited. You keep hitting the edge, coming back to where you’ve been, getting the same result, and start to wonder who is the real manipulator. At the moment, the gallery experience consists too often in looking impatiently over the shoulder of someone who hasn’t mastered the programme but won’t let go of the mouse.

Art will never catch up.The progress of interactivity offers still more curious problems These are partly practical. It’s intriguing and creepy, and it’s done pretty fluently.But we’ve seen that Michael Jackson video, we know that already (though at enormous expense) head-mutations can be done with quite astonishing fluency, a level of effect that Ark only nods to. And when such effects become easier and cheaper, will artists go back and perk up their earlier work? I’d guess not; there’ll be some further not-quite-possibility on the horizon to aim for. The artist can’t but think ahead to what could be done in the future but when that future arrives there’ll be another one to think ahead to.So the fact that a work’s reach tends to exceed its grasp is more than a teething trouble, it’s inherent. At the Bluecoat Gallery, for instance, you can see Marty St James’s and Ann Wilson’s Ark; a roomful of monitors, encased in ornate traditional frames, showing some of their “living portraits” – human heads, turning and changing expression slowly, but this time also melding and mutating into the heads of animals. The resistance of the medium will always be felt as a constricting limitation, not as a stable working resource If it works perfectly, it’s pass. Whatever is feasible asks to be used, but whatever is feasible (or affordable) now will shortly be superseded.

The situation, for both artist and audience, isn’t like that at all.The technology moves on inexorably, fast, with no plateau in sight, and it’s not the artists who are making the going. The days when a work might be a single tape playing on a single monitor and be found interesting are gone. I don’t think there’s one example in the various exhibitions showing around Liverpool over the next month. Complex installations and lively image manipulation are standard now Interactive devices thrive As yet, there are no virtual headsets and body bags. But these things will come.In this field, the foreseeable future presses everywhere on the present, which makes it odd to say (and people do) that the electronic arts are still in their infancy – as if at some point in the future the whole business was going to grow up and settle down: so just bear with us. But one day, and perhaps quite soon, when the virtual has got really real, and interactivity is total, just imagine: an image may be able to gob in your mouth, and you gob back in its.
“Video Positive 95″ is the fourth biennial “UK Festival of Electronic Arts”, and stress the subtitle because, over the years, the name has dated Video itself is already looking primitive as an art medium. But all the extracts so far have concentrated on belittling everyday human activities by comparison with philosophy.

It might be nice if, over the next few weeks, the producers could include something from a slightly more cheerful thinker Gary Richardson would be good.Robert Hanks. In a corner of the Liverpool Tate, two large video-projections are cast on to abutting walls At first, both frames are blank. Then, slow motion, a male mouth, in profile and vast close-up, enters on the left and facing it, on the right, a female mouth enters. The male mouth begins to purse and wriggle.On the soundtrack we hear a heavily amplified articulation of mandibles. The female mouth, meanwhile, begins to stretch wide open, till it strains at maximum gape, and holds it, trembling yearningly. The naked mouth pouts – and suddenly gobs, and a comet of sputum flies across the frame, round the corner, into the other frame and disappears down the woman’s throat with a loud plop Then the walls go dark and the tapes rewind This is Intercourse by Stephanie Smith and Edward Stewart It’s all over in a minute. Intercourse is a juicy one-liner, but as these things go it’s now at the trad end of the spectrum: a straight film for a viewer who stands before a double-screen There are no buttons to push The show doesn’t change if you move about Your involvement is just looking.

This is meant to be ironic; but after Boethius seems welcome and deeply persuasive.All this is very well done – nicely read by Anthony Hyde and Alan Howard, well-chosen extracts that give you a strong flavour of the author’s style and themes. The line here is that happiness has no relation to facts, but only to opinions – hence, fawning and deception of all kinds are a good idea as long as they keep you happy. You can imagine losing patience with him very rapidly in any kind of crisis.Friday: Erasmus, from In Praise of Folly – the nature of happiness. His theme is the unpredictability of “that monster, Fortune” – the idea being that everything you count as a blessing is either bestowed by nature or belongs to other people, so you shouldn’t take too much pride in having it, or worry about losing it.