Art for shopping centres
Join us 10-20 May, 2007 @ Manchester Arndale!
“Thirty years after Brian Eno’s Music For Airports, Futuresonic presents ART FOR SHOPPING CENTRES - transforming the city into a space of experimentation, freeing urban space, and making it strange!
Art For Shopping Centres is the centrepiece of Urban Play, continuing Futuresonic’s focus since 2004 on taking artworks out of the galleries and into urban space. The exhibition is located in Manchester’s main city centre shopping arcade. This is rich territory in many ways - Manchester Arndale was made famous by its proximity to the IRA blast that devastated the city centre in 1996, which was also a catalyst for Manchester’s subsequent commercial boom.
All of the artists bring something a little different, and each has a distinctive vision of the role of the artist. To be honest, it would seem more incongruous for this lot to be working in a gallery, whereas working in urban space, with real people, surrounded by the informal cultures of the city, is to work on home turf.”
MediaShed ft Methods of Movement, THE DUELLISTS
Parkour, or freerunning, involves fluid, uninterrupted movement, adapting motion to obstacles in the environment. Like free-media, freerunning makes use of and re-energises the infrastructure of the city. MediaShed ft Methods of Movement present an acrobatic parkour competition between two late-night traceurs, staged overnight in the Arndale shopping centre, filmed using only the in-house CCTV system, in the first official implementation of the GEARBOX free-media video toolkit, and shown on the screens inside the shopping centre, with an original soundtrack by Hybernation.
Katherine Moriwaki, EVERYTHING REALLY IS CONNECTED AFTER ALL
Visit the Arndale to discover a whole new shopping experience. Using a flock of mobile devices, emergent narratives adapt to the proximity of other people around you while you roam the plazas and arcades. The shopping centre is a ‘non-place’, a space that is unique but identical everywhere across the world. The stories are tales of everyday people encountered in this space. As a backdrop for desire, projection, and the acquisition of material objects, the Arndale and the experience of shopping is explored in order to locate and find experiences and concerns that bind us together in small and large ways.
Harwood, NETMONSTER
Harwood seeks to uncover truths forgotten in the light reflected from the endless shop windows, in an ever-evolving ‘network image’ showing how the Arndale and Manchester city centre have risen from the ashes of the 1996 IRA bomb. Coinciding with the date Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams are scheduled to form an historic power-sharing government in Northern Ireland, Harwood revisits the legacy of the 1996 IRA bomb, which famously detonated just a few meters away from Manchester Arndale. Harwood’s NetMonster software searches the internet for thematic content, sniffing out links and connections, creating a living, composite image from images splintered around the worlds media.