Glitch in the Matrix: FACT Turns Ten
Fancy seeding a forest on Bold Street, taking a virtual bike ride or polling against capitalism? FACT's tenth anniversary exhibition, which features augmented reality and an indoor fracking site, asks us tough questions about our real and digital environments
"FACT is a safe place to have risky conversations," says Mike Stubbs, director of the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT). For the Liverpool gallery's forthcoming tenth anniversary exhibition, Turning FACT Inside Out, those conversations include fracking, capitalism, and the schism between the virtual and the real environment.
They're big, outward-looking issues for a birthday show to tackle, especially where many institutions might instead have chosen to stage a retrospective celebrating a decade of their own achievements. But with the tags 'Art, Media, Film,' "we've got the license to talk about all sorts of things in society which are taboo, or not normally discussed openly," Stubbs explains. "It's really important that we remind everybody that's what it's all about. It's not about beautification and making things lovely."
Co-curated by Stubbs and Aneta Krzemien, five new commissions by artists HeHe, Katarzyna Krakowiak, Manifest.AR, Nina Edge and Uncoded Collective join work never before seen in the UK, in what Stubbs describes as an "occupation" of – rather than mere exhibition in – FACT's galleries, atrium and surrounding public spaces.
With Fracking Futures, Parisian duo HeHe – Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen – will turn Gallery 1 into a noisy industrial landscape "complete with earth tremors and flames." Known for their provocative events/media campaigns – perhaps most notably Nuage Vert ('green cloud') in which, in 2008, they projected a fat emerald laser beam onto the thick emission from a smokestack in Helsinki, thus forcing residents to confront the reality of their energy usage – HeHe are no strangers to art with a socio-political bite; nor is American artist Steve Lambert, whose touring installation Capitalism Works For Me! True/False will be set up in the building's entrance, encouraging visitors to respond with a black and white 'yes' or 'no' (no fence-sitting, please).
As well as prompting visitors to analyse their own stances on divisive global topics, the exhibition aims to challenge what FACT itself – as both a building and organisation – is, and what it is willing to be. "[We're] deconstructing people's perceptions of what an arts centre is, by working with artists who are fundamentally deconstructive and attempting to repurpose," Stubbs explains. Taking this idea to its literal extreme are American cyberartist group Manifest.AR, whose six commissioned augmented reality games propose to remodel the FACT building and the city, enabling visitors to 'write' in the sky with airplane trails, 'plant' burgeoning flora and fauna on Bold Street, and 'delete' office blocks and vehicles, all through a mobile device.
"This is the first time Manifest.AR have been invited into an institution without them hacking it," Stubbs jokes, referring to the collective's recent 'uninvited interventions' at MoMA and Tate Modern where "neither institution knew they were having their exhibition, but about 1500 people turned up one day, and they didn't understand why these people were walking around the space holding their phones up."
Elsewhere, for installation TranseuropeSlow – titled after Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express album – Uncoded Collective have been recording bicycle journeys through the outskirts of Liverpool, which can be experienced on a bike in the building's foyer; Krakowiak's Chute will allow us to listen to the sonics of FACT itself, and Nina Edge's Ten Intentions, a 'communication experiment' using Siri voice recognition software, sounds more than a little Black Mirror.
Exploring this confluence – or gulf – between the real and the virtual is Stubbs' pet fascination, and is increasingly the main thrust behind FACT's programming. "Most of us experience digital space through social media, but increasingly that will shift into a whole range of services and environments, and the relationships that come with it," he says. "How do they in turn inform the way that we go about real life?
"We're learning lots of new protocols and customs, super-quickly without even thinking about it, because we haven't got time to think. People have multiple identities across digital space, and it's really shifting their view of the built environment. We've got a society where the cities still look like they were built on medieval, Roman or turn-of-the-century Industrial Revolution models, but the way that we are now immersed in ubiquitous digital media means there's a clash in the way we're conceiving of the world.
"That's probably the thing which excites me most about the future of FACT going forwards: engaging with those questions more and more."
Turning FACT Inside Out, FACT, Liverpool, 13 Jun-25 Aug, free
The launch on 13 June will see the participating artists animate their works with special performances (6-8pm, free), followed by a party at The Kazimier Garden with Optimo (JD Twitch) (8pm-late, donation)