AL and AL at HOME
Ahead of their new solo exhibition at HOME we talk to artists AL and AL about everything from Francis Crick's panspermia theory (us neither) to an Alan Turing dreamscape populated by anorexic Terminators (that's more like it)
AL and AL are busy at their home just outside Manchester. “We’ve been editing. With the films we go into another universe,” says AL. “Most of the work for the show is done but we’re working on this new piece, we must have been working on it for the last 18 months now, on and off. We don’t know what day it is or what time it is.” Editing fatigue, however, does not seem to show and they are smiling, chipper even, inside my computer screen (we’re talking on Skype). They have every reason to be upbeat. On 6 February the duo open their new solo exhibition, Incidents of Travel in the Multiverse, at HOME, Manchester, which includes film installations, drawing, print and a new commission titled The Demiurge.
After meeting in 1997 (apparently by chance in Derek Jarman’s garden – good art-world meta-info), AL and AL have been making films together since 2001. They often deal with sci-fi or alternate realities, imagined multi-dimensional situations, technological theories and historical moments that suggest possibilities for the future. “In one sense the stories always start with fact,” says AL, “then they become a kind of re-meditation on that fact.”
“The new commission is really about Francis Crick’s panspermia theory,“ says AL, referring to the idea that microorganisms could have been sent deliberately to Earth from space to establish life and could also be sent from Earth to other places in the universe as ‘seeds.' “And [it's also about] the work of nanobiophysicist Bart Hoogenboom who created the world’s first ‘real’ images of DNA. Because, of course, the images of DNA structure that we all know, no one has actually 'seen' the double helix, it’s not a real image. Hoogenboom has created this cantilevered needle and as the needle strokes the atoms it creates the image of the atom. He’s basically feeling them. The rub is creating an image of what it’s touching so it creates this real image of DNA in its natural environment. They are finding that they are not as perfect as we imagined.” AL and AL’s resulting film works as modern myth, following the demiurge character on board a spaceship populated by genetically modified clones travelling across the universe searching for a cure for death.
Alan Turing and Multiverse is the Creator
Modern mythology and storytelling run through all of AL and AL’s work. Part of the exhibition is an ‘event horizon’ V-shaped triptych installation, which includes their 2010 work Icarus at the Edge of Time (40 mins), based on Brian Greene’s children’s book. The two have been developing this into a three-screen epic space opera which for the Manchester show will include a special live performance at the Royal Northern College of Music. “Brian is coming over to narrate live with an 80-piece orchestra,” says AL. “We’ve done that before and it’s an amazing event and a beautiful live piece.”
Perhaps a central work in the Multiverse is The Creator (2012; 40 mins) which follows a dreamscape narrative in which scientist Alan Turing is visited from the future by 'thinking machines'. (“We prefer that term to AI,” says AL, “as to call any intelligent being artificial reminds us of the homophobia Turing suffered.") Exploring the last days of Turing’s life before he is thought to have committed suicide (although this is much disputed), anorexic Terminator-type entities cavort, with shiny silver and breathy voices following Turing as the machines he has created become a reality.
Why did the two become fascinated with Turing’s story? “Turing is really important to us. He essentially invented the computer age. You know, Steve Jobs, Microsoft, etc. have come in and built the operating systems we all work on now but without Turing it’s questionable whether we would have those computers at all. His ideas were the seed. And computers are really important to us and how we work. We make films on computers, so when we started to learn about his story many years ago we knew we definitely wanted to make a film about him in the future.”
Turing’s story, of course, is not just about his contribution to the evolution of computer technology but also very much about his private life and how he was treated by society as a gay man. After a career that included cracking the Enigma code (thought to have shortened WWII by at least two years) and designing the first electronic computer, he was convicted, in 1952, under the Gross Indecency Act for homosexual activity. Rather than go to jail he accepted a course of chemical castration, had his security clearance revoked, and suffered ongoing harassment as he was thought to be a security risk. His was found dead by his cleaner in 1954 by cyanide poisoning, a half-eaten apple next to his bed.
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“Obviously Turing should have been a gay superhero for us when we were growing up,” says AL. “We only learned about Turing later in life, because the law erased him from a heroic history. When the Cornerhouse commissioned us to make a film celebrating his centenary in 2012 we wanted to get away from the Cambridge professor and his twee cucumber sandwiches and get inside his futuristic sci-fi head, where he was thinking about making an intelligent machine.
“It’s also fascinating to think of what he could have gone on to do with his research. Towards the end of his life he was actually bored with computers. He was working on morphogenesis in Manchester. He believed he was on the cusp of his most important theory. He made a beautiful drawing of the Fibonacci sequence inside a sunflower, numbering every seed.”
A relatively new element of the Multiverse for AL and AL is the exhibition of their drawings from over the last five years. AL and AL see them as both planning-and-development tools and works in their own right, almost scores for the films. “We haven’t really shown them that much before,” says AL. “We’ve always concentrated on the video work because that’s the sort of meat, if you like, in one sense of what we do, or it’s the main thing we spend our time doing. When we sat down with this solo exhibition we just felt that it was time, and important, to bring out some of the processes that go into the films.
“Interestingly enough we were talking to Philip Glass, who’s composing the score for our new film, about that. We had just gone to see a drawing show at MoMA. He was telling us about the way he writes his music and when he showed us the score, we realised that they were like drawings. In many ways drawing is the fastest way to get an idea from your head into the world. And obviously making film is the slowest. Because of course you have to cast it, you have to build the sets, you have to light it, you have to film it, you have to grade it and you have to do the sound... There’s a million jobs to do whereas with drawing there is that immediacy.”
AL and AL on the exhibition at HOME
AL and AL have used the occasion of the show at HOME to delve into and make visible the multi-layers that go into conceiving and making work. “An important part of the exhibition is a book we have just written containing different facets of conversations we’ve been having, Multiverse reports of our adventures making these films,” says AL. “You have all these strange meetings along the way and we’ve got these incredible relationships with these scientists over the last five years – they’ve inspired so many different channels of investigation. In a way those conversations are where the real work is."
The exhibition platform and the installation of a film, over a cinema release or festival screening, is also an important further layer for the two. “The whole gallery space is a place where people can have those conversations. Exhibitions can really be revelatory, life-changing moments – like the seeds of a beautiful romance or conversation. You know when you go on a date to a movie or a show, it’s a beautiful thing to have a great conversation with a lover afterwards. It’s part of the experience of your life.”
Does bringing in other voices and having those outside conversations, I wonder, help keep the two stimulated in their creative and personal relationship? “I think anyone who’s been in a relationship for as long as we have, which is getting close to 20 years now – of course you change all the time and develop by the week, month, year. But we’ve always managed to seduce each other and make our conversations go in ways that are interesting to each other and obviously all these other people we’ve been able to talk to and work with are part of that development.”
The HOME exhibition will be a key development in AL and AL’s career, a moment when the artists can take stock a little of all facets of their practice before they move forward with the next major project – their first full-length feature film, which will be released in 2017. The Creator feature, supported by the BFI and Creative Scotland, will take the shorter 2012 film and expand the Turing narrative. “We knew that story was right for our first feature film. We’re working up to concentrating on filming now. It’s been an amazing ride with that project, years and years.” So no rest after the exhibition opening then? AL and AL laugh. “No, not at all. We just keep going and going.” I wave a real/virtual goodbye and shut my computer to let them do just that.
Incidents of Travel in the Multiverse runs at HOME, Manchester, from 6 Feb to 10 Apr