Another show which isn’t part

Another show which isn’t part of the Liverpool Biennial but I have to mention it and I know I say this almost every day but ‘this exhibition is fun’, unfortunately it finishes on Thursday evening. There are four interactive works from graduates of the JMU International Centre for Digital Content (ICDC). I’m a bit of a geek so these things appeal to me and I hope serious artists don’t object to me reducing their work to a ‘this is fun’ statement, I do appreciate the serious side too. I also hope they don’t mind me taking the piss out of artists statements or brochure blurb. e.g. ‘Paul Ashton focuses upon experiences that aim to provide participants with the opportunity to become the producers, performers and consumers of sound and noise’ – Its actually a voice-activated slot car track called ‘Soundxtric’. There are 2 helmets with microphones and the louder you say ‘vroom, vroom’ or whatever the faster the cars travel.
‘Echolalia’ by Diana Lorenzo Saxby is ‘an interactive installation based on images, sound and expressive typography designed to produce connections between the machine and the user’ i.e. IBM Via Voice with pictures. I was particularly interested in this because my late wife used a voice recognition system years ago which was great because she was able to carry on working even when she could no longer use the keyboard. But you had to spend hours, initially, to train the system to recognise your voice and speech patterns and it could be infuriating when background noise like a door banging produced garbage. Whenever she sneezed (she also had hay-fever!) it would come up with a word like ‘Christmas’. So for this work Via Voice will have been ‘trained’ by Diana presumably and she has a spanish accent so when visitors speak into the mic. you get some interesting results.
‘Visible City’ by Chris Nelson is a sort of pivoting table top with a screen built into it showing a virtual sphere in a blurred landscape. As you manipulate the screen the sphere moves around the landscape which should slowly become more detailed.

The 3 above are all in the Box, tucked under the stairs in the foyer area is Adam Cooke’s work where you can use the cursor control on his mobile phone to move the arrow cursor on the screen and hear different pre-recorded sounds, some recorded within FACT. I came away from that feeling a bit un-hip because my mobile doesn’t have a cursor control button!