Saturday, February 14, 2015

UIQ - (The unmaking of ) and bye to Steve Strange

Well having looked at what was on in an around my 'hood came to the conclusion having read the below blurb that I couldn't miss it:

Working with the paradoxical conditions of the unmade as something both already and not yet present, the artists seek to' produce' Guattari's film through a collective experience of envisioning without filming a single scene.
The exhibition centres on A Love of UIQ: the unmaking-of, a spatialised, polyphonic soundwork containing edited fragments from a number of 'seeances' that took place in different cities in which the participants become receivers and transmitters of UIQ (the Infra-Quark Universe), contaminating each other in turn with their own visions and ideas of Guattari’s film and of UIQ’s possible manifestations, both within and beyond its limits.
A Love of UIQ: the unmaking-of will be accompanied by a quantum archive of documents, photos and videos – spanning themes of Autonomia, free radio, the schizo-analytical and sci-fi – as well as other works that Thomson and Maglioni have produced around the unmade film.

The exhibition did bring to mind both the imagined film of Ilona Gaynor (A 2014 Designer in Residence at the Design Mueum)  and the audio work seen recently in Turner Prize submissions for 2014.

Rather oddly on the day I heard of  55 year old Welsh born Steve Strange's death, he was part of  Visage and their  big hit single (Fade to Grey)  was part of the accompanying ephemera of UIQ. 
Bye Steve, he literally has started a fade to nothing  

[I did read today that one dies twice, first at the time of one ceasing to live and the second time when your name is spoken for the last time.] 

I can't help but feel that something of a trick was missed, as with other 'Video installations the media seemed to be running free without a particular schedule and explanations were limited.

The venue was The Show Room just near Edgware Road station  and the experience for me was slightly bizarre, sitting in a darkened area on a cushion watching intermittent images and trying to decide where I'd come in.

Certainly there's a good idea there but the narrative is not strong and we're very tuned to an arc we can follow.


A venue one can only be surprised at.

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