The Manchester Weekender

The Manchester Weekender was an arts festival held across Manchester During October. It was an eclectic mix of fine art, design, film, experimental music, and drama.

The Feral Trade Café

The Feral Trade Café in Castle Field Gallery, provided an inciteful and quirky look at the idea of a the world as one big social network. A slightly hippy approach, food was purchased and then transported all over the world in a kind of hitchhikers/ black market kind of exchange where the organizers would get a friend of a friend to bring back interesting ingredients into the UK and then finally making its way into Manchester.

Recorders

This exhibition opened with an evening of live electrica that was strangely calming in the open atrium of the Manchester Art Gallery. Upstairs, housed a host of  digital … well fun! An entire gallery room was lit by rows of hanging dim orange  light bulbs which pulsed gently and then went out. A beautiful effect anyhow, but on closer inspection each individual beat, was actually a recording converted into light of an individuals pulse. Placing my hands on the sensor I waited as my pulse was measured and transferred into a light blub above my head. Once it was pulsing the room went black and it beat alone. When light returned the pulse was gently transferred along to the next light bulb to join the pulsing masses. A really beautiful and human display. It said something about our fragility and our collective identity as a species.  It visualised your own internal  life processes , a comment on both life and death.

The other crowd pleaser was a second huge gallery room, whose wall was made up of giant projections – cameras projected you as film onto the wall whilst tracking your movements and tagging you with a number- It felt a little like a comment on surveillance and the increasing digital  intelligence that leaves us unable to escape. This same room featured light projectors which cast huge (or small if you stood close) shadows of those within the room – needless to say some very amusing camera shots were to follow!