Release Your Inhibitions at AND Festival

Where else can you expect to see Drag artists and Marxist philosophers at the same event?  ‘Abandon Normal Devices’ (AND) is the place, a series of visual experiments of digital cinema, performance and media art.

After AND’s smash hit conception last year in Liverpool, this year Manchester takes centre stage, with its headquarters at the Cornerhouse mixed arts venue on Oxford Road.  From there AND will spread out across Manchester, appearing in nearly every cultural centre in the city. The focus this year is on ‘Identity, Behaviours and Systems’. With brand new commissions from internationally renowned artists, filmmakers and cultural provocateurs, we can expect our perception of who we are, what art is and its relationship to science to be deconstructed and redefined. The title, ‘Abandon Normal Devices’, is a reference to the musician Brian Eno’s ‘Oblique Strategies’; a set of cards devised to break the monotony of working life and create new ways of thinking. AND is a festival of contemporary enlightenment with an aim to dissolve the overbearing borders of art, science and technology, to produce a cacophony of visual delight and mental stimulation.

Highlights of this year’s festival include, ‘Midnight Mass’, by contemporary drag artist Peaches Christ aka Joshua Grannell. He invites us to don trashy  ‘Gore couture’, costumes we can create and  therefore celebrate all that is ‘bad’ in cinema for the international premiere of his horror comedy, All About Evil. Here the audience is the focus for this 4D floorshow extravaganza, as you go wild in the aisles in the cinema that demands devilish behavior. Expect sex, scandal and Rocky Horror Show glamour.

Or, for an intellectual feast, try one of the AND Salons, where top academics will be challenging our attitudes and rousing new approaches. Generated from Ben Goldacre’s book, Bad Science, science as a whole will be scrutinized following recent controversies from within the field, from stem cell research to climate change. Our sexual identities, how we are inscribed by social norms and how sexuality is commodified will also be debated. Famous bioethicist Professor John Harris and artist Heath Bunting go identity shopping, exploring how we define our individuality via digital avatars and biological alterations.  Other topics of debate include the relevance of socialism today, stemming from a renewed interest in communism, pioneered by current key philosophers including Slavoj Zizek. Leave your preconceptions at the door.

Not to be missed will be the artist Lawrence Malstaff’s award winning performance, Shrink. A fusion of art, science and technology, Malstaff invites us to contemplate the human form, as volunteers are shrink wrapped in clear PVC sandwiched together and vertically suspended in the Freemasons’ Hall for periods of 20 minutes. Disturbing and delightful, this is performance art at its most exciting.

Abandon Normal Devices runs from 1^st-7th October. Unlike any other festival previously seen, AND is anything and everything you want it to be.  If, “normality is the gravity that holds us together,” AND will allow you to fly. A paean to abnormal reality, expect to drink whisky made form urine in Cube gallery and experience a Soviet carnival ride in Whitworth Park. Why not Abandon your Normal Devices – you will not be disappointed.