The Frequency Festival of Digital Culture arrives in Lincoln with an official launch party to kick off nine days of art, technology and culture.
The biennial festival will see virtual realities blur with medieval streets when extraordinary art exhibitions, installations and performances combine to transform Lincoln’s streets and buildings from 18th – 26th October 2013.
As part of the University of Lincoln’s collaboration with Frequency 2013, a number of its internationally renowned artists will exhibit their work in historic and contemporary venues across the city. A world-first screening of an entire NASA film collection is just one of the installations created by staff and students at the University as part of this year’s festival.
Dr Chris Riley, Visiting Professor at the University of Lincoln’s School of Media, will unveil Apollo Raw and Uncut, an intriguing video compilation charting NASA’s Apollo space missions.
Between 1966 and 1972, NASA amassed around 13 hours of 16mm film footage shot in space and on the surface of the Moon during the Apollo missions. Since then this irreplaceable collection has been stored under liquid nitrogen to preserve it in NASA’s vaults in Houston.
Visitors to Frequency 2013 will now have an exclusive opportunity to see this entire Apollo flight film archive for free in high definition, from 9am on Saturday 19th October at the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre on the University’s main Brayford Pool campus. For the first time, the showing of this unique work will take place in one single screening event, projecting the entire 13-hour body of film, which includes spectacular views of the Earth from space and the moment Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the Moon’s surface.
Dr Riley said: “Apollo Raw and Uncut is a unique project that presents the Moon shots to the public, without the usual editing that documentary film-making enforces on our view of the Apollo story. It is a story which revolutionised our view of the Earth – seen with human eyes for the first time from so far away. The footage in this collection, shot entirely by the Apollo astronauts themselves, permanently changed our perspective of our home planet and our place in the Universe.”
Frequency 2013’s theme of ‘revolution’, which invites audiences to explore the ways in which digital technology has changed the way that we see the world around us, is also evident in the Misdirect Movies exhibition curated by Andrew Bracey, MA Fine Art Programme Leader at the University of Lincoln.
The innovative cinema-inspired display showcases work from seven international artists, who explore new possibilities of collage using materials gleaned from classic movie scenes. Misdirect Movies was developed by Andrew and his co-curator, artist John Rimmer, to celebrate cinema’s near endless supply of imagery through a wide range of media that bridge analogue and digital platforms, such as projections, digital prints and painting.
Andrew said: “The works in Misdirect Movies are embedded in the lineage of collage; cutting up, repositioning and rearranging a vast selection of cinematic imagery to create new meaning. Orson Welles’ unfinished version of Don Quixote features a scene where Quixote slashes at a screen in a cinema. This scene acts as a lynchpin for the exhibition, expanding on the notion of Quixotic, intertextuality and the slippage of reality and illusion. ”
University of Lincoln artists commissioned by Frequency 2013 include Interactive Design graduate Matthew Whetherly, postgraduate MA Curatorial Practice students, the LPAC Producers and Lincoln School of Media lecturers Graham Cooper and David McSherry.
For more information and to view the complete programme, visit www.frequency.org.uk.