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Liverpool Biennial review – bleeps, bones and a machine that curates

Adding AI and more to its traditional art offerings, the festival’s theme of artistic experience shared through technology could not be more timely

There’s a sugary quality to Chiptune — the synthesized electronic music popularised by video game consoles and arcade machines in the 1980s. Hearing it live at the online “listening party” for Larry Achiampong’s series, Videogame Mixtape, is perhaps comparable to eating, as an adult, the confectionery you once binged on as a kid – time is reversed, instantly evoking full-coloured memories of your youth.

Achiampong’s listening party was one of a raft of online events to launch the postponed 11th edition of Liverpool’s biennial art festival: The Stomach and the Port. The British-Ghanaian artist has long been interested in video game storytelling, and his Videogame Mixtape is a meditation on the heritage and evolution of gaming music. The sonic limitations of Chiptune – its 8-bit or 16-bit processors could produce only a small number of sounds – are what gave games like Super Mario Bros their famous blocky and bleepy texture The sounds crossed over into other genres, inspiring grime musicians who sampled and adopted video game soundtracks in their tracks (1994’s Wolverine: Adamantium Rage is said to accidently be the first ever grime instrumental). The piece is also, quite simply, a playlist of “grooves”. Achiampong mixes together glitchy melodies from games such as Sonic The Hedgehog 2 and Street Fighter with accompanying chromatic graphics to be enjoyed as a cinematic compilation album of greatest hits.

2021’s Liverpool Biennial opens in two phases. The first, last week, included the unveiling of seven outdoor commissions, including a photomontage mural of layered flowers, small animals and red lips by Linder in College Lane, a bronze sculpture of two cast heads by Rashid Johnson at Canning Dock, and, at Exchange Flags, Teresa Solar’s Osteoclast, large sculptures resembling human bones that are made of kayaks. The first phase also features a range of digital commissions, including a podcast series, tutorial videos titled First Birth by body percussion ensemble KeKeÇa, and an AI project – The Next Biennial Should Be Curated by a Machine – by Ubermorgen, Leonardo Impett and Joasia Krysa.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3w4Be64
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