Turning FACT Inside Out
at the FACT, Liverpool until 15th September 2013
Reviewed by Denis Joe July 2013
FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. The centre houses three galleries, three cinemas, including the most uncomfortable cinema I have ever been in: The Box, where they show the more interesting films. Over the decade the galleries have housed some interesting and provocative exhibits including the excellent Nam June Paik exhibition, which was the subject of my first review for the Manchester Salon web site.
To celebrate, FACT have put on an exhibition which they describe as turning FACT ‘inside out’, testing the way in ‘which the cultural centre will extend beyond the walls of the physical container, moving outside and online’.
The first work that one encounters is Nina Edge’s Ten Intentions. The work is a communications experiment that attempts to discover what people will say to a robot that turns talking into writing. The work uses Apple’s voice recognition technology, Siri, which allows writing to be produced at the speed of speech. It also ‘mishears’ speech, producing misunderstandings.