Abandon Normal Devices

About

This summer, Abandon Normal Devices invites you to experience a festival that highlights the complexities, gradations and anomalies encountered when we examine success as an ideal. AND 2012 is as much about work evolving over time, artists experimenting, and setting ambitious parameters, as it is about finished exhibitions. The experience of success can be fleeting and addictive. A strategy for survival; a money-spinner and a motivator: Rewards can have us going around in circles, travelling far but getting nowhere. We have become the status chasing generation; #winning is our meme. Through unusual strategies, the artists and filmmakers working in this year's festival reveal alternative ways of being by offering rich counterpoints to perfection and undermining accepted logic. During a kaleidoscopic five days, unlikely monuments will be inflated, failed technological dreams will be resurrected and extinct industries will be salvaged and rebuilt. We share artworks which hold a mirror to celebrity culture and shirk responsibility for the financial crash. Alongside these are a number of events that focus on self-improvement, from workshops to enhance your charisma, make-overs that better-prepare you for 2020 and teenagers on-site and online ready to solve all your problems. All this, plus a cacophony of late-night actions and events make up our festival in 2012. We accept that, whenever we strive for something new, there is always the chance we will fail, but in a hyper-competitive Olympic year, AND's attention is drawn to subtlety, humour, vulnerability and tenacity. Are you big enough to fail?