INTERFACES, Mnemonic City in collaboration with Fish Island Labs

About

The opening of the show will unravel an unusual if not surprising collection of works for their incredibly disparate forms and origins. Indeed Fish Island Labs a creative High-Tec experiment based on data research, programming cutting edge apps, digital media and hologram environments, robotics 3d printing and statistics, virtual reality in all its intriguing guises revealing the tastiest cyborg devices emerging in the metropolis, has teamed up with the Magma Collective and Open Visor. The Barbican is promoting this collaboration, inviting Magma, a group of dedicated mostly multi disciplinary artists, to invoke a new Mnemonic City, now into it’s fifth residency, out of the time machine.

Mnemonic city has travelled from the idea of Plato’s cave, into the street market of Dalston, through Madrid to the outer edge of the city, the abandoned interscape of Edmonton into the cradle of a European symbol of ancient beauty, back to the heart of the global economy in the fortress of cultural entertainment, the Barbican before heading for the Atlantic shores, the magnificent Portuguese capital of Lisbon. After a year of deep core immersion into the layers of our old mega town, the inventions are ready to speak. What we find is a point of connection between ideas of past present and future, in the form of analogue and information technology, both indispensable to the modelling of a modern civilisation where theorists and practitioners alike begin to understand the crucial role of equilibrium between science and art and as importantly the cultivation of openness towards the inclusion of an audience in this process.

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Over the past 12 months, this community of 20 practitioners have developed cutting-edge new work, covering everything from sculpture, installations and physical performance to coding, film editing and digital art – and now they’re taking over the Barbican Foyers.
Together, these artists take a diverse approach to interrogating how human experience can be transformed by multi-media art practice."