Loop-pool

Produced under the banner Art Creating Society in partnership with The Yellow House, this work was commissioned by Liverpool City Council as part of the programme for the European Capital of Culture bid, and comprised a large scale public art and multimedia project sited on the Pier Head, Liverpool. The notion of the art process becoming a pre-text for the creation of networks of association was first explored in the Art Creating Society exhibition and symposium (MOMA Oxford 1990) (Elliott and Willats). Informed by this idea, Loop-pool proved to be a summative project of research around new media and collaborative practice over a 10 year period, involving collaboration with The Yellow House working in Hamburg, Glasgow, Gdansk, Frankfurt, Koln and Prague, where the working premise was to investigate how, in different ways, with participants in cities linked by twinning agreements, an art process could explore aspects of difference in an international and transaction-based context. The key issue explored was how artists and participants in these differing urban contexts could interact with each other through an art making process. Loop-pool was a spatial intervention literally reflecting the cityscape and the river Mersey as the historic gateway to the wider world of trade commerce and cultural exchange, incorporating videowork of people in Koln, Prague and Gdansk speaking about Liverpool. The Loop-pool public art installation, constructed collaboratively by the project participants, gave wider public access to the activity, documented over the previous eight years, of this network of European citizens. Loop-pool manifested a socially and interactively constructed critical but positive and celebratory view of Liverpool’s place in Europe, contrasting with more negative, stereotyped and media driven perceptions of the city