Fast and Slow Networks

Digital technologies are the accelerator pedal of contemporary visual culture. Artists, in response, are producing evermore dynamic content, framing how such technologies are reshaping our urban culture. They are also exploring through their practice, ways of socialising these technologies; making them more person orientated and relative. This project highlights how technologies of the information age mirror older, slower networks of the industrial past. Interval is interested in the collision of physical person2person networks with their digital counterparts, and has brought together a group of artists and DIY technologists to explore this conception. Interval will set out on a journey along Manchester's canal network on a barge, hosting a selection of projects in this 'mobile media' space. Live work created aboard the boat will simultaneously be streamed over a custom-built wireless network and projected inside a shipping container located at the Museum of Science and Industry. Interval's selection of mobile locations responds to our express culture; to the supermodernity of impermanence. Through making the work mobile, the audience is encouraged to slow down, to relocate from network time to 'not-work' time, get swept away over Manchester's glittering waters, and join the flotsam and jetsam of barge culture