Stu Robarts
Since 2007

BIO
FACT, the headquarters of the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, is a new media arts centre, gallery and cinema.

FACT commissions and exhibits film, video and new media art and is the only organisation of its kind in the UK. Since its inception, FACT has curated work by some of the world's foremost artists, including Barbara Kruger, Vito Acconci, Walid Raad and the Black Audio Film Collective.

FACT was, and remains, a vibrant flagship in the £100 million redevelopment of the Ropewalks district of Liverpool and played a key role in the city's successful Capital of Culture bid.
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EVENT

Had to be There?


Dates:
Mon Oct 15, 2007 00:00 - Tue Oct 02, 2007

Can you archive digital art?

Do you have to enjoy digital art in a gallery, in the here and now? Or can it be archived and preserved for future generations?

Leading figures from film, video and new media art will be at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) for a one-day symposium, to discuss the merits and histories of archiving time-based media, on 16 October 2007.

The event coincides with the launch of the FACT Archive, which is the world’s first archive of video art, video-installation art and new-media art to be made available online, with moving image records, including all the links between the data, made freely accessible to all. It contains information and recorded documentation from the FACT Video Positive Festival 1989-2000, at the time Britain’s first and biggest festival for art in these forms.

The one-day symposium, Had to be There? will discuss archiving time-based media, issues arising in its development, and how those issues might affect the art form itself.

Invited speakers include:
Mike Stubbs, artist and Director/CEO of FACT;
A: Database, collaborators on the FACT Archive;
David Hall, artist and filmmaker;
Lynn Hershman Leeson, artist specialising in interactive computer and net-based media art;
Tamara Krikorian, artist and founding member of London Video Arts;
Stephen Partridge, artist, producer and lead on REWIND at the University of Dundee;
Katie Lips, artist, marketer and Director of Kisky Net Media;
Superflex, artist collective;
Sonia Boyce, artist

Had to Be There?
FACT
16 October 9.30am - 6.00pm
Symposium 25.00/20.00 (FACT Members and concessions)
Symposium & Dinner 50.00/45.00 (FACT Members and concessions)
(Dinner 15 October 7.00pm)

For more information contact Gabrielle Jenks on Gabrielle.Jenks@fact.co.uk or 0151 707 4450


EVENT

Anna Lucas Here and Your Here


Dates:
Tue Oct 16, 2007 00:00 - Tue Jul 24, 2007

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool presents three major new film commissions from London based artist Anna Lucas in an exhibition entitled Here and Your Here from 30 June until 19 August 2007.

Lucas travels from the community on her doorstep in Brixton, to the Middle East and Peru in search of two exotic and rare plants growing wild in their natural habitat. Both plants, Kaff Mariam and Una de Gato, can be used for medicinal and nutritional purposes, but their whereabouts and the folklore surrounding them is shrouded in myth. Even the plants themselves seem intent on cancelling the other out - one is believed to encourage fertility, the other as a contraceptive. Amidst a backdrop of political uncertainty and environmental concern, Lucas explores the complex network of belief, superstition and spiritualism that surrounds each plant leading her to challenge her own understanding of territory and that of the people she meets along the way.

Lucas’ journey begins with with Atlantic Botanic, a two-screen installation juxtaposing Brixton Market with the regimented interior of the South London Botanical Institute (SLBI). The market’s reputation for selling foodstuffs and ingredients from all over the globe gives its traders an unschooled knowledge of plants and their uses, contrasting with the SLBI’s academic approach to botany. What at first seems like a collision of two very different conventions becomes, through the course of the film, an intimate insight into two similarly dying cultures, as mainstream urbanity extends its domination.

Kaff Mariam and Una de Gato depict Lucas’ expeditions to the Middle East and Peru. With the help of the indigenous populations, she must overcome language barriers, difficult terrain, attitudes to her sex and most importantly separate the truth from the legend to find the plants.


EVENT

FACT revisits ground-breaking Video Positive Festival


Dates:
Fri Aug 31, 2007 00:00 - Tue Jul 24, 2007

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) unveils a new online archive giving public access to over 20 years of technological innovation to coincide with an exhibition re-visiting the organisation’s ground-breaking visual arts festival, Video Positive.

Running bi-annually between 1989 and 2000, The Video Positive Festival brought video art onto the national stage, giving its artists international recognition. The festival reflected FACT’s ethos and long-standing commitment to new work and pioneering art forms and exhibiting commissioned work across a variety of venues across Liverpool. Emerging from the festival came FACT’s Collaborations Programme, now in its 15th year and one of the first arts projects in the UK to be socially engaging and bring artists into the community.

Re: [Video Positive] Archiving Video Positively, will re-stage work by some of the most significant and internationally renowned artists of the festival: David Hall, Judith Goddard, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Imogen Stidworthy and Lei Cox. A new commission by artists Thomson & Craighead will also be on view.

At the same time as the exhibition, the FACT Archive launches, making over 2,000 works by over 100 artists freely available online. Predicted to be one of the largest online archives of digital art, the FACT Archive will include artists working across a variety of disciplines including painting, sculpture, installation, video and performance. Its aim it not only to encourage the enjoyment and perusal of new media and digital art but also to help preserve it by transferring it to a sustainable format.

The exhibition, and archive, is an opportunity for new media and digital artwork to be re-contextualised, examining the rapid development of technology. How do you re-present a work originally conceived in analogue when the current norm is projected in HD? As the audience becomes acquainted with new technology, so too does the artist so the re-presentation of these artworks, some commissioned almost two decades ago, will consider the sociological and cultural differences affecting the how the works will be seen in today’s fully technological context: The sculptural video installations of the 80s; laser discs and CD Rom at the beginning of the 90s, and the explosion of interactive art later in the decade.