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Eternal Youth

by AL and AL
Exhibition of CGI-Films
FACT, Liverpool, UK
18 April - 08 June, 2008.

Reviewed by Yvonne Spielmann

yvonne.spielmann@uws.ac.uk

The British artist duo AL and AL work with computer-generated imagery in a mixed style that merges elements of computer games, fiction films, and television shows. Their overriding concept is to dismantle the power and control structure of contemporary cultural industries as they create and manipulate behaviour, desire and social roles. AL and AL here use the metaphors of the double and duplication to critically investigate the notion of identity and imitation with regard to media celebrities such as Britney Spears and John Lennon. Their aesthetics are rooted in pop culture and refer to movies as well as to music icons. In the semi-fictional narrative settings of their films, AL and AL also implement blue-screen images of themselves as actors and agents. The resultant synthetic landscapes and interiors are impressively three-dimensional and maneurable as if computer games. The composite imagery mainly result from the application of multi-layered effects - including morph, moving shadows and highly reflexive surfaces. The visualization of live action in animated landscapes - floral scenes but also geometric 3-d environments that are typical to VR - seamlessly blur recognizable distinctions between machine-generated and photographic elements in a self-reflexively unfolding media reality of its own.

What AL and AL are interested in is to create the viewer's awareness for today's proportion of media presence that reaches most aspects of life. Evidently, as the overall implementation of billboards, studio settings and cameras in AL and AL's film stresses, media products such as shows, commercials, films and music videos manifest multiple mergers of 'life' and 'live' so that at the end death and life in the media world become almost indistinguishable from real events. The implementation of real life elements is highlighted in the noticeable physical presence of AL and AL as they immerse figuratively into the simulated live environments of their virtual computer-game like spaces. Herein the artists as authors duplicate as figures of a game and as navigators who have hands on the tools. On the one hand, they control the software to initiate the films externally and, on the other, they handle camera and studio tools to produce the media reality inside the films. This dual approach can be seen as a way to explore in-between spaces of computer generated environments and self-representation.

At FACT, AL and AL show three CGI- films in large-scale projections, "Interstella Stella" and "Perpetual Motion in the Land of Milk and Honey" - that were broadcasted at Channel 4 - and the newly produced work "Eternal Youth" which was commissioned by FACT. In the earlier work "Perpetual Motion" (2004), AL and AL make use of the computer-game structure of endlessly navigation through open-ended virtual spaces, while considering the scientific purpose to develop a machine that has the power to enable free motion. To intersect the scientific with popular elements (the later referring to Britney Spears), AL and AL use black dressed human figures as freely moving shapes with white dots attached to their 'bodies' that visualize trigger points of the movement. Furthermore, the stage and the laboratory are connected through the control panel, where the scientist with a lamb head symbolizes another form of hybridity. Like "Perpetual Motion", the following work "Interstellar Stella" (2006) is heavily loaded with Christian metaphors. While the earlier work stages crucifixion in a surrealist manner, the latter has monks in a church who, not unlike in Old Testament, perform iconoclasm following the here arbitrary rule to "abolish the image and destroy all mediated desire". The narrative plot employs child celebrity, double identity, and merges Christian symbolic of resurrection with revenge crime stories: The film visually exploits board games, street gang looks and pop star images when confronting the main characters, in particular the girl as media celebrity, with their own mediated images.

In the commissioned work for FACT, "Eternal Youth", the life and death of John Lennon serves as structural frame for a narrative that focuses on the identification of the 'fan' who is killing the 'star'. The plot, however, is far from being that linear but is stacked up in different time and space zones that allow the revision of the past and encounters in the future as well as the constant transfer of external and interior views. The film also refers to science fiction elements of transfiguration and rebirthing as well as to film noir style of private investigators. This figure, in "Eternal Youth", is conceived as an agent in-between  crime story and music industry. The visual elements also make reference to Japanese tradition regarding the whitening of faces and to using traditional Japanese wooden houses as places for another line of time/space events. The complexity of the CGI-films is further highlighted by special visual effects on metallic surfaces that show strong reflections as if they were see-through windows. AL and AL surely exploit the latest applications in a style that spans from music to fashion shows and from genre film's plot structure to digital non-linearity.

Initially, the artists AL and AL took advantage of their identical name initials and further developed concepts of duality into the simulation of oneself as another form of presence in virtual reality. Through acting out their screen appearances as multiple selves in specifically designed media spaces which at the same time appear uncanny and familiar, the performances by Al and Al not only multiply and transform their identities through duplication, substitution and other forms of simulation. These are common in computer games. More interestingly however, AL and AL also include the transfiguration if not transubstantiation of the 'physical body'. Their works show conceptually open-ended transformations of visual pattern and bodily presence that foster older imaginations of being in multiple time zones (past and future) and changing events in past and future. These options of multiple appearances of the same person alive and after life are well known from science fiction literature and had also manifested in expressionist cinema before becoming a core element of computer games.

Nevertheless, AL and AL's reappearances and time loops are not meant to be interactive towards the viewer. They maintain rather cinematic compositions with regard to the continuous narrative structure and overall temporal development as the major driving force of action: It centers around rebirth/remodelling, death/transfiguration, and duplication. These features drive circular development, encounters with oneself and the other/enemy and revenge stories in the dramatic narratives. However, the linearity of AL and AL CGI-films is always substantially countered by three-dimensional, almost naturally looking floral landscapes, Japanese traditional houses and interior spaces that are wrapped onto each other. Moreover, the metallic surfaces that show reflections like real mirrors finally transgress the linear-temporal structure that derives from film with spatial density that belongs to VR.

Along with the installations in the exhibition goes the new FACT publication Eternal Youth. Other titles of the FACT publication series were published earlier on the commissioned works by Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson and on Anna Lucas.