Abandon Normal Devices

The festival, now in its third year, will fulfil its usual remit of experimentation and boundary blurring, boasting 50 newly commissioned works across multiple platforms including film, performance, visual arts, media arts and public realm.

With the festival launch coinciding with the Manchester leg of the Olympic torch relay, this year’s theme is ‘success?’ (note the question mark.) Following the launch, events will take place across Manchester and the festival will then tour the North West, ending up back in Manchester for its finale at the beginning of September.

Among the line-up highlights are the premiere of Andrew Kotting’s and Iain Sinclair’s Swandown, a characteristically bizarre yet brilliant-sounding film that is, according to the festival, ‘a travelogue and odyssey of Olympian ambition; a poetic film-diary about encounter, myth and culture.’ The film sees Kotting and Sinclair pedalling about in a Butlins-style swan-shaped pedalo boat- taking their ludicrous vessel all the way from the seaside in Hastings to London’s Hackney via the English inland waterways, joined as they go by a revolving cast of invited guests including Stewart Lee, Alan Moore and Dudley Sutton.

Also making its debut is Al & Al: The Creator, a film exploring the myth of Alan Turing in an entirely new, surrealistic manner. The film will be premiered on the centenary of Turing’s birth, and we’re promised a combination of ‘Lynchian nightmare with the prophetic themes of J.G. Ballard’. You have been warned.

The Cornerhouse arts centre in Manchester will be showing the first UK solo exhibition of works by American artist Stanya Kahn, featuring recent drawing and video works examining such uneasy themes as personal trauma, resilience and recovery through the artist’s own unique blend of absurdity and self-deprecating humour.

Mark Amerlka’s The Museum of Glitch Aesthetics (MOGA) is the latest work in his  collaborative series of transmedia narratives. Other new works include and new commissions by Jeremy Bailey, Mammalian Diving Reflex,

Mark Amerika and John O’Shea.

AND Festival runs from 22 June – 9 September at various locations throughout the North West. For more information visit http://www.andfestival.org.uk/