Incidents of Travel in the Multiverse at Home

An agent for lost souls journeys to the land of the dead to free the spirit of a slain hip-hop singer. A child model is chauffeured through a mid-west paparazzi safari, punctuated by Princess Diana’s overturned car wreck. Britney Spears colludes with the lamb of God in her frenzied quest for immortality.

Such are the unique, fever-dream visions of artist duo and film-makers AL and AL, with whom I have spent the past two years producing and curating their newest commission and landmark solo exhibition for HOME in Manchester – AL and AL: Incidents of Travel in the Multiverse.

Serendipity and coincidence form two sides of a falling coin that guides this duo’s path. Having met in Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungeness, Kent, the pair discovered they shared not only first names, but second names and third names, with a great many peculiar happenstances to follow. Both sons of the North, after graduating from Central Saint Martins the pair have gone about quietly and conscientiously fashioning a unique, multi-award winning practice that draws upon blue screen technology, generating astonishing CGI environments – often casting themselves within the un-spooling fantasies – characterised by a research process that would shame a notation-addicted academic.

The Demiurge by AL and ALAL and AL’s relationship with HOME began in 2011 when Cornerhouse put out an open call in collaboration with the Abandon Normal Devices Festival to commission an experimental short film on the occasion of the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth. Widely recognised as the father of computer science and progenitor of studies in artificial intelligence, Turing’s personal life was as tragic as his achievements were great.

Upon submitting the chosen proposal, AL and AL went on to defeat expectations by delivering The Creator, a 40-minute fantastical allegory drawing upon Disney’s Snow White, the crucifixion of Christ and Merchant Ivory version 3.0 to create an alternative retelling of Turing’s final day. Visited by intelligent, thinking machines from the future who journey through time on this most auspicious of dates, this Lynchian nightmare laced with a drowsy sense of auto-erotic sacrifice went on to debut at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, winning the Prix du Jury at the Utopiales Film Festival.

The Creator plays in its entirety within the HOME gallery, accompanied by companion piece Superstitious Robots which was commissioned by Channel 4 for Random Acts. And there’s an adjacent Divination Room housing an eerie and prophetic robot-tarot in reference to Turing’s visit to a fortune teller in Blackpool in the months preceding his death. Turing himself remained silent on the matter but AL and AL contribute to the expanding myth around the man whom they posit as a godhead, father of a future race. The Creator by AL and AL

Turing is just one of three key scientists in response to whose work AL and AL have conjured three lead journeys throughout the exhibition.

AL and AL: Incidents of Travel in the Multiverse curated by Bren O’Callaghan and Sarah Perks is at HOME from February 6 until April 10, 2016.

Incidents of Travel in the Multiverse, the publication, is available from the HOME Shop or can be purchased online. 

By kind permission of Bren O’Callaghan and our friends at Northern Soul.

Published: 11-Feb-2016: (3549)