Sky’s the limit for Lancaster Artists

A video installation created at Lancaster University is set to be broadcast on giant screens in the centre of Manchester.

‘skyWriting’ is a digitally animated video installation, produced in a collaboration between the composer Neil Boynton, a senior lecturer in the Music department, and artist Emma Rose, a senior lecturer in the Art Department.

The installation depicts a series of images that shift between photographic realism and abstraction.

Ms Rose said: “In ‘skyWriting’ the animated image shifts between photographic realism and abstraction, surprising and alerting us to properties that make up the composition and sequence of images: familiar visual sights, such as the landscape, a fairground, a tree, docks and cranes are digitally enhanced. Eye and brain are forced into an insecure relationship, where we cannot take anything for granted, each vision cut by a window revealing another world.”

Dr Boynton said: “The audio reflects something of this fresh view of the world with, for example, the mixing of samples from a child’s voice with those of an adult man. ‘skyWriting’ reinvents the physical world, rearranges it in ways that come close to contemporary visual experience: digital technology begins within a clear sky, a tabula rasa for expression.

“We are really pleased that this is happening in the North West, and in such a public space.”

‘skyWriting’ will be shown throughout the day on the Big Screen, Exchange Square, Manchester from October 23 to November 5. The video will screen Monday to Friday at 10am, 12 noon, 2.05pm, 5pm and 10.35pm; these times are subject to change.

For information about the schedule, see http://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/features/big_screen/index.shtml> and follow the link 'What's on at the Big Screen'.

Future showings of ‘skyWriting’ include the Annual Exhibition of the Scottish Society of Artists in Edinburgh from 22 January to 17 February 2005. NWUA event at the Whitworth Art Gallery, 2nd November.