Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard

RADIO MANIA:

An Abandoned Work

The Gallery at BFI Southbank, London, SE1

8 May - 11 July 2009

Private view: Thursday 7 May, 6.30-9pm

Admission free

www.bfi.org.uk/gallery

This May the Gallery at BFI Southbank goes 3D with a new video installation by British artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. This new commission takes as its starting point one of the first 3D films ever produced - The Man from M.A.R.S. (also known as Radio-Mania in its 2D version). The artists have set about creating a contemporary adaptation of this silent movie, staged a rehearsal and filmed it using contemporary 3D video and audio technology, capturing the actors, directors and musicians working on the script and score. The Gallery is transformed into a mind-bending stereoscopic limbo, warping the viewer's sense of space and time. Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work opens on 8 May and runs until 11 July.

Forsyth and Pollard's practice revels in the grey edges of science and the idea of haunted media. Here they have created a compelling work-in-progress stuck on repeat, like a locked-groove record. Their entertaining, stark and immersive installation recalls Beckett, summoning an atmosphere that oscillates between the theatricality of the stage and the illusionism of cinema. The work occupies a state between extended reality and hallucination.

Their work often cross-references art and music. Since 2007 they have been working with Nick Cave on a series of film and music video projects. The soundtrack for Radio Mania: An Abandoned Work has been composed by the legendary Barry Adamson. A former member of Magazine, Visage and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Adamson has contributed to numerous soundtracks including David Lynch's Lost Highway, Derek Jarman's The Last of England and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers.

The Man from M.A.R.S. was made in 1922 to demonstrate ‘Teleview', a stereoscopic motion picture system created by Laurens Hammond who later went on to invent the Hammond Organ. In this film an inventor builds a radio transmission device capable of communicating with life on Mars only to wake up and find it was a dream. Following its premiere in New York, the film closed 24 days later, after which neither Teleview nor the 3D film was seen again. Radio-Mania now forms part of the BFI National Archive.