Arts review: Jane & Louise Wilson/New Media Scotland: Reveal/Reset

Published on Monday 10 August 2009 19:13

JANE & LOUISE WILSON **** TALBOT RICE GALLERY NEW MEDIA SCOTLAND: REVEAL/RESET **** INSPACE

THE stories of great movie projects never realised would surely fill several books. Film and video artists Jane & Louise Wilson have chosen just one, The Aryan Papers, the adaptation of Louis Begley's novel about the Holocaust, Wartime Lies, which would have been Stanley Kubrick's last movie. It got as far as pre-production in 1993 but was then cancelled by the director, partly because Steven Spielberg had just released Schindler's List.

The Wilson twins came across the story when they were given access to Kubrick's archive in the University of the Arts, London and were drawn to the story of Johanna ter Steege, the Dutch actress cast in the lead role of Tania, a Polish Jewish woman who disguised herself as a Catholic in order to save her family. She worked with the famously secretive Kubrick, practised lines and had costume fittings, telling not even her closest friends, only for the project to be dropped after eight months of delays.

With her help, the Wilsons have made Unfolding the Aryan Papers – which was first shown at the British Film Institute earlier this year – an intense, contemplative film about her experience, and about the art of film-making.

She is filmed in a series of interiors, with a kind of lingering intensity which owes something to Kubrick as well as to the artists' own aesthetic: golden light falling on wood panelling, patent shoes ascending an ornate staircase.

In Talbot Rice Gallery it is shown within a room made of gauze, both enclosed and permeable, so that the images can be seen, and ter Steege's poignant voiceover heard from most parts of the gallery (even if it is sometimes drowned out altogether by the thundering of feet on the wooden floor).

Apart from a 1989 photographic work which feels slightly out of place, the rest of the exhibition unfolds around the film: still photographs of ter Steege on set and among the unfinished books of a London antiquarian bookshop; a vitrine containing stills which sketch out their process; a series of archive photographs from Ealing Studios which Kubrick collected, made into an installation using sculptural bronze yardsticks like those used by cinematographers to demonstrate scale.

These look like artefacts from a past era, although they are newly made. This exhibition plays with time, continually keeping us guessing about whether we are looking at images from Kubrick's pre-production, or the Wilsons' 15 years later, or the period in which the film was set.

It's a study of the craft of film-making in general, and Kubrick's in particular, but the sense of the project as a response to archive material is turned into a human story by the presence of ter Steege. For eight months, her life was bound up with this project which would have probably shot her to world-wide stardom. When she heard it had been dropped, she stayed in bed and cried for two days, and says that making this film brings her closure.

Other questions spiral out from it: whether Kubrick abandoned the film, despite his personal commitment to the subject, because of his own doubts about cinema as a vehicle for tackling such events as the Holocaust.

Artists whose interests extend into more complex combinations of electronic media occupy the new InSpace Gallery on Crichton Street within Edinburgh University's Informatics Building. These nine projects, the technology behind which I can't begin to explain, were made possible by New Media Scotland's Alt-w fund and range from a sphere by ~ in the fields beaming out poetry and film of flocks of birds to Ben Dembroski's Project2891 clacking its Morse code along the window ledge.

Thomson & Craighead's A Short Film About War is made entirely from content posted online in the past year, collated from blogs and websites such as Flickr. The vignettes, ranging from a stressed-out US soldier returning from Iraq to a 104-year-old woman in Ramallah, also reflect the diversity of voices which can now be heard or read on the web in raw, unedited form.

Wendy McMurdo's two-screen film work shows a figure skater practising and a young girl mimicking her movements, a study in the way young people's role models are increasingly filtered through film and video games (the skater's movements were scanned for computer games imaging), and the unreachable fantasies these promote.

Technology is often seen as something that distances us from one another – tweeting and blogging as a substitute for human contact – but Distance Lab's Mutsugoto (Japanese for "pillow talk") device sets out to do the opposite, setting up an intimate digital tryst for long-distance lovers. Each wears an electronic ring and the movements they make appear drawn on their partner's body in light.

The star of the show, however – and it knows it – is Cybraphon, a new work by collaborators Found, which looks like a combination between a Victorian music box and a curiosity cabinet. Cybraphon scans the web for mentions and comments about itself, which determines its mood, shown on a dial ("desolation" through to "delirium"), which in turn affects the music it makes.

Cybraphon is something of a prima donna, the gallery staff's deference to its moods mirroring that of a real superstar. It was pinging and hooting and flashing in a state of "jubilation" when I visited. Who knows what will happen when we publish this review? The fact that I'm concerned at all about what a machine will "think" about what I'm writing shows how cleverly Found have used to technology to make us reconsider our relationship with inanimate objects.

&#149 Jane & Louise Wilson until 26 September; Reveal/Reset until 5 September. Both shows are part of Edinburgh Art Festival ( www.edinburghart festival.com). For more on Cybraphon, see The Scotsman's Festival magazine tomorrow.