Transport yourself into the heart of the Acid House movement in this euphoric and interactive virtual reality adventure.
In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats by award-winning immersive artist Darren Emerson will take you on a multi-sensory joyride into the past. Grab your friends and go in search of an illegal rave set over one night in Coventry in 1989. The virtual reality experience brings to life the stories of promoters, police officers, and rave-goers, whose rivalries and relationships drove a working class revolution in music and society.
From poster-strewn bedrooms and pirate radio stations to a police headquarters and empty warehouse events, you’ll step into the shoes of rave culture pioneers as you witness this social phenomenon first-hand. Feel the anticipation, trepidation, excitement, and euphoria that was Acid House through an explorable virtual world and multi-sensory simulation.
Book your ticket back to 1989 to share in an experience that shaped a generation.
Following the VR experience, don’t miss a small exhibition containing archive and other audio-visual materials exploring Liverpool’s Acid House scene to enjoy at your leisure. From Liverpool’s infamous all-nighters at Quadrant Park to the rise of Cream as a super club and global brand.
This immersive experience is presented by FACT in celebration of Eurovision 2023 in Liverpool.
In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats was originally commissioned and presented as part of Coventry UK City of Culture 2021. Supported by the BFI Film Fund, awarding National Lottery Funding.
*** When booking, please select either a WALKING or STATIC experience.***
Whether you are walking, seated or standing, each attendee will have access to the same virtual experience and virtual space. The WALKING experience allows audiences to move physically around the virtual environments within a large play space. The STATIC experience provides the audience member with a smaller fixed space where you can sit, stand and rave whilst you using controllers to move you within the larger virtual environments.
This experience lasts 45-60 mins and runs once every hour.
TReasured is a collaborative online artwork inspired by Mandy Romero’s personal archive accumulated over 35 years.
An anthology of short films, original writing, and photography will link together with collected ephemera from her numerous productions, projects and memories to create an interactive poetry of transgender.
Created with artists; web designers, film maker, an archivist and a literary mentor, this ever growing encyclopedia will inspire new performances.
Official Launch: The site will be launched on Transgender Day Of Visibility (TDoV), April 1st 2023 with a launch event at Liverpool Museum. Other significant dates + performances TBA.
The LAKE gallery in West Kirby is showcasing the work of four exciting, contemporary abstract artists in its latest exhibition.
The Shape of Things runs from March 30 to May 6 and will feature work from Christine Evans, Derek King, Sherilyn Halligan and Annie Luke Turner.
The Grange Road venue is a new artist-led space, opened in September 2022, which hosts a changing programme of exhibitions of fine arts and contemporary crafts by established and emerging artists.
The gallery is open from 10am-4pm, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
This is the first public exhibition by The Rubber Glove. RG began making work during lockdown, creating a confusing but nostalgic set of digital collages and animations combining familiar faces of light entertainment gone by with those of a more identifiable modern iconography. The exhibition, presented in conjunction with Dead Pigeon Gallery, is like nothing ever hosted by the venue before and is a visual cocktail of satirical comment on popular culture past and present.
All selections have now been made for the Williamson Open Art & Photography Exhibition 2023, the 60th edition of the exhibition
Every year since 1962, barring 2021 due to the pandemic, the Williamson Open has aimed to reflect the current active visual arts scene in Wirral. It’s open to artists and photographers who have connections with Wirral through birth, education, residency or occupation. Work in all media is accepted.
This year’s exhibition promises to be another showcase of the fascinating and diverse visual arts being created locally.
The exhibition runs 5th April – 29th April 2023 (closed Good Friday 7th April) in Galleries 1&2. For full visiting information check their Visit Us page.
Apollo Remastered at Birkenhead’s Williamson Art Gallery & Museum will showcase spectacular images from Andy Saunders’ extraordinary bestselling book on a never-before-seen scale.
The original NASA photographic film from the Apollo missions is some of the most important and valuable film in existence. It is securely stored in a frozen vault at Johnson Space Center, Houston. It never leaves the building – in fact, the film rarely leaves the freezer.
The images it contains include the most significant moments in our history, as humankind left the confines of our home planet for the first time and set foot on another world.
For half a century, almost every image of the Moon landings publicly available was produced from a lower-quality copy of these originals. Until now…
Bluecoat Display Centre’s spotlight exhibition for March features Merseyside-based and internationally acclaimed sculptor Emma Rodgers.
Emma’s display celebrates nature and the start of Spring and includes a range of ceramic and bronze pieces including ‘Flora’ (left), ‘Fauna’ (right), peacocks, and a charm of hummingbirds.
Join us for an informal Meet the Maker event with Emma on Saturday 11 March between 2pm – 4pm, and Friends of the Bdc will receive a 10% discount on all purchases.
A selection of Emma’s pieces are available to purchase from our online shop.
LuYang Arcade Liverpool transforms the gallery into a retro-futuristic arcade composed of games, avatars and environments inspired by anime, sci-fi, Buddhism and neuroscience.
Motorcycle racing simulators, Space Invader joy-con towers and dance mat stations transport you to entertaining and thought-provoking worlds.
Through gameplay, the artist invites you to explore the idea of “living on the internet” and to abandon binary ideas of “identity, nationality, gender – even your existence as a human being”.
Ashley Holmes is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield, working across sound, video, radio broadcasts and performance.
His work brings together themes of collective memory, ownership and belonging with a specific focus on the nuances and unique authority of music from the Caribbean.
Ashley has been in residence at FACT over the past 9 months, as part of the 2022 Jerwood Arts / FACT Fellowship. During this time, he has been exploring the legacy of Black music, with particular focus on the social, geographical and musical influences of Dub – a subgenre of reggae music – in Britain, and in the context of Liverpool.
As an outcome of his residency, Ashley presents a three-channel sound piece developed from field recordings and conversations taken in the city. The sound work explores the ways music travels: allowing us to re-imagine notions of storytelling, and examine the ways Dub, as an experimental process, provides a perspective for understanding and re-defining links between the past and present.
Ashley also presents a collection of works on paper as part of an ongoing series titled Abyssal, made in response to some of the audio recordings. Elements of his research are displayed in the space including poetry anthologies, extracts from Loosen the Shackles – a publication documenting the first report into race relations in Liverpool, and a selection of vinyl records from Ashley’s personal collection by Dub musicians and producers who used pioneering techniques of echo, delay and storytelling.
Hope Strickland is an artist-filmmaker and researcher from Manchester, UK.
Her current practice is concerned with maroon ecologies and the bonds between resource extraction and racial violence. ‘Maroons’ are the name given to those who escaped from slavery and their descendants. Their existence outside plantation logics was often, in part, due to their successful navigation of inhospitable environments such as swamps and dense mountains.
Hope’s work also explores the temporal fractures and intimacies that can be found in working across 16mm, digital and archival film formats. Hope produced the short film I’ll be back! (2022) after being awarded a FACT Together digital residency in 2021.
I’ll Be Back! begins and ends with the story of the rebel slave Francois Mackandal. In 1758, Mackandal was condemned to be burned at the stake, not only for his crimes but for his radical powers of metamorphosis.
