An inflatable stroboscopic installation which mimics the effects of psychedelic drugs. A football cultured from living cells. An interconnected network of life-support machines rewired so that they behave like a biological structure. An exploration of the unusually high incidence of UFO sightings in Preston.
You can expect all this and more at Abandon Normal Devices (AND), an annual festival of art, film and new technology in the north-west of England this autumn. Taking its name, in a slightly tweaked form, from a card in Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies – his randomised collection of instructions for musicians, intended to help them practically overcome any creative blockage – AND seeks to bring together artists, film-makers, thinkers and scientists in an open-ended multidisciplinary collaboration.
Contributors are encouraged not just to abandon their own normal devices, but to think outside the box that traditional exhibition spaces (and laboratories) represent, in order to create an experiential event that, in its own playful, off-the-wall way, poses some important philosophical questions about they way we live.
"It's about normality and about questioning what normality is," says festival manager Gabrielle Jenks. This year, specifically, that questioning of normality will explore the outer limits of faith and belief, and related ethical dilemmas in medicine, science and the future of the body, as modified by technology. Hence Kurt Hentschläger's ZEE, a "mind-altering" art installation based on retinal imaging. "We've been told it's like taking drugs without taking drugs, so it's this complete separation of mind and body." Or artist Shezad Dawood's feature film, Piercing Brightness, about UFOs, which uses the extraterrestrial to riff on ideas of identity and migration.
A co-production between Liverpool art house cine FACT – which will host the main festival – Manchester's Cornerhouse and Lancaster's Folly, the latter a public art agency concerned with digital participation, AND was launched in 2009 and bills itself, rather blandly, as a festival of "new cinema and digital culture". In reality, it has immediately become a wide-ranging platform for what its website describes as, "anarchists of the imagination".
"Often," says Jenks, "we get artists contacting us, saying, we've got a strange idea, we think it'll be perfect for AND."
Last year, for instance, AND screened a movie that lasted nearly 10 hours. This year it will show a number of films created for chimpanzees as part of a zoological research project. Basically, anything that's innovative and interesting goes. In daily debate sessions at the festival HQ, artists and academics, both those exhibiting and those invited to observe, will thrash out the wider questions posed by the festival exhibits.
Not that AND is a dry, forbiddingly cerebral event. In the first instance, certainly, you are welcome to have a laugh with it.
"It is quite cheeky in the provocations that it makes," says Jenks. "It's light on its feet, even though important questions are being asked. That's one of the qualities of the festival – making people laugh, and being quite sardonic with that."
Brian Eno, that great entertainer-intellectual, would surely approve.
• Trailblazer events from 1 September in Preston, Egremont and Chester (andfestival.org.uk). Main festival, 29 September to 2 October, FACT, 88 Wood Street, Liverpool, (0151-707 4464, fact.co.uk). Exhibition free, screenings £6/£5, Q&A sessions £8/£7
