Troubadors and truth drugs

Cracking conference accompanying the Sk-interfaces exhibition at FACT, Liverpool, on Friday and Saturday, which managed to subvert my expectations nicely. Frankly, I’d expected some pretty dry media theory. Instead, media theorist Richard Cavell played his presentation as a stand-up act and had us all laughing. Scientist Denis Noble said he was going to demolish some cherished beliefs of biology but first he would sing us a troubadour’s love song, which he did, beautifully, with highly-accomplished guitar-playing, and there was a succession of terrific presentations from the Sk-interfaces artists, including Maurice Benayoun‘s powerful media art practice, artist Kira O’Reilly‘s provocative live art, Marion Laval-Jeantet of the intriguing Art Oriente Object, and Neal White (Office of Experiments) withNicolas Langlitz from the Max Plank Institute who slapped ‘truth serum’ patches onto their necks and proceeded to recruit volunteers for self-experimentation. Other speakers included artists Stelarc,Orlan, Jill Scott and Oron Catts of SymbioticA.