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Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art 2006
The Milk Float
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With the desire and laughter of consumerism, artists Ben Parry from Liverpool and Jacques Chauchat from Paris unite forces to create a sonic junk street machine. A fully charged 1975 Milk Float (retrieved from the milk float graveyard of dairy express) and the detritus of the city undergo a metamorphosis to become an orchestra of dischord; 45 cubic meters of kling, clunk, slash and boom create a peal of thunder.
The series of interlocking kinetic sculptures create a reverberating cacophony of motors, pullys, wheels, cogs and other mechanisms - animating objects in anarchic motion in which the spectator experiences the poetic language and song of detritus; as it resounds the cities rhythms and narratives, its state of desire and endless pace, its dynamism, movement and infinite chaos. Yet as a machine it is functionless; a sculpture of the absurd; it is debris in perfect discord.
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The electric milk float is built up to a height of 5 metres with a giant integrated series of mechanical sculptures made from discarded objects collected from Mersey Waste's domestic disposal sites around Liverpool and from the street itself. The physical journey through the city offers the surprise encounter, the discovery of the unknown, and how the familiar can be re-read in both the regulated and unregulated city streets. The Milk Float as a conceptual vehicle for urban ecology reflects the city as a living organism in a constant state of change and modification.
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The Milk Float, conceived for the fourth Liverpool Biennial, exploring Liverpool 08's prevailing cultural theme 'Cities on the Edge' as both a literal and physical interpretation of Liverpool's changing urban fabric. The Milk Float as a conceptual vehicle for urban ecology reflects the city as a living organism in a constant state of change and modification. Creating art through the concept of the 'ecological city' uses the debris of contemporary capitalist exchange to illustrate how consumerism meets the adaptive design of human traits and behaviours. Finally, this work is about the increasing mechanisation of life; machines for living, the economic machine, the media machine, military war machine and the domestic washing machine.
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The Milk Round: Re-mapping the City?
The physical journey through the city offers the surprise encounter, the discovery of the unknown, and how the familiar can be re-read in both the regulated and unregulated city streets.
The Liverpool Biennial
Between each Liverpool Biennial huge changes to the physical and social fabric of the city have taken place, ensuring that each festival is staged under a different cultural and political climate. Jump Ship Rat has engaged and explored the changing nature of the physical and psychological urban fabric throughout much of their work; seeking to discover new and unknown territories where art becomes engaged with the social and political realities of everyday life. The pressures of accelerated development have been strongly felt by the Biennial, competition to find venues has meant that the certain elements of the festival and the way in which artists' work has had to change. To match the city's development we need to re-invent the way in which art work is encountered and experienced. Jump Ship Rat no longer operate from a venue and have had to address this more fundamentally; to look at ways of taking art beyond the city's interior spaces and onto the street, exploring the notion of temporary and itinerant public art projects.
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