Tim Arnold's Super Connected
The Temple of Art & Music @ Mercato Metropolitano, London
"Super Connected" is Tim Arnold's response to the digital age and its insidious influence upon society. A filmic essay, post-Warholian in tone, it lands a visual punch upon the virtual world. Dystopian by nature the concept harnesses' his frustrations well to purvey the threat he perceives. A polymath's exercise on how connections can be anything but.
For one night only as the film rolls in the wonderfully kooky and ritzy venue of The Temple Of Art and Music. Arnold, stage left, performs the songs that are its soundtrack. An inspiring aural confection that references the scale of Radiohead and the panache of David Bowie he even has Stephen Fry as an occasional narrator. A cavalcade of references abound. Home movie ethos and animation merges with elements akin to Dr Who and sci-fi. The film stars Arnold and Kate Alderton as the nuclear family in meltdown in not so sweet suburbia. There's an exquisitely surreal moment in the show when the dancer, prima ballerina Daniela Maccari (Lindsay Kemp's dance partner and founder of Kemp Dances), glides across the stage in an act of visual escape from the screen. A moment of grace that brings to mind Kate Bush.
At the end of it all Arnold removes himself from Facebook. A bold and audacious act but the problem with genies, especially digital ones, they are impossible to return to the bottle from which they sprang.
This is a work and an idea which it must be hoped flies once more beyond the confines of this single evening to continue connecting with the outside world. There is a joyous moment when the audience with their hands in the air connect with each other to the strains of Elgar's "Nimrod".
A happening within a happening.
(Sign up for the future Super Connected events at https://superconnected.technology/.)