Tuesday 25 August: Power Plant (Royal Botanic Gardens)

I have a stonking big backlog of things to review, including pretty much everything I saw in this year's Ednburgh festivals (though I posted notes on most of them to Facebook). So to avoid another day passing by with my doing nothing about it, here is the solitary Fringe event I saw (unless you count the International Exhibition of Photography which I have now visited, I think, for 28 consecutive years: always an inspiration, but nothing really to blog about, with its being wholly visual).

Tuesday 25 August: Power Plant (Royal Botanic Gardens)

Power Plant is a touring installation by a number of artists, mostly in the plant houses but partly in the open and visited at night. You are given a map of what is where and it's then up to you how you visit the pieces, though in some parts there is little choice of route. The pieces themselves vary a lot, and initially I was underwhelmed by for example a sort of wigwam of fluorescent tubes accompanied by loud electrical noises. Though the trees projected onto the outside of one of the glasshouses were quite pretty. I think the point at which I decided I liked this idea (and I had been waiting to get in for over an hour) was when I wandered through a misty pathway and discovered that I was being projected upon, and that the path looked completely different depending on the direction I faced because of the projections (which were of oval shapes rather like the ones atop fly agaric toadstools). And at the end of this path of projections was a small box labelled "Tsunami" which went off every ten minutes or so, shaking the rubber sheet affair inside with low-frequency tremors which forced the sand on the sheet into gradually shifting patterns. After that came easily my favourite part, "Pyrophones". These were vertically-mounted tuned flamethrowers, played by a guy at a keyboard (though at the time I imagined they were automatic). As each emitted a gout of flame it also generated a musical note, a sound best described as a cross between a rutting stag and an Andean flute. The effect was both musically and visually striking, and wholly lovely. Then there were the wind-up gramophones playing sheets of sandpaper, or the vividly fluorescent little electric fans.

In the middle of it all was a little yurt where they were selling herb tea. I gather it was very good though as my ticket was for the last slot of the night, and as I tend to linger over gallery-type things anyway, i thought it wiser to press on rather than indulge.

The whole thing was quite charming, and vey different from anything else I'd ever seen. Everyone I knew who#d seen it, and everyone on the night, seemed hugely impresessed as well.