This month’s The Black Lights festival has billed itself as “a dream you can’t wake up from”. And its smattering of visual, sound, and performance art – esoterically dubbed as The Third Wave – promises exactly that.
From 26th to 28th of June, The Black Lights is staging a psychic takeover of Blackpool via sight and sound. Its Third Wave will “alter” the town’s “internal logic”, by warping the interiors of hotels, cinemas, galleries, and civic spaces with artistic installments.
With performances from The Caretaker, Jack Sheen, and the Manchester School of Digital Arts, hauntology is front and centre. Eerie is the key word.
Ivan Seal and The Caretaker will continue their longstanding collaboration with a building-wide installation in the Albert Hotel. Your Guests Never Mention Me will be a “48-hour interruption” that will see existing artworks replaced with Seal’s paintings, accompanied by looped audio vignettes from The Caretaker and a new spoken word piece from Seal.
“We came up with the idea of doing a show in a hotel, but it had to be a very specific hotel, a hotel, which seems like it hadn’t changed much since the 1970s,” Seal tells STAT. “We wanted something which was somehow kind of already active within the idea of Blackpool.”
The artworks reference subjects relating to absence and presence, and Blackpool itself and will be presented in three stages: in the bedrooms, viewers can see a series of characters waiting in the form of an object, “and the object seems to be made out of shells, but it also contains faces and scenes and dances,” Seal explains. In the restaurant, a series of paintings of ships made from shells; and in the cellar, a brand new word piece focusing on work and leisure.
Woven into the pieces is a sense of waiting, melancholia, transience, and juxtaposition – a nod to “this relationship between industry, the working class and Blackpool,” says Seal. “There’s something quite ghoulish about replacing all the artworks in a hotel, but sad as well,” he adds.
Conductor Jack Sheen will continue the hauntological atmosphere with a live performance installation in response to Louise Giovanelli’s exhibition in the Grundy Art Gallery, which has been extended to accommodate the festival.
“On a more technical level, it’s going to be a string quartet combined with electronic sounds,” Sheen tells us. The quartet will be positioned in the centre of the room with one of Giovanelli’s paintings and draped in translucent fabric. “Like Louise’s subjects it will be slightly obscured, kept at distance, but also sort of protected and made precious,” says Sheen.
And, under the fluorescent lights of the Houndshill Shopping Centre, Agentic Anxiety – a dispatch from the Manchester School of Digital Arts (SODA) – stages a high-definition intervention. A collaboration between AUDINT, Michael England, Lois Macdonald, Adam Cain, and Christopher Gladwin offers a new take on artificial intelligence.
Agentic Anxiety will feature four short films: AUDINT’s Archive of Irrational Exuberance, Michael England’s Phantom Channels, Lois MacDonald and Adam Cain’s Patience XI and Chris Gladwin’s Biokinetic Mantra IX. Each will offer an exploration of our relationship to non-human intelligence.
“The way we treat artificial intelligence is the way we think about other intelligences, whether it’s the Earth’s intelligence, whether it’s animals’, whether it’s things from out of space, it’s always in a hierarchical fashion with humans at the top as the apex mode of intelligence,” says Dr Toby Heys, a professor of digital arts at SODA. “It’s not an interesting way to think about it – it needs to be a lot more lateral, a lot more distributed, so that’s what the show is about.”
The show also intends to inject some nuance into the conversation about AI. “It’s the easiest thing to do, to take a position on things being either good or bad or right or wrong — it feels safe, but it’s not useful” says Heys. “So what we’d like people to get from the show is to think a little bit more about the complexity of what it means to be living in a world where we are already radically entangled with artificial intelligence.”
Poster
The festival will also host the first performance of Bow Down since the passing of writer Tony Harrison last year, presented by The Commission for New & Old Art. “It’s very exciting that Black Lights has given a platform to a really important piece by two men from very humble backgrounds from the North England, which is what attracted me to the collaboration,” director Sam Fairbrother tells STAT, adding that the uncanniness of the play fits neatly into the wider programming.
Elsewhere on the lineup is Nothing Is Explained, Everything Is Optional, by Mark Fell and Rian Treanor – a concert where the guardrails of traditional performance have been dismantled. There will also be a collaboration between Bound Arts Book Fair and Manchester watering hole Impiety Hour at the Winter Gardens, where visitors can submit texts, images, and recordings across the weekend, culminating in a live editorial system of material that will later become a zine.
Poster
The Albert Micropub will “compress the storied soul of the pub into a single, kinetic engine of community” – and the Regent Cinema will feature a programme of films hand-picked by maverick filmmaker Gerard Johnson.
The Black Lights Festival
Blackpool, Lancashire
26 – 28th June 2026
You must be logged in to post a comment.