FE Recall: No.24 – Tony White

Forced Entertainment have been friends of mine since the late eighties, when I was an art student in Sheffield and making work on the edges of the UK live art scene. There’s a lot of water under the bridge since then, happily, but only once did I find myself actually in a Forced Entertainment work. Frozen Palaces was also maybe a rare foray for the company into what would prove a technological dead end.

My son James – then five years old – and I joined the cast to pose (stock-still, like Victorians) for a series of sumptuous panoramic tableaux photographed around Hugo’s then home in Spitalfields, London. Parties, a séance, a murder, a magic act, all then rendered in Apple’s Quick Time VR for publication on interactive CD-ROM – a medium that’s now almost completely inaccessible. You can catch glimpses of this beautiful work today, from the outside, but it’s largely locked in time and memory and obsolete hardware: a frozen palace indeed.”

tony white, Friend & performer