Other people’s brains

I just felt the need to mark that this week has been a good one for meeting people and having meaty conversations.

On Monday I was in London hanging out all day with Lynne Bruning, Rain Ashford and Jamillah Knowles [Outriders]. I’m not even going to attempt to sum up the topics covered, suffice to say that there were many and they were heartfelt. And there was a lot of cake. Rain took loads of photos, of which the above is one of the few that didn’t feature cake.

To be honest, some of the ones I took featuring cake didn’t technically feature as much cake as they could have done…

Tuesday featured a Pecha Kucha Night afternoon Coventry event – always good – and a meeting that involved much passionate talk about making stuff and making stuff happen.

Wednesday I got to chat to some knitters as I started a new residency at The Public (you’ll be hearing more about that later…)

And yesterday I was back in London for a Creative Lab at King’s College London helping to develop projects and new digital prototypes for cultural organisations. I was in a lovely team with a stimulating blend of familiar names and faces and people I hope to hear from more in the future.

There was no cake.

Cause and effect

I’ve been commissioned by Andre de Jong at the artist-led space VINYL to produce a piece of work for this Autumn, the set-up being that I’ve been paired with artist Nita Newman and Andre’s leaving us to riff off each other and see what happens.

A while ago Nita and I went for a stroll around Digbeth looking for inspiration. We explored a few different spaces and ideas, but we kept coming back to the Duddeston viaduct: 355 yards of futile endeavour.

Duddeston viaduct

… originally built to connect the GWR‘s B&OJR line to the LNWR‘s Curzon Street station. As stated elsewhere, the GWR fell victim to the LNWR’s politicking which meant that whilst the LNWR stopped the GWR gaining access to their station, the LNWR still demanded the viaduct be built even though they knew it would never be used.warwickshirerailways.com

Nita’s developing a site specific audio composition (call for participants currently on her website at http://nitanewman.wordpress.com/news/), so I’m taking my cues as being the following:

• effort
• journeying
• separation
• railways and engineering

I have some proto ideas that I’m investigating for feasibility since they’ll involve some data-streaming from a moving bicycle.

In the meantime I’ve also been doing some exploring of old railway lines and cunning mechanisms.

There is a shipwreck…

A few days ago I spent the day down in London with Lisa May Thomas at the Chisenhale Dance Space. Lisa’s been in residence there developing a version of her piece There is a shipwreck in my bones.

I was invited to get involved after Lisa heard me talking at the Pervasive Media Studio last year – she liked the combination of technology, sculptural materials and the sense of movement within my projects.

So, having already armed her with a selection of wax pods, on Sunday I filled a large rucksack full of microcontrollers and sensors and headed over to see what I could add.

Lisa was already experimenting with projecting onto different surfaces, including the pods which resulted in a really nice scale and distorted image.

I made some systems for colour shifting some LEDs in response to inputs of touch and distance. I also grabbed some snippets of the audio accompanying the piece and rigged up an ultrasound trigger in the passageway leading through the seating tiers to the performance area (Shipwreck is to be a promenade style experience where the audience moves freely around the auditorium, making discoveries along the way.

Of life.

Of death.

Of sea.

What was really interesting though, was the process by which I decided to not include any of these. Putting circuitry in the pods limited the way they could be carried and the sense of otherworldliness. The effect of the proximity sensor in the corridor could so easily be replicated with an mp3 player for a fraction of the stress and uncertainty in my absence (I was only there for the one day).

In the end it may be that the one make I have contributed to the eventual realisation of the performance is a scrunched up soaked piece of brown paper.

Sometimes that’s just the way it should be.

Curzon Street GPS traces at Re:Call

The 3 composite GPS ‘fingerprints’ I have so far made from repeatedly walking around one of Birmingham’s ‘Eastside’ regeneration areas (the smaller, AWM one) have recently been exhibited as part of Re:Call at Bournville School for the Visual Arts.

Qualitative and Quantitative Data, 2011a (After the multistorey car park had been built, but before the roads had been closed.)

Re:Call is a rolling exhibition of work by graduates from the BA and Foundation courses that have been based at the site.

Re:Call in turn is part of ‘Art has left the building‘, a multi-strand project curated by Amanda Grist to commemorate and celebrate Bournville School of Art in the lead-up to its closure in July 2013.

Whilst the Re:Call exhibitions have mostly been aimed towards the Bournville community, on Wednesday March 20th there will be a public closing party at Ruskin Hall – all are welcome to attend.

3 – 6:20pm, Ruskin Hall, Bournville Centre for the Visual Arts [map]

The event also doubles as part of the fundraising activities for this year’s graduating students – this means there will be drinks and cake available to buy!

3 Bridges in Libre Graphics Magazine

When I was in New York in 2011, I made a few new pieces of work using my GPS difference technique. One of these was 3 Bridges, made by collecting the GPS data as I walked across the bridges that connect the Southern tip of Manhattan to Brooklyn. From North to South, these are the Williamsburg Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge respectively.

Each of these bridges is a completely different experience to walk across – you may be in a tunnel of iron girders, alongside busy subway tracks or out in the open with a criss-cross of suspension cables rising above you. The different characteristics of the the bridges are reflected in the different GPS ‘fingerprints’ shown by the lines in the drawing.

3 Bridges has been reproduced in Issue 2.1 of Libre Graphics Magazine (entitled Localization/Internationalisation).

We react to regional differences, as well as efforts at internationalisation, in varied ways. In a world that has become increasingly globalised, we may hope for ways to communicate more effectively with others, or we may cherish our own regionally-specific terms and ways. We may create habits and classification systems which help us to trade knowledge and understanding with others, or we may take refuge in personal eccentricities.Editor’s Letter: Localisation and internationalization, ginger coons

I was given a sneak peek at the print copy a few days ago and it’s a lovely piece of work. You can order your copy from http://libregraphicsmag.com/ or you can download pdf versions to view or print yourself.

Welcome to Stirchley (Take me; I’m yours)

Limited edition laser-cut plaques for those who know where to find them.

Hacking The Public

Last weekend I took part in The Public’s experimental Gallery Hack Camp event. Experimental in that they’ve never hosted anything like this before and also, well, it’s a bunch of creative people in a space – we’re going to end up trying stuff out!

First up: rearrange the letters. GRAHAM CAKELY PLC. That’ll do nicely.

Second up: respect The Public’s attitude towards caffeine.

Third up: a tour of the 230 metre long gallery ramp that we had been invited to tweak and re-imagine.

++th up: IDEAS!

Eventually the ebb and flow of conversations settled down into coagulations around ideas. Kim, Alyson and I set off in search of cracks and crevices to leverage towards exciting, secretive, human-scaled experiences. This involved some impromptu den-making and a certain amount of static electricity…

Eventually the gravitational pull of the ramp drew us back in to what had been most people’s first response to the ramp: by some administrative oversight, the ramp is currently without a marble run. Shocking!

We fixed that.

like marbles; but BIGGER

We only had a few hours making time, but we managed to scrump some interesting materials from various boxes, shelves and cupboards. We by this time being Kim, Dave and I.

I think we had a nice demo mix of mechanical and electrical going on with chutes, a bicycle wheel paddle wheel, drumroll, unfeasibly large alarm clock, fire bell and Christmas lights all either affecting or responding to the golf balls along their journey.

Things got a little eratic after we relocated from the camp HQ to the ramp, but I think the power of these things is all in the build. Remember the Improbable Machine?

marbles from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

It’s got me thinking a lot about the use (or not) of prototypes in settings like this. I think I’d like to be able to engage with imperfection more.

Traces of doings with Ikon and BIAD

The Northfield work I was involved with for Ikon Gallery is being showcased over the next few days. Their publicity seems to feature a photo of me pulling a jib rather extensively, but I hope that’s not reflected in the content of the exhibition.

11am–6pm until the 3rd of February
Events Room, Ikon Gallery

Hopefully some of the Mum Signs may leach out into the surrounding area, too…

~~~

I’ve also done a few more days with the second year students at BIAD, helping them refine their ideas and builds for the Mis-fitting project.

There will be scaly coats, stilt-walking sculptures, spongy red men, shopping bag costumes, generous plant pots and more, all making their appearances around Birmingham city centre over the next week or two. If you spot one of the happenings, feel free to join in and get involved!

Mis-fitting at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design

This term I’m doing some Visiting Tutor work teaching into a project for the second year BA Art & Design students.

The original idea was ‘Body Architecture’. Here’s what the brief evolved into after my recruitment:

Creative Mis-fitting

Watch the following music video:

We see someone wearing a succession of body sculptures (is it fashion? art? architecture?) as they walk through the city and prompt a variety of responses from the Normal People.

When we work in the bubble of an art school, it’s easy for us to forget the world outside and how our work might be perceived by those who have not encountered similar things before. We’re going to take our work outside.

Starting at the Margaret Street school of art, walk, run, slide, skate or use an alternative mode of locomotion for 3 minutes 50 seconds (the length of the music video). The place where you find yourself at the end of that time period is the place you will locate your work. Make sure you have arrived at your own space and are not within 20 metres of another Mis-fitter’s location.

Your brief is to design, construct and ultimately wear a body sculpture that responds to and in some way fits your location, whilst at the same time misfitting people’s expectations of what they might encounter in that place. Find a niche or other point of leverage at your location for your construction to echo – a bit like how the guy in the video’s costumes echo the things that are thrown at him. You will be wearing your work, so you also need to consider how it relates to your body and how you will move whilst wearing it.

You will document the process of arriving at your location, finding the bit to riff off, constructing your attire and any interactions that arise out of you and your costume inhabiting your location.

The project launched yesterday and I joined them in the afternoon to give a lecture on the-sort-of-stuff-I-do-and-the-things-I-think-are-interesting-about-working-in-public-space. This included: an overview of Dust, leading on to the importance of interfaces; objects as permission-givers; magic vests; triangulation; vibrant social spaces; interactions with/between strangers; Urban Sensation Transformers; silly hats and the implications of different design aesthetics; city as playground; rule-bending and transgression; comfort zones and accumulation of actions.

Following this we went outside into Birmingham city centre (Victoria Square and Chamberlain square for some blindfold work and giving the students a way in to working (and being vulnerable) in front of an incidental audience.

Working with one blindfolded person and one chaperone, they were given the following exercises:

1. Blindfolded person to describe everything they sense/notice/feel/are aware of as they walk around.
2. Chaperone curates a series of sense experiences foe the blindfolded person.
3. Try to facilitate some interactions with stranger by making the first approach – ask people for the time or for directions etc and see if they then come back with questions or conversation.

We’ll be unleashing works in progress and the final pieces onto the streets around the school of art over the next few week, so keep an eye out for any unusual goings on …and don’t be afraid to say “what are you doing?”

Star Jar

Last year I made a Geiger counter triggered decoration.

This year I’ve improved on it by making it fully mains-powered and fading the transitions. [Instructable]

Star Jar from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

Season’s greetings.