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.

The street and you(r artwork)

I’ve spent the last week or so in Paris hosted by a gang of wonderful creative people.

At some point after talking about Parisian and Tokyo galleries with Orie, I challenged her to take her work and site it out in the city somewhere rather than waiting for a formal exhibition.

The next morning we set out to do just that, asking ourselves a) where needs some art, b) where would we like to put some art and c) where do we feel we can put some art? Yet again, I was struck by how powerfully having a task to accomplish can frame your experience of place and foreground details within your surroundings.

We were fortunate enough to dodge the rain, but strong winds and bitterly cold temperatures made it hard to work with Orie’s tiny radish seed musical notes and her delicate leaf frogs. We still managed to install a few subtle interventions, though…

I was also amused/bemused by how we could set up with glue, scissors and thread on a major throughfare and not have anyone pay any attention to what we were doing. A laissez faire metroplolitan attitude, or just a blind eye to tourists doing odd things?

Mould improvements

I’ve been getting some interesting cast out of the first mould I made for the waggle pods, but a lot of out-right failures too. It’s been feeling like I’ve been fighting the mould most of the time.

Time to make a new mould.

I managed to get a decent wax cast from the first mould which I dressed to make into a pattern for the second:

I decided to include a pouring hole in the design for this mould – more to assist with cooling and extraction than for the pouring process itself. Also a few extra details like handles, because I’d been struggling to part the two halves of the last mould.

Wow! This mould works a lot better! The first three casts have all come out successfully, so I now have enough to experiment with to try and get a solution for inserting and fixing the electronics…

Where the heart is

I’m interested in how we connect to distant places.

A lot of my work prompts people to consider their immediate surroundings, but what of those places we feel some part of us is in, even when our bodies are elsewhere? Are you homesick? Do you long to travel to a particular place? Are you missing someone you can’t be with right now?

When a GPS Orchestra workshop seeded sleepless imaginations of being able to harness bee power, it got me thinking about the waggle dance bees use to communicate the location of good sources of pollen with other bees back at the hive. Since then I’ve been working on developing an object that signals to you your relative location with these significant places.

I want something that feels special.
Something that feels as precious and as fragile as the emotions and memories the person holding it has invested into the process.
Something that makes you slow down, something that encourages you to be contemplative.

I want a conversation that lets me spend time thinking about the places that are significant to me.
I’m curious about the places that belong to other people. The people that belong to other places.

I want to be stood on the deck of a sailing boat at dawn and have it remind me where home is.

Place interfaces – thoughts on bubblewrap, bees and lumps of clay

Here’s the audio and visual for the Lunchtime Talk I did on Friday for the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol. I’m afraid I couldn’t add the wax pods…

In the talk I outline how I first got critical of interfaces and then use 3 recent projects (Colony, Dust and Waggle) to talk around approaches and experiences relating to using physical interfaces to mediate between people and place as well as between people and tech (and people and other people).

Wax and a bit of a waggle

Hurrah! Three separate proofs of concepts came together today – functioning mould, motor affecting a wax shell, and the electronics – so it’s now full steam ahead to try and get a working prototype together for my upcoming talk at the Pervasive Media Studio.

Here are some photos from today.

Soaking the mould in order to separate the two halves

The two halves of the mould parted to reveal the clay pattern they were formed around.

The mould, now containing molten wax, strapped up and about to be tumbled until my arms ached too much to continue...

Next it was time to see if the motor I've been protoyping with has the right sort of effect on the wax shell. It does!

All of my ‘making of’ photos are going into this set on Flickr. If you do eventually spend fifteen minutes walking around with one of these things, please spare a though for the weeks of making that have gone into it!

Recent work for Ikon in and around Northfield

Since the Summer I’ve been working on a few different projects for Ikon Gallery with their Learning Co-ordinator Emma Bowen.

Most of these projects have been linked to Ikon’s activities in the constituency/district of Northfield (the wards of Weoley, Northfield, Longbridge and Kings Norton), and last week these collectively got their own space on the internet in the form of the Ikon Northfield website.

The new Ikon Northfield website

I’ve written several blog posts for the website detailing various exploits involving GPS, data, walking, secret signs and some light, socially-engaged graffiti.

All my posts are gathered under this tag: http://ikonnorthfield.org/author/nikki/, so if you’d like to catch up on what I’ve been up to, click on through to the other side…

There’ll be some exhibitions at Ikon in the new year celebrating the work the different groups we’ve been working with have done – keep an eye on the website for further details as they become available.