We’re currently getting excited about the re-appropriated business cards we’re using for the Invigilator: Digbeth invitations. Hope you do too!
INVIGILATOR: DIGBETH
paul conneally + nikki pugh + you + them
Saturday 29th March, 2-5pm
meet at VIVID at 2pm
bring a red top if you haven’t already arranged to use either one of ours or one from a different venue
npugh.co.uk/blog/invigilating_digbeth
enquiries@npugh.co.uk
Since May last year, Paul Conneally and I have been invigilating.
First I invigilated some of the New Forest. Then Paul replied by hopping on the train with the morning commuters and invigilating a building site in Derby.
Shortly after that I wanted to explore what would happen if you had more than one invigilator. I wanted to see how the presence of multiple invigilators affected the dynamics of an area that has to be walked through (rather than just a point location that people can walk past).
I was in Japan at the time so this gave rise to Invigilator: Tokyo and – inevitably – a whole barrage of further questions!
More recently, Paul and I met up in Nuneaton for the first of the invigilations that we have done together. More questions!
We now feel it is time for us to turn the process around on itself and use the next invigilation to examine its origin: my old part-time job invigilating the gallery space at VIVID.
We want to dissect what we have learned so far.
We want you.
We’re currently gathering people who would like to don red t-shirts and join us on Saturday the 29th of March for Invigilator: Digbeth. We want to scale up the Tokyo action and send small teams of invigilators percolating out through Digbeth: turning the whole cultural quarter thing inside-out to extract people from their barricaded, security-protected warehouses and onto the street for an hour or so.
As a nod to how this series of works came about, we’ll be using VIVID as a base, liberating their red t-shirts, and also returning there for the debrief session and refreshments afterwards.
The invigilations themselves involve following a set of left/right/straight-on directions and then probably about 30 minutes standing around that location being watchful. What we’re after, in order to give Invigilator: Digbeth some clout is a) as many invigilators as possible so we can properly cover a large area and b) some suggestions for relevant starting points for the random walks.
So, for now, we’d like you to do three things for us:
More details to follow a bit closer to the day, and further invites are being circulated in the real world too.
This morning I went along for an introductory visit to the local primary school where I will be doing a project with some of the students.
I found myself in the staffroom with some teachers fresh from an assembly where they’d had two dancers performing. One thing led to another and suddenly the conversation had evolved into the one about Not Getting Modern Art. You know the one – it always starts with The Bricks and The Bed.
I let it go. I didn’t have the heart to introduce myself as the artist who’d just been asked to do something with the reception class’ bricks.
Observation became participation after stepping in to perform banana-opening duties at break time and the food-related theme continued with invisible chocolate soup and an invisible glass of wine with cream on top.
You gotta love it.
I was asked to condense how my practice had developed since graduation (June 2006) into a 20-minute presentation to the current final year students on the BA at Bournville.
This is what I came up with:
I’m not sure what the students thought of it (I think I might have scared a few of them), but it’s only now, after the presentation, that it’s starting to dawn on me exactly how packed those 16 months have been.
I’m finding the whole thing a bit mind-boggling. I can’t quite get the time-scale right in my head: graduation seems like such a long time ago, and yet I still feel like such a beginner*.
*I’m not necessarily saying that’s a bad thing.
(Again.)
Prompted by several things (not least of which was the opportunity of being able to observe someone else using it on someone else’s equipment – there’s nothing like seeing your shortcomings projected onto a large screen!) this site is due for another overhaul.
Significant chunks of the last few weekends have been spent re-coding the page templates from the ground up and then, whaddyaknow, WordPress announces another release due for tomorrow! Hey ho.
I’ve mostly finished the new site, however that means I’m now up against The 10% Wall. You know the one: where the last 10% of the work manages to take up 90% of the total time. Sigh. Perhaps time to back off a bit and then come back to it with fresh eyes later…
What I thought I’d do in the meantime was to put some thoughts down here just as a way of keeping the juices going.
Here’s a quick teaser-screenshot of the forthcoming Genzaichi Edition:
As you can see I’ve gone back to the light background and white-space of previous incarnations. Also a return to the sort of flat graphic style that I seem to gravitate naturally towards. In fact, there’s really not a lot of obvious decoration in this one at all. Probably why I’m having to spend so much time tweeking the little details…
The other big change is more functional: I’ve decided to give commenting another go.
After bad experiences with spam on the weatherproject site, over the past few years I have avoided giving other people the ability to leave comments on posts. The tide is changing though. I’m assuming WordPress now has better inbuilt protection against spam, but I also see the people around me becoming more au fait with blogs and the idea of commenting on other people’s sites.
Add to this the recent announcement of the upcoming closure of Midwest (strange how the fora have just sort of died off), and really positive experiences of utilising blog commenting to help drive collaborative projects, I’ve decided to give it another go. If it all goes to pot I can always disable the function, but I hope it won’t come to that.
Of course, the other thing to consider is that there might just be a horrible silence…
What else can I say? JavaScript libraries, sIFR and IE are nearly playing together nicely. All I’ve really got to do is wait for some blind monks to get back to me…
[I’ve run out of steam now. Can you tell? Perhaps I should just go back and have another look at the line heights…]
Yesterday I posted a few YouTube videos of work from SoPG:Yamanote.
Looking at the post later, I happened to set both players off at the same time and was struck by the effect of having two narratives running side by side.
The videos are definitely much stronger when taken as part of a group, so this is something I’ll be investigating further.
In the meantime I rattled off a quick side-by-side rendering as a test of concept. I like the way there seems to be a call and return between the two tales. Imagine what this would be like with 29 stories running at the same time!
The resolution of the video isn’t very high at all, so if you want to actually read the text, you can watch slightly better quality versions on the original post.
I recently came across these two presentations on how our education systems consistently – across cultures and continents – reduce the capacity of their students to be creative.
A study by psychologists that gave a percentage creativity score to various groups came up with the following results (for more information please watch the second of the two videos below):
| Group | Creativity Score |
|---|---|
| Children in pre-school | 90-95% |
| Primary school students | 70-75% |
| Secondary school students | 40-50% |
| University Graduates | 20-25% |
| Adults | <10% |
Take some time to watch these videos now.
The first, below, is Sir Ken Robinson presenting a TED talk and the second is by Tony Buzan “the father of Mindmapping as we know it today”.
Where then does this leave graduates from art school? Do we actually learn how to be creative or are we simply learning how to conform to a particular set of rules?
How can we unlearn the fear of being wrong?
When I first went to Japan I had no concept of where I was geographically other than “somewhere to the left of Tokyo”.
When I went to Japan the second time, I had no concept of where I was geographically other than being slightly savvy with the metro map.
After going to Japan for a third time I decided to plot the places I had been on a map. See the full interactive version here: http://npugh.co.uk/jmap
Curious as to how people navigate themselves around what might superficially seem like an open, empty space, yesterday I set myself up at a carpark on Canada Common and chatted to dog walkers as they returned from their walks and asked them if they could describe where they’d just been.
I spoke to about a dozen sets of two-leggeds and four-leggeds with a range of results from which two different methods of navigating seem to be forming.
The first is by landmark: fixed things in the landscape to aim for. The bench on the hill; the pond; the white chimney; third pylon to the left from the big tree…
The second is by rule: look for water so the dogs can cool down; avoid water so the dogs don’t get too muddy; keep away from men; keep away from dogs that are bigger/scarier; avoid all that poo over there…
How might I re-draw a map of this area?
I must not think about it. I must stop pondering possible outcomes, wondering where this story is leading me. I will follow it to the end.
Sophie Calle
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