Young Rewired Art
I recently spent a week as a mentor/lead artist on the Young Rewired Art programme, a parallel project to Young Rewired State.
YRA took 10 young artists with varying practices (poets, actors, writers and graphic designers) and, over a week with myself and Antonio Roberts introduced them to different ways of working with data. The aim being to support them in exploring ways in which data and digital tools could be integrated into their work.
I led the first day, introducing concepts of physical computing and live datastreams coming from sensors. What better way to do this than with the sonar goggles!
We were based in the BCU section of Millennium Point, but it wasn’t long before the participants rose to the challenge and ventured out into more public space.
Later that day I did a quick introduction to Arduino and we finished off with a few MaKey MaKey boards and a chain of everyone we could find triggering a plum-based piano.
This ice breaker made me think of performing arts lessons in which I have to wonder around blindfolded and tune into my other sense. I thought the glasses would be great for my performing arts practice for when I wanted to work on spatiality.
Other tangible technology Nikki introduced to us were ‘Makey Makeys’, I have to say that this was the highlight of my week; with the aid of the ‘Makey Makeys’ we were able to make a piano out of plums! By doing this we were able to also interact with the Young Rewired State young people by bringing them into our room to see how many humans we could add to our live circuit and still have it working (23 and that’s only because there weren’t more of us). Lexia Tomlinson
After Antonio had done similar introductions for data-bending and glitch art, it was time for the participants to get into groups and come up with a prototype project that hybridised their existing practices with some of these new ingredients.
What emerged were a set of glitched Vanley Burke images, a short film exploring digital dependency and twin bears that used proximity sensing to trigger audio contrasting different political viewpoints.
On the final weekend we ventured down from what was now our base in the Custard Factory and displayed our projects guerilla style amongst the amazing chaos of the Young Rewired State Festival of Code.
We struggled to compete against the lunchtime noise, but finally found a spot for the bears outside and stood back to observe the interactions.
All my photos and videos are in this Flickr set, keep an eye on the project’s Tumblr for the participants’ final videos which should be published shortly…
Thanks to all who took part – it was an intense and inspiring week!
Young Rewired Art was devised by Amy Martin in partnership with Young Rewired State and Lara Ratnaraja. It is funded by Arts Council England.