I have just spoken to Joy at The Park, and the people who run The Folk House are running a new café at Daventry Road, in the front of The Park, and Bordeaux Quay are gonna run cooking classes, I am so excited! I Think she said September.
Digital Glow Fish
We had a great session with the Digital Fish on Wednesday. After discussing last week ideas of what we could do as performance for camera and video, we thought we’d give one a try. I managed to get hold of some light-up LED gloves (about which Sandra was especially excited, but alas she couldn’t make the session!) and glow sticks, so we did some experiments in the dark in KWMC’s big studio. We got some really brilliant effects with the glow in the dark, and the photos and video, and had a lot of fun! We’re going to edit them next week, but here’s a little taster!
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A productive couple of days
Things have been carrying on well with the workshops. We had a great session with the NLarge group on Tuesday – we looked through a selection of the photos that the young people took last week, and reflected on what they might mean. Emotions and responses to the images ranged from “abandoned” and “panic” to “everything’s not what it seems” and “dreaming of the real world”. There were some really beautiful images, which I’ll get uploaded to Flickr, but here are a couple to preview:
Photo performance by NLarge
Photo performance by NLarge
We were thinking about how we make associations about images, objects and experiences, but how they completely vary depending on our own viewpoint and life experiences. This is true in life as in art – something that might conjure up joy in one person might provoke fear or disgust in another. And this got me thinking about data and how we ‘tag’ things with such associations – so that if I Google search (or have a programme that searches and / or orders things by how they’re tagged) something like “oranges”, it’ll filter through all of the information available and find me things tagged with the word “oranges”. This is simple enough, but what about when it’s a more abstract idea like “curiousity”, “fear” or “movement”. After reviewing all of the images, we then did something which kind of reversed the process. Rather than making meaning out of images, we made images out of meaning. Each person took a word (from the one’s we made earlier, in association to the other images) out of a box, and then we went out and created performance images to interpret those. It was great fun!
Photo performance by NLarge
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Busybusybusy
I visited some of the youth programmes again last week, and things are really starting to take shape. Some of the excellent young people in Voices of the South have agreed to get on board with the digital journalism and help us shape what the project blog will be – most likely a Tumblr, with linked in Twitter, Twitpic and Flickr streams, so people can upload data in the form of words, photos, etc. and it’ll all come together in one place. (Hopefully….!) I’m off to meet them in a little while so we can figure out a little more how it’s going to work, as well as how it’s going to look, etc. (I find designing the colour scheme one of the most fun parts!) It’s very exciting! On Tuesday I also worked with the brilliant NLarge digital photography group, and we went outdoors to do a photo shoot of what we call “performance-for-camera” – the name sort of gives it away, but it’s a different way of making performance, for the lens (or screen) rather than for a live audience. It’s an interesting way to work. They all came up with some beautiful (and bonkers) images, which we’ll hopefully have up on here very soon – the problem with digital photography is that you can easily shoot hundreds of pictures, so it’s the editing that takes the time! Wednesday was time to work with the Digital Fish again, a group of brilliant young film makers who came up with lots of amazing ideas for performances-for-video. They ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the instantly achievable to the near impossible, so we’ll see what we can do tomorrow! Thursday saw some time with some of the Music and Lyrics group, in between their DJing and digital music-making sessions. We had a lot of fun, doing some sound improvisation with objects like teaspoons, bottles, BMX helmets and balloons, partly inspired by the avant-garde musician / artist John Cage. I recorded one of the experiments, but something strange happened to the file and I can’t convert it to put it up here. I’ll carry on trying and do so asap! Gotta dash 
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First workshops at KWMC
Last week I started visiting the youth programmes at KWMC, as part of ‘Why? And what does it mean?’ We looked at all sorts of examples of Live Art, including the Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh, who made some mind-boggling year long performances, including one where he punched a time clock in his studio on the hour, every hour, for a whole year.
One Year Performanc 1980 -1981
We also looked at some of the work of Manuel Vason, an amazing photographer, who creates collaborations with artists which we could call performances-for-camera. He’s worked with people from KWMC last year on the project Still Image Moving. We had some great conversations about what art, performance and music could be, and why on earth artists would do half this stuff (myself included!). We’re hopefully going to be starting some experiments of our own this week – I’m off to work with the Voice of the South and NLarge this afternoon, and with Digital Fish and Music and Lyrics tomorrow and Thursday. We’re also starting to think how this site and Tumblr (a blog site, where anyone in the project can post up photos or writing about what we’re doing), Flickr (a photo site), and things like Twitter (where people write much much shorter updates, but can do so in a kind of constant stream, from their computer or even from their mobile phone).
Paul Hurley performance 'Art Voodoo', Context, Taunton 2010
I think all of this stuff is really interesting in relation to Live Art – we know that performance (whether it’s theatre, a pop concert, X-Factor or a football match) is (usually) live and happens in front of us, but data is something that is also live. We can watch live data (photos, videos, tweets, etc.) unfold on our computer as we might watch live TV, or better still, we can create our own live data streams about anything we want.
The hard part is getting them all joined up in one place…!
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Bristol’s Big Day Out
On 25th June Bristol Civic Society encouraged the people of Bristol to celebrate where they live. Right across the UK as part of the Civic Voice/Civic Day initiative likeminded groups will be promoting their own activities to shout about what makes their city attractive, enjoyable and distinctive.
As part of this day The Happy Hearts Walking Group celebrated the green spaces of Knowle West with an expedition into the nooks and gnolls of their urban idyll.
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Filwood Funday
So who is going to Filwood Funday on 25th June? Can’t find it in ‘events’? How will this posting thing even work…it’s all mystery to me…until I click ‘publish’! and why can’t I let people comment on my posts? hmm
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