R.M. Sanchez-Camus – The Bothy Ramble
The work proposes the construction of a bothy made from native trees in which the participant is invited to ramble to the destination to spend an evening in and as part of the work. The journey is a performance enacted by the public and instigated by the existence of the bothy which is given life as an artwork through participation. Sleeping in the bothy is the climax of the piece, while the to return to urban life is the slow exit of the aesthetic encounter, in which the time to consider the implications of the work can begin to set-in. The poetic substance is the work is simple yet powerful, it is precisely about being and action of movement. The installation components would be made up of ethically sourced local trees as timber, ideally situated in a unique yet accessible location. The actualisation of the piece is developed by each individual’s ramble. Walking as a psychogeographical/therapeutic experience like Richard Long’s simple journeys across a landscape.
The work is informed by great social movements of rambling, rights of way, commons, enclosures & clearances. It is also inspired by ritual, folklore, and shamanistic practices of wilderness exploration as a vehicle to self-actualisation. The piece honours and reflects the political power of rights of way, the importance of collective exchange, the etiquette of shared shelter environment, and the idea of nature as a place of contemplation.
The Bothy Ramble resonates with how we may personally define life. Inspired and informed by the practices of walking found across various cultures, the work puts the participant into a context in which they are fully included into the biomass around them. From mountains, to stones, to trees and animals the work instigates a conversation around our interconnectivity and the interrelatedness of being, both political and ecological. This journey is a cathartic experience where thoughts move from the conscious, seemingly factual plane, to the unconscious or intangible essence, and then return back again to the conscious as knowledge. The process reveals a clearer understanding of being, which is cyclical in its nature and yet may have no measurable conclusion. The closer we come to the pure knowledge of being, by the revelation of the unconscious, the larger the query becomes. The piece is as much about local flora and cooperative social systems, as it is about the collective unconscious and the individual pursuit of self-awareness.
The work is directly informed by Heidegger’s theory of knowledge and being, combing it with walking as a cathartic experience. According to Heidegger, the goal of reflection and thinking is the very seeking itself. Knowledge as defined by Heidegger is a combination of representation, thought, judgement and assertion. The end result is not where we should seek to find answers but in the journey itself, the questioning. The Bothy Ramble will enable the space/site for this encounter. The work creates a cyclical process in that the seeking leads to more questions and in turn to more knowledge. Through this knowing, the cathartic process could then reveal the truth behind knowledge; by tapping into our essence in the unconscious and representing it as a factual in the conscious.
The piece begins with identifying a location. Beginning with a site navigable by public transport from where the participant-rambler can begin. The journey time to the destination is key in the work, for it designates the amount of thinking space the walker will have. The journey to the bothy is a central component that will take into consideration landscape, its effects and affects on the individual. Along side identifying the potential location is identifying the source trees for construction. Native British trees such as Oak, Ash, and Elm are known for their durability and for traditional uses in woodcraft and construction. Trees that are scheduled to come down can be identified and utilised so that the bothy is part of the development of existing tree culling and thus honours and recycles the wood. The process of development from tree to timber to construction can be presented in a visual format through an informative bothy book that describes the process, identifies the trees, and gives historical details into rambling and the bothy system in Britain, as well as walking practices around the world. The walk and the bothy as an artistic experience takes the Fluxus notion of the everyday as a living art practice and makes it available for public practice. Much like Kaprow’s happenings, where public engagement with the work created the piece, each ramble to the bothy will be unique to each person where they will be producing their own piece through simple participation.
The bothy itself can be further developed into a visual component by etching text into the wood cladding of the exterior, with poetic information about the work / tree / site. The inside would be simple, austere and utilitarian. A place for a warm fire and contemplation, shared company with strangers and exchanges of knowledge.
The work honours the idea of the collective space, the common use of land, the sharing of resources and respect for nature. It reflects a tradition of walking, pilgrimage, journey and adventure.
If this cathartic process can help define our individual knowledge of the essential meaning of being, then it is not something that can be fabricated or told, each individual must experience it. In the process there is an inherent creativity as it is not representation or intention, it is a type of co-creative manifestation, between the public and the work. The essential need to discover or uncover belongs to the individual as custodians of their concealed unconscious which they are sharing by the mere act of engaging.
The Bothy Ramble offers a platform in which to explore the essence of being through a site-specific work.
Aura Satz – Her Variable Light
Drawing on pattern perception in the history of astronomy, this site-specific installation in an existing observatory (or, alternatively, a temporary construct in an appropriate site) aims to look at light and sound patterns, the space between signal and noise, decipherable recurrence and meaningless random sequences. It will use amateur astronomical perceptual devices such as the PROBLICOM (Projector Blink Comparator), which serves to render small imperceptible spatial changes in astronomical images visible through the juxtaposition of near-identical images and rhythmic blinking effects using an occulting shutter. An array of slide projectors will be juxtaposed in pairs throughout the space, creating a collage of twinkling imagery, ranging from stars to other phenomena and diagrams. These might also be gleaned from the living archive of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO), which acts as a depository for amateur and professional observations of variable stars. Potentially this could be regularly updated with new data throughout the exhibition duration. The entire dome of the space will be covered in overlapping projected images, animated to stroboscopic effect, recalling pulsing stars, lighthouse signals, flicker film, Morse code, minimalist music - hovering between sensory stimulation and overload, regular rhythms and their subversion, exploring the yearning and predicting of patterns. In addition to the clanking mechanical sounds of the slide-projectors there will be a binaural composition playing on rhythmic repetition and difference, played through headphones.
Inspiration comes from the little-known history of women human computers, finding small pattern differences by comparing photographic plates of stars, in particular the deaf astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt who discovered the relation between the luminosity and the period in Variable Stars. Crucially, the project attends to the heightened perceptual mode of pattern discernment in scientific discovery, drawing on this history and inviting the audience into a perceptual experiment.
Background: Women’s contributions to formative moments of technological and scientific discovery are for the most part underrated, underpaid, and unacknowledged. I have made several projects addressing this, on electronic music inventor Daphne Oram; frequency-hopping inventor and Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr; technicolour consultant Natalie Kalmus. This project likewise feeds into my overall objective to place women back in the historical canon and draw attention to their achievements, but also to address the conceptual specificity of their particular contribution, in this case, the perception of rhythmic pattern recurrences. Deaf astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt was crucial in mapping the stars and ultimately finding a key to measure the size of the universe. She is the namesake of the Leavitt crater on the moon, which is also in honour of deaf scientists. Her work comparing minute light pattern differences, paired with the fact that she was deaf, provides a rich starting point for the visual and acoustic format and content of this project.
A single PROBLICOM version has been shown as an installation at Baltic 39 and performed as a live event at Oberhausen film festival and De Appel Arts Centre
Chris Shen – IRL/Hello Real World
This longlisted idea is not publicly available for the moment.
Jamie Shovlin – Subs
Subs is a prpject that will document a season in the life of Leicestershire Sunday League football club, Anstey Swifts. Titled in relation to the shorthand used to describe the subscription fee paid by each child to play for the team, the project will be an irreverent and informal document of the club’s teams, from six to 16-year-olds, throughout the 2014-5 season, presenting a multi-faceted cross-sectional study of the club, its culture and socioeconomic context.
Presenting an extended narrative that will portray an intentionally ambiguous geographic location, the project will largely be about people’s relationship to place, both geographic and, more acutely, imaginative. Subs will outline a mental space of investment and projection from players and parents alike in documenting a voluntary self-sustaining community. The point of access for working with the club will be the Swift’s long-serving secretary (and also my mother), Valerie Hayes, who has managed operations for over 25 years.
As a child, I played for the Swifts for over six years, initially as a means of escape for a fidgety 10-year-old in the late 1980s, enjoying minimal success, although secretly, I dreamt that becoming a professional player might offer an escape from the boredom of my suburban reality. I also became aware of acting as a psychological surrogate for my father’s unfulfilled ambitions towards his own football career. A decade after his own efforts, he could live vicariously through the activity of his son, an experience he shared with the majority of parents attending their child’s midweek training sessions and weekend match days. A large majority of these parents would eventually go on to manage the teams.
What it meant to be a Sunday League footballer was dramatically affected by the advent of the English Premier League in 1992. Money buoyed the top tier of the game; the result of lucrative television rights and endorsement deals, increasing the visibility of players and their earning potential. The amplified spectacle attracted increasing amounts of youngsters from the myriad number of Sunday League youth football teams across the country. Football at this level, and its relationship to the larger culture within which it operated, was indelibly changed. Every player dreamed of making it, and if they didn’t, their parents would happily do so on their child’s behalf.
Subs is intended to reveal the internal dynamic of a football club alongside the socioeconomic context of its village home. Anstey, both the Swifts and my own birthplace, is a rapidly expanding suburban community subject to intensive housing development. Historically a notable working class centre for the hosiery and footwear industries, it is now an increasingly desirable suburban feeder village for workers in the city of Leicester, revered for its shared proximity to the city and the surrounding countryside. Anstey’s rapid social ascent echoes the increased professionalisation in the dynamics of youth football, giving rise to a larger population engaged in the activities of the village’s local football club whilst concurrently stretching the gap between elder and younger members of the community.
Subs will focus on two distinct elements of Anstey Swifts’ season that will be interwoven within the final project:
I) A season-long collection of documentary footage and material artefacts that will outline and expand on the club’s culture, relating the personnel and interrelationships that define the community of the club and village. Spanning the youngsters with aspirations of a career as professional footballers to the parents running the various teams voluntarily and often to the detriment of their own relationships, the footage will provide a ten-year cross-section of experience, with each subject ultimately acting as one of a number of narrators that give shape to the season’s – and project’s – events.
II) An extended multi-camera account of a single game shot from the player’s point-of-view. Utilising the small and robust GoPro cameras, each player will be fitted with an individual unit that will document his or her point-of-view within the game, providing a multi-camera synchronous take. The approach will present an alternative, kinetic method of recording a football match that captures an intensively personal experience from the individual’s immediate point-of-view and will. Each of these individual records will be combined and realised in a large-scale synchronised multi-screen projection.
Jamie Shovlin – Subs
Subs is a prpject that will document a season in the life of Leicestershire Sunday League football club, Anstey Swifts. Titled in relation to the shorthand used to describe the subscription fee paid by each child to play for the team, the project will be an irreverent and informal document of the club’s teams, from six to 16-year-olds, throughout the 2014-5 season, presenting a multi-faceted cross-sectional study of the club, its culture and socioeconomic context.
Presenting an extended narrative that will portray an intentionally ambiguous geographic location, the project will largely be about people’s relationship to place, both geographic and, more acutely, imaginative. Subs will outline a mental space of investment and projection from players and parents alike in documenting a voluntary self-sustaining community. The point of access for working with the club will be the Swift’s long-serving secretary (and also my mother), Valerie Hayes, who has managed operations for over 25 years.
As a child, I played for the Swifts for over six years, initially as a means of escape for a fidgety 10-year-old in the late 1980s, enjoying minimal success, although secretly, I dreamt that becoming a professional player might offer an escape from the boredom of my suburban reality. I also became aware of acting as a psychological surrogate for my father’s unfulfilled ambitions towards his own football career. A decade after his own efforts, he could live vicariously through the activity of his son, an experience he shared with the majority of parents attending their child’s midweek training sessions and weekend match days. A large majority of these parents would eventually go on to manage the teams.
What it meant to be a Sunday League footballer was dramatically affected by the advent of the English Premier League in 1992. Money buoyed the top tier of the game; the result of lucrative television rights and endorsement deals, increasing the visibility of players and their earning potential. The amplified spectacle attracted increasing amounts of youngsters from the myriad number of Sunday League youth football teams across the country. Football at this level, and its relationship to the larger culture within which it operated, was indelibly changed. Every player dreamed of making it, and if they didn’t, their parents would happily do so on their child’s behalf.
Subs is intended to reveal the internal dynamic of a football club alongside the socioeconomic context of its village home. Anstey, both the Swifts and my own birthplace, is a rapidly expanding suburban community subject to intensive housing development. Historically a notable working class centre for the hosiery and footwear industries, it is now an increasingly desirable suburban feeder village for workers in the city of Leicester, revered for its shared proximity to the city and the surrounding countryside. Anstey’s rapid social ascent echoes the increased professionalisation in the dynamics of youth football, giving rise to a larger population engaged in the activities of the village’s local football club whilst concurrently stretching the gap between elder and younger members of the community.
Subs will focus on two distinct elements of Anstey Swifts’ season that will be interwoven within the final project:
I) A season-long collection of documentary footage and material artefacts that will outline and expand on the club’s culture, relating the personnel and interrelationships that define the community of the club and village. Spanning the youngsters with aspirations of a career as professional footballers to the parents running the various teams voluntarily and often to the detriment of their own relationships, the footage will provide a ten-year cross-section of experience, with each subject ultimately acting as one of a number of narrators that give shape to the season’s – and project’s – events.
II) An extended multi-camera account of a single game shot from the player’s point-of-view. Utilising the small and robust GoPro cameras, each player will be fitted with an individual unit that will document his or her point-of-view within the game, providing a multi-camera synchronous take. The approach will present an alternative, kinetic method of recording a football match that captures an intensively personal experience from the individual’s immediate point-of-view and will. Each of these individual records will be combined and realised in a large-scale synchronised multi-screen projection.
Output Arts – Steps
Steps is a work that examines human presence, and how it can be captured, perceived, and re-experienced.
It will use an evocative yet common space, e.g. a school or village hall, in which an adapted parquet floor will be installed. The floor will be sprung allowing movement and a series of computer controlled sensors will be embedded under the floor in order to detect and re-create subtle movements on the floor surface. These sensors will be positioned under every individual wooden tile so they can be read and manipulated independently. Manipulating these movements enables us to evoke a number of effects, from walking, running and following, to create the presence of one, or many, unseen others, or to re-experience the movements of previous inhabitants still held and remembered within the fabric of the floor.
Specific software will be designed to capture the information as the tiles are walked over. They will monitor the sound, the angle of the tread, the weight etc. and this information will then be stored and archived to be brought out at a later stage; either after a period of a few seconds or several hours, creating a presence within the room when there is no physical body. This will create a haunting impression, the space remembering and reflecting a passing presence.
The combined skills of the members of Output Arts enable us to design and produce projects that combine both traditional and digital expertise. This proposal will call on both, as the floor will have to be carefully designed and laid to ensure that the sequencing operates in a fluid and uninterrupted way so that it creates the illusion of the previous occupants of the room. It is envisioned that the sequence replayed could be of a lone person, or, at times, multiple persons creating a buzz of activity. Audio as well as movement will be used, building to a crescendo of sound.
The installation will be self managed with motion sensors at the doorway activating the computer equipment. The viewer will enter an empty room looking for the art work. They will walk a few steps and think there is nothing to see. The sensors will capture their movements and after a short period, (timings to be determined in prototype development), the floorboard that they have walked on will reactivate, echoing their footsteps in both audio and physical form.
Where more than one person is in the room at the same time, floor conversations could be held between the participants paths.
Output Arts is Andy D'Cruz, Jonathan Hogg and Hilary Sleiman
Terry Smith – Breaking and Entry
Imagine.
I was born in Hackney East London in 1956, eleven years after the end of the Second World War. I played on bombsites, in old air-raid shelters and threw stones at windows of derelict houses. All those spaces had stories and myths imagined and invented of strangers and ghosts who occupied the empty rooms and buildings. We lived in one half of a terraced house with a Nigerian couple above and our next-door neighbours from the West Indies, who were a large family; the kids became my best friends. At that time in small gangs our ages around five and six we were almost feral, playing by canals and sewer pipes, climbing on piles of rubble. These urban landscapes became a fertile ground for our imaginings.
When we were forced to leave due to the new development of flats that began in the early sixties, it left a profound mark on me. Like many East Enders my extended family were dispersed into other parts of London and Britain and even as far as Australia. We left not only the house but also the area. My grandmother stayed there in the same street. On a visit back after we left, I was now six years old, I found some of my former playmates, my house was still there, but now boarded up and ready to be demolished. I was curious and led an assault on the building and an adventure into the known. We pulled away the wooden planks that covered the back door and I climbed over, entering into the dark interior. The rest of the gang stayed outside too scared to enter, I was also scared but curious and my curiosity over took my fear. I wandered around with the torn lino and dilapidated wallpapers, and as my eyes became accustomed to the dark, it was a different place entirely, it was scarred and battered. In the few months that it had been empty of life it seemed to have aged, of course it was also empty of the furniture and fittings that filled it with purpose. But there was worse to come. To discourage visits like mine some of the floor boards and steps on the stairs had been removed and as I gingerly made my way around the lower rooms I began to make my way upstairs, suddenly I lost my footing and fell, just managing to hold onto the balusters. I hung there in mid air with my feet dangling in space, the floor no longer available, for what seemed like an eternity, but eventually I found a foothold and pulled myself to safety. This shock that the house that was once a place of safety was now full of danger. I made my way quickly to exit back through the half broken door to my friends in the daylight.
I left that day and never saw the house or my friends again.
Since then I have been drawn and fascinated by ruins and destruction.
Fast forward.
After many years of working in studios, I moved into an ACME house, which I eventually bought. It was in a poor condition and so bit-by-bit I began its refurbishment. I discovered sash windows with the counter weights hidden in the casement; the different layers of plaster and the laths used to infill the walls. This was a moment of discovery. This layering was something that had always been a feature of my work, obsessed with surface and deconstruction I found myself drawn to the process and imagined a series of works where the building itself was the raw material for the work.
The new East London link road was about to destroy parts of Leytonstone where many of my friends lived. The houses were decanted and I sort permission to make some work in the empty buildings, it was denied. I broke into the building and made the wall cuts anyway.
After the first manifestation of this project, which I called Site Unseen, there followed a series of interventions in various museums and galleries and warehouses. These included Capital in 1995 at the British Museum a thirty foot by seventeen-foot high wall cut. As well as projects such at the Tate Modern during its redevelopment and a house in Peckham both in 1996 the sites were unsuitable for the public to visit. The premise as always has been to make the work from whatever was available as material in the building. Bringing nothing into the space.
I have had the idea since the beginning to make a series of interventions in a row of domestic houses, where the viewer is taken through the window and then into each room and house through holes and gaps in the walls to see a multiple series of different states and interventions and cuts and alterations and changes of use. From lowering of an entire ceiling to waist height, to an island of floor surround by a void, to trails that lead a climb to the roof and outside.
My method is consistent; the work develops out of a process of doing and undoing. I don't really have ideas, rather I call them staring points, beginnings where ideas and the physical space intermix, and the work soon takes off into all kinds of directions. I can, given more space describe in detail many more of the starting points and ambitions I have for this project, some will be seen through to the end others abandoned and news ones developed on site.
Breaking and Entry is a project that follows on from that first series of works began in 1994 in Leytonstone, working site-specific playing and working.
In 2013 in NYC I made a project called Broken Capital, commissioned by the New Museum and the Drawing Center. The final work was a single Corinthian capital 60 ft x 45 ft broken and shown in different sites in the Lower east side of Manhattan. One of the sites.
Stephanie Smith / Eddie Stewart – Divide
This confrontational new work will use the scale and expanse of a space (site/s to be determined) to engage the viewer with ideas about the fundamental nature of the relationships we have with one another - intimate, familial, social, political.
Our work is predominantly about relationships, starting with our own. (We have worked collaboratively & been together as partners for just over 20 years). This proposal has developed out of our collaborative practice where our concerns revolve around human relations and what people are capable of doing to one another, physically and psychologically. Central to this exploration is the body and its context and different media are used to explore ideas of separation, unity and ultimately, mortality.
A key previous work to cite would be Enter Love and Enter Death, made for the rooms of the Georgian Inverleith House in Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden. In a pared-back installation throughout the building, handmade sculptural constructions divided the space and the bodies of those populating it. The fabricated structures marked out the space (and its imagined potential functions). These divisions, determined to some extent by the fabric of the architecture, suggested feelings of somehow being categorised; split up into oppositional camps or simply surrounded. Through minimal means, the viewer's vision was obstructed and their movement frustrated: They were implicated within the work and forced to experience it. Once inside, the proximity and position of the framework compounded the impossibility of being able to see the entire structure, which was only comprehensible in the mind’s eye or imagination. This created a precarious balance between a seemingly floating space contradictorily bearing down its weight. The installation occupied the borderline of the material and the insubstantial.
Divide aims to place the viewer in the middle of a stark sculptural arena, so that their actual physical experience of the work makes it function and have meaning. Through setting up a kind of poetic situation constructed with materials and forms which challenge and disrupt your movement through the space, you're made more aware of how you move (or how you can't), your interaction with others and how others exist around you - conscious only of the present. Everything is constantly shifting (the floor, the walls, the space, bodies) but the structures are set, fixed. You're caught in limbo, a state of here and now.
We have already started the discussion about the feasibility of being able to undertake such an ambitious piece with consultant structural engineers from Arup Engineering, specialist steel fabricators & a core drilling company – all of whom are inspired by the challenge and prospect of pushing their field to the limits. However, the potential participants, site and logistics of such an undertaking would need to be determined with the help of Artangel.
We want to push this idea beyond expectations and can only envisage this within a collaborative support structure to facilitate the project to happen.
Susannah Stark – Filter Ono Filter
Inspired by the site of The Pipe Factory in the Glasgow Barras marketplace, the project, Filter ono Filter, aims to bring together a library of hidden sounds etched into ephemeral ‘memory discs’ on vinyl, dubplate, and acetate.
The vinyl record; a commercially produced item now often associated with collective nostalgia, is my point of departure. Inspired by record stalls in the marketplace, I will be conducting and combining research into the rich oral history of the Barras area with that of rural Scottish communities. Through casting, recording and collaboration, I will attempt to interpret and enrich the meaning of ‘encounter’.
The Barras market is a place where many locals roamed as children, just as its grounds were a locus of activity for prehistoric Scottish culture. This unique space brims with not only with personal memories, but with the memories of the entire city. The Barras market, a “corner of the city” is particularly suited to examining the language and music of a particularly ‘Glaswegian’ area but also allows us to open a dialogue with various communities of the world. Strolling through the market, it can be sometimes uncertain whether we are beholding the longings of yesteryear or the imaginings of today. In our recollections, the symbolism of our childhood and that of the selves we have become seems to overlap.
The project will look at real places that do exist and are formed in the very founding of society, which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.
The core concern lies in exploring the experiences that resonate among technology, music, art and people. In a commercial economy that replicates desires, how can the area access human motility to discover innovative creativity that transcends reproduction, and an aura that transcends anti-intellectual escapism?
In addition to the creation of an installation of records, the project looks at developing a collective narrative in visual, textual and audio forms, and I aim to track my progress via an online platform as ideas evolve, using the site as a public resource to upload recordings, pilot tracks, images from tours & sound workshops, along with other research, that I will use to broaden interest and garner further support for the work. I hope especially to attract, and will be contacting, musicians, composers and sound producers who may be interested in future collaboration, and developing the project in new contexts with me after Glasgow International Festival.
I will work with other Pipe Factory artists to contact individuals from the area for interview, organise tours of local heritage sites, and forge connections between local organisations such as Calton Heritage & Learning Centre, the Barras Market Traders, Glasgow Women’s Library and Historic Scotland, who can provide access to archive material relating to the history of the site, and information surrounding local lore, as well as additional support and backing for the project.
I will be working with a local orchestra, and musicians from Glasgow Royal Conservatoire to compose pieces specific to the project, inspired by sounds of the prehistoric site of the Barras, to football songs, sonnets and nocturnal urban activity,
I will be using sound editing software and working in tandem with a local producer to edit and master the tracks. These will then be cut into dubplates and vinyl by a London-based company.
Copies of the records will be available through The Pipe Factory and independent music suppliers such as Monorail Music in Glasgow, to generate further funds for the project’s continuity. These will have hand printed sleeves, containing a short publication about the project. I have been in conversation with BBC Scotland regarding broadcasting a feature on the project later in 2014, including recorded events taking place throughout Glasgow International Festival. Through working with various local organisations I hope to generate support & longevity for my project, particularly when entering negotiations with Area Trust funders regarding the potential for a permanent installation in the Barras area later in the year.
During April 2014, the project will be exhibited inside The Pipe Factory in its first stages as part of Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2014.
There will be a Record Launch event on the 11 April, during which a collection of limited play ephemeral acetate discs will be spun until they physically ‘disintegrate’ in the space, looped in and out of synch by hand in a durational performance, alongside local poets and musicians who will be invited to perform and interact live with the discs. I will be using video mapping software to realise a projection for the outside of the building for the duration of the opening event to draw both local visitors and a wider art audience. This will be a large image of a broken disc. On the 15 & 16 April, visitors and invited artists will be able to participate in a live recorded desert island discs sesasion at The Pipe Factory, and play a set of records along their own personal narrative, in response to the theme of ‘encounter’, for use in The Pipe Factory archives, the project blog and potential nationwide broadcast later in the year.
Furthermore, during May 2014 I will be undertaking a residency at Scottish Sculpture Workshops in Aberdeenshire and continuing to develop the project in a rural context, drawing on experiences and interviews with individuals in the immediate community, examining the oral history of the site and experiences of collective memory, from prehistoric to present day, combined with similar research undertaken in the Barras. There will also be a possibility to create discs from bronze, for permanent installation in the Barras area later in the year.
Richard Strange – Language is A Virus From Outer Space
A new work with an original composition by Gavin Bryars with direction and libretto by Richard Strange. With Doctors of Madness, Audrey Riley, Sarah Jane Morris, Gavin Turk, Haroon Mirza, Kate St John, Terry Edwards, Jeremy Reed and Ginger Light, Rupert Thomson, David Coulter and Seb Rochford, Atar Shafighian, Raf and O, and Luca Silvestrini as participants and collaborators
The novelist William S Burroughs was born on February 5th 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri. Consequently 2014 is his Centennial year.
It is our intention to celebrate the life and work of this remarkable and influential artist in a cantata- Language is a Virus from Outer Space.
Drawing on material from Burroughs’s books, plus anecdotes, observations and comments, the piece will use the drama, artistry and humour of his life to create a multi-media theatrical musical event.
Burroughs has been cited as an inspiration by musicians since the 60s- he is featured on the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album sleeve and has been referenced by such disparate contemporary musical artists as Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, John Cage, Nirvana, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and U2.
One of his most renowned and oft-emulated creative techniques was the cut-up which he developed with his colleague and collaborator, the writer and artist Brion Gysin. The cut-up method uses elements of random and chance to free the meaning of texts and words. Elements of this technique will be echoed in the score, the libretto and the staging.
Several of the key elements of Burroughs’s life will be referenced in the narrative of the cantata, from his days as a young gay member of The Beat Movement, alongside Jack Kerouac (On The Road) and Allen Ginsberg (Howl), to the accidental killing of his wife in Mexico (in an attempt to imitate William Tell in a hotel room, he tried to shoot a glass of his wife’s head, but his aim was poor and she was shot in the skull and died.) His lifelong battle with drugs, his obsession with firearms, his invention (with Gysin and Iain Somerville) of The Dream Machine, and his distaste for all forms of officialdom and state control will all be alluded to, as will his unique literary style. Part autobiography, part science fiction, part Swiftian satire, Burroughs’s work (The Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Wild Boys etc.) is by turns hilarious and hellish. The author Norman Mailer wrote of Burroughs, “(He is) The only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius." The William Burroughs Estate have been very helpful in offering me permissions for some key Burroughs texts to be used in the making of this work.
The project revolves around the commissioning of a new musical work of twenty minutes duration from the world-renowned composer Gavin Bryars, with a libretto by the writer, musician and actor Richard Strange, working alongside the arranger/cellist Audrey Riley.
Creating the music for the piece is the award-winning British composer Gavin Bryars, whose professional career began with his landmark recordings of Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet and The Sinking of the Titanic in 1975 for Brian Eno’s Obscure record label. His work has been performed all over the world since those recordings were released, and he has collaborated with many of the greatest names in Contemporary Culture, including Robert Wilson, Christian Boltanski, Merce Cunningham, Atom Egoyan, The Quay Brothers, Siobhan Davies and Tom Waits. The librettist and director, Richard Strange, is a former member of 1970’s proto-punk band The Doctors of Madness. Musician, composer, lyricist, actor, writer and curator, Strange fell under Burroughs’s spell at the age of fifteen, and even went as far as hitch-hiking to Paris to buy Burroughs’s books, which were until the late sixties banned in the UK. The Doctors of Madness were hugely influenced by William Burroughs, and Strange went on to work between 2004-2008 with the musician Tom Waits, and the director Robert Wilson on a musical play, The Black Rider, which featured a libretto by Burroughs, and also performed in the recent British premiere of Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels at the Royal Festival Hall.
It is intended to involve a student collective of musicians from the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance, London, an ‘orchestra’ otherwise known as “We Are Children (We Make Sound)” in the performance. By using these talented students, and also by featuring live performance by music students from The University of Southern California, via a live Skype link-up, thanks to the participation of Dr Richard Smith of The Music Faculty at USC, it is intended that we look forward as well as backwards with this celebration. The two ensembles will perform simultaneously at the same event, but separated by 8000 miles. A professional soloist will also be featured in the work, as well as vocalists and a narrator. An allusion to Burroughs’ cut-up techniques will be evidenced by live vision-mixing of the event to audiences in London and Los Angeles. The audiences will experience the same event simultaneously, but totally differently. The project is led by Richard Strange, who will also direct the performance, and Audrey Riley.
Stage design will be by top designer Becs Andrews, and it is intended that we invite some of Britain’s leading contemporary artists to contribute custom-made installations, and the work will be developed in collaboration with the visual arts department of the London College of Fashion, a faculty of the University of the Arts, London, whose students will provide costume designers, mask-makers, stylists and film makers. Thus a whole new generation of students from three different educational institutions, ICMP, LCF and USC, will be exposed to the work of this great American artist, most for the first time.
Visual arts, theatre and film will play a strong role, with Bryars’s composition underpinning the whole. New technologies will also be strongly represented in the creation and performance of the work.
The 2014 World Premiere performance of Language is a Virus from Outer Space will be high-quality, innovative, contemporary, experimental and entertaining, featuring live music, which will showcase two ensembles and soloists on two continents, as well as film, dance, installations by leading visual artists, text and performance. It is envisaged that the performance will be the culmination and centerpiece of an immersive event, celebrating the many facets of William Burroughs’ life and work, and will be staged as a promenade-style, site-specific work, at a venue yet to be finalised.
It is hoped that a version of the work will subsequently tour internationally in its own right, playing both concert halls and literary festivals, at home and abroad, as befits a work with feet in both camps. It is further intended that Language is a Virus from Outer Space will introduce a whole new generation to the work of Burroughs, Bryars and Strange, and engage them with the concept of multi-media immersive performance events.
Annika Ström – The Swede TV (working title)
Episode 0
DEMO: Featuring Carina Westling, Gunnel Lindblom See Vimeolink
Episode 1
Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre: The wrong Tate (Battersea power station) Outline far below.
Episode 2
Meadow hall Sheffield
A Canadian, eating muffins (Jennifer Allen) overhears The Swede. She hates Sweden and then begins complaining about Germany. Bodil believes Steve has been murdered.
Episode 3
Penn Mart Shopping Centre New Castle: The Swede interacts with the Norwegian shoppers. Bodil tries to find the murder.
Episode 4
Drake Circus Plymouth: Danish TV team records Nordic Noir. The Swede interacts. Bodil doesn’t realise that it is fiction, now convinced Steve is a murder victim.
Episode 5
Ikea Wembley, London: Fake shoppers filling trolleys with items, they abandon these at the till. The Swede uses the kitchens and naps on their sofas. Bodil gets lost at Ikea. The Swede loses her.
Episode 6
Houndshill Shopping Centre Blackpool: Bodil keeps looking for Steve. The Swede looks for Bodil. Bodil goes to the police.
Episode 7
Brent Cross Shopping Centre London: The Swede's Spanish companion Carlos drives her to Brent Cross and has a panic attack choosing a parking place.
Episode 8
West Quay Shopping Centre, Southampton: Bodil decides to jump on a ship to Sweden but gets the wrong one. The Swede somehow manages to guest on a TV food show.
Episode 9
Houndshill Shopping Centre Blackpool: Two elderly builders are having difficulty buying Valentine's cards for their wives. The Swede interferes.
Episode 10
Lake District: The Swede ends up in the Lake District, and wanders around grumbling to herself.
Outline for Episode 1: The Visitor
The Swede: Carina Westling/ confirmed
Bodil: Anna Blomberg (Swedish comedian)
Steve: (Danny Midwinter)
The Anti Swede:
Camera: Annika Summerson/ confirmed
Music: Mark Brydon / confirmed
The Visitor
As a young woman, Swedish Bodil was an au-pair in London but returned home after 3 weeks. Back home, she lived a normal life, got married, and had two children. When the grown up kids left home the husband left too. None of the kids ever gets in touch. She works part-time in a reception at a doctor's office. When her mother died, she inherited £2,200 and decides to go to London. She plays with the thought to look up Steve again, a man she had a fling with 25 years ago.
At her arrival at Stansted, some credit card thieves rob her at an ATM. She still has some cash and heads to the hotel. She takes a bus, which takes 4 hours to Liverpool Street. She arrives at the address. The hotel she has booked and paid for online doesn’t exist.
Bodil is active on Facebook and has promised to report on her trip each day. She finds an Internet cafe. She logs on and writes to her friends that the hotel is fantastic, she has already drunk the champagne from the minibar and that she thinks she has Steve’s number. Her friends write back and attach images wearing English hats.
Bodil now recalls that her old college friend Carina moved to London just after she graduated. She looks her up. She is easy to find, as she uses the forum to spread her political views.
Carina agrees to meet up – happy to have a fellow Swede to complain about England to – and suggests meeting outside Tate Modern.
Bodil is directed by an Italian Pink Floyd fan to Battersea Power station. Carina agrees to meet outside the Parliament instead.
Carina is already there, grinding on about England. Carina does not recognise Bodil, but is happy that she has a new audience. Any audience will do.
Carina rages to the tourist groups about unbearable England.
A man standing nearby is selling mini voodoo dolls of David Cameron, Milliband etc. and overhears what she says. He hates Sweden. He replies unasked, comments about Sweden like:
They are not good looking at all./Everything from buns, food and booze is seasoned with the herb dill.They even sprinkle it on cappuccinos, They only grow two things Pine Trees and Dill /That they sell weapons to war-torn countries while they bang on about peace ./The landscape is okay, but you can't see it because of all the Pine Trees /That they think they're so exotic because they are from the north, but he comes from the same latitude in England and nobody there talks about the Nordic light. And all these Nordic noir nonsense, every other day there's a murder….. and their poor food (Etc.)
Carina ignores him while Bodil is trying to convince him about their Ikea, Volvo and cinnamon bun. She fancies him.
Bodil keeps trying to call someone (Steve) but no answer.
They go for dinner at Elephant & Castle where Bodil has downloaded meal vouchers before she left.
Bodil compares prices all the time. She tries to hint that she is broke and robbed, but Carina is just angry. Bodil doesn’t dare to ask for help.
Bodil makes more phone calls and finally she hears that Steve might be up north touring with his music. Bodil is hopeful and impressed that he is on tour.
Bodil gets a picture message of her Swedish friends wearing English hats drinking beer in their hands at the local English pub in Helsingborg.
The Swede suddenly realises she has to take care of Bodil.
The Swede declares she is welcome to come with her to Sheffield if she can drive.
Bodil thinks Steve is up there playing in shopping malls, so she agrees.
Bodil went to Tarot reader before she left.
They head to Sheffield.