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Dr. John Richards: Wonky shapes and wrong code

Dr. John Richards (Reader in Music, Leicester Media School, De Montfort University)

Wonky shapes and wrong code

At the 2017 symposium, Richards started his talk by quoting Tim Long, “let the objects speak for themselves”. He also explored an idiosyncrasy of the room, a composition which he called “a piece for PowerPoint”; he used a black and a white screen, and the humming created by the audio cables to organise sound. He explained that a lot of his work involves a similar method, creating music using sound.

After his PhD in composition, Richards turned his back on the idea of composing and spending hours and hours at a computer. He explained how he enjoys making music that is tactile, he is interested in the material of sound and the type of material, timbre, spectrum and noise. He described how his work has become more and more noisy. However, Richards does not like having the reputation of being a “noise musician” as noise is an unwanted sound; he makes choices with the sounds he creates music with, and they are not unwanted.

He refers to quotes and books that resonate with him:

  • Henry Cowell, “The Joys of Noise” (1929).
  • Daniel Sudow, Ways of the Hand (1978).
  • Laurie Anderson, “there is not enough dirt in virtual reality”.
  • David Tudor, “composing inside electronics”.

Dirty Electronics is how Richards describes his research as it means getting your hands dirty and working with noise. His first exploration was through the notion of instrument, and his journey has been through sound to get to the idea of objecthood and materialism. His work sees a shift away from the subject and more towards the object; instead of playing an instrument, he has some sort of relationship with the instrument. Richards describes his approach as looking at the “very thing that is making the sound”. He also asked himself, why electronic sound? He doesn’t have an answer for this, he suggests that perhaps he is trying to make sense of it. He is not interested in technology, but concerned with the human aspect of it and relationships with technology.

Richards has made many simple interfaces, but doesn’t like the term ‘interface’ as it suggests a go-between. Although the work that he has made has been commercialised, he does not call himself an engineer. He described his objects as deliberately problematic; many of his artworks and performances have a scenario where things can be difficult to control, clumsy or break. Richards explained how it is not about making things efficient, he is interested in design questions and strives to exaggerate certain problems.

Richards has an interest in creating music with motors as it is related to the loud speaker; rotating motors create a wave form and an electric current. He showed an example of a printer motor with a pair of scissors attached, he explained how his research often focuses on incorporating objects that have a latent action.

Although Richards does not listen to it at home, he is a fan of improvised music. He likes to witness the effort and the struggle, as you have to work hard to achieve something. This is evident in his objects as an effort is required to achieve the sound, and it is not obvious how you can make music from it. Richards explained that the action is as equally important as the sound, and he has an interest in how sound changing over time affects how the sound is perceived.

The electronic norm is the singular DJ, but he has more of an interest in groups, event based performances, DIY, and what he calls “worshipping” the object. During these events, the building acts as an analysis; the building is a way of studying the object and will inform the player how to use it and create some sort of extended relationship between the maker and the resulting action. Sometimes videos and recordings are made, but he tries to avoid this as the artefact is what he gains from the extended events, e.g. circuit boards. Richards would design circuits which have particular shapes or patterns as the visual aspects, form and function of the components are very important; the design of the circuits often involves a collaboration with artists. The object is a replacement of the CD or the score, and the object has its own compositional ethos. Therefore, the object is not an instrument, but it is somewhere between composition and instrument. Richards concludes by describing his work as “a little bit fluxus” for creating deliberately impossible situations, but also describes his work as not too serious. He aims to push the limits of the norms associated with circuit boards to create objects that are as unconventional as possible.

You can view some of Richards’ work here.

Dr. Elly Thomas: Shuffled Landscapes: Game Playing Sculpture

Dr. Elly Thomas (Artist and independent scholar)

Shuffled Landscapes: Game Playing Sculpture

At the 2017 symposium, Elly Thomas discussed some of her latest work that explores childhood play and creativity, with a particular interest in building blocks. Her practice takes influence from the work of Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005) through modulatory and potential infinite variability.

Thomas visited Eduardo Paolozzi’s Krazy Kat Arkive (personal archive of 20th century popular culture) at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It holds many toys, models and action figures, but the kits are not assembled as the interest is within the component parts. His late work has been described as Meccano work as individual elements are organised in multiple ways. Paolozzi supports this description as his writings contain repeated references to building blocks of childhood play and Meccano, a toy that he played with as a child. His methods have also been described as collage with play influences (repetition, variation, rules and rhythms).

Paolozzi’s work includes sculptures that use pre-existing elements (machine mass produced elements), newly created elements, repetition and configuration. He often reused elements and this is described as a ‘floating process’ because the work is always temporary and reconfigured with other reused or new elements. This ‘floating process’ is also evident in his print work; a periodic table is used in many of his prints and it is always changing (e.g. position and colour). Paolozzi seems reluctant to let it settle and the process of the work is just as important as the sculpture.

Paolozzi’s 1967 Print Suite pushes these ideas further with audience interaction and chance elements used for an endlessly shuffled pack of cards. Like his sculptures, the shuffling game has no finalisation; there is a spatial approach to duration, with an infinitely evolving narrative. In museums, the Print Suite is often framed and cannot be used which undermines what Paolozzi tried to achieve.

Thomas has reflected on Paolozzi’s processes and expanded on his ideas in her own work:

  1. She used a sketch of a kit which she then cut up and used with an OHP to explore the different outcomes possible through audience interaction.
  2. Within sculpture, she has used an infinite piling process to produce artwork that is never finished. Her work often starts with an action, e.g. piling, and she asks “how many things can come out of that?”. She moves the sculptures into different states to experiment through the idea of a kit and using random offcuts.
  3. In her project of subsculpture, with the idea of early form, she used building blocks in the biological sense, e.g. simple single cell organisms. The project involved putting the work in different states, misusing elements, and taking elements and misunderstanding their use within her work. Thomas described how galleries can be unsuitable spaces for works that are never ending and use such large elements. Thomas changed the building blocks of this project several times, treating the sculpture like toys, and it was displayed in the window of a gallery which allowed it to be a public sculpture.
  4. In Thomas’ building blocks project she allowed audience interaction. She found that other people were freer to play with the work than herself. The public had a different logic or thinking, without the sense of failure that she often feels when rearranging her sculptures.
  5. During a residency, Thomas created sculptures that were reactions to found objects and incorporated them.
  6. She collaborated with Jennifer Taylor to create sculptures using found objects. She found that collaboration was competitive and a one-up-man-ship. Unlike other collaborations, they both worked at different times (day and evening) rather than together. Thomas described how this worked well and the competitiveness was like a game itself.
  7. Thomas’ solo show involved an improvisation using found objects. She collected objects in the street such as furniture, but she soon discovered practical restrictions; the items that she collected had to be held outside and when she started organising her sculpture in the gallery, she found that she hadn’t collected enough objects. Midway through the exhibition she reorganised the elements and this process was captured on video. Thomas did not plan the changes as it was improvised and the video shows her decision changes which are part of the narrative. There is no end to the sculpture due to the shuffling and reshuffling, and there is an aspect of performance.

To view Elly Thomas’ work, click here.

Dr. Phaedra Shanbaum: Temporary implants and the human body

Dr. Phaedra Shanbaum (Lecturer, Digital Arts and Media Education, UCL Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, UCL)

Temporary implants and the human body

At the 2017 symposium, Shanbaum discussed her current project “are we human or are we cyborg?”. She described implants as a technological device that aims to support, mediate or enhance pre-existing biological structures in the human body. The project analyses the utopian and dystopian stories told around these technologies and the consequent meanings attributed to them, critically examining the claims of implants, and the human and non-human relationships that the claims provoke and create. The project involves an artistic, collaborative and cross-disciplinary discussion, and an exploration from a humanities context, that can perhaps reconfigure our human relationship with technology. The notion that implants matter is at the heart of this project.

Shanbaum’s project is currently a work in progress, therefore her talk aimed to contextualise the project by talking about her aims and previous research. She focused on the notion of failure as implants will fail technically (cease to work) and conceptually (socio-political and cultural ideologies that underpin the device will be discredited, e.g. deemed outdated, racist or ablest). According to Shanbaum, experimentation largely constitutes practice-based research in the arts. One of the key things that constitutes experimentation is failure, the non-performance of what is required or expected, and deemed unsuccessful. Failure has become something that should be avoided at all costs and it evokes notions of disapproval, dissatisfaction and rejection, and feelings of anxiety, disappointment and discomfort. Failure is linked to existential and abstract notions of truth, wholeness, correctness, and power, control and ownership over bodies.

Flaws and weaknesses are often dismissed as unnecessary complications, however Shanbaum sees failure as positive and a radical potential to explore different relationships with technology. This is linked to her previous research project: ‘The Interface is Obsolete’, a critical framework for understanding the digital interface in interactive digital media installations. Her aim was to dispel the instrumental cybernetic action/reaction myth that surrounds the functions of the interface and constitutes as one of the main limitations of its conceptualisation today. Shanbaum believes that a rethinking of the interface is essential if we are to take them seriously and to engage with them on a deeper level. She concentrates on the aesthetic and cultural aspects of the interface to expand the definition of the digital interface from the direction of art history and media studies: “the digital interface is a dynamic, hybrid, aesthetic and cultural process”. Making the invisible aspects legible links the interface project to her latest project.

Shanbaum questioned, “what comes next?” and “what happens when we have thoroughly convinced ourselves that digital technology is invisible?”. She states that the next step is digital technology becoming interiorised, an implant. Her research questions: “what are bodies? Who controls the shape or forms they assume? Who or what owns the body and biological data?”. Implants can be both temporary or permanent, but her research is based on temporary implants, e.g. types of birth control, wires and screws used for healing processes that are later removed, and breast implants. Temporary implants are also used for non-medical purposes which are done at home or in tattoo and piercing parlours (the grinding community), e.g. North Sense, a device bolted to the chest that vibrates when the person is facing north. Phaedra states that implants are nonhuman technologies and are not innocent as they are not neutral or value free technologies. They are usually medical devices created by humans and give a very narrow and bias model of the world, and have a very dark history. The history represents another type of experimentation and another form of failure.

The aim of Shanbaum’s project is to explore what the terms deficient, normal and enhanced mean in relation to the human body and to critically challenge cultural assumptions around the body that these terms promote. By challenging these notions, her goal is to reveal contradictions within traditional theories of the body and its relationship to technology, linking her research to post-humanist critique, and therefore widening the definition of what it means to be human in the 21st century. The research questions for the project are: “how does the temporary implant challenge or change our current conceptualisation of the human? And, how does the version of the human that the temporary implant promotes differ from other visions and versions of the human?”. There are four phases of the project: consolidate (historical images, text, video and audio recordings), collect (documenting contemporary devices with oral and written histories), commission (collaboration with artists) and create (production of the archive). The outcome includes an archive of temporary implants, people’s lived experiences and medical records, and historical documentation, which will be available online to researchers and to the public. It will contribute to the investigation of issues around historical and contemporary perceptions of the body, embodiment, identity and technology. Phaedra referred to Rebecca Schneider when explaining that the archive is about recollecting and performing different bodies and modes of being.

 

Lisa Barnard: The Canary and the Hammer

Lisa Barnard (Senior Lecturer, The University of South Wales)

The Canary and the Hammer

“Like the ‘canary’ taken into the mine, gold is the gauge by which we monitor our environment; the hammer the tool that smashes the structures to which it is embedded.”

Lisa Barnard was the first speaker at our symposium titled ‘Practices, Processes, and Materials: Re-configuring Practice as Research in a Post-digital Age’ held on Thursday 1st June 2017. She discussed her project, which she described as a depository, on the subject of gold and as a response to the financial crisis of 2008. The output of Barnard’s research is a scrolling website with audio, film and photography, a three-screen interactive cube, and a book. Barnard explained how gold is “a potent symbol of ultimate value, beauty, purity, greed and political power”; the depository is a personal journey which explores these stories. Her work is fragmented, to avoid the photographic norm of a series, and this is evident through each of the chapters of this project. In her talk, Barnard spoke about her journey through the depository, with each chapter containing several subjects which are documented through narration and photographs:

Disease of the Heart

  • An historic overview of the financial crisis during the reign of James I and the Charter to the Virginia Company of London in 1606 for the pursuit of gold and silver, and the relationship between Pocahontas and John Rolfe.
  • Space ownership and the mining of asteroids, specifically referring to 433 Eros, an S-type near-Earth asteroid discovered in 1898.
  • The Dolaucothi Gold Mines (Carmarthenshire, Wales) are the only known Roman gold mines in Britain. Jewellery made from pure Welsh gold is very rare; the jewellery of the royal family has been made from pure Welsh gold since 1923.

Sweat of the Sun

  • The history of gold in South America, Francisco Pizarro, a Spanish conquistador, who looted Peru for its previous metals, and the gold mining that exists in Peru today.
  • Internal maps and tunnels of the mountains of central Peru and portraits of the Peruvian gold mining workers; men are employed to mine the gold and women, known as the Pallaqueras, are employed to sort the minerals.
  • The process of gold extraction at a mine in central Peru, and the Carbon in Leach (CIL) method. This method uses cyanide and has poisoned many lakes in the surrounding area.
  • During the talk, Barnard referred to the philosopher Martin Heidegger when discussing the idea of the tool, ‘the hammer’, how it is an extension of the body and what happens if it breaks.

The Ghost of the Gold

  • Barnard discussed invisible gold, gold and capitalism, gold reserves and the actor Jimmy Garner.
  • The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is the largest gold repository in the world. Some of the gold belongs to many foreign governments who are trying to repatriate their deposits.
  • The Bank of England vaults hold a fifth of the world’s gold. The Bank of England abandoned the gold standard in 1931, and the US followed suit in 1971.
  • Today, people are investing in gold and silver, and are even burying it in their gardens.
  • Lisa discussed ISIS propaganda and the obsession with gold currency. They claimed to have created a currency called gold dinars, but there is no evidence of this.

Excrement of the Gods

  • Nasa uses an enormous amount of gold for technology, e.g. spectrographs, the Hubble space telescope (to be replaced by the James Webb Space Telescope), in circuits as a conductor, and to plate polyester film to reflect infrared light.
  • Barnard also discussed the gold rush and gold mining in the US.

The Fox & the Rooster

  • Electronic waste (e-waste) is becoming a fast-growing problem, and the US is the largest producer of e-waste in the world. Instead of being recycled, the e-waste of the US is exported and dumped in Asia and Africa. In efforts to decrease the pollution, the Chinese government have relocated and scattered a lot of the waste to South China. Hong Kong is one of the major ports that sees e-waste being transported to China; it is often illegally smuggled and labelled as plastics. The gold is illegally extracted in China and sold back to the jewellery industry in Hong Kong.
  • Birmingham is the home of the jewellery industry in the UK. Barnard explained how a refinery near Birmingham uses similar methods to what she witnessed in China.

Lycurgus & Ambrosia

  • Gold nanoparticles have been used by artists for centuries for how it reacts with visible light to create vivid colours.
  • Gold nanoparticles are used in medicine, e.g. cancer treatments and malaria drugs. Barnard photographed parts of the process at an organisation in Cardiff.
  • At York University, there is research into using plants to produce gold catalysts.

 

To explore Barnard’s depository, click here.