Hands-on play session for the CLIP experimental music group in Colchester. HAVE FUN WITH POWER DRONE and LIGHT-REACTIVE FREQUENCY SWEEPS This workshop is open to girls and gender minorities ages 12-25. Free but booking essential: link here.

Last week I ran a sound arts workshop culminating in a sound piece with a group of 20 secondary school children from a local school in Saxmundham as part of the Art Station’s Telephone Exchange exhibition.

ABOUT

The Art Station is partnering with Saxmundham Museum and BT Adastral Park to celebrate the historical significance of the 1950s former BT telephone exchange and post office building that serves as their current home. The project will open the original exchange rooms and equipment to the public for the first time alongside contextual archival materials and artefacts. Digital artist Henry Driver will also be displaying his work Secrets of Soil within the space, providing a unique creative response to the developing technology of communication. Creative Technologist Emily Godden will be exhibiting 1858 Dunwich-Zandvoort cable ft. GPT-2, a piece exploring our relationship with the archive in the age of deep fakes and neural networks. Oral historian Belinda Moore is interviewing former employees and capturing their stories. Sound artist Loula Yorke will be running hands-on workshops with local students to engage with analogue and digital technologies associated with the equipment used at the  exchange.

This collaborative project invites the community to observe and engage with its rich history as a hub of connectivity for the East Suffolk coast. The building at 48 High Street Saxmundham is an iconic example of 1950s industrial architecture – designed by Thomas Winterburn, one of the ten post office architects associated with the Festival of Britain movement, it functioned as a busy working post office and telephone exchange until the 1970s.

Saxmundham Telephone Exchange will be opening to coincide with Heritage Open Days 2021, with weekend openings on 12-4pm Saturday 18 September and 12-4pm Saturday 25 September at 48 High Street, Saxmundham IP17 1AB.

This exhibition has been made possible thanks to funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

From one dose of Big Jacket weather to another (brrrrr it got cold suddenly didn’t it)

New show up for CAMP is now archived on Mixcloud to listen again. Music from Lucy Railton and Kit Downes, Odalie, Erika de Casier, Bearcat, DFANIKS, Eugenio Bennato, Frankie Cutlass, Yorgo Stenos, Pip Millet feat. Ghetts, IAMDDB and more.

On the evening of 24 September 2021, I will be performing a sonic response to the Proxy Bodies exhibition at Hamilton Micro Arts Space in Felixstowe.

Proxy Bodies is a collaborative exhibition initiated by Elly Clarke in culmination of her three-month CHASE DTP supported PhD placement at Hamilton MAS. Through the media of photography, performance, embroidery, drawing, music and sound, the show explores ideas and lived realities of having and keeping a body going in an uber-connected, politically & ecologically unstable world – among other drags, pressures and pleasures.

All work in the exhibition makes use of different kinds of repetition. In Clareese Hill’s photo series Conjuring from the Rhizome, this repetition is also a form of ceremony, where she activates ancestral and critical diasporic knowledges to create spaces of rest. In these ceremonies, Hill conjures up The GUIDE, who is a triadic collaboration of Black knowledges, autoethnographic mining and ambivalence of participation within the academic conventions of research. Dominique Savitri Bonarjee’s Collapse, which has been performed in different places around the world over the past five years, is a ritual of resistance and surrender, a practice for listening to gravity, time, the weather, the climate, and the movements of an expanded field of aliveness. Next to this, her embroidery work Do Nothing is Best, made during lockdown last year, and gathers a number of sayings by four renowned Butoh dancers, as well as the artist’s contemporary meditations on their movement riddles.

Exhibited for the first time Bryony Graham’s rubbings of pain med blister packs were for a while the only thing she could do, when her illness made it incredible difficult to walk. Album is a high street stationery bought notebook which she repurposed into a photo album in 1991. In 2019, as part of a period of life review, radically adapting to a new way of living with a chronic, incurable pain condition, Graham took the images out again, leaving only the photo corners visible. In her work as an artist and as founder and director of this space, she is interested in invisible support structures, and in finding ways to make them visible.

For Elly Clarke, it’s the constant reusing and recycling of images that are the documentary digital detritus of performances and film projects she has created as her drag alter ego #Sergina. Traces of a Performance is a new series of images that are all taken from a single screen recorded rehearsal from a VJ set Clarke did on International Women’s Day in a former Nunnery in the Alsace in France in 2019.

Galina Shevchenko’s Prosthetics Series/Liquidity iterations muse with the ideas of labour, production, procreation, and mediation. Emerging as iPad drawings, the images evolve to become digital embroideries through custom-developed algorithms. Hanging in the windows, the embroideries are pinned to the ready-made matrix of commercially produced fabric and lace, channelling the processes of artificial cross-breeding. This work is inspired by Donna Haraway’s Cyborg manifesto and Shevchenko’s ongoing research into Renaissance Grotesques.

On Friday 24th September, Loula Yorke will perform a sonic response to the exhibition.

We are very grateful to CHASE DTP for supporting this exhibition.

I’ll be sharing some insights into my work on the evening of Monday 6 September in association with Collusion.

Whether you have a project in mind or just want to know more, are a complete novice or a more experienced user of tech who’d like to expand their skills and share their knowledge, join us – try, share, connect and maybe create exciting new art!

Join us at Norwich Arts Centre for registration and drinks from 6pm. The session starts promptly at 6.30pm and there will be time to explore a range of ideas and technologies, with experienced artists and creative technologists on hand to chat to. Areas covered will include visual projection tools, interactive augmented reality, motion tracking with Kinect, and cool sounds! The session will wrap up at 9.30pm.

ART // TECH // PLAY is led by Collusion, a not for profit arts organisation with a track record of working with artists to projects involving digital technologies . This session is supported by Norwich University of the Arts, Norfolk County Council and Norwich Arts Centre. It is part of an initiative designed to support more artists to engage creatively with digital technologies.

Artists attending:

Will Hurt – Visual Artist and Creative Technologist who will be showcasing his new playable project ARPS

Loula Yorke – Live artist and composer who will be sharing insights into her work with live performance and improvisation on hardware synths.

Karen Eng – Writer and multidisciplinary artist who will be showing how Tagtool can be used to cast live projected visuals.

Jamie Gledhill – Artist working at the intersection of storytelling, audio-visual experimentation and interaction design who will be talking about creating The Multitude, an interactive playable story.

Liam Roberts – Video Artist and Creative Producer who will be demonstrating techniques in using moving image content as part of a live performance or installation.

One evening in late July 2021 Frazer Merrick – sound artist, composer and inventor (alongside Simon Keep) of the Photon Smasher – came over to TR-33N HQ at Asylum for a visit. Frazer’s invention is a handmade microphone that turns light into sound. He’d given myself and Dave a couple of devices to play with during the Atari Punk Girls workshops, but we decided to take it a bit further and see how the Photon Smasher would react to light emitted from soundwaves containing pitch information from our laser. Here are the surprisingly musical results!