Month: March 2016

These are the notes that I found and used for my presentation on Blast Theory and their use of technical aspects and technology as a whole.

Blast Theory

Est. 1991 and they are based in Brighton, UK

Founded by Matt Adams, Niki Jewett, Will Kittow and Ju Row Farr. The group is currently led by Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj.

51 notable works between 1991 and 2015 and have won many awards including an interactive arts BAFTA award.

Genres of performances

The genres of their performances are listed as so Audio, Gallery-Museum, Games, Live, Mobile, Online, Video & Our Research

A lot of their performances also cross over genres

Soft Message

Comes under the genres of audio and mobile

The calls catch people drunk at parties, in art galleries and out on the street. We hear them arguing, shouting at their cats or as their friends grab the handset. They open their lives to the listener, they reveal secrets and declarations of love. From the first call to a Mancunian goth pretending to be Romanian we follow these four people through a week in their lives as they open up to us.

The conversations use the intermittent, slow motion nature of the interview to explore the things that are rarely said and rarely heard. Most importantly, we hear the voices of people alone, confessing, contemplating, and opening up to the absent interviewer.

The programme explores the ways in which radio and telephones lend themselves to a certain kind of intimacy. The programme asks how is the rise of the mobile phone affecting how we talk to each one another and what does it mean to talk to strangers?

The programme was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 at 10pm on Thursday 7th December 2006.

Fixing point

Genres are audio live and mobile

Fixing Point is an audio walk about Seamus Ruddy made in collaboration with electronic musician Clark. This work was first shown at Snape Maltings in Suffolk. The Maltings focus on a programme of classical music in an idyllic rural setting. However the area has a strong military history with experimental installations at Orford Ness and an American nuclear base at Bentwaters.

Building on these contexts Ju Row Farr conducted an interview with Anne Morgan about her brother Seamus Ruddy. He was killed in 1985 by members of the Irish National Liberation Army in Paris. His body has never been found but is believed to be in a forest in France. He is one of a number of victims who disappeared and relatives are still anxiously hoping to find news of their loved ones. Anne speaks movingly about Seamus and what it is like to wait 26 years for news that never arrives.

To take part in Fixing Point you walk to a wood wearing headphones connected to a smartphone. The screen shows a map of the area and audio recordings are hidden in the wood. You explore the wood to reveal the recordings and learn more about Seamus. Each recording is also marked by a metal fixing point which is screwed into the ground leaving a galvanised steel ring visible above the surface. Blast Theory Associate Artist Jon Sutton created the Android application.

This work was premiered on 28th May 2011.

Too much information

Genres are audio live and mobile

Use a smartphone to find audio recordings of secrets and intimate moments hidden around the streets of Manchester, set to a score by Martyn Ware of The Human League and Heaven 17 fame.

Too Much Information is an audio walk around the streets of Manchester, based on a series of frank and funny conversations between two groups of people at very different stages of their lives – a group of young adults and a group of over 60s.

Posing some seemingly awkward questions, Blast Theory Artist Ju Row Farr and Associate Artist Niki Woods worked over a series of 3 intensive workshops with two groups at the Royal Exchange Theatre. The two groups had never met and under normal situations, would be highly unlikely to have such personal conversations with each other.

Too Much Information explores our expectations of young and old people, it looks at different life experiences and what we can enjoy and learn from each other from different points in our lives.  As you walk around the centre of Manchester these shared revelations are set to specially commissioned soundscore by Martyn Ware.

This is the second piece of work Blast Theory has created in partnership with the Royal Exchange Theatre, following on from 2013’s My Neck Of The Woods.

‘ An eloquence emanates from these abandoned spaces, and Pilgrim cleverly allows them to speak for themselves, to reveal more than she imposes’ (The Guardian, Deep End).

Geraldine Pilgrim creates Site Specific installations and performances in extroadinary buildings and in different locations. Her main work is creating memories and atmospheres and interpreting them into Site Specific art.

Pilgrim created a Site Specific piece called Not Forgotten which ran from September 2010 until September 2011. The installation is based on the fourteen children of John and Mary Towneley, who had a family portrait back in 1601. The family tree, the lavender and the cots were each a memorial to each child.

‘I want to create a memorial to the Towneley family, part of which installation that changes and develops over time and draw on the family history, the hall and landscape to create an artwork the belongs to the people of Burnley.’ (Pilgrim, 2010).

I feel that it was her aim to create a type of artwork that makes the public think and imagine a home that experienced the life, loss and love of the family.

http://www.midpenninearts.org.uk/contemporary-heritage-notforgotten

Blog post

For the research project I decided to look further into Forced Entertainment’s piece Dreams Winter, originally performed from the 15^th to the 20th of July 1994 in the Manchester Central Library. The piece was devised as a site specific performance for the Library, an interview with Tim Etchells by the Independent sheds more light on his inspiration for the piece.

‘A library is where lovers meet and where spies exchange information,’ says Tim Etchells, the company’s writer and director: ‘We were drawn to the idea of animating the stories and secrets contained in all the books, as well as conjuring the ghosts of past library users, invoking the voices of authors and characters, as well as readers. There are lots of stimulating contradictions: it’s full of voice yet you’re supposed to be silent; a reader sits in one place yet this consciousness travels unfettered . . .’

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-quiet-please-mayhem-in-progress-from-off-the-wall-to-off-the-shelf-forced-entertainments-1413545.html

 

We can see that Etchells was clearly influenced by the vast collection of novels and the plethora of knowledge that resided in the space the performance was designed to occupy. Etchells mentions the readers too, and with this in mind I believe the audience are incorporated in to the performance. The spectators are real people in the library, and the actors can be seen as a surreal and corporeal version of the spectators, their minds active and wandering around the library whilst they remain in their seats inactive. We see the actors for the piece performing bizarre actions such as climbing on to the bookshelves and up the walls. Even more bizarre than that we also see that “at Etchells signal they rifle the shelves, seize hefty tomes, hammer them down upon the tables and rip out the pages.”

The Manchester Central Library boasts truly outstanding architecture, similar in style to the pantheon of Rome. Although beautiful from the exterior with the many giant columns granting a sense of majesty to the Library, the architecture really came in useful for Forced Entertainment when it came to the interior of the building. Aside from the grand columns the Library is also well known for the great dome that makes up the majority of the structure. The architectural bonus of the dome in terms of the performance is that it “causes echoes to travel in specific and surprising directions”according to Etchells, which would have created a great percussive echoing during the section of the show “Panic!” The section I mentioned previously in which the actors aggressively slam the books on the tables.