Lever, crank, bell crank, cam and ratchet was an installation of a series of sculptures I made specifically for the GOODS In group exhibition (Saturday 28th June, a one day event in a disused warehouse space).
It was the first time anything like this had happened in this space and location-wise it was outside the usual destinations and a little bit tricky to spot (amusing considering the size of the place!) so it was good to see so many people track it down and come and have a look over the few hours it was open.
As per usual I ended up producing something that needed active participation from the audience in order to function: Lever, crank, bell crank, cam and ratchet consisted of 5 small cardboard models of each of the named mechanical components connected to each other and to weights via threads that arched across the room.
The sculptures were made so that rather than forming an array of mechanisms that combined to produce some overall useful effect, each one worked in isolation and therefore was limited to a basic repetitive action.
Apart from a few extras to form the axles and pivots (and the occasional rubber band, of course), the units were made from A4 cardboard picked up when I worked as a temp for an examining board. This is the cardboard used to reinforce the envelopes in which adult basic literacy and numeracy exams are returned.
I’ll leave you to form your own connections and meanings…
The way it worked out, there was no signage to accompany the works in the show so it became quite interesting for me to watch and see how people overcame (or otherwise) the usual gallery barriers to interact (or otherwise) with the mechanisms.
Many people wouldn’t operate the levers and handles - even when told they could, and even when they’d been looking at them for some time presumably wondering what would happen if…
As usual, the best way to get people participating was to lead by example and just get on and have a play and then invite them to join you. There were some nice cascades where for a while we’d have 3 or 4 people all operating different parts of the installation.
Also, as with other projects, those that got over that initial participation barrier tended to become ‘power-users’ [to borrow a term from a recent post] and get properly stuck in. I’m definitely talking about Pete here as demonstrated by the final scene in this video:
Saturday was the big ‘closing’ event for Emergent Game (again, we all seem to have trouble thinking of it in terms of being the end) and, as usual, my head’s full of stuff that I’m going to inflict on you as part of the process of sorting through it and pulling out threads. There are lots of photos to be shared and stories to be told, but I expect this will be done in a different place and in a different voice.
Here are some initial thoughts from the point of view of organising the event:
What is?
Partly through needing some distance and partly through commitments to other projects in the interim, there was quite a long gap between the NGA festival-related part of The Game (up until 20th of June) and the Grand Finally.
Though I didn’t have a lot of time for directly organising stuff, it did give me the opportunity to think a lot about more general things like what sort of an experience I wanted it to be. The event had been presented in terms of being a combination of the City Wide Treasure Hunt mission (coming from random descriptions in the festival literature) and the Ludens’ Tea Party mission - both big scorers within The Game and ideal ways to combine cabaret and collaboration.
As it began to take shape in my head though, I increasing lost sight of this and, especially after going to Hide&Seek last weekend, was thinking more in terms of the types of behaviours I wanted to encourage.
That sounds odd. What I mean is…
…that after much thinking I decided that the aim of the day was not to discover the location of some object or to solve a puzzle; it was to give people the opportunity to do things they wouldn’t normally do, within the framework of a larger context that added layers of excitement such as trying to remain anonymous when you knew there were other Ludens criss-crossing the same space at the same time.
Looking back at it now, I’m wondering if it’s enough to regard the larger context as being the day’s event, or whether you have to include all the play that came before it? Would the Grand Finally have been possible/as successful had there not have been the 2 month’s worth of conversation and interaction that built up the characters and narratives involved?
Certainly when I was planning who should do what, a lot of the missions were based on references to things that had developed out of the game. @egorbeaver was given a lot of teaparty themed activities, @cross_triangle’s day was based on glyphs and @LeonHerring got to spend some time at the beach. With other players I knew who they were in real life and so was able to build in references to things outside of Emergent Game.
The other benefit to having been through all the missions and stuff beforehand was that I’d got a sense of what, for me at least, provided the buzz: knowing that you might find yourself at a drop-off point at the same time as another Ludens; having to work with your avatar in public locations; having to either explain to Sapiens what was going on or pretend that nothing out of the ordinary was going on and it’s perfectly normal to be taking photos of this soft toy in this shop thank you very much.
By the time it got to In Deep End-Dance day I knew that I wanted In Deep End-Dance Day +1 to be based around the following:
A Common starting point and a common end point (i.e. the pub!)
Going to parts of the city you probably hadn’t been to before
Interactions with Sapiens
Remote interactions with Ludens - i.e. transfers of information and objects
Possibility of accidental direct encounters with Ludens - i.e. crossing of paths
That and 2 things to follow up on after a barrage of phonecalls and texts to possibly friendly Sapiens were pretty much all I had to go on at the start of spending the day in town looking for ways to string it all together…
Interactions with Sapiens
In moments of optimism I had thought it might be nice to have Sapiens tweeting in tasks etc over the course of the event, however the degree of interaction from Sapiens up until this point had been, frankly, disappointing so I gave up on that idea.
In comparison, the support I had from random strangers as I wandered around town and made strange requests was phenomenal.
First stop was the Borders bookshop in the BullRing where a supervisor friend volunteered two front-of-store staff to be in on the Grand Finally. Thanks to them I was able to leave several mission packs in a couple of different locations.
Four of the Ludens and two watchers passed through this space in the first hour or so of the event - I’d like to see the cctv footage!
Likewise, assistance from the staff at the Pen Room really made a huge difference. I’d only had a glimpse of this place a few years ago and wasn’t disappointed on going back for a closer look. I strongly recommend you do the same.
In the 2nd of the two pen room rooms is was immediately apparent that this was somewhere to send not only cross_triangle, but also the stamptmeister Loki. A big thankyou to Malcolm both for his enthusiasm and his assistance in relaying contents of emails.
A meeting in a coffee shop then secured the assistance of Zebra Scraf Woman on the Fluxus boat trip …and also the name of a friend’s mum librarian …which led onto one of the players being shown some of the Central Library’s Shakespeare Collection.
The other big contribution came from the security staff at the Victoria Law Courts at the top of Corporation Street. This is a favourite hidden gem where I usually take visitors to the city. Once you’re past the x-ray machine you’re immediately in another world of 19th Century architecture. Check. It. Out. (information sheet available from the desk inside)
I checked to see if they’d be open to the public on Saturdays and at first it looked like they wouldn’t and that I’d have to come up with another idea. So I asked them if they could think of any alternative locations and that drew a blank. …and then suddenly I’m proudly being shown the portcullis over [under] the main entrance [can anyone confirm this is the only one still in use in the world?] and we’ve worked out a deal that if I send a player along first thing then they’ll probably still be there and everything will be OK. Love it - and what’s more it sounds liek they were conducting their own personal treasure hunts when LeonHerring turned up with Leon’s mission:
As the Grand Finally progressed we also had encounters with various unsuspecting members of the public including (but not restricted to) most of the staff of Borders, someone with a clipboard, the man with the cigar photographed with egorbeaver at a prominent Birmingham landmark, the person ad Hudsons who took temporary custody of the receipt for the mug that had the photo of the man with the cigar photographed with egorbeaver at a prominent Birmingham landmark printed on it and the patrons of the children’s library. Job done.
Timetabling
Some of the players had to get to certain places by certain times before Law Courts shut or boats set sail. The timetable looked like this: (click for larger)
Needless to say most people werelate turning up for the start and a few coffees later quite a few things had to be jiggled. Didn’t seem to matter too much in the end, but lesson learned to leave more allowance for this sort of thing next time around.
Love it or hate it we relied on Twitter really heavily through all stages of Emergent Game. It’s caused us headaches on more than one occasion so I made sure everyone had my phone number before the Grand Finally began. Just as well really, because somewhere between Manchester and Brum egorbeaver discovered egorbeaver was suffering from the same PIN thing that had prevented me from playing Cruel 2 B Kind the weekend before.
So, for the first hour or two I was relaying instructions to egorbeaver by text. Luckily I did then manage to log onto egorbeaver’s account from the Grand Finally HQ in Coffee Lounge and get things working again later!
One thing I hadn’t really anticipated was the extent to which 7 people tweeting would eat up the battery life on our phones. We’ve talked about the benefits of using Twitter for a decentralised method of communication, but my phone gave out about 20 minutes before the end and we came really close to losing a few of the others too.
Next time around we’d have to consider either a) doing things over a shorter time-scale, b) doing things over a much longer timescale (i.e. you can go home and recharge between missions) or c) making more use of direct messages so that players only recieve tweets for them and not so much of the general chit chat. Hmmm, not sure if I’d want that or not…. I’m curious to find out more about egorbeaver’s experience of playing for a few hours with Twitter silence to see what this is like in comparison to having an awareness of what the other players are doing.
The other thing I like about public tweets is that they are then available as an archive of what happened in the way that direct messages are not.
Documentation and commentary
Puppet Mastering the Grand Finally was an intensely hectic experience. I didn’t get a chance to pause for the whole 3 and a half hours and only got the chance to go for a wee when Loki’s brain went bork and Loki joined me for a few minutes before going to collect the mug.
I’m definitely thinking in terms of this being a two-person job next time around. There certainly wasn’t any time available for live blogging or LudensShow tweeting for the benefit of any Sapiens.
I’m really glad that Alex and Vanessa agreed to join us as Ludens Stalkers and help document the event. I’ve now got some great images of various players at different points of the game and it seems like most of them were unaware they were being followed!
Although we heard a few tales in the pub afterwards, I’m really hoping the Ludens will take the time to write up their experiences so we can start to piece together what happened and, more importantly, what it was like to be in it.
The meet up
So, the guessing game is over! Now we know who they are! (Well, some of them, anyway.)
A bunch of Ludens in a pub eating beevapoo… who could have known that would have made me feel so happy! :)
One of the things several people commented on as the Ludens started to appear was how so many of them were women. Normally I’d pay as much attention to gender labels as I do to those for Art and Science (i.e. I try not to), but it does seem this is something significant. It would be interesting to find out who all the other players are to see if this trend is carried out across the whole Ludens population.
It’s interesting to look back now with hindsight and look at the different assumptions I made about whether Ludens were male or female. In my mind’s eye egorbeaver was male until I got the furball in that box and somehow the handwriting was female too. Oh, and the singing voice!
Ditto for cross_triangle: female handwriting on the labels that accompanied the treasure. What the hell does female handwriting look like?!?! How do I have an opinion about what female handwriting looks like?!!?
It occurred to me this morning that what we had in the pub was a bunch of web-literate people talking about digital stuff …who mostly happened to be women - and it all felt very, very different to the one blogmeet I’ve been to.
Anyhow, it feels like it would be a heinous crime to reveal anyone’s identity, so I’m going to leave it there.
Lessons learned and a big thank you to all those to whom I owe thanks.
Although it’ll be a good chance to find out more about The Game we’re intending that it should also stand alone and be of value to anyone who’s interested in the Big Game approach to collaborative creativity and exploring what’s around you.
So, armed with a pocket-full of technology and a soft-toy avatar, we invite you to join us in seeking out some interesting parts of Digbeth. Tonight, drop in from 4.30pm until at least about 7pm. It’s free - just bring yourself, your mobile phone/digital camera and a sense of humour.
Judging by the Google map for the mission they’re finding it hard going. So far they’ve logged a few libraries and a couple of free WiFi connections.
The issue of free WiFi in Birmingham (or the lack thereof) has come up a bit recently, and the idea of mapping free WiFi nodes is not new - although it’s often hard to distinguish between genuinely free resources and those you have to pay to use.
We’re appealing here for anyone who knows of a free WiFi connection or, (even better for the purposes of Emergent Game) anywhere members of the public can use an internet-connected computer for free, to let us know in the comments on this page. Then we can hunt it down, add it to the map and use it later as part of The Game. Of course, you could even add it yourself, if you felt so inclined…
The recon2 map is here and it’s public access for anyone to view. Like the resources it maps, it’s free. Use it.
paul conneally + nikki pugh + you + them
Saturday 29th March, 2-5pm
meet at VIVID at 2pm
As Digbeth continues its metamorphosis and assimilation into Eastside (Birmingham’s transforming, revitalising and regenerating regeneration project[1]) art institutions and project spaces present there are slowly increasing in number and yet, for the most part, they are safely kept behind locked gates, barred windows and access-controlled doors.
For Invigilator: Digbeth, a team of volunteers will take the role of gallery invigilator/visitor assistant outside where, rather than sitting in gallery spaces, they will be watchful over the streets and the day-to-day life unfolding there.
This is the fifth in the Invigilator series[2] where a single set of directions has been transposed onto different locations to determine the exact place for watching over; we can choose our significant starting points, but then a pre-determined sequence of lefts, rights and straight-ons takes us on a not-quite-random walk to an unplanned invigilation site.
Invigilator: Digbeth will consist of several invigilations taking place simultaneously throughout the Digbeth area. The significant starting points will be the galleries, studios and project spaces that would normally host the invigilators. The same galleries, studios and project spaces responsible for Digbeth’s renaissance…
Digbeth is also significant as the starting point for the Invigilator series as a whole since the directions used to arrive at the invigilation sites were derived from those used to get from home to a part-time job invigilating at VIVID.
All are welcome to join us for Invigilator: Digbeth. We will meet at VIVID at 2pm, borrow some of their red t-shirts and then walk to our respective invigilation sites (about 4 people per team) where we will be watchful for about 30 minutes before returning to VIVID for refreshments and feedback. No special equipment required: just bring yourselves, suitably warm clothing and a willingness to interact with the city.
I generally have a couple of website clients on the go alongside my main commissions as an artist [caution: superficial divisions - not always useful!]. I don’t do the web design full-time so, in addition to being a supplementary source of income, these commissions are really important to me as a way of keeping my skills as up-to-date as possible.
After several months working alongside Joe and Kelly in Rednal, we’ve now launched the website for their new holiday home Fern Cottage. Well, when I say new, I mean about 250 years old…
Fern Cottage was built circa 1750 and, as well as being one of those places that’s tucked away in it’s own quiet niche so you can forget that you’re just on the edge of Birmingham, it’s also famous for being one of the childhood homes of J.R.R. Tolkien. Yes, thatJ.R.R Tolkien .
I’m happy to say that, in true Grand Designs stylee this project met with several delays linked in with the renovation of the cottage, but the results were worth waiting for. I just wish we were a bit further on into Spring so the turf and garden had had a chance to get going a bit.
So, what was I up to whilst Joe and Kelly were sanding the wooden beams in the ceilings and debating over the light fittings? Where was I bringing in a bit of learning curve to the web design?
Paperwork
This was the first challenge. As the projects I’m getting involved in get progressively larger in scale it was time to get the contracts and other paperwork up to standard too. I’d already learned my lessons (the hard way) with regards to fighting project creep and making sure there’s a design brief that sets out exactly what’s to be done for the price quoted, but it was time to make sure things like copyright and liability were explicitly covered too. Fortunately AIGA (founded as the American Institute of Graphic Arts, now a professional association for design in general) have already done most of the hard work with their Standard Form of Agreement. Perhaps a bit O.T.T. for most of the jobs I do for artist portfolio sites, but we felt it was necessary here. And of course, now I’ve developed my own templates from this, these can easily be adapted for future projects. Phew!
All this was backed up with Slim Timer so I could compare how long I estimated things would take with how long they actually did.
Blueprint
I’ve been implementing my own frameworks for coding sites for several years now (particularly with regards to browser resets and typography), but with the Fern Cottage project I decided to give the Blueprint CSS framework a try.
This felt sort of alien at first, however it was very easy to implement and yes, it did speed things up a lot - particularly with the usual fun and games getting compatibility across browsers.
After a bit of wrangling I decided to leave the Blueprint classes in the code for all to see. Does it feel like cheating? Maybe just a little, but I’m sure I’ll get over it!
Libraries
I’ve been playing with javascript libraries more and more recently, but have been very strict when it comes to using them within live sites. It’s very easy to start using transitions and effects just for their own sake. Since I’m coming at this web design stuff from a process and architecture point of view rather than as a graphic designer (probably evident in the rather flat style I seem to be developing!) I’m generally cautious about following the crowd with whatever the in thing currently is.
The Fern Cottage rooms and facilities slideshow however was a perfect situation to use glider to add a bit of interactivity and compress what would otherwise be a fairly mind-numbing list.
Setting up the tea and cake shot for the dining room section was quite fun too!
Getting social with Flickr
After a few photo shoots it became obvious that we had loads more photos that we wanted to share than we had space to put them on the website. Flickr came to the rescue and although it wasn’t appropriate to embed slideshows within the Fern Cottage site, Flickr was a nice way of extending stayatferncottage.co.uk out into the wider world. The We’ve stayed at Fern Cottage group is an important part of this and I’m hoping it will be both an appealing way for people to get involved (complementing the guestbook) and also an easy way for Joe and Kelly to document the cottage as it grows into itself.
Joe and Kelly would also be really interested in hearing from anyone who has any photos of Fern Cottage from the past so please get in touch with them if you have any Fern Cottage photos, or perhaps just add them to the Flickr group.
First I invigilated some of the New Forest. Then Paul replied by hopping on the train with the morning commuters and invigilating a building site in Derby.
Shortly after that I wanted to explore what would happen if you had more than one invigilator. I wanted to see how the presence of multiple invigilators affected the dynamics of an area that has to be walked through (rather than just a point location that people can walk past).
I was in Japan at the time so this gave rise to Invigilator: Tokyo and - inevitably - a whole barrage of further questions!
More recently, Paul and I met up in Nuneaton for the first of the invigilations that we have done together. More questions!
We now feel it is time for us to turn the process around on itself and use the next invigilation to examine its origin: my old part-time job invigilating the gallery space at VIVID.
We want to dissect what we have learned so far.
We want you.
We’re currently gathering people who would like to don red t-shirts and join us on Saturday the 29th of March for Invigilator: Digbeth. We want to scale up the Tokyo action and send small teams of invigilators percolating out through Digbeth: turning the whole cultural quarter thing inside-out to extract people from their barricaded, security-protected warehouses and onto the street for an hour or so.
As a nod to how this series of works came about, we’ll be using VIVID as a base, liberating their red t-shirts, and also returning there for the debrief session and refreshments afterwards.
The invigilations themselves involve following a set of left/right/straight-on directions and then probably about 30 minutes standing around that location being watchful. What we’re after, in order to give Invigilator: Digbeth some clout is a) as many invigilators as possible so we can properly cover a large area and b) some suggestions for relevant starting points for the random walks.
So, for now, we’d like you to do three things for us:
Put that date in your diary: 29th of March, 2-5pm.
Suggest some cultural venue/art institution-esque starting points that the random walks to the invigilation locations can start from. We know about the obvious ones near to VIVID such as Ikon Eastside, the Custard Factory and the soon to be opened Eastside Projects, but we’d like more. Are there any? Bung something in the comments and let us know about it!
Let us know if you’d like to take part. All welcome, but we’d be particularly keen to hear from anyone who would normally work as one of the aforementioned venues.
This morning I went along for an introductory visit to the local primary school where I will be doing a project with some of the students.
I found myself in the staffroom with some teachers fresh from an assembly where they’d had two dancers performing. One thing led to another and suddenly the conversation had evolved into the one about Not Getting Modern Art. You know the one - it always starts with The Bricks and The Bed.
I let it go. I didn’t have the heart to introduce myself as the artist who’d just been asked to do something with the reception class’ bricks.
Observation became participation after stepping in to perform banana-opening duties at break time and the food-related theme continued with invisible chocolate soup and an invisible glass of wine with cream on top.
I was asked to condense how my practice had developed since graduation (June 2006) into a 20-minute presentation to the current final year students on the BA at Bournville.
This is what I came up with:
I’m not sure what the students thought of it (I think I might have scared a few of them), but it’s only now, after the presentation, that it’s starting to dawn on me exactly how packed those 16 months have been.
I’m finding the whole thing a bit mind-boggling. I can’t quite get the time-scale right in my head: graduation seems like such a long time ago, and yet I still feel like such a beginner*.
Prompted by several things (not least of which was the opportunity of being able to observe someone else using it on someone else’s equipment - there’s nothing like seeing your shortcomings projected onto a large screen!) this site is due for another overhaul.
Significant chunks of the last few weekends have been spent re-coding the page templates from the ground up and then, whaddyaknow, WordPress announces another release due for tomorrow! Hey ho.
I’ve mostly finished the new site, however that means I’m now up against The 10% Wall. You know the one: where the last 10% of the work manages to take up 90% of the total time. Sigh. Perhaps time to back off a bit and then come back to it with fresh eyes later…
What I thought I’d do in the meantime was to put some thoughts down here just as a way of keeping the juices going.
Here’s a quick teaser-screenshot of the forthcoming Genzaichi Edition:
As you can see I’ve gone back to the light background and white-space of previous incarnations. Also a return to the sort of flat graphic style that I seem to gravitatenaturallytowards. In fact, there’s really not a lot of obvious decoration in this one at all. Probably why I’m having to spend so much time tweeking the little details…
The other big change is more functional: I’ve decided to give commenting another go.
After bad experiences with spam on the weatherproject site, over the past few years I have avoided giving other people the ability to leave comments on posts. The tide is changing though. I’m assuming WordPress now has better inbuilt protection against spam, but I also see the people around me becoming more au fait with blogs and the idea of commenting on other people’s sites.
Add to this the recent announcement of the upcoming closure of Midwest (strange how the fora have just sort of died off), and really positive experiences of utilising blog commenting to help drive collaborative projects, I’ve decided to give it another go. If it all goes to pot I can always disable the function, but I hope it won’t come to that.
What else can I say? JavaScript libraries, sIFR and IE are nearly playing together nicely. All I’ve really got to do is wait for some blind monks to get back to me…
[I’ve run out of steam now. Can you tell? Perhaps I should just go back and have another look at the line heights…]
Looking at the post later, I happened to set both players off at the same time and was struck by the effect of having two narratives running side by side.
The videos are definitely much stronger when taken as part of a group, so this is something I’ll be investigating further.
In the meantime I rattled off a quick side-by-side rendering as a test of concept. I like the way there seems to be a call and return between the two tales. Imagine what this would be like with 29 stories running at the same time!
The resolution of the video isn’t very high at all, so if you want to actually read the text, you can watch slightly better quality versions on the original post.
Curious as to how people navigate themselves around what might superficially seem like an open, empty space, yesterday I set myself up at a carpark on Canada Common and chatted to dog walkers as they returned from their walks and asked them if they could describe where they’d just been.
I spoke to about a dozen sets of two-leggeds and four-leggeds with a range of results from which two different methods of navigating seem to be forming.
The first is by landmark: fixed things in the landscape to aim for. The bench on the hill; the pond; the white chimney; third pylon to the left from the big tree…
The second is by rule: look for water so the dogs can cool down; avoid water so the dogs don’t get too muddy; keep away from men; keep away from dogs that are bigger/scarier; avoid all that poo over there…
So, I decided I needed to put the lid on, shake things up good and proper and then see what came out: I needed to scare myself a bit.
I went to Japan; I studied at Joshibi; I learned loads; had a great time and was not ready to come back home. It may not have turned out to have been that scary, but now I’ve had some distance, I’m starting to realise exactly how much it’s turned things upside down.
To borrow somebody else’s words, “watashi no sekai ga hirogaru”. My world has spread. And that’s probably a good thing.
I’ve been looking at things differently:
Wandering around with a camera, wondering how to explain car boot sales.
Actually appreciating [some of] the architecture of Birmingham.
Oh yeah, and myself.
I’d been questioning the way I worked for a few months prior to going to Joshibi. I’d been doing the Professional Development sculpture course at Dudley, learning stone-carving, wood-carving, more welding, more ceramics and more casting - but not being quite sure how that was going to manifest itself in my work.
Then I had a bit of an early-hours-of-the-morning-eureka-moment. My best work wasn’t to do with what media I worked in, it was to do with the way I worked. Joshibi was a chance to try out a few hypotheses.
Rule #1: A clean canvas
Don’t take any materials/plans with me. Don’t resume any existing projects.
Rule #2: Learn new things
Well, it would be stupid not to.
Rule #3: It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.
OK Pugh, think defining the rules of the system and then leaving the rest to chance. Think putting yourself in a situation and then documenting the results. Think that compulsively collecting random things is entirely justifiable behaviour.
Rule #4: Relish being illiterate.
‘Cos it’ll be different next time I’m here.
I’m going to leave it there for now and have a think about what the results were…
