Tag: interactive

Hutong Watch

Hutong Watch is a guided walk promoting critical reflection on our immediate environment, accessed using a mobile phone, and undertaken simultaneously by two colleagues in different locations.

Instructions are received via text from Hutong, and participants undertake a series of challenges whilst keeping in touch using smartphone messaging apps.

Hutong Watch takes participants on an identical rectangular walk traced onto different maps. It finishes with a short meditation delivered as a phone call to participants as they sit in a quiet public place of their own choosing.

Colleagues in three continents took part in Hutong Watch in April 2015: in Mexico City, New York, and London.

It devised and delivered as part of a pilot of artistic interventions in the workplace at SHM Productions, and delivered using a custom-made programmable telephonic interface on loan from Coney.

Hutong Watch was inspired by and adapted from another test piece called Hutong, created by Mel Cook with Hey Fan, Tassos Stevens and Annette Mees for Coney in 2010.

related projects

The Slow GIF Movement

Public Selfcare System

Silent Cacophony

Silent Cacophony

Silent Cacophony was an installation created in collaboration with Holborn office workers as part of a London-wide initiative exploring alternative ways of commemorating Remembrance Day.

“By experiencing your complex and profound works we have ended up with a shared language to deal with the unsayable.” – Maurice Biriotti, CEO SHM Productions.

  • Footsteps installed on the pavement in Bedford Row mirrored the journey taken by a silent Zeppelin airship and its crew on the night of 8th September 1915, when over 40 bombs were dropped on the Bloomsbury area, killing 26 people.
  • The journey was replicated on a scale of 1:125 and reoriented by 90 degrees. Each footstep corresponded to one of the bombs dropped, and the location it was dropped in.
  • Some of the steps were marked with responses, questions and thoughts from local workers to the map and story of this raid.

 

Audiences were invited to take this journey in silence.

Dates: 11 Nov. 2013, Holborn, London.

This installation was part of a London-wide project of the same name by Platform-7 supported by Arts Council England, The SHM Foundation, and Queen Mary, University of London.

INK

“it was a great privilege to be involved” – Nicola Jennings, caricaturist with The Guardian

INK was an eclectic collection of 120 museum artefacts, artworks, texts, films and other items all relating to the history and substance of ink. It drew extensively from the remarkable teaching collections, personal archives and the work of staff at University College London (UCL), and contemporary artworks sat alongside priceless museum artefacts and everyday objects.

Every day a ‘live respondent’ inhabited the space and created an exhibit to add to the collection. These included political cartoonists Nicola Jennings and Martin Rowson, renowned tattooist Lal Hardy, artist and poet Ansuman Biswas, and calligrapher Paul Antonio.

BONE

“a riot of postmodern museum methodology” – John O’Connell, The Times.

“time and space open up” – Ruth Richardson, The Lancet

 

BONE at the Florence Nightingale Museum was created to explore a rich and vital material from an inter-disciplinary perspective.  It was designed to present its contents evenly and accessibly with no one object – be it museum object, artwork, every day item or scientific imagery – prized above another.

Deliberately installed without labels, the exhibition design by Mobile Studio architects and field guide by MOTHandRUST were constructed to provide information as a departure point for the curious rather than as definitive answers, and to encourage audiences to make their own connections and relationships between objects.

A number of “live respondents” who work with bone were in residence throughout the exhibition, adding to the exhibition. They included sculptor George Nuku, taxidermist Amanda’s Autopsies, and artist Sue Palmer.

All About Sam

All About Sam considers what it is that we want to know when we say we want to get to know someone.

“By experiencing your complex and profound works we have ended up with a shared
language to deal with the unsayable.” – Maurice Biriotti, CEO SHM Productions.

All About Sam was an installation and game designed for and physically located in an office in Holborn. It was created in partnership with senior management with the following aims:

  • to encourage curiosity among staff
  • to interrogate the kinds of knowledge and insight required in their work
  • to give a sense of occasion to the arrival of a new set of companies as clients

 

A performative documentation of the work was simultaneously broadcast on Twitter with the following aims:

  • to experiment with remote access for participatory works with a limited audience capacity
  • to explore interaction between live and online audience groups

Dates: 12-16 May 2014 in Holborn, London and on Twitter.

Actions from the Afterlife

“Rhiannon created an interactive piece that asked participants sat around a table to perform actions on behalf of others in the audience. It represented the commemorative rituals we do for those who have died, and argues that it is those actions that make up their afterlife. This provided a jumping off point to explore how we do things for and on behalf of others as part of our online life, of private grief vs public ritual, and, crucially, who profits from digital acts of remembrance.” – Robin Kwong, head of digital delivery at the Financial Times

Actions from the Afterlife was a work in progress performance shared as part of the Contemporary Narratives Lab: an initiative by the Financial Times, Queen Mary University and People’s Palace Projects to explore the impact of creative partnerships between artists and journalists. It was presented at Battersea Arts Centre on 29 June 2018, alongside work by They Are Here, Coney, Conrad Murray, and Paula Varjack.

 read Robin Kwong’s blog post about the project.

The Slow GIF Movement

The Slow GIF Movement takes the ubiquitous, flashing, momentary image of a GIF and reimagines it as slow, durational artworks and a public health intervention for the online world.

This wide-ranging project explores our agency and responsibility over public space, both in real life and online. Rhiannon brings hers and others’ lived experience of neurodiversity to an understanding of how GIF culture is currently increasing the hostility of online space, and seeks to rectify that with the creation of calming, gently looping GIFs of her own and others’ creation.

The Slow GIF Movement is offered as a public health intervention in the online world: the act of making and sharing them becomes an intervention in the environment, an act of solidarity, and a way to disseminate a collection of art works.

 

 

 

Research and development for The Slow GIF Movement was supported by The Space Arts and Unlimited, and through Rhiannon’s position as the Brighton Digital Festival/Blast Theory Artist in Residence (2018).

The Slow GIF Movement is in development, with a number of planned or existing public sharings:

  • public intervention in a conference environment for Light Up the North and Nesta (October 2018)
  • a day-long workshop and evening virtual tresspass event (planned for Brighton Digital Festival 2019)
  • a research project with St George’s Hospital exploring clinical uses of the Kaleidoscope Landscapes for Better Breathing series for patients with heart failure (2019).

Hearts-R-Us (mirror neuron)

Hearts-R-Us (mirror neuron)

Hearts-R-Us (mirror neuron)

Kaleidoscope Landscapes for Better Breathing (Portslade)

Kaleidoscope Landscapes for Better Breathing (Newham)

Kaleidoscope Landscapes for Better Breathing (Hackney)

Poems Made from Words Found in the Bin

Poems Made from Words Found in the Bin

Poems Made from Words Found in the Bin

Reflections (nature)

Reflections (nature)

Reflections (nature)

Virtual Tresspass at Travis Perkins, Brighton Digital Festival

Virtual Tresspass at Travis Perkins, Brighton Digital Festival

Virtual Tresspass at Travis Perkins, Brighton Digital Festival

The International Archive of Things Left Unsaid

The International Archive of Things Left Unsaid collects unspoken words of love and pain from members of the public, and arranges for them to be listened to.

“creates a different kind of approach to most confessional material emphasising empathy rather than sensationalism” – Lyn Gardner, The Guardian

The International Archive of Things Left Unsaid is an evolving collection of anonymous testimonies donated by members of the public responding to the question “think of a time when you wanted to say something to someone, but didn’t”.

It is a treasure trove of real life intimate testimonies, delivered with special care to honour the emotions expressed and preserve the anonymity of the people involved.

“a dichotomy of personal encounter and observational distance […] beautifully achieved” Caroline Darke, Artvehicle

“a simplicity and focus of care that is absolutely astounding” – Griffin Gilligan, blogger

“small moments of defiance that are also celebrations” – Jane Frances Dunlop, Exeunt Magazine

The Archive was established in 2006 in response to a provocation by curator Ali MacGilp to create a performance for an exhibition entitled ‘There’s Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You’, at Space Station Sixty-Five in London. This one-to-one performance grew and now exists in multiple forms:

    • an installation and one-to-one performance that has toured nationally and internationally
    • a web-based work at www.unsaidarchive.com (The Space’s inaugural commission for a web-based performance)
    • an interactive textile

This project is regularly remade for different contexts including at HMP Feltham Young Offender’s Institute, East Bergholt High School, for Haringey Advisory Group on Alcohol, and at various galleries including W139 in Amsterdam, Barbican Gallery, ALMA Enterprises, Propeller Island, Space Station Sixty-Five, Battersea Arts Centre, Pulse Ipswich, SLAP Yorkshire.

performance at SLAP in York

GIF created for the launch of web work

performance at W139, Amsterdam

quilt on tour in Darlington

performance and installation at W139, Amsterdam

quilt on show at Battersea Arts Centre

performance at Shunt Vaults, London

performance at Shunt Vaults, London

related projects

Poems Made from Words Found in the Bin

The Slow GIF Movement

The Lullaby Directory

Can I Help You?

Can I Help You? offers free help to passers-by and the general public. There are no plans and no boundaries: anything goes, the only requirement is that we figure it out together.

“A beautiful, open intervention that allows people to find their own ways to shape it.” Mel Evans, Liberate Tate.

Stationed in a town centre or prominent shopping street, we are available to anyone and everyone for free help. Offered as one person to another, rather than particular skills or knowledge we come with a tool belt containing things we thought might be helpful:

…chewing gum, change for a tenner, an umbrella, a bin bag, The Little Book of Hope, string, a sewing kit, plasters, super glue, hand cream…

So go on, buy that extra bag of melons, there’s someone here to help you carry them home!

tour pack

article with Mel Evans for The Scottish Journal of Performance

Can I Help You? came out of an invitation to make a piece of work for a festival that wanted to challenge how we respond to people who exhibit unusual or disturbed behavior in public.

  • first presented at Bonkersfest with South London Gallery and Creative Routes (2006)
  • toured to Hull, Wigan, Darlington, Rochester, Gloucester, and Paignton (2016)
  • presented with multiple “helpers” as part of In Your Way festival in Cambridge (2018)

Rhiannon has presented numerous talks and workshops about this work, sharing her methodologies on relational performance in public space with organisations including Greenwich Docklands International Festival, Take Me Somewhere, Glasgow University, and Battersea Arts Centre.

Images 1-2 by Jerome Whittingham; 3, 7, 10 by Alexander Parsonage; 9 by Rob Irish; others by the artist.

related projects

Public Selfcare System

The Loveliness Principle

Silent Cacophony