Tag: participation

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.

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.

Shred

Shred was a series of craft circle and oral history sessions designed for an office environment.

At these sessions participants:

  • used shredded paper discarded by the business to design and create a collective artwork of woven squares
  • asked questions of the company “elders” about their time at the company as well as changes gone through and lessons learnt

The resulting materials were consolidated into an interactive display for the boardroom where visitors can access recorded excerpts of these oral histories using their smartphones.

Shred was devised and delivered as part of a pilot of artistic interventions in the workplace funded by The SHM Foundation.

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

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

Public Selfcare System

Public Selfcare System is a one-to-one performance, direct action, a tandem jump into the unknown, and a masterclass in the radical act of stopping.

“thank you for making such clear-sighted, gentle, insistent work” – audience member

Public Selfcare System is drawn from Rhiannon’s lived experience of chronic debilitating conditions:

“I am an expert at resting in public thanks to a condition that sometimes forces me to lie down wherever I happen to be, and stay there until I am well enough to get up again.  We may all one day have to learn to stop in the middle of the street, in the middle of the day, and rest. Get ahead of the curve, get your training in now.

Come with me to a place you may have seen, walked past, but never been to. We are going to lie down and have a rest: I am going to look out for you and look after you. You have a right to be here, you have a right to do this. We can do it together.”

article by Rhiannon for Exeunt Magazine 

 tour pack

Public Selfcare System was developed with financial support from Arts Council England, and has been shown at festivals including:

  • Dublin Live Art Festival
  • SPILL Festival in Ipswich
  • Compass Festival in Leeds
  • Buzzcut in Glasgow
  • Tempting Failure in Croydon
  • Greenwich Docklands International Festival Hub in London

The project has also been presented in wider participatory modes including:

  • as a professional development workshop for artists with long term disabling conditions ‘DIY Public Selfcare System’ with The Live Art Development Agency and DADAFest
  • as a textile work developed through drop-in craft and discussion sessions at Waltham Forest Migrant Action
  • as an interior design concept for a “Quiet Room” at Battersea Arts Centre (launching March 2019)