Tag: workplace

What is a Creative Project Consultant?

A long term residency in a management consultancy. 

“By experiencing your complex and profound works we have ended up with a shared language to deal with the unsayable.”

What is a creative project consultant? was a long term residency and artistic intervention experiment at a “specialist provider of business services” whose expertise lies in human motivation.

As stated in the public biography, Rhiannon was at SHM to:

  • think about things differently
  • bring fresh perspectives to the business’s work
  • adapt her creative methodologies to their work

Some of the things that happened as part of this include:

  • metaphoric takes on client work, deployed in diagrammatic form
  • weekly team sessions defined by a lack of productivity, where the main activity was the use of consensus decision-making techniques to choose how to use the time

Outcomes of this period include:

  • a methodology for a 6-month schedule of artistic interventions in the workplace, ART | WORK, that enhances wellbeing in the workplace and shares innovative creative practice

The rest of Rhiannon’s work at SHM is subject to non-disclosure agreements that are commonplace at the cutting edge of global capitalism.

Dates: April 2013-2014, Holborn, London.

“Since you’ve been here people have been ‘bringing themselves to work’ a lot more, and that is invaluable for creativity and innovation.”

“Oh my god she just brings life, she brings a sense of possibility because even when she says something that’s kind of left of field and we all tell her she’s wrong, she just picks herself up and says something else that’s amazing.”

related projects (created whilst in residence)

All About Sam

Shred

How to write Poems from Words Found in the Bin

Hutong Watch

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.