Exhibition

photo Ursula Rae

Photo David Wright

Evalution

The idea of ‘Blue Sky thinking’ was interesting to me, ‘Uninhibited thinking without a structure, beginning or end’. Throughout this course, I have being driving myself to having more structure by executing my work thinking about the concept, process and context. Trying to think more realistically which area my practice will go into; will it sell, who is the audience, why have I done it. Becoming increasingly aware of the fact that I am in second year and only have one more year left to know what my practice is about and where I see it in the art industry. Therefore, the fact that this college was all about spontaneity, the wackier the idea the better was refreshing and really opened my eyes again to what I have always enjoyed in the art; the process of coming up with a concept without any limitations or boundaries. I did not mean that we did not have to consider the concept, process and context we did, however it focused more on the concept and process at it was for a metaphorical festival so the logistics were not key. In effect, what art is like when you are a child. The sky is the limit and because you are so naïve about the world around you, you feel anything is possible. In addition, the fact that this was the second time doing Unit X, really meant that I wanted benefit from what it is trying to do; encourage collaboration between all the different areas of the Arts. Even though my group VOID had four other textiles students, we also had two from interactive art and one from history of art, which was a nice mix. Working in this group was very successful, there was no one who I felt really let down the group or was not involved in some way. This was probably due to us meeting up on a regular basics to develop ideas, designate different areas for everyone to develop individually and then as a group decided what did work and what did not.  What I learnt from working in a group previously on Unit X last year is that in a group environments you need to be almost ‘cut throat’ with deciding what does and doesn’t work. It is not personal it is just developing the idea that works the best for the outcome to be at its best. Luckily, with our group all of us had a very similar idea of the direction we wanted in; an intangible design festival attached to a daytime festival, being concealed in the light and revealed within the dark, focusing on a sensory experience that develops the more interaction there is within the space. Creating a bioluminescent world, VOID that makes people really reflect on their senses.

I have always liked working in a group as I feel the concept part of the project is very effective when in a group environment as you can work off each other and one person can trigger another person to come up with a great idea. We spent a long time discussing the concept and thinking of ways to develop it. Which at the time felt as if we were not actually doing much practical work just thinking. However, with this project the thinking was a huge part, even shown in the name, ‘blue sky thinking’ and worked out as being very beneficial, as we developed majority of our concepts at the beginning giving us a great start. However the fact that there was a lot of thinking involved and not necessarily having a final piece to strive towards did throw me a bit and put me out of my comfort zone. I am a visual person so need to visuals how things are going to look. However, with one of our key themes being intangible design it was hard to visualise something that has no physical presence. We came up with many low fi ways in which to portray what we effectively wanted to happen in our festival. This was hugely successful as we did this through experiments in our group and combined our different research and knowledge to produce very intriguing visuals and clips via sound and light. My area was investigation the visual side of our festival. I struggled with it at the beginning, as we wanted majority of our visuals to be interactive and able to be manipulated and changed by the festivalgoers, the more people that come the more the visuals would change, encouraging interaction. This was hard to create through a 2-D image as I wanted to create the illusion of movement and the image being distorted. I ended up doing it in a very low fi way but filming my images on Photoshop and smudging the images slowly, symbolising movement. Being in a group that worked really well together meant everyone’s work informed my work and my visuals. Some of my visuals interacted with an idea that someone was developing such as Martina’s magnetic wristbands. Coming up with a theoretical festival and having no limits on what we could pitch with our ideas was really eye opening sometimes you just have to take a step back and go back to basics to have a clear perception of everything and you will surprise yourself with how it turns out.

I had my own Strengths and Weaknesses in this project. I found that my strength were mainly in coming up with the concepts for the festival and researching the idea behind it to do with our sense and how you can manipulate them through; colour, sound and touch. How the MRI to a blind person highlights different sense to that of a sighted person. I found all of this research interesting and would like to continue it further by getting into contact with people such as Dr Victoria Henshaw who Tom interview on this project, she is the ‘UK’s leading expert on the interplay of odours and the environment’. Expand my own personal knowledge of the sense and see how we could detach the festivalgoers form everyday distractions, heighten their senses so they would be very aware of which one they were using; an internal experience in an empty space… VOID. One of my weaknesses is I often come up with ideas but do not execute and develop them efficiently which was not always a bad thing as one-persons idea can trigger some else to use elements of it and develop it further themselves. However, I feel I need to work on this so I want to give myself a personal target of not only coming up with loads of ideas and following through with some, put come up with a concise set of ideas and follow through with all of them and see which one is the most successful. The ideas that I did follow through were effective. However, I learnt that you do not always have to change things and edit them a huge amount, often keeping it simple can look the most effective and work the best.

This project has been the best group project I have been a part of because not only did we work well as a group but also I personally found the outcomes, (the pitch and exhibition) visually pleasing and a hugely successful. We got the reaction we wanted, which was to create intrigue and to encourage interaction with one another and our intangible designs, which was particularly shown in our exhibition. We have had such a positive response and been encouraged to develop our ideas further, which I am very keen to do as I feel our project has no real conclusion we can develop it some much further.

Pitch

Book: printing, binding

I really enjoyed doing the layout for the Book/Catalogue, taking everyones images from the different areas of our project; Research, Area, Promotion and Visuals and creating a book of tasters of what our festival would be like. Not giving to much away but almost 'wetting the viewers appetite' of what is to come.

Choosing the images was hard as we had such a strong variety but I wanted the whole book to flow so I was very objective in my decisions. 

This all went very smoothly until it came to printing the book out from InDesign. It wasn't printing the way I intented it to so Tom being the tech master in the group had to re order the whole book and we had to print it off one side at a time. But eventually we managed to print out the book in the right order and the right size. It took a long time but was worth it in the end and I was very pleased with the final result. It is a visual summary of our project.

Pitch prep

Pitch:

Roles:

• Speaking: Tom introduction up until promo and background to the research film at the end, Ursula and Martina speaking the rest
• Lighting: Emily
• Control of the PowerPoint: Hannah G
• Equipment: Tom experiment doing a live feed
• Demonstrating: Danusha, Lara, Hannah S: the paint preferably with someone in the panel and with Ursula's cable tyres hand out resin squares

Tom introduction to our ideas:

Slide 1: VOID

Slide 2:

• Our initial ideas
• Creating a sensory experience in Manchester
• Organic growth
• Bringing people together through a collective experience
• Temporary and intangible design
• See the festival as a stimulus is actualised by the viewer
• Changing the city at night
• Our night walk exploring a space manipulating through glow sticks and bubbles

Slide 3:

• Leading on to the experiment (live feed?) with ink the which bridges gaps between different sensory stimule which is evolving our concept as well as developing the content of design festival.

Slide 4:

• This is our promo video, which is an example of how these experiments can be generated in to our content.
• Leading on to the manifesto
• From these organically concepts and experiments in informed our manifesto

Slide 5:

• Read out points of the manifesto

Slide 6:

 introduction to the festival

• Explain night festival idea
• We are VOID a night festival an additional layer to the day time.
• Promo: quote 'concealed within the light, revealed within the dark.'
• The intrigue and enigma are the selling point so we don't need to promo the content what we are promoting is empty space hence the name VOID .

Slide 7: 

• We have social media sites with updates of intriguing visuals bit no set program

• Social media hype

 Slide 8:

Location

• What where are why?

• Cathedral garden recently been regenerating (light fountains) still not particularly busy area. The regeneration through public experience rather than the tangible regeneration. The area in the tunnel and the car parks are space that we have mainly been looking at. However we have not been restrictive within our space so there is the potential of growth.

 Slide 9:

Hannah's Map:

• Highlighting the area we will be using but not pin pointing specific events

• Our map implanted into the day time festival map illuminating our space at night.

 Slide 10:

• Including having glow way markers to direct people to our space…' following the glow brick road'

 Slide 11:

Peep holes:

• Boxes dotted around the day festival with people looking in and getting a taste of what is to come

Slide 12:

Magic Eye/ Mirror

• Flyers that involve your interaction to find the message within

Slide 13:

Resin promo:

• To be handed out in the day festival to encourage people to be a part of it and create their own installation with in our festival.

Slide 14:

• Wristband - when people reach the Victoria bridge, which is the entrance to the festival they will collect a wrist band which will have some sort of device enabling them to interactive with the intangibles spaces throughout the festival and manipulate the visual experience.

 Slide 15:

• The visuals reacting to the public’s movement and even more so when interacting one another which encouraging audience participation throughout out the festival.

Slide 16:

Clapping

• Further to the interactive floor we have considered other sensory experiences such as sound.. Play clip

• this would be a blank black wall which went the public claps the wall pixelates, the more participation the more the wall pixelates

Slide 17:

smell/light/dark/sound:

• We will have other space that will disorientate the sense for example disassociation of smell. A really really light room contrasting with a really really dark room. Even possible incorporating sound and lasers which will create a visuals and divide them (lazer) all of this links back to our original concept.

 Slide 18:

River and Victorian arches

 • River that runs at the beginning of our site it is something we want to regenerate. The arches will be replaced with glass so people can look out on to the river but also look down from the bridge to see the glowing flowing lights on the river which will change the aesthetics to the grimy river.

Slide 19:

Practical spaces

 • Exploring interaction within areas that are crucial to the workings of the festival ie information points, bar areas, covered spaces maybe even the toilet. Reaction to people moving past

 Slide 20:

Pods and pouches

 • Isolated pods dotted around different areas of the festival for people to be at one with themselves and chill out/ reflect on what they have experienced. Also the glow in the dark panels creating spaces

 Slide 21:

• Small-scale experience through sensory touch to neutralise your senses e.g coffee in perfume shops

Theory side behind our ideas - Tom

 

This all has to be 30 mins

 

Lighting: spotlight on, when people are talking but off for clips such as; live feed experiment, promo video and clapping

Final touches

Final things:

Toms final Promo video:

http://vimeo.com/66018723

Ursula finished the final version of the, manifesto:

photo Ursual

Book/ Catalogue

Final book and poster just before the exhibition

Example of one of the visual pages how it is layout

My priority in this week was is to finish the book and make sure it is bound and ready for the exhibition on the 17^th



Plan:

Interation with the visuals

A clip of my own visual from the inside of a bus which I had edited on photoshop. I wanted to try and show interaction that could occur with the wall. Through using the smudging tool on photoshop. It is a low fi experiement which I feel works and would like to try on a bigger scale for the actual festival.

Further research on creating a sensory experience

Taste:

Heston Blumenthal is know for confusing his dinner through changing the colour and even the look of food to force the dinner to think they are eatting one think and actually be eatting the opposite.

''Charles Spence, the Oxford experimental psychologist who helped Heston Blumenthal develop some of his playful multisensory signature dishes, places vision right up there with smell, in flavour's "premier league", if you will. Taste sits far below with sound and texture and touch. "Half the brain is visual in some sense," says Spence, "versus just a few per cent for overall taste senses. So in cortical real estate, vision is always going to win." This is in part why the colour of our food and drink can not only determine whether it is appetising, but its flavour, too.''

Heston's Tudor inspired meat fruit

Smell:

Victoria Henshaw research associate (architecture & Urbanism) she organised a smell walk around Manchester in 2012.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/manchester-scents--the-city-7665919.html

'My reasearch interests centre upon the design, management and regeneration of towns and cities with a particular emphasis on sensory experience, and my PhD examined the role of smell in urban design. I am keen to work with both academics and practitioners exploring innovative and experimental ways of improving the design and experience of urban enviroments.'

Tom got in contact with her and interviewed her for our research film.

Photo Emily Jackson

Could we try and create a smell which has no associations with the past?

You can not create a smell that has no associations whatsoever however you can mask the context of a person surrounding as shown in the febreze advert.

Febreze advert

Sight/Colour:

I found a paper on Sense of Colour by Boryana Gerorgieva and feel this section really related to what we are trying to do with VOID.

'In addition to the optical centre in the brain, the red colour and its derivative – the orange colour also arouse the auditory centre, thus provoking a sense of increased volume of the sound. That’s why, there are grounds those colours to be frequently determined as “loud”. Green and blue are emollient; they reduce tension in the auditory centre and create a sense of falling off or compensation of the intensity of the noise.' 

I'm visuallising that as my visuals are projected and are moving.. as it turns red the sound is the room could increase to complement the atmopshere, with blue vice versa etc

Magnetic jelly experiment

Martina and I did a Magnetic jelly experiment hoping that the iron filings that Martina has put in the mould would encourage movement with the jelly. As the Ferrofluid had not arrived and so we wanted to create a similar movement.  However, this was not very successful as the fillings all clumped together and did not move the jelly at all. Nevertheless, it did create some interesting visuals, the jelly looking almost diamond like. It was a really fun experiment though and who doesn’t love a bit of jelly fun!  

clips

Noisy Jelly and Squid soup

Noisy Jelly; This concept is so clever; A box arriving, with all the ingredients to create a DIY ‘jelly band’. I do not know how it works as when your touch the jelly at different points it creates did not sounds. It is something that is so simple yet so fun and is a great feature for child who we would want at our festival as it is an event for ever one.  Even something, like this though I would spend hours playing with, brings out everyone’s childish side.

http://vimeo.com/38796545

Squid soup; a company that does very similar things to what we are trying to active but half away across the world in Australia. They encourage interaction with people and lights through touch. 

http://www.squidsoup.org/blog/