More creative ideas for the box!

ELECTRICITY

IS ESSENTIAL WHEN BOX DWELLING

Contrast

The Box has landed

A cardboard box curves creativity........

This is proof that an empty cardboard box make you feel creative and imaginative. When our fridge got delivered during the summer holidays me and my flat mate (Bit Face) were left with this empty card board box. We had a million and one ideas of what we should do with it but eventually just ended up painting it. It sat in the middle of our living room for about a week.....now it's in the shed. It's in the creepy corner!

On this note, I have sourced myself a GIANT CARDBOARD BOX from Peacock Visual Arts. One of the performance artists on Friday Jacque Van Poppell had requested a cardboard box he could fit in for his performance. I was a hell of a lot more excited to see the cardboard box than I was his performance so I enquired afterwards if I could have it. It's big. I'm picking it up today. Watch this space.......

Objects to assist construction

Favourite soundwaves + Italo we wrote

objects

Music

structure

Structurally, Biologically......

I have been looking at Modernist architecture to influence he structure of my fort. My previous work was about how the body can relate to the structure of architecture and how the stucture then effects the psychology of the human being. This seems like a perfect progression of these thoughts into something real because I will physically have to fit inside the structure i'm creating. I have found that I am attracted to modernist/brutalist architecture because of its harsh angular geometries. Modernist architecture to me just represents a change in style, it's a movement of society into a more modern visual concept.

It is a Space....

but it's not the space I was in before. It's a fort i've just made in the corner!

"One can undoubtably become aware of existing by escaping from space....
The novelist should have given us details of the inversion that lead from home to universe, in quest
of being."

JE SUIS L'ESPACE OU JE SUIS
(I AM THE SPACE WHERE I AM)

I am really enjoying reading about the poetics of space, i'm finding the references it has towards
the spaces we inhabit really relevent to the work i'm doing at the moment. He is constantly referring to space, the universe, daydreaming and these are all things I love and find fascinating.
It's comforting to have what would often seem really obvious explained in a poetic way.

The house is a space for your imagination to run free because it is your space that is hidden away from the rest of the universe, a place to be yourself and daydream. It's such an obvious thing but
I needed to be pointed out to me before I even realised it. The fort is an imaginative space that you create. It's the same room you were in before but its a new space that you just created using your imagination. Inside this space is freedom to be inspired by your own thoughts. Freedom to invent, to create and to daydream.

When you are a child you build forts out of whatever you happen to have lying around: old paint sheets, rocks, the washing line, card board etc. Inside this fort you’ve created is your world, its your own imaginative bubble that you’ve just created from the junk that was lying around. To you it’s not junk its your FORT! It is your barrier from the outside world and the place for your imagination to run wild. As a child I remember hiding in my fort for hours and hours and taking all my favourite toys in there with me, ready to camp out for days. I’m hiding from my parents and also from reality. I could stay here for days making up stories and adventures.I've found a perfect space to Daydream.

This is a transfer of these ideas into the gallery space and into adulthood. Our instruments are our toys and our forts are our still active imaginations. Imagination is such an important aspect of art. The niches that an art school puts you into can often restrict ideas and imagination. Beats and Forts is a chance to be as imaginative, inventive and creative as you wish with the childhood playfulness in mind. It’s a chance to break down the conventional barriers and build new ones in the form of your fort. It is important to consider the relationship that the body will have with the structure as you will have to be inside the fort to play music from it. Just like when you are a child your fort will be a place to be imaginative visually and aurally through the construction of the fort and through the music you will play once you’re in there.

The Skinny!

Got Beats N Forts listed on The Skinnys website and in their email newsletter!

Whats on in Aberdeen?? Not much until the 5th of March! lol

BEATS N FORTS N

Beats N Forts.

Saturday 5^th of March / day event 11am - 6pm + evening event 8pm onwards

£5 /£4 Students

Beats and Forts is set to be an audio visual experience. Artists and musicians include Marianne Wilson (MWX), Sharon Graham (Bit Face), Tom the Noisemonger and Sarah J Stanley.

Beats and Forts is an all day event at Project Slogan where art and music will come together in the construction of cardboard forts and electro performances by participating artists. On Saturday the 5^th the artists will be installing three individual structures into the gallery during the day. The forts will be built live in the gallery and the public is invited to come and watch the construction of the forts. In the evening there will be a musical performance from each musician that involves dirty electronic beats being played from each of the forts.

The daytime event will be free entry but for the night time we will be asking for a donation of £5 and £4 for students.

This event will also run along side “Buy art and Money Is Cheaper”. see projectslogan.com for details.

Marianne Wilson and guests perform and build forts in a daylong event of electro music and sculpture ending in a party.

www.projectslogan.com/events.htm

Artists Brief

Each artist will build a structure in the gallery on the day of the 5^th of March. The structure should be made from cardboard and other materials such as paint, paper etc. The dimensions of the fort will be restricted to: (measure gallery space). It should be taken into consideration that there will be three forts and a crowd of people so your fort cannot be massive.

You can plan in advance what your fort will look like but the actual construction should happen live in the gallery on Saturday the 5th between 11am and 6pm.

In the evening the performances will begin from 8pm and run on into the night. There will be an element of improvisation with the music being made but you can also construct a set to play if you wish.

Poster for Beats N Forts N

Formations of the beat
My body turned into a machine for the evening.


Having a Play with Ableton with Jack on Monday night was really fun.
I plugged in the M-AUDIO midi keyboard and away I went with a whole
archive of instruments. Arpeggiators are my favourite, it sounds so much
like italo! Managed to start puting together a pretty basic sounding tune.
I'm feeling slightly less nervous about Beats N Forts. I actually went into
Beats N Forts pretty blind because I can't actually play any instruments!
So i'm now learning ableton just for the occasion. Although I must say
I'm really enjoying learning it and especially being introduced to the midi
keyboard. Now I have to keep working on ideas for the fort!

The Poetics of Space

The Poetics of Space is a book written by french philosopher Gaston Bachelard. I'm reading this book to get a better idea of the psychological effects a physical space has on a persons state of mind, how a human being adapts to a space and also how a space will adapt to a human being.

Not only is this is an interesting read it also relates to an art and music festival I went to in Amsterdam last year called The Poetics of Space, the concept of which i'm guessing is based around the theories in this book. The festival was really interesting and took place over a weekend in Amsterdam. I made it to Amsterdams New Media arts gallery for one part in which there were six rooms all of which has different conceptual pieces of art within. Most of which was created using only light and sound and some were structural. The whole experience was really insightful into the way modern art is going in terms of utilizing technology. There were a lot of experiments with sound and light. One room was actually just completely black with a hgh pitched sound playing I could barely step into. This is an exploration of the effect sound and light can have on your well being. Other rooms that were quite tranquil people would spend time in.

The wonder and beauty of teaching Physics Walter Lewin

This is probably insanely geeky to be into this but there is some really interesting stuff in this about colour and light formation and how they can create optical illusions.

Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Elisan is a Danish/Iclandic artist. I find his collaboration with art and science quite fascinating. His work has a structural quality that I feel I can relate to. I think using light and light bending as a natural scientific thing in an art gallery is very beautiful and thought provoking. I always think that are and what you create should be like a mimic of how you see the world.

Tony Oursler

Tony Ourslers work combines a mixture of stop frame animation, projections, home made sets, sculpture and video. His more recent work is based around peoples obsessive relationships with technology. His inanimate sculptures are brought to life and animated by projections onto a small parts of them.

www.tonyoursler.com

Thomas Hirschhorn

'I want to invite people not to turn their eyes away from the non-positive. The world is only entire when it possesses all components.' 

War, violence, blood, guts, amputated limbs, flat daddies, newspaper slogans, packing tape, fragments of images, love hearts, plywood. Thomas Hirshhorn's exhibition at Stephen Friedman Gallery confronts the viewer with a visceral, abhorrent reality of war and destruction and the contemporary condition itself. 

Two separate assemblages overtake the two rooms of the gallery so that the viewer has to uncomfortably edge around them. They act as two islands, each inhabited by a series of mannequins and cardboard cut-outs; life-sized substitutes for real people; this is a place where the image has the same value as the real. Together they thrust the corruptions and barbaric contradictions of the war and spew a productive anger, passion, urgency and energy out in every direction. Layers of meaning thrust themselves down the throat, forcing a visual gag-reflex of repulsion. 

There's a comparison to be made here with Mark Wallinger's State Britain, currently on show at the Tate Britain, a precise reconstruction of Brian Haw's demonstration outside of the Houses of Parliament, but where Wallinger's position remains ambiguous- his work is at best a simulacrum of a protest - Hirshhorn's is a loud and imperative cacophony. Hirshhorn makes art like an artist wounded by the violence of the world he inhabits. Wallinger's Haw becomes a martyr, a loner making a worthy but ultimately frustrated and futile gesture among the art tourists of the Tate galleries. 

Hirschhorn's didactic language at times boarders on the obvious; shock tactics we've seen before; graphic images of mutilation. An uncompromising critique of a situation from an emotionally remove can be dismissed as a resolutely one-sided representation of a complex series of arguments and contexts. However, his visual language is not a naive one; it's in your face certainly, and moves in a non-linear, multi-faceted series of arguments and questions but despite the chaotic look manages to maintain an coherent form and style from which to read this brutal and difficult message. 

Quotation from Thomas Hirshhorn interviewed by Hannah Duguid, The Independent, February 2007.

http://www.artvehicle.com/events/148

Animal Kingdom

Starring Guy Pearce (The Proposition) and the OSCAR-nominated Jacki Weaver, ANIMAL KINGDOM is a stunning modern crime thriller of brooding and brutal intensity. Masterfully directed and graced with outstanding performances, the film is being ranked alongside crime classics like A PROPHET, THE DEPARTED and LA CONFIDENTIAL. Following the death of his mother, the young ‘J’ Cody goes to live with his estranged gangster relatives. With conflict escalating between his family of criminals and the police’s armed robbery division, J finds himself at the centre of a cold-blooded vengeance plot. As he naively navigates his way through the criminal underworld, he is forced to question where his loyalties lie as he tries to decipher who he can trust and who can protect him as he struggles for his own survival. Animal Kingdom won the much-coveted Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

www.animalkingdomfilm.co.uk

Tom O'Sullivan and Joanne Tatham

After getting a tutorial with Joanne Tatham and asking what her work was like I realised I am actually a fan of their work. Bit star struck! Cool as Fuck.