summary of events

It started with an idea. An idea to play Electronic beats in the gallery, with a twist. You first have to build a fort to play beats from.

Having the box made me question everything. A place within a space to think, you’re still in the room you were in before but somehow it’s different. It was a place to be contemplative and imaginative and hide from the world. I don’t think I had been inside a box that big since I was a child. The first thing I did was have tea and Red Velvet cake in it.

I thought about the things I needed to have with me when I was in the box, the objects I needed to assist my life….. my phone, my sketch book, pencil, camera, laptop, instruments but most of all electricity. Somehow, very quickly the box became cluttered as all these tools assisted the documentation of the imagination unfolding.

The poetics of Space was my bible whilst doing this project, every time I thought of a new idea or structure I’d think about where it’d be positioned in the gallery and look up in the Poetics of Space what that meant poetically and theoretically.

The whole concept of Beats N Forts was to make something out of nothing really. To take something of waste that is to be recycled and make it have purpose again.

Technology is rapidly changing; it is changing faster than the materials it is made from are decomposing. Changing rapidly because of the consumerist’s demands. I’m taking disregarded objects and doing photograms of them to illustrate how beautiful and interesting they can look. It is ironic because they are deadly to the environment.

I used the photocopier to enlarge the photograms and also to manipulate the image and the technology. I was putting through photograms of circuit boards and other electronics and duplicating the X and Y axis, mirroring, ratio, Pos-Neg, using all these features and what was coming out was a new image but larger, bolder and for me resembling directly the repitition of the machine. This repitition is also apparent in electronic styles of music its all about loops. The photocopies I was getting out of the photocopier looked like bits of technology and circuit boards and in a sense visual music. I used these images to wallpaper the inside of my box, it made it look like the inside workings of some crazy machine, a machine made up of all the unwanted parts of other machines. A waste machine, an italo disco machine a juke box. The days that led up to the event were hectic and full of adrenaline. I was so fuelled with excitement of what was to come and what was to happen I hardly slept I only day dreamed about the box. I was also super excited because my best friend and my boyfriend were coming up to help with the making on the day in the gallery. I decided that although I had wallpapered the inside of the box that was the only preparation I was going to do, the rest would be completely improvised.

When I was inside the box wallpapering I felt like I was doing sticker graffiti. Like when people go out with a bucket of wallpaper paste and their drawing or print and make a big piece on a wall somewhere illegally. It felt like I could do that and it’s something I might want to explore. Taking your art out into the environment to be exposed to the elements. I would like to make bigger circuit board pieces. With my work there is always a sense of curiosity as I like to take things apart to see what’s inside them, see what they’re made of. This helps me to understand how technology works by looking at its insides. It’s kind of biological

I took the most inspiration from the photogram of the cassette tape and as this event was about music as well as art I plastered a lot of cassette tape images to the inside of the box. There is a word I had never noticed before on the video cassette tape that I kept cutting out and sticking that was PRECISION. It is possibly the most distracting word because as soon a soon as you see it you think OH shit I have to be precise and it throws you. At the same time it is such an important word to remember when making art. Precision. It is almost an essential aspect of making a successful piece of work. On the outside I used VHS tapes I bust open so many of them and put them all over the outside of the box and as I was playing from inside the box I was turning the cogs making more and more tape unravel, as the show went on the tape unravelled more and more. For me video tape represents time unfolding, there is time encoding on the tape itself. The VHS is an artifact of the past and something I as a child watched at least once a week. Time is changing, video tape is really beautiful and sleek and shiny, yet now it is almost obsolete in its primary function. I used it to give my music box some sort of functionality in that there was movement and progression of its state as the night went on. So with the disregarded technology on the inside was this VHS tape all over the outside, together the box was a waste machine pumping italo beats into the night.

I wanted the front of the box to be more striking and demanding on your eye. I always said the fort you create should in some sense resemble the music you’d be playing from it. Italo Disco was the music I’d be playing. I almost can’t even explain what Italo is like. It’s just so amazing. Since I first fell in love with Italo just over a year ago I’ve never got sick of it. It was originally a word to describe German and Italian disco compilations but it became so much more. Italo is predominantly italan but sang in English and often incorrect. The music is all made using electronic synthesisers, vocoders and drum machines. The voice is seen as an instrument there are always catchy, dubbed and often nonsensical melodies about love, Space and Robots…..I mean it doesn’t get much better than that. Although you may not be familiar with Italo Disco you will have heard of such composers like Giorgio Moroder, he did the sound track to the Never Ending Story and a few others. This was all happening in the late 70’s; early 80’s so you can imagine the fashion sense of the music, sparkly, metallic, bold colours all come to mind. The front of my fort is quite trashy looking in an 80’s OTT way just like the music. Italo was mainstream in Italy but in Britain it’s pretty much kept to underground club nights because its such a niche market. There’s a night in Glasgow called Slabs of The Tabernacle dedicated to Italo and there I’ve seen some of Italo legends like Casco who sadly died recently. His most famous track is Cybernetic Love. Generally speaking the music makes me insanely happy and energised. I just want to spread this feeling to the audience I’d be playing to. I think it is often refreshing to see a DJ who is genuinely loving the music the are playing and several people said that was very much apparent in my set. The small crowd who were there were dancing and I could feel the energy. I usually play Italo at 130 bpm which is faster than it should be with an extra kick drum which gives it more bass so it sounds more pumping. The box was jumping I could feel it moving all around us.

Improvisation

On the run up to the event I spent a lot of time inside the box, very much entrapped and enclosed in my own thoughts and feelings, it was like being in the womb. If I had painted it pink it would have been just like my old bedroom at home. But, on the day I felt more extroverted. I don’t know if it was because of the confidence of having my two best mates there but I decided I didn’t want to be enclosed and entrapped I wanted to be on a sort of platform ready to perform and interact with the people. Interaction seemed more important. I think art in a sense has the same potential as music to bring people together. I mean it was pretty apparent when you saw the way the crowd reacted to the enclosed fort of Bit Face (which was amazing) compared to a more open fort like mine. I think it affected the mood of the audience how much the artists is participating and encouraging the audience to relax and get involved. So I made the box into a DJ booth. We folded down one of the flaps and made it into a table then held the table up with planks of wood from an old bed frame (and duct tape). It was string enough and it held all my equiptment. I built up the front of the box again using an angular shape and creating a red foil window it reminded me of the dark room. I then made triangular turrets to make the structure more fort like and demanding. There was essentially a bit of overkill but that was inevitable with lots of shiny foil and coloured paper paint and glue around. Especially because I was working with two friends. It was excellent to work with them but I think I approached it differently with them around. I was much more extraverted and confident with the overall aesthetic and performance. When I was inside the box doing the wallpapering a lyric from a song on a Helium Robot mix that goes “creativity is laughing with your soul” and I thought man that’s so true. Art makes me really happy and I know it makes other people so happy too. We were all buzzing after the day of making and being creative so it really was beautiful to spend that time making with the people who were there.

I definitely want to do another Beats N Forts I think it’s a concept people were excited about in Aberdeen but also outside of Aberdeen. Beats and Forts was something BIG created from waste and the imagination; this to me alone is beautiful. Creative people inspire me and to be in a situation full of creative people at their peek! TRYING TO MAKE SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING. It's amazing what you can do. I'm going to take Beats N Forts on tour, part 2. Coming soon only bigger and better!