Plotting, Fossiking and Buzzing around Finsbury Park
Summer project updates and thinking in progress
I know its a bit early to call it a ‘Summer newsletter’ but its pretty warm and sunny ☀️ and there are some things I want to share before June so if I send it now it means I’m less likely to interrupt your ACTUAL summer proper! 🌻
Upcoming
Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park
This multispecies exploration of biodiversity and interspecies politics that i am contributing towards as part of Futherfield’s Treaty of Finsbury Park is getting physical. This June we are staging 3 days of Interspecies activities as part of the Interspecies Festival of Finsbury Park. You are very much welcome to join and you should! let me fill you in with a summary of the story so far.
The Treaty of Finsbury Park is an immersive fiction that looks at what it would be like if other species were to rise up and demand equal rights with humans.
Using live action role play players temporarily become a species that inhabits one of the many different ecologies of the park (Dogs, Squirrels, Geese, Grass, Tree, Stag Beetle, Bees). The interspecies assemblies were a series of online role plays that took place last year where the programme of activities for this festival was invented and now ready for your to experience in the park itself including
⇨ Multisensory Mystery Tour: see, hear and smell the old forest through the sensory superpowers of squirrels, trees, and dogs…
⇨ Multispecies Choir: squeak, squawk, howl and honk “songs” of lament, celebration and protest…
⇨An Interspecies day care and spa for pampering, relaxing and multi-species mindfulness
⇨ By taking part you will also help shape the first-ever interspecies treaty of cooperation for bountiful biodiversity…
Dates: Sat 3 or Sat 10 or Sun 11 June 12.30-5.00., Finsbury Park
Tickets are completely FREE and masks are provided! but booking is required!
Book here
The Treaty of Finsbury Park is a project by Furtherfield and supported by The New Design Congress.
Making - what have I been up to?
Rare Earth Walks
I wanted to share with you some of the brilliant images taken by Ibi Feher from the Rare Earth Walks I organised last month. It took place as part of this year’s Control Shift Festival ‘Feeling Machines’ and was lots of fun going exploring in the woods fossicking for stones, minerals and other ‘rare’ metals along the Brislington Brook. You can see a collection of the things that we found along the walk + a few objects that contain trace elements of some of the minerals that are used in the hardware of mobile phones on my site. We were joined on the expedition by a geophysicist and geo-chemist who provided specialist insights into the geological terrain of the area, industrial mining practices and the fragile dependencies of rare earths in the demand for renewable energy. I am now drafting these walks to be part of a series of workshops in earthly computing for KS2 children (and their parents/ carers) to try and do STEAM based education using forestry school methods.
Plotting Voice Figures
While deep in reading The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World by Jennifer Higgie I have been trying to be more in tune with subconscious thoughts and acting upon them. One morning I woke up from a dream where I was continually spinning in rotation in a giant drawing plotter so i acted on this dream and bought a small drawing plotter kit from ebay before getting out of bed. Like a record going round in my head I’ve been thinking about artists as a medium or clairvoyant into their own subconscious & interfacing with other realms. Many of the artists mentioned by Jennifer Higgie devised specific instruments and developed methodologies for communicating with the non physical through subconscious or transcendental states.
One artist mentioned in the book is Margaret Watts Hughes (1907) a welsh singer, songwriter, scientist and voice artist who using a self made instrument called an Ediphone to visualise sound waves by reverberating her voice to produced these incredible geometric illustrations using the resonance of different frequencies. She produced hundreds of these ‘voice figures’ between 1890 and 1905 and through this process contributed to scientific understandings to the geometrics of sound. Through experimenting with different materials she made new understandings about the fractal qualities of different cell structures and was able to produce both abstract and figurative (like the image of a tree above) in a live act between her lungs and granular matter. I’m going to be making some of these ediphones over the next few weeks and adding it as a session to the earthly computing cookbook to do with others!
Books
The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World by Jennifer Higgie as already mentioned has heightened my awareness of the marginalised history of female artists exploring spiritualism and art. Higgie surveys so many forgotten (or rather intentionally overlooked) female figures in art history who pioneered practices combining art, mysticism and sciences. Thanks for lending me a the book
:-)Ive just started reading ‘Braiding Sweet Grass’ by Robin Wall Kimer, another recommendation from a friend Miranda Webster that renditions various indigenous knowledges relation to plants and the natural environment.
Ive also discovered 2 new fiction authors that i discovered from Granta’s best of young British novelists lists,I am going to share because i severely lack recommendations in fiction books and perhaps you will need a beach read soon…
Saba Sams - debut collection of short stories is pretty exquisitely written capturing fragile moments of femininity, love and precariousness.
Olivia Sudjic - just read sympathy about an instagram obsession and now reading Asylum rd, both have me gripped.
Recent exhibitions
“Thin Air” at the Beams (pictured above) is a large scale audio / visual but mainly Laser Laser Laser installation artworks. Elliot Woods (AKA kimchi and Chips) and Rosa Menkman’s piece was my favourite as it told the story of cyclops while we we looked at 2 walls of hexagonal spheres (?) of fractured light. On till June 4th
Pilvi Takala’s ‘On Discomfort’ at Golsmiths CCA also worth a visit
Sarah Sze new installation ‘The Waiting Room’ in a disused space under Peckham rye train station will be interesting, commissioned by Art Angel
Also its degree show season! BA Fine art at Camberwell College of Art (where I teach) is on at 9 - 17 June and MAFA is on 3 - 8 July 2023. I will be at the MAFA opening on Tuesday 4th July 6 - 9pm and celebrating the work of the group of Computational Arts students this year - do come along if your near that part of South London.
Seasonal Chat
I think May is my new favourite month / time of year. The long days and shorter nights as we approach midsummer (summer equinox) lend itself to a fever of activity and I’ve found myself waking up before 6am, the sunlight stretching out my experience of each day. My dreams also have become more memorable and I wonder if the clocks going back and the increase of sunlight soaks in my brief nocturnal adventures and lets them emit into my awake thoughts throughout the long day. While there are studies that claim you have more intense dreams if you have less sleep , this seems to be a side-effect of sleep deprivation - which fortunately for me is not currently an issue. I wonder if the shortness of the night and expansion of the day historically lends itself to a flurry of over-activity of humans, both physically and psychologically, that spills over the long days into the short periods of darkness.
This could be a factor of the celebrations of May Day (or Beltane as it known as Pagan celebration) that mark this time of year with rituals to honour the sun and celebrate the fertility of spring. In Wales the May Festivities are called ‘Calen Mai’, and during the night before spirits supposedly roam around making it a good night for foretelling the future. It is also said that those who gather at the crack of dawn to celebrate may day are protected by the witches from ‘the evil eye’. While I am awake at 6am hats off to anyone who went out to celebrate the sunrise with bells on, I saw the wicked Boss Morris in Stroud were dancing over a hill, with very little sun in the sky and lots of dogs, people and a goat playing the violin.
Enjoy
MX