Queen's Park Arena Design Competition

My Dad sent me this clipping from a newspaper which regards a competition to design a new bandstand for Queen's park to replace the one which burnt down in 1996.


Can you remember what the bandstand was like?
Can you imagine what a new performance space might be like?
Our aim is to restore the amphitheatre / former bandstand area in Queen’s Park for modern performance use.
The project will provide opportunities to perform, entertain, and enhance the Park.
This is a pilot project designed to see whether community councils can work together to shape and lead community projects. It is one of only two in Scotland supported with £15,000 pump-priming funding in 2009-10.

Experimenting with Piston Motion

I have been meaning to study different forms of motion for quite some time having been an admirer of Sharmanka (Russian Kinetic Sculpture) for several years now.

With this understanding of how to transform one form of motion into another I would be able to make large-scale kinetic sculptures. I have found the website flying pig to have been particularly useful and have been experimenting making a piston mechanism.




Ideally this would be powered by bicycle or wind power but I would equally like to learn how to use a car battery with an inverter. Below I have tried making a small wind powered piston which moves a small object on wheels back and forth.






There were several problems with this which were that the back garden is not windy enough and there was too much lateral friction from the weight of the car, however the resulting motion was as expected.

Chris Petit's 'Content'

Tuesday 09 March 2010

10PM

More4

Thirty years ago, Chris Petit directed Radio On, now considered a road movie cult classic which caught the zeitgeist of the Britain of the time.

Now showing in the True Stories strand, Content is described by Petit as, "an ambient 21st century road movie", a meditative essay inspired by the almost trancelike state the act of driving can bring

With the narrative provided by Hanns Zischler, the film is variously about memories of other journeys from Texas through to Poland, the impact of modern technology and the rise of the huge impersonal factory sheds which now line roads throughout the world.

Which Way Home

Tuesday 17 November 2009

10PM

More4

The Oscar-nominated Which Way Home follows unaccompanied child migrants as they journey through Mexico on a freight train they call 'The Beast', hoping to reach the USA

Rebecca Cammisa's film tracks the stories of children like Olga and Freddy, nine-year-old Hondurans who are desperately trying to reach their families in Minnesota; Jose, a ten-year-old El Salvadoran who has been abandoned by smugglers and ends up alone in a Mexican detention centre; and Kevin, a canny, streetwise 14-year-old Honduran, whose mother hopes that he will reach New York City and send money back to his family.

These are stories of hope and courage, disappointment and sorrow. They are the stories most people never hear about: the invisible ones.

Found - Cybraphon

Preview at SWG3 Saturday 14th April


The objects which were sourced for this piece came from the incredible collection of Michael Bennet Levy's collection in Monkton House, described in an article of the Edinburgh Evening News and the catalogue of all the items which were sold at auction by Bonham's on the 30th September 2009, which included a collection of 20 pre-war television sets (rarer than a Stradivaius violin), is available to view here.

Triste Tryst, a tango for Cybraphon by Bernd Rest from Cybraphon on Vimeo.

NVA White Bicycle Plan

On Thursday the 15th April I participated in NVA's White Bicycle Ride out from the Fountain in Kelvingrove Park to St. Georges Square, a re-anactment of the infamous White Bike Plan, a Dutch anarchist action from the mid 1960’s. It turned out to be a very successful ride with very little agression from the drivers which I have experienced before on Critical Mass when there have been much fewer people.

White Bikes from Central Station on Vimeo.

“The White Bicycle Plan proposes to create bicycles for public use that cannot be locked. The white bicycle symbolizes simplicity and healthy living, as opposed to the gaudiness and filth of the authoritarian automobile.” Provo manifesto

Tipoo's Tiger

V&A Conservation in Action - Playing Tippoo's Tiger from Victoria and Albert Museum on Vimeo.

Baschet Brothers

Sculpture Sonores is the name given to the Baschet Brothers vast collection of visually striking instruments crafted out of steel and aluminum and amplified by large curved conical sheets of metal. Some small, some over twenty feet high and incorporating glass rods, metal cones, wires, plastic inflatable resonators, and many other devices, these fascinating structures are not only aesthetically entrancing, but produce an incredible range of sounds and varied sonic textures.

These cones seem rather similar to the one I made for the performance in the garage space last at the end of first term. If you would like to download an album of theirs I recommend you check out Continuo's web blog here...enjoy.

Ron Pippin

Interactive art on display at the Kinetica Art Fair

Artworks that move, glow and react to human movement and sound are on display at the Kinetica Art Fair in London.

The show aims to push the boundaries between science, art and engineering.

The Kinetica Art Fair February 2009.

Jean Tinguely - Homage to New York (1960)

I am subscribed to the South London Gallery who issue small publications every month addressing some very interesting issues. This month in reference to Michael Landy's 'art bin' they mentioned Jean Tinguely who's I decided to do some further research on. Here is a short video of the work which made the most significant impression on Landy.

Jean Tinguely - Homage to New York (1960) from Stephen Cornford on Vimeo.

To grasp what he’s getting at here, one needs to appreciate Landy’s long-standing love affair with the Swiss Dadaist/performance artist, Jean Tinguely, who died in 1991. In 1982, Landy caught a Tinguely retrospective at Tate and the anarchic energy of the show, coupled with the joyous response of the audience, made a deep impression on his teenage mind. “There were machines you could ride or throw balls into; there were others where, if you put your foot on a pedal, they did a manic dance,” he explains. “They were all made out of junk, so aesthetically they were quite ugly-looking, but I was a textile student, collecting and making patterns out of junk. It was a revelation.”

(Read more...)

Feldstärke international

Open Day at Centquatre (Paris)
Saturday 3rd April

Over the Easter Holidays I went to go visit a friend in Paris. Whilst I was there I found out about this opening being held in this fantastic building CENTQUATRE, a place where the artistic dynamic pushes back the boundary between art and the public.


People were inside this temporary enclosure creating sounds out of objects which they had purchased for under a euro. The performance was then streamed live to several tv's and speakers next door for the audience to watch, creating a somewhat disjointed experience of a live event - existing in such close proximity yet witnessing the event through a screen.


“Feldstärke international” is an exchange programme that brings together students from 16 Schools of Art from Germany, France and Turkey, as well as one from the United States. Participating students have the mission to share their disciplines and to work together with the enthusiasm and the vision of creating works of art collectively.


The aim of this programme, which is a joint programme between CENTQUATRE, PACT Zollverein (Essen) and ¨cˇu’m„a* (Istanbul), is to motivate the 44 arts students from all disciplines (design, dance, cinema, landscaping, plastic arts, music, theatre etc.) to work together at each of the three partners’ venues, thus at PACT in January 2010, at CENTQUATRE in April and finally in Istanbul in October. The programme, which was launched in 2009, is to be developed at international level over the next few years.


The picture above is the site of a performance where two people would hold balloons just outside the beam from the projector and gradually bring them in, creating fantastic effects as they span the balloons round highlighting a temporary round window of the projected pattern


The Blog is the online forum of exchanges between the students where they share their interactions, whether they happen over long distances or when they meet together: www.104.fr/blogfeldstaerke10