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Here are some of the materials we may need.

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Hi guys! I post three different colour Videos in padlet, you can make a signal which one you think is better for our Presentation. Thanks.

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After change colour.
Use Coventry colour:
103 140 150

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Coventry blue and Coventry silk.

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Dots represent trajectories, lines represent silk, and rectangles represent devices. Use the rhythm of the line to make a video about silk. Because of the memory of the paddle, there is no music in this video. The lines in the real video are rhythmic according to the change of music.

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Here are some facts on Weaving in Coventry.

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The hexadecimal color code #678c96 is a shade of cyan. In the RGB color model #678c96 is comprised of 40.39% red, 54.9% green and 58.82% blue. In the HSL color space #678c96 has a hue of 193° (degrees), 19% saturation and 50% lightness. This color has an approximate wavelength of 486.52 nm.
Buy paint matching this color

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Taubmans Coventry Blue / T10 48H-2 / #678c96 Hex Color Code

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The hexadecimal color code #678c96 is a shade of cyan. In the RGB color model #678c96 is comprised of 40.39% red, 54.9% green and 58.82% blue. In the HSL color space #678c96 has a hue of 193° (degrees), 19% saturation and 50% lightness. This color has an approximate wavelength of 486.52 nm.

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Natural light penetrates the translucent colored fabric bring different color variations, that maybe can affect the visitor's senses, so maybe we can consider to use more than one color silks?Just an idea

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Had an idea where perhaps on the floor, we could play a video like this one, but mapped onto the silk we could put images of coventry. Was thinking we could use hashtag tracking maybe to project say, the latest image that's tagged #coventry or #coventrycathedral etc. onto the video and then each time someone posts a new post with the hashtag, it can be mapped onto the silk? Not sure of the technicalities of this but I'm sure someone with some programming knowledge could work it out.

That way it's encouraging more audience participation and linking the work with coventry.

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Potential location: Fargo village https://www.fargovillage.co.uk/

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Potential location where the ArtTrail could be placed 

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Potential location where the ArtTrail could be placed 

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https://www.ourwarwickshire.org.uk/content/article/former-silk-ribbon-weaving-factory-coventry

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had these thoughts for the sustainability theme in our project.
Source: google

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Found this one really interesting but its done in an enclosed space with suspensions making it look like its floating.

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I installed my blue silk sculpture "The Ocean's Whisper to Me" last week in the newly renovated Park Towne Place Apartments in Philadelphia. It was a new experience for me to be installing artwork in the middle of a construction site. Hard hats were required although maybe not necessary. It was scary though, especially when one artist was leaving and backed into a huge ditch. Luckily there were plenty of large pieces of equipment on hand to pull his truck out of the hole in the road and send him on his merry way. It was a bit surreal and I had to somehow stay focused on the job at hand, coming up with an installation that looked stunning from 3 sides. No problem, right? I was sweating a little near the end, not sure if I liked it but knowing it would take too long to do it all over. Here's how it looks, kind of cool with a marble wall behind it. I had to Photoshop out all kinds of construction things from the background, you can still see the blue dumpster outside.

Below is my favorite view. The picture is taken from the far corner of the room. Hopefully this view will be noticed through the glass windows as you are approaching the building.

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Silk Sculpture Installation | Linda Celestian

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I installed my blue silk sculpture "The Ocean's Whisper to Me" last week in the newly renovated Park Towne Place Apartments in Philadelphia. It was a new experience for me to be installing artwork in the middle of a construction site. Hard hats were required although maybe not necessary.

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I really like this idea.  She installation is in the large, dimmed main gallery, six machines attached to the high ceiling periodically drop typewriter-size sheets of white paper to the floor. I think we can refer this idea? show the process of silk fibers turn into mini size sheets of silk pieces drop to the floor? So audience can take away.

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Ann Hamilton on the creation of “at hand”

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Ann Hamilton is an artist that deals with the connection between text and textiles. we can make something that audience can join in to it.

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Sculptural tree by Studio swine and COS 

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Sculptural tree by Studio swine and COS 

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I think we can make installation that people can touch, feel or take part in. So the audience remember our work even after they've left the physical work. This is the inspiration i would like to share~

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Studio Swine has released a movie revealing its Milan design week installation for COS - a tree-like structure that emits pale bubbles, which dissolve into white mist as they burst.

The London-based duo - Japanese designer Azusa Murakami and British designer Alexander Groves - wanted their installation to be reminiscent of cherry blossom trees.

Called New Spring, the six-metre high structure consists of slender tubes that extend up and out like the branches of a tree.

Large translucent bubbles emerge from the ends of each branch. These bubbles burst when they come into contact with skin, but not when they touch textured fabrics - meaning visitors can handle them with gloves.

As they burst, a pale mist is released.

Like many of Studio Swine's past projects - which include accessories made from hair and furniture produced from ocean plastic - the installation is an exploration of unusual materials.

Recycled aluminium was used to create the sculptural tree. It is on show inside Cinema Arti, a movie theatre built in the 1930s by local architect Mario Cereghini.

The pair said they looked to Milan's architectural heritage when developing the form of this installation.

"We were immediately drawn to the Murano chandeliers housed in private Milanese palazzos and, by contrast, the tradition of modernist Italian design," they explained.

"With a desire to create a communal experience, another key reference for us became Italy's public fountains, one of the country's greatest luxuries."

Studio Swine and COS first unveiled their plans for the ""blossoming sculpture" by releasing a teaser movie in February.

COS creative director Karin Gustafsson said the project would draw on design principles shared by Studio Swine and the brand.

"Our many common values - a focus on timelessness over trend, functionality with beauty, and the exploration of materials - means that working together is a very natural fit," she said at the time.

Murakami and Groves established Studio Swine in 2010, shortly after graduating from the Royal Collage of Art. They named their studio after their first project, a mobile food stall for cooking and selling pig heads, after being asked to publish it by Dezeen.

They become the latest in a series of designers to work with COS in Milan, following past collaborations with Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, Brooklyn studio Snarkitecture and Japanese design studio Nendo.

Pig Truck by Studio Swine

Both Studio Swine and COS ranked on the Dezeen Hot List - a guide to the most newsworthy players in architecture and design. Studio Swine came in at 292, while COS was listed at number 45, the second-highest position of any fashion brand.

New Spring is on show at Cinema Arti, Via Pietro Mascagni 8, until 9 April 2017.

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Studio Swine and COS create sculptural tree that blossoms with mist-filled bubbles

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Studio Swine has released a movie revealing its Milan design week installation for COS - a tree-like structure that emits pale bubbles, which dissolve into white mist as they burst. The London-based duo - Japanese designer Azusa Murakami and British designer Alexander Groves - wanted their installation to be reminiscent of cherry blossom trees.

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first one is website, second one are some pictures.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-10-textile-artists-who-are-pushing-the-medium-forward

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About the Silk Harp sound we could make it an interactive part where the people can swing their hands around the silk threads which will make make a soothing sorta sound.
this link is just an example.

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Expression Wall
For Deloitte University

The Expression Wall is a playful surface that allows you to express yourself in many different ways. You can engage from a distance as your body movement triggers colorful animations. In expression mode, you can move abstract color around with your hands.  In drawing mode, you are prompted with a question that you can answer in written or drawn form. 
 
This unique touch surface was created with 100 procedurally generated slats of plexiglas which are backlit by LED light.  The natural flex of the plexiglas provides a surprising and delightful surface for drawing.  

The Expression Wall is an ongoing installation at Deloitte University gives attendees a way to express themselves. Each expression is stored in an ever growing gallery that reflects the moods, opinions and interests of D.U. attendees.

https://redpaperheart.com/work/expressionwall

Team
Zander Brimijoin - Creative Director
Daniel Scheibel - Technical Director
Greg Schomburg - Lead Developer
Paula Ceballos - Junior Designer
Neely Lisk - Producer
Lisa Walters - Producer

Partners
PiotrWorks - Industrial Design
MachineHistories - Fabrication

Commissioned by Deloitte Digital

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Excuse the terrible sketch. It’s supposed to be like silk sheets/ nets draped in the structure with lights shining in it to change the colour of the sheets. Maybe the audience can change the colour of the lights.

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Maggie Casey has some really cool installations but I really like the cloud model one. Perhaps we could try something similar but instead of a cloud, maybe something more Coventry based?

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The ones in this by Sheila Hicks and Nick Cave are really interesting and we could definitely use them as inspiration. The one by Sheila specifically talks about enticing the viewer to touch the threads, which is I think what silk does.

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10 Pioneering Textile Artists, from Sheila Hicks to Nick Cave | Artsy

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The practice of weaving was invented as early as 27,000 years ago. Today, the medium is undergoing a renaissance.

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This is my research for some silk art installations, hope it can give some inspiration for our work.

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This is my research for some silk art installations, hope it can give some inspiration for our work.

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Rounded at the back or shall we do it more square?

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My idea for our art trail is different colors lines (silk) connect two wheels. I think Car still very famous in Coventry city and it is typical. So wheels can appropriate representation of the car.

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These are the link about how the silk is made. https://www.biddlesawyersilks.com/how-is-silk-made-a-step-by-step-guide/
https://youtu.be/77ktNSPFbwQ

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Do- ho such is one of artist that is worth checking out�
https://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/do-ho-suh

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1.Silk has been used as a form of currency for its precious in china for a long time.
2.In Tang Dynasty, the colour of silk can represent different class and identity of people.
3.From the Spring and Autumu Period and the Warring States  Period (770-221 BC), silk making is a common economic mode for women.

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The dragon element in chinese culture represents imperial authority and especially used for government occasions.

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So this is a basic idea I came up with after looking at silk weaving and patterns.
A giant wooden shaped C that's made of of silk strings like the original idea, with installed lights around to reflect on the strings & effects for night, also maybe a rotatable base that goes 360 degree.
I looked into string Art and we can make  a drawing inside for when people look at it from the front like a portrait of the city (We'll have to use the theme CityScape in Coventry).
links to some string art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODWcE0MCh18
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIAGUrNxfKc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJRVqzoQUG0

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https://magazine.artland.com/top-ten-kinetic-art-artists-and-pioneers/

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Fashion in 1730-1750, or the Rocaille fashion, was a French style of exuberant decoration, with an abundance of curves, counter-curves, undulations and elements modeled on nature, that appeared in the early reign of Louis XV of France. It was a reaction against the heaviness and formality of the Style Louis XIV. It began in about 1710, reached its peak in the 1730s, and came to an end in the late 1750s. Rocaille was exuberant and inspired by nature like Rococo, but, unlike Rococo, it was usually symmetrical and not overloaded with decoration. It took its name from the mixture of rock, seashell and plaster that was used to create a picturesque effect in grottos during the Renaissance, and from the name of a seashell-shaped ornament which was frequent feature of Rocaille decoration.

In 1715 Louis XIV died; he is succeeded by his five-year-great grandson Louis XV. The Duke of Orleans is regent and this period is called régence. In 1730, the late baroque or rococo, with its distinctive sweetness and elegance, arises in architecture and visual art. The clothing has light pastel shades, and ruffles and accessories come back. Louis is not interested in state affairs or the poor people. His mistress, Madame de Pompadour, influences fashion: it is feminine, playful and airy. Around 1740, the Age of Enlightenment began, characterized by an informal clothing style with accessories and motifs from nature. There is civilized conversations and people read a lot.

Around 1715 the Robe Volante came into fashion for women: a pretty shapeless dress with petticoats and a dress with a wide double (Watteau) fold on the shoulders. The décolleté is usually square. The hairs are tied back and lightly decorated. Around 1720 the Robe à la Franҫaise became fashionable. This has a tight, V-shaped body with bows and décolleté, and sleeves with cuffs. The skirt or panier is becoming wider and more pompous, so women have to go sideways through a door. Women powder their own hair with chalk or flour. They wear it briefly, with curls around the head, or put up and covered with a flat hat with hanging ribbons or a bouquet. A lot of powder and rouge is used.

Fashion in the period 1730-1750 in European and European-influenced countries is characterized by a widening silhouette for both men and women following the tall, narrow look of the 1680s and 90s. Wigs remained essential for men of substance, and were often white; natural hair was powdered to achieve the fashionable look.

Everywhere at that time, clothing styles became less loaded as fabrics became more valuable. The silhouettes became more natural and less voluminous, and the colors began to lighten towards the Rococo style. Styles for both sexes have found simple compliance. The heaviness and the black colors of the previous period disappeared and were replaced by pastels, light, and a certain freedom of spirit. It was the time of the Regency and the Rococo.

Costume tastes influenced by entertainment, culture, arts, theater, architecture and fashionfelt. A sense of freedom and a joy of life that reflected well in the fashion of the time, a certain frivolity was developing. The politics and administration of the country were forgotten by the nobility and the king. The affairs of the country were left to the middle class, while the nobles and royalty pursued the entertainment and the pleasure. The remoteness of the government, combined with a new skepticism, has spread the styles of traditional male fashion; in the transition from Baroque to Rococo, this change brought the elegant, sweet, and feminine styles. the tissue sweet and floral patterns have gained popularity.

Women's fashion
The clothes of women of that era adopted a more informal fashion. The shapes of the dresses became more natural.

During most of the 18th century women wore dresses floating. They had skirts heavily draped over baskets. The silhouette of the women who wore them seemed like a big bell with a very small waist and wide hips. Most of the dresses were low-waisted, pointed. Under each dress the women wore a boned body and petticoats. The corsets were essential for getting a small waist and for keeping the shape of the corsages, and the petticoats helped support the baskets under the skirts. Watteau folds covered the backs of the coats and a traincompleted these elegant dresses. In 1740, the silhouette of the dresses was transformed. The baskets grew around the hips, the skirts starting to look like boxes. Just before this fad disappears, the magnitude of some of these dresses reached four meters. But after this brief fad, the more natural forms came back.

This fashion of dresses imposing and inconvenient to present themselves in society will bring the appearance of the neglected to put on a comfortable outfit at home.

Until 1720, fashion was the fountain headdress consisting of a cap topped with a fairly high wire form composed of several degrees filled with muslin, ribbons, flowers and feathers.

The hair does not cut any more, one even adds some hairpieces to gain some bouffant. Many accessories (flowers, birds, doll, animals, etc.) are added to the hairstyle to express the tastes of those who wear them. Queen Marie-Antoinette launches the style of the beanstyle hairstyle created by Monsieur Léonard. They also powder themselves to be white.

They sometimes wear a laissez-tout-faire that is an ornate apron worn by elegance. It is the fashion of the parasols. The shoes are pumps or mules made of silk with high heels.

Like Louis XV, rich women used luxury fabrics for their dresses. The satin, the taffeta, velvet and silks were popular, and dresses were often covered with floral embroidery in the feminine style of Rococo. The middle-class women used cotton and wool and put stiff petticoats instead of baskets. Detail and jewels were missing in the peasant dresses, but the basic form remained the same. Without exception, everyone is trying to be fashionable. Rich people, even peasants, imitated the styles of the king and his court.

Social classes have certainly influenced fashion in the xviii th century, but fashion has influenced the social classes.

Gowns and dresses
In the early decades of the new century, formal dress consisted of the stiff-bodiced mantua. A closed (or "round") petticoat, sometimes worn with an apron, replaced the open draped mantua skirt of the previous period. This formal style then gave way to more relaxed fashions.

The robe à la française or sack-back gown was looser-fitting and a welcome change for women used to wearing bodices. With flowing pleats from the shoulders was originally an undress fashion. At its most informal, this gown was unfitted both front and back and called a sacque. With a more relaxed style came a shift away from heavy fabrics, such as satin and velvet, to Indian cotton, silks and damasks. Also, these gowns were often made in lighter pastel shades that gave off a warm, graceful and childlike appearance. Later, for formal wear, the front was fitted to the body by means of a tightly-laced underbodice, while the back fell in loose box pleats called "Watteau pleats" from their appearance in the paintings of Antoine Watteau.

The less formal robe à l'anglaise, Close-bodied gown or "nightgown" also had a pleated back, but the pleats were sewn down to fit the bodice to the body to the waist.

Either gown could be closed in front (a "round gown") or open to reveal a matching or contrasting petticoat.

Open-fronted bodices could be filled in with a decorative stomacher, and toward the end of the period a lace or linen kerchief called a fichu could be worn to fill in the low neckline.

Sleeves were bell- or trumpet-shaped, and caught up at the elbow to show the frilled or lace-trimmed sleeves of the shift (chemise) beneath. Sleeves became narrower as the period progressed, with a frill at the elbow, and elaborate separate ruffles called engageantes were tacked to the shift sleeves, in a fashion that would persist into the 1770s.

Necklines on dresses became more open as time went on allowing for greater display of ornamentation of the neck area. A thick band of lace was often sewed onto the neckline of a gown with ribbons, flowers, and/or jewels adorning the lace. Jewelry such as strings of pearls, ribbons, or lace frills were tied high on the neck. Finally, one other large element of 18th century women's dress wear became the addition of the frilled neckband, a separate piece from the rest of the dress. This ornament was popularized sometime around 1730.

Underwear
The stays or corset of the early 18th century were long-waisting and cut with a narrow back, wide front, and shoulder straps; the most fashionable stays pulled the shoulders back until the shoulder blades almost touched. The resulting silhouette, with shoulders thrown back, very erect posture and a high, full bosom, is characteristic of this period and no other.

Skirts were worn over small, domed hoops in the 1730s and early 1740s, which were displaced for formal court wear by side hoops or panniers which later widened to as much as three feet to either side at the French court of Marie Antoinette.

The shift (chemise) or smock had full sleeves early in the period and tight, elbow-length sleeves in the 1740s as the sleeves of the gown narrowed.

Some women wore drawers (underpants) in England. For instance, as early as 1676 inventory of Hillard Veren had "3 pair of women drawers". Though, they are not common in English or New England inventories during the 17th and 18th century. Clothing Through American History: The British Colonial Era, by Kathleen A. Staples, Madelyn C. Shaw page 245

Woolen waistcoats were worn over the corset and under the gown for warmth, as were petticoats quilted with wool batting.

Free-hanging pockets were tied around the waist and were accessed through pocket slits in the gown or petticoat.

Loose gowns, sometimes with a wrapped or surplice front closure, were worn over the shift (chemise), petticoat and stays (corset) for at-home wear, and it was fashionable to have one's portrait painted wearing these fashions.

Outerwear
Riding habits consisted of a fitted, thigh- or knee-length coat similar to those worn by men, usually with a matching petticoat. Ladies wore masculine-inspired shirts and tricorne hats for riding and hunting.

When outdoors, ladies also wore elbow-length capes, often lined with fur for warmth.

Fabrics and colors
In the early years of this period, black silk hoods and dark, somber colors became fashionable at the French court for mature women, under the influence of Madame de Maintenon. Younger women wore light or bright colors, but the preference was for solid-colored silks with a minimum of ornamentation.

Gradually, trim in the form of applied lace and fabric robings (strips of ruched, gathered or pleated fabric) replaced the plain style. Ribbon bows, lacing, and rosettes became popular, as did boldly patterned fabrics. Silk gowns and stomachers were often intricately embroidered in floral and botanical motifs, demonstrating great attention to detail and care for an accurate portrayal of nature. A mid-century vogue for striped fabrics had the stripes running different directions on the trim and the body of the gown.

Chintz, Indian cotton fabric with block-printed imaging on a white base, was wildly fashionable. Bans against their importation to protect the British silk, linen and woolen industries did nothing to reduce their desirability. Brocaded silks and woolens had similar colorful floral patterns on light-colored grounds. Blends of wool and silk or wool and linen (linsey-woolsey) were popular. Until the 1730s, European textiles were of inferior quality that could not match the complex fashionable designs of Indian calicoes. Europe was able to produce high quality petit teints (colors that faded with light and washing), but they were unable to produce grand teints (permanent colors resistant to light and wear).

Footwear and accessories
The shoe of the previous period with its curved heel, squarish toe, and tie over the instep gave way in the second decade of the 18th century to a shoe with a high, curved heel. Backless mules were worn indoors and out (but not on the street). Toes were now pointed. This style of shoe would remain popular well into the next period. Shoes at the time had many variations of decoration, some even included metal wrapped threads.

Women, particularly in France, began wearing a boutonnière, or a small bouquet of fresh flowers in a "bosom bottle." About four inches in length, these glass or tin bottles were small enough to discreetly tuck into the bosom or hair, but also just large enough to contain water to keep the flowers from wilting.

Makeup
An 18th-century toilette began with a heavy white foundation made from white lead, egg white, and a variety of other substances. This was overlaid with white powder (typically potato or rice powder), rouge, and deep red or cherry lip color.

Tiny pieces of fabric, known as patches, in the shapes of dots, hearts, stars, etc. were applied to the face with adhesive. The fashion is thought to have originated as a way of disguising pox scars and other blemishes, but gradually developed coded meanings. A patch near the mouth signified flirtatiousness; one on the right cheek denoted marriage; one on the left cheek announced engagement; one at the corner of the eye signified a mistress.

Style gallery 1730-1740

1.Queen Sophie Dorothea of Prussia wears a rose-colored velvet gown with ermine trim (and possibly lining).
2.Prussian court fashion: Queen Elizabeth Christine, wife of Frederick the Great, wears a gown with a slightly squared neckline and narrow lace frills at bodice and sleeve. Note the trim on the pocket slits in the skirt of her open gown. She wears a diamond choker around her neck.
3.Declaration of love 1731
4.Louise Eleonore von Wreech née. von Schöning (c. 1737) Hermitage Museum (Bayreuth)
5.A rigid, upright posture with a sharp "break" at the bust is characteristic of the stiffly boned stays of the 1730s. These English ladies wear formal mantuas for tea.

Style gallery 1740-1750

1.Comtesse de Tessin (Ulla Tessin), 1741, wears a black hood over a lace cap, and a red, fur-lined shoulder cape called a mantle or tippet. She carries a matching fur muff. A large ribbon bow trims her bodice at the neckline.
2.Mary Edwards, 1742, wears a red gown with a lace-trimmed kerchief or fichu tucked under the ribbon bow on her bodice. Her sleeves are bell-shaped, and she wears a lace hood or cap.
3.Hogarth's Marriage à la Mode series depicts a fashionable young wife wearing a sack-back jacket and stomacher with a contrasting petticoat. A linen hood or cap is tied under her chin, 1743-45.
4.Luisa Ulrika of Prussia, Queen of Sweden wears a gown with "split sleeves" (elbow frills and a lower sleeve tight to the wrist). Her overskirt is looped up over her petticoat and she wears a black cap set with diamond studs. Her choker necklace is set with a diamond-studded bow, 1744.
5.Madame de Sorquainville's open gown is laced with a wide blue ribbon over a stomacher and is worn with a matching petticoat. The front edges of the gown are trimmed with robings, rows of fabric ruched or gathered on both edges. Sleeves are narrower, and are worn with elaborate lace engageantes. She wears a small cap and a black ribbon or frill around her neck.
6.Surviving Robe à la française in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York features a matching petticoat and is shown with an elaborate stomacher. English, fabric from Holland or Germany, 1740s.
7.English silk shoes with shoe buckles, 1740s.
8.Stomacher, silk satin with metallic-thread lace, appliqués, passementerie and tassels. France, 1700-1750. Los Angeles County Museum of Art M.67.8.99.

Source from Wikipedia

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Louis XV style fashion of Women 1730-1750

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Fashion in 1730-1750, or the Rocaille fashion, was a French style of exuberant decoration, with an abundance of curves, counter-curves, undulations and elements modeled on nature, that appeared in the early reign of Louis XV of France. It was a reaction against the heaviness and formality of the Style Louis XIV.

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https://panoplie.co/ with the last picture. As inspiration, we can transfer the paper to silk to make some interaction.

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The pattern of the silk represent a part of chinese culture, the peonies symbolize prosperity, and the small red creatures are simplified description of bats, symbolizing happiness.The association between bats and happiness has its origins in a pun, as the words for “bat” and “happiness” are pronounced identically and similarly in Mandarin Chinese.

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The website of the silk association of UK

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The website of the silk association of UK

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http://www.silk.org.uk/index.php
with some history and pictures of silk making in this website

And an interesting metaphorical meanging for silk in UK
The silks in slang can represent Queen's Counsel

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https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Spatial-Magnetic-Field-Visualization%3A-Interactive-Lee-Kim/f8df79171a6be9584f9e502132a2084186b4cdc5

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that is my idea for silk installations. Use line to make sounds.Describe the history of coventry silk with sound and color.

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that is my idea for silk installations. Use line to make sounds.Describe the history of coventry silk with sound and color.

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like:
industry revolution sounds
old train sounds
The sound of machine operation
so on

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This is interesting!

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Send Feedback

To save, right click the thumbnail and choose Save Image As....

Drag colors to blend.

Press Space to start anew.

Press Z to undo.

Try different colors and symmetries.

Sally forth, you weaver of wonder, sower of silken waves.

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I also screenshot the vote so you can put it in your log books :)

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Some keywords to research.

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I screenshot the whiteboard of our ideas for our log books, so here it is.

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Silk is a fabric first produced in Neolithic China from the filaments of the cocoon of the silk worm. It became a staple source of income for small farmers and, as weaving techniques improved, the reputation of Chinese silk spread so that it became highly desired across the empires of the ancient world. As China's most important export for much of its history, the material gave its name to the great trading network the Silk Road, which connected East Asia to Europe, India, and Africa. Not only used to make fine clothes, silk was used for fans, wall hangings, banners, and as a popular alternative to paper for writers and artists.

Origins & Cultivation

Silk is produced by silk worms ( Bombyx mori) to form the cocoon within which the larvae develop. A single specimen is capable of producing a 0.025 mm thick thread over 900 metres (3,000 ft) long. Several such filaments are then twisted together to make a thread thick enough to be used to weave material. Fabrics were created using looms, and treadle-operated versions appear in, for example, the murals in tombs of the Han dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE). The silk could be dyed and painted using such minerals and natural materials as cinnabar, red ochre, powdered silver, powdered clam shells, and indigo and other inks extracted from vegetable matter.

The earliest known examples of woven silk date to c. 2700 BCE & come from the site of Qianshanyang in China.

Sericulture - that is the cultivation of mulberry leaves, the tending of silkworms, the gathering of threads from their cocoons and the weaving of silk - first appears in the archaeological record of ancient China c. 3600 BCE. Excavations at Hemudu in Zhejiang province have revealed Neolithic tools for weaving and silk gauze. The earliest known examples of woven silk date to c. 2700 BCE and come from the site of Qianshanyang, also in Zhejiang. Recent archaeological evidence suggests that the Indus Valley civilization in the north of the Indian subcontinent was also making silk contemporary with the Neolithic Chinese. They used the Antheraea moth to produce silk threads for weaving.

However, silk production on a large scale and involving more sophisticated weaving techniques would only appear from the Chinese Shang and Zhou dynasties in the 2nd millennium BCE. Silk then became one of the most important manufactured and traded goods in ancient China, and finds of Shang dynasty (c. 1600 - 1046 BCE) silk in an Egyptian tomb are testimony to its esteemed value and use in early international trade.

Evolution

During the Han dynasty, the quality of silk improved even further, becoming finer, stronger, and often with multicoloured embroidered patterns and designs of human and animal figures. Chinese characters are also woven into the fabric of many surviving examples. The weave of some Han period pieces, with 220 warp threads per centimetre, is extremely fine. The cultivation of the silk worms themselves also became more sophisticated from the 1st century CE with techniques used to speed up or slow their growth by adjusting the temperature of their environment. Different breeds were used, and these were crossed to create silk worms capable of producing threads with different qualities useful to the weavers.

Weavers were usually women, and it was also their responsibility to make sure the silk worms were well fed on their favourite diet of chopped mulberry leaves and that they were sufficiently warm enough to spin thread for their cocoons. The industry became such a vital source of income for families that land dedicated to the cultivation of mulberry bushes was even made exempt from reforms which otherwise took away agricultural land from peasant ownership and mulberry plots became the only land that it was possible for farmers to claim hereditary ownership of. Mencius, the Confucian philosopher, advocated the smallest of land holdings always set aside a plot to plant mulberry. As demand grew, then the state and those with enough capital to do so set up large workshops where both men and women worked. Great aristocratic houses had their own private silk production team with several hundred workers employed in producing silk for the estate's needs and for resale. Silk production even became the subject of poems and songs such as this example from the Master Xun philosophical text of the Warring States period:

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How naked its external form,

Yet it continually transforms like a spirit.

Its achievement covers the world,

For it has created ornament for a myriad generations.

Ritual ceremonies and musical performances are completed through it;

Noble and humble are distinguished with it;

Young and old rely on it;

For with it alone can one survive.

(in Lewis, 114-115)

Eventually, the Chinese could no longer keep the lucrative secret of silk production to themselves and it began to be manufactured in Korea and Japan where it would become a state-controlled industry. Other states and cultures then acquired the skills of sericulture such as India around 300 CE, and from there it spread to Byzantium, Arabia, the Levant, and Italy.

Trade: the Silk Road

The fame of Chinese manufactured silk spread across the famous trade route which took its name - the Silk Road - such was the commodity's importance to the Chinese economy. The Silk Road or Sichou Zhi Lu was actually an entire network of overland camel caravan routes connecting China to the Middle East and hence is now often referred to as the Silk Routes by historians. Silk - in the form of the thread, woven cloth, and finished products - was thus exported via middlemen (no single trader ever travelled the length of the routes) not only to neighbouring states such as the Korean kingdoms and Japan but also to the great empires of India, Persia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In the case of the latter, it is said that the eventual financial collapse of the state was in part due to the constant drain of silver to the east where it went to purchase the silk that the Romans could not live without. The Romans even called the Chinese Seres, after the word for silk in that language.

In addition to land routes and passage across the Inland Sea to Japan, from the 11th century CE Chinese junks sailed and traded across the Indian Ocean and silk thus remained the number one export product of China for centuries; it would only be rivalled by porcelain and tea from the 15th century CE. By the 20th century CE, it would be Japan that would replace China as the world's largest silk producer.

Uses

In China, and later elsewhere, silk was used to make clothing (especially long robes, gowns, and jackets), hand fans, furnishings, wall hangings, screens, decorative scenes for and from famous books and poems, military banners, funeral banners, Buddhist mandalas, and for the purposes of writing instead of bamboo or paper. Brightly coloured and exquisitely embroidered silk robes became a status symbol and helped distinguish officials and courtiers from the cotton- or plain-silk-wearing lower classes. In other cultures, such as Korea, there were even laws forbidding the wearing of silk by persons below a certain social rank. Embroidered silk became so varied and refined that a whole connoisseurship developed around the material, similar to that surrounding the fine porcelain of Chinese potters. Taoist priests were another group who were distinguished by their silk robes, often embroidered with ceremonial scenes.

As a valuable commodity bolts of silk were often used as a form of currency, especially in the payment of tribute such as by the Northern Song (960-1127 CE) and the Southern Song (1127-1276 CE) to the Liao and the Jin emperors, respectively. Silk was also an esteemed gift. Given to tributary states in appreciation of their loyalty, it was an impressive symbol of the Chinese emperor's great wealth and largesse. For example, in 25 BCE alone, the Han gave as gifts an incredible 20,000 rolls of silk cloth. Traders used it is a payment, people paid their tax with it, and even armies were sometimes paid in silk.

In art, silk became a popular surface on which to paint landscape scenes and portraits. Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) artists were particularly famed for their skills in dyeing, printing and painting on silk, with many examples of their work surviving in Japan where they were sent as gifts. Silk books were made which had copies of famous paintings and so became reference albums for art connoisseurs.

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Cultural Repercussions

The trade of silk and other commodities along the Silk Road also brought with it ideas and cultural practices in both directions; language and writing were especially important elements transmitted along the routes by traders, diplomats, monks, and travellers. Buddhism came to China from India and was then passed on to Korea and Japan. Explorers such as Marco Polo used the route, as did Christian missionaries from the west to enter China for the first time. New foodstuffs were introduced into China and then cultivated there such as walnuts, pomegranates, sesame, and coriander. Silk, symbol of China for so long, had opened the doors to new lands and new ideas, and finally connected the great empires of the ancient world.

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Silk is a fabric first produced in Neolithic China from the filaments of the cocoon of the silk worm. It became a staple source of income for small farmers and, as weaving techniques improved, the reputation of Chinese silk spread so that it became highly desired across the empires of the ancient world.

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A history of the silk weaving industry in Coventry

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A history of the silk weaving industry in Coventry

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Cash's (UK) is now known as one of the UK's quality weavers.
But it was the Quaker brothers in Coventry last century who started the company.
John and Joseph Cash were sons of a wealthy stuff-merchant. They began production of silk ribbons in the early 1840s.
At this time Coventry was already famous for its silk weaving.

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The discussion this morning, produced a number of potentially good directions and ideas. My recommendation is to go back to the brief and the Learning Outcomes, noting the keywords, and judge each direction as to its potential in delivering effectively to these.
Mike

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The living Sculpture idea gives me an inspiration. Maybe we can design some small and delicate QR code image to put in different corners in Coventry and collect Coventry's own sound music, leaving people free to scan there QR code and listen. For another angle, we could also collect different countries' music to be scanned through these QR code to show Coventry's intergrated and exchanged culture.

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here's the link Gill Evans provided us the first week with readings surrounding the module project just in case you forgot about it

https://padlet.com/giz/cart

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Hello Quaranteam!

I'm aware that the brief we have been given is difficult to read, so I've extracted the main points for us and summarised them in a document. Please give this a read ASAP, so that we can come up with a few more ideas before we vote and decide on an idea next week.

Please, if anything is unclear or you still don't undertsand it, please ask either me, Yassine or Michael.

Also please note that this does NOT replace the formal brief we have been given, so any dates or information that is wrong on there I take no responbility for.

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Make, Do and Mend in Coventry: Silk Weaving

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Make, Do and Mend in Coventry: Silk Weaving

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After doing some research around Coventry’s history, there was a part that hasn’t been highlighted as much as the war history and automotive history, and that is the Silk weaving trades and how successful it was in Coventry. Silk Ribbon weaving was Coventry's main industry from the early 1700s to the 1860s. During this period about half its population made a living from ribbon weaving and Coventry was the main center of ribbon production in England.

I find that this part needs to also be highlighted for the Coventry City of culture art trails. So for the chosen theme, I went with “Make, Do and Mend in Coventry”

First proposal:
The installation art installation will be a silk weaving machine from 1860 (first sketch), with silk coming out from the machine that will create motion more of a visual appeal to the trail.

Second proposal:
The installation will be a minimalist representation of a silk weaving machine with only the threads and silk. (second sketch)

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Sign languages or/and illustration.
So trying to buy on the current ideas. I was thinking for the hands maybe we could make them a sign language saying something like "United" "stay safe" I don't know🤷🏾‍♂️ but something, so when you walk round you get the word.
Secondly, to make it even better we can illustrate on the hands themselves the different countries, races etc present in Coventry.
Lastly the mascot, plants, flower what ever could be at the center of the piece (if that's not over killing it).

What do you'll think? 👀

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Did a little rough sketch on the hands idea I had. There would obviously be more hands, but I only drew two.

It would also be a veggie garden and the hand would be a bit bigger than life sized I guess.

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On the topic of hands, I found this article with all these gigantic hand sculptures around the world.

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See them firsthand (sorry).

Hands have historically fascinated artists and sculptors, despite being notoriously tricky to draw and even more finicky to render realistically in 3D.

Regardless, some artists have made a name for themselves through their depictions of hands: Lorenzo Quinn is the brains behind the Venice Biennale hands which rose from the canals to make a political statement on climate change. Meanwhile, Mario Irrarázabal is known for his trademark hands which, rather than rising out of the water, seem to be sprouting from the very earth itself.

If you're keen to see more oversized hands in sculpture around the world-of the permanent rather than pop-up variety-here's where to head.

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Can You Even Handle These Gigantic Hand Statues of the World

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Hands have historically fascinated artists and sculptors, despite being notoriously tricky to draw and even more finicky to render realistic in 3D. Regardless, some artists have made a name for themselves through their depictions of hands: Lorenzo Quinn is the brains behind the Venice Biennale hands which rose from the canals to make a political statement on climate change.

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Okay, so I thought about the idea of creating a fun mascot for the coventry culture event 2021. Mascots were introduced as an entertainment purpose for people, the audience, so that they can interact with them and support the event thoroughly. Different games, sports teams, events have their own mascots. Animals were included into this, as to build fear against the teams.

Therefore, the Phoenix Bird being the main symbol of Coventry city, due to it’s personality. It says that the bird cannot die, and if it does, then it’s reborn. That’s what happened to coventry after the WW. Therefore, Mythical Phoenix being the symbol of rebirth, coming out of the ashes, just like coventry city was re-builded once upon a time.

This is just a rough idea, i’ll be working on it. Will be deciding with the color scheme and many more things.

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OK I’m there. This looks good. I would say be careful of your primary impact. You know , when I’m teaching design I use examples like if someone’s dressed as a diver with a mask, they can say what they like but as far as the world is concerned they’re a diver! So the overall ‘way in’ to the work will be it’s identify.

Looks good!

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here's some pins i gathered from Pinterest
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/yassinenidazi/installation-art/

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Ali: Illustration/ Background in Architecture/ Photoshop skills
Jessica: Digital Art / Psychology / 3D (beginner level)
Ran Zhu: Digital Art/ Animation /Graphic Design
Manal: Painting Skills/ Advertising & Branding/ Installation Art
Peng Zhang: Graphic Design/ Food Engineering
Ritesh: Illustration/ Graphic Design/ Painting
Shiya Li: Editorial Design/ Graphic Design
Yassine: Advertising & Branding/ Research and Synthesis of information
Kayode: Building Technology/ Graphic Design/ Digital Art/ UI Design/ Branding
Jiaxin: Illustration and animation major/video editing/ graphic design/3D.
Xiaoyi : Illustration/ Graphic Design/ Animation/ Painting

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I love Jess's idea which is make a model car or bicycles that have veggies growing on it. I have a though came into my head. I think we can set up a speaker in somewhere. It can play music. I saw somepeople play different instrument in the street. I think it is one kind of the cityscape in Cov. My idea is record the sounds and mix together to create new music. The audience can feel it. I do not it is helpful or not. :)

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“Coventry began as a Saxon village. It was called Coffantree, which means the tree belonging to Coffa. Trees were often used as meeting places. In this case, a settlement grew up around the tree and it eventually became called Coventry.”

Idea: “History Tree” A tree can be visualized in many ways, one of the idea I had is that we’ll have like a timeline tree sculpture with all pictures of main events that happened in Coventry History (you’ll find the link for Coventry timeline below) being hang in the trees’ branches.

This idea could be also interesting to visualize digitally since the audience can click on the image and get a brief history lesson on that specific event.

http://www.localhistories.org/coventrytime.html

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I think Yassine is right about needing a theme that directly relates to Cov and it's history. Had a thought about maybe doing a living sculpture, but with the frame being a model of the OG car or bicycles that were invented in Cov and started both industries? Again, could have veggies growing on it, but the idea would be that it's sustainable  and giving back to the community like both of those inventions did when they were invented in Cov.

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While reading the brief i realised we have to have some story telling around the city of Coventry in our Art Trail, i think that is an important element that we should keep in mind.
So basically the two main things i realised Coventry is famous for in history, are its Automative History and The War History. I think finding some element in either of these two themes would work well with the Art-trail

here are some links i found about random history facts of Coventry

https://www.coventry.gov.uk/info/99/local_history_and_heritage/2064/25_things_you_might_not_know_about_coventry

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/23/coventry-britain-motor-city-wheels-turning-again

https://www.coventry.gov.uk/info/99/local_history_and_heritage/2064/25_things_you_might_not_know_about_coventry

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I love Mo's idea. I think perhaps we could make the plants like vine varieties of tomatoes/ beans/ courgettes etc that would in turn help feed the homeless in Coventry? So people would be more likely to take care of the garden as it's giving back to the community and feeding the community.
Just a thought, what do you guys think?

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ok guys! so this is a thought than went through my head. since jess was telling about sculptures. I those of this one. Its a buddha pose sculpture. I gave a rough reference to show how large the thing is gonna be. it will have many hands with different colors representing the different races. and each palm will have a space for plants(in this case I considered vines/creepers). this will eventually grow on the surfaces connecting throughout the body. so overall, i mean to show "unity can heal the planet and the planet will unite humanity". yes there are some technical stuff which I have to think through(like how the vines grows, material used for the statue). tell me what you guys think :)

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This is just a short recording of the work I mentioned that I saw at Digbeth. Not sure if you can see it but yeah.

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Hello everyone, I've been thinking about doing a sustainable piece maybe, so it got me thinking about doing a living sculpture? or sort of, so here is a link to living sculptures to kind of see what other things are out there. There's a pretty cool one in there where its an old VW beetle that's been covered in plants, which could be an idea for reference to Coventry's car industry.

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68 Best Living Sculptures images in 2020 | Garden art, Topiary, Topiary garden

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Feb 20, 2020 - Explore skkgagnon's board "Living Sculptures", followed by 105 people on Pinterest. See more ideas about Garden art, Topiary, Topiary garden.

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I was thinking about an exhibition I went to in South Africa at my university where the artists used XBox Kinect to create interactive digital art. I've linked the paper from the exhibition so you can take a look.

I was thinking a lot about interaction between the physical world and online, and how the work might be able to be influenced both from online and in the physical realm and therefore help with the question of accessibility.
(I'm typing this whilst trying to listen to the conversation on Teams, so sorry if my sentences make zero sense :') )

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Meaning Motion was a duo exhibition (with Tegan Bristow) of interactive art, at the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, June - August 2013. It took up two floors of the museum, and featured 8 installations of work, including the international premiere of Stern's scripted, and the first full exhibition of his Body Language suite of work - all with new, updated code.

Body Language (2000 - 2013) is a suite of four interactive works that has us encounter some of the complex relationships between materiality and text. Each piece stages the experience and practice of bodies and language in a different way, enabling in-depth explorations of how they are always implicated across one another. elicit invites viewers to perform the continuity between text and the body; enter effectively asks its participants to investigate how words and activity are inherently entwined; stuttering provokes its performers into exploring the labor and intimacy of embodied listening and communication; and scripted asks us to remember how the activities of writing, the shape and sound of language, are forever a part of the physical world.

Meaning Motion produced two publications, including a Body Language catalog with essay by Charlie Gere, and coincides with a panel on interactive art at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (Australia), and the release of Stern's book, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance.

Various press includes:

" The Politics of Meaning and Voice," in Business Day
" Viewers Make the Art Work," in the Mail and Guardian
"The Games Artists Play: Performance and Failure" in the Sunday Independent
An interview with Nathaniel Stern on the Morning Buzz, WORTfm in Madison
" Meaning Maker" on Mahala.co.za
An interview with Tegan Bristow on Radio Today, Johannesburg
" Wam set to wow this June," in the City Buzz, Johannesburg

The politics of meaning and voice
This article by Chris Thurman appeared in both the online and print editions of Business Day, South Africa

ART IN MOTION: Stuttering by Nathaniel Stern, part of the Meaning Motion installation at the Wits Art Museum.

TWO weeks ago, I referred to the TV show, The West Wing, that popular bastion of liberal US politics created by Aaron Sorkin. So it is with some reluctance that, at the risk of sounding like a Sorkin acolyte, I mention his latest undertaking, The Newsroom. Its second season hit South African TV screens this week, and I can't get it off my mind.

In the US, the season premiere was watched by about 2.2-million people - good news for the number crunchers at HBO. The critical reception suggests that many viewers who had disliked the show for its preachiness are relieved that "the second season is just going to show how the news is made". Others, however, can't bear the prospect of yet more "wit and dazzle" from the "insufferably high-minded characters" who populate the show.

This is an objection that could be applied to many of Sorkin's scripts, including those for the short-lived series, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (another exercise in meta-TV, a putative behind-the-scenes look at satirical sketch shows such as Saturday Night Live) and for acclaimed film The Social Network. Nobody is consistently as eloquent as Sorkin's characters, as mentally sharp, as cool under pressure, as impressive in their general knowledge.

Sorkin admits this. The Newsroom hinges on actual events of recent years so, he observes, "the audience knows more than the characters do" - but it also gives him the chance to make those characters "smarter than we were". Like The West Wing, the show was conceived as an "idealistic, romantic, swashbuckling, sometimes comedic but very optimistic" depiction of two professions about which we are (often justifiably) cynical: journalists and politicians.

But the fact remains that, while we may be enthralled by Sorkin's verbal fireworks, we don't find the repartee realistic. Our daily conversations are, by contrast, fragmented, repetitive, disjointed, interrupted, fraught with miscommunication and not very gratifying - unless we give them our considered attention. This is the kind of dialogue represented in Nathaniel Stern and Tegan Bristow's Meaning Motion, installed at the Wits Art Museum (1 Jan Smuts Avenue, Braamfontein) until August 18.

The exhibition is dominated by six blank walls - blank, that is, until visitors approach them. As a series of motion sensors are triggered, so the walls come alive with colourful projections, tracking the movements of the viewers. Letters and words appear, briefly cohere and then dissolve, accompanied by sound bites echoing or extrapolating from the written text.

The possibility of "meaning" is thus simultaneously offered and withdrawn by every "motion". Yet the works also show us that, if we move very patiently and deliberately, studying the effect of our actions closely, the words are less chaotic. Bristow and Stern want to "find alternative routes of making meaning through and with embodiment", asking: "Can we use our bodies to listen and communicate with more care?"

Stern's "Stuttering" is the most direct manifestation of this aim. The faster you move, the more the work itself will "stutter in a barrage of audiovisual verbiage" - instructions, descriptions and assertions crowd the screen and shout from the speakers. Cautious movements invite measured responses. In "Scripted", visitors attempt accuracy in plotting out lines and curves to "write" letters on the screen.

"Enter" has participants reaching for phrases that seem to float in the air; once they are touched, the words come alive in a spoken utterance.

Bristow's work also encourages this physical and linguistic playfulness, but there is a dark political undercurrent in her piece, "Unsaid". Here, we are invited to approach an open microphone. As we do so, we see ourselves projected in black-and-white video footage, but our faces are blacked out or replaced by those of Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema. The words we speak into the microphone are repeated, but fade as they merge with other voices - questioning, Bristow notes, "the effectiveness of the voice of the individual in the larger world of politics and power struggles".
See this article on the Business Day web site or in print.
The Games Artists Play: Performance and Failure This article by Mary Corrigall appeared in both the online and print editions of the Sunday Independent

Once inside the Wits Art Museum, it's an unexpected relief to be confronted with what appears to be large blank canvases on the gallery walls. This may have something to do with having waded through a cacophony of studenty-art at the exhibition of the work by the long-listed candidates for the Absa L'atelier Award earlier in the week.

That experience alone could test anyone's desire to be an art critic, though ironically such "bad" (read: lame, contemporary art-by-numbers) work affirms the need for critics - someone has to outright reject it if competition adjudicators can't be relied upon to do so.

At Meaning Motion, a joint exhibition by Tegan Bristow and Nathaniel Stern, the viewing experience seems to rest in the hands of the viewer, rather than the artist. This could be said to be the case any time you observe an artwork but in the context of this show, it's not just how you look and interpret it that will shape your experience but how you move. You have to stand close to the screens (they appear like large canvases) to trigger the technology that facilitates the interactive work and most of the works rely on your physical gestures to determine how the images, signs, or letters, in the case of Stern's work, are animated.
This means the work relies on your presence to exist, to have some sort of visual life. The moment you step away from the screen, the work becomes dormant.

This is an attractive idea for viewers, especially critics, because it means you can silence or end the work at will. In this way the artwork is not imposed upon you, you choose when, and for how long, you want to engage with it.

This isn't usually an option when viewing conventional art shows or performance art. The latter relies on this; performance art doesn't only test the endurance levels of the performer but the viewer too. Enduring something as it takes place live is vital in our understanding of an embodied experience - that is gaining knowledge through an awareness of our bodies. And this should be more than feeling the back of a chair stabbing your back.

Stern and Bristow take this element of performance art one step further by jolting viewers out of their comfortable passive positions and encouraging them to feel the experience of looking and making, thus it is a kind of embodied observation and interaction that attempts to blur the boundary between viewer and participant. In a sense you are simply watching a self-reflection that has been mediated by different computer programmes written by the artists.

The underlying premise of this show is to generate a set of images with your body, turning you into an involuntary performance artist of sorts, though the intended meaning of the work, the outcome and structure, has been determined by Stern and Bristow. So, it's an illusion of control that they are really offering, under the guise of free will or interactivity. This idea is particularly pertinent to Bristow's Unsaid, which appears to be set up for a participant to express themselves: a microphone is placed in front of a screen. However, as you approach the microphone a black square pops up over your face on the screen, erasing your identity and the words "left it unsaid" appear in the box.

In this way once you begin to "make" the work, you realise you have been "written out" of it.

As a result, you walk away feeling quite helpless in the face of the technology that is mediating this live interaction with yourself. This seems to fly in the face of interactive experiences, which are predicated on the idea that the participant gets to enjoy some level of control; this is, after all, the main payoff.

Stern's Stutter pic by Christo Doherty

Participation and interactivity are usually marked by immersion too, a temporary forgetfulness of who and where you are, but quite surprisingly, while this exhibition appears to be set up for interactivity, the activities aren't immersive or gripping in a traditional sense. It's almost like each work is a new toy and once you have figured out how it operates, you move onto the next one. Perhaps this is because most of the interactive works are quite simplistic in terms of what they offer and the graphics, and visuals too, which have a sort of retro or crude digital aesthetic. This kind of mismatch between sophisticated technology and basic visuals emphasises a disconnect between the real and the intangible digital realms and what occurs when you try to make the invisible visible. This is best illustrated by Bristow's Sound Prints - naive hand-drawings connected to small circuits via wires. Beautiful, slick or hyperreal graphics would not have relayed the divide between the complex programming and technology and the end product. Bristow's Chalk vision; a black screen where your silhouette is rendered in an ethereal chalky line, is also crude but visually compelling. But mostly, the ideological pay-offs are more interesting than the visual or experiential aspect of the works, which may well be in contradiction with what this show sets out to achieve.

Take Stern's notion of the body writing words or eliciting text - for a writer this is an especially thrilling idea, as few seem to understand how performative writing is; not only is it something the body produces but it is informed by a certain persona and is usually engaged with relaying the experiential and desire to fix it to the page faithfully.

It is no surprise then to learn that in the work Elicit Stern employed an extract from a text by Marcel Proust, the French novelist famous for his enhanced recollections of reality. When you stand in front of the screen where this work appears, letters from the text appear in order. The faster you move and the closer you are to the screen, the quicker they are generated. In theory if you moved slowly enough you would be able to read the text.

Bristow's Unsaid pic by Christo Doherty

"Every pixel the sensor sees as 'moving' in every frame births yet another character, and so we usually get a sea of erupted text. I love this. We get a 'sense' of meaning, but can only 'feel' it," observes Stern.

It is a highly evocative text where Proust details how the aroma of fresh scones triggers memories of his grandmother. Yet this sensual aspect, this intangible physical experience (smell) that is described in this text is withheld from the viewer, so while we can "feel" and control the letters, what they mean is completely beyond our grasp. Stern clearly intended this to be the case; he wants his viewers to get past the "words" and their literal meaning, allowing them to come into contact with a more abstract engagement with language that is triggered by a physical gesture/vocabulary.

After all is this not what Proust does to some extent; it is through conjuring a scent through text that the reader and writer are able to penetrate beyond it - into the physical world and those intangible qualities that allow for nostalgia.

Ironically, this idea sounds better on paper than an experience of it. While the body is immersed in the work in the sense that it is required in order to generate it; you never penetrate it; Proust's text is broken into visual units, motifs that don't necessarily allow for a more physical or experiential encounter. What occurs is disconnection: your body is reflected back at you in an unrecognisable form; the shape of letters, words, or motifs (in Bristow's Dissonance at Six). In other words you become words and shapes and a kind of disembodiment occurs - you become separated from yourself, when confronted with the real-time digitised representation of yourself that is out of your control.

This, of course, seems in contradiction with this being an exhibition centred around interactivity and the body. But somehow this chasm, or failure, and the exhibition's general inability to completely deliver on interactivity and control, is perhaps what makes it significant, particularly in an era where "immersion" in various kinds of digital realms has created the illusion that we are more connected to what is happening and are able to shape our experiences through it. It also draws to attention the difficulty in bringing performance into the gallery and the power dynamics of participation, which has become such a sexy concept in art making, and something that has driven the digital era. Stern opens an interesting discourse on text and the body, though perhaps it can't be resolved in an aesthetic or visual plane.
Failure seems to be a prerequisite for performance artists.

Moys (in red dress) tries her hand at ballroom dancing
pic by Paul Greenway

Anthea Moys's grand multi-performances at the National Arts Festival in the work Anthea Moys vs the city of Grahamstown was as its title suggests set up to fail; its hardly likely that Moys would have been able to "beat" the city, which was represented via various teams or groups engaged with different extramural activities.

Failure should be an unpredictable outcome of a performance rather than the driving objective. This may have been why Moys is said to have spent around three months in the small Eastern Cape hamlet training and learning how to play chess, soccer, sing and dance. In this way she would be seen to be trying her utmost to win in the face-offs with the various teams or individuals. The assiduous pursuit of acquiring all these skills would also make her appear like an over-achiever, as obviously winning the inaugural Standard Bank Award for performance art would also infer. The irony of pursuing failure, or setting herself up for failure as the work she would produce for the award, was not lost on her, it may have even given rise to it. The work the winners of the Standard Bank Young artists produce at the festival is always heavily scrutinised, particularly by their contemporaries and critics, who use it to measure their suitability for the award. So what better way to navigate this obstacle by admitting failure from the outset? Of course, the sense that she would most certainly be defeated by Grahamstown - quite a ridiculous and absurd notion in itself - also meant the work would fail on an artistic level too; as the outcome would be predictable - would there be any point in watching, when we knew what the result would be?

In a way, you found yourself willing her to fail too. Moys's bubbly gung-ho vibe seems to invite failure in the sense that you want to see beyond this artificial performer persona she seems to consistently wear in this work, and previous ones. This sense of inevitable failure built into her performances proved an almost insurmountable barrier to it; if she did fail, which was inevitable, surely she would be succeeding because that is what she set out to do? It became obvious by the second or third performance that going through the motions of failure is more complex than it appears; it can be rewarding and there are different kinds of failure.

By turning competitions into performance art pieces she set up and juxtaposed the two competing notions of success and failure: to fail in a performance art piece is considered an achievement (evidence that you understand the underlying difficulties of performance), while failing in a competition is not.

As the performances progressed, however, the hard line between the two blurred; when she didn't dance well during a ballroom face-off did this make her a bad performance artist? Those who were present at her face-off with a choir were quick to remark that her singing voice was awful.

Each of the competitions demanded different kinds of skills, so the success of the performance was reliant on different qualities each time she performed. Strategising was quite important in the chess game, while getting into character was considered of value in a historical re-enactment, where the winners and losers were also predetermined. In this way Moys's OTT work was a richly layered one centred on understanding predetermined failure, not only in relation to performance art but in everyday life, particularly in these amateur groups where presumably losing at a chess game doesn't have any consequences - the payoff is in cultivating a sense of belonging to a community, losing might even further this end (as it did for Moys).

Ultimately, and quite satisfyingly, the theme of failure driving Moys's work almost made it beyond scrutiny. As she kept shifting the measures by which to assess her performances, she obviated the need for judgment, questioning its validity to the point that it seemed superfluous. - published July 28, 2013, The Sunday Independent.

The Meaning Motion exhibition will show at the Wits Art Museum in Joburg until August 18.
See the online and print editions of this article from the Sunday Independent.

all texts, Body Language, elicit, enter, Meaning Motion, review, scripted, stuttering, Wits Art Museum press

Viewers make the art work
Laurice Taitz

Tegan Bristow and Nathaniel Stern's exhibition Meaning Motion reminds me of the question of whether a tree falling in the forest, with no one there to hear it, makes a sound.

When you enter the main chamber of the Wits Art Museum, all is quiet and the space appears empty. It's a nonexhibition, until you approach one of the walls.

From then on it's magic and mayhem, as each piece is responsive and you trigger the artworks. This is no place for passive observers. The artists expect you to be active in giving the works meaning, cleverly breaking the implicit rules of "looking" at artwork in a gallery setting.

The interactivity relies on cameras and motion sensors and clever programming code. Bristow and Stern use the technology of the Microsoft Kinect - a motion-sensing device that comes with the XBox video game console - in their work to capture movement and then to translate it into digital expression, projecting it as a large-scale artwork.

The exhibition is comprised primarily of seven distinctive interactive works. Bristow says: "Many people think that interactive art is limited to a certain way of doing something ... but the work comes from such a different place and we both use the medium in very different ways."

Stern comes from a performance background. His four works, grouped as Body Language, explore his concern with the relationship between the body and text, and how we perform text. He sees language as a physical object, and language and text as being part of who we are as a body.

The impetus for a joint exhibition came after Stern used Bristow's work as a central reference in his upcoming book, The Implicit Body, based on his PhD research. Stern is an associate professor of art and design at the University of Wisconsin [Milwaukee].

Bristow lectures in digital arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. A painter, she changed career direction after mistakenly attending a computer science lecture.

"I had my class down for the wrong day and was blown away that you could write programs," she says.

Her work combines her engagement with surface and visual aesthetics with the maths of digital code.

Taken together, the works talk to and across each other.

Stern's elicit is about the agency of movement. He wrote it for a dance performance and it responds to how fast or slowly you move across the space, emitting spurts or great gushing streams of letters to form a poem that you can never read.

In stuttering, your movement induces a series of phrases, repetitious sounds and the static associated with being lost between radio channels.

If you slow down, you get to explore the screen more fully, as one would quiet a stutter.

In enter, red dots outline your body as phrases float around you. When you grab a word from the screen you hear a line of poetry being recited or a choice phrase such as: "If there's one thing to get in the way of a good time it's other people."

Bristow's Chalk Vision is a subtle piece that explores the visual and material quality of programming code and how it understands motion.

She says: "It's an aesthetic exploration of what's called computer vision, how the camera sees because the camera is our primary sensor."

Her Dissonance at Six encourages you to get more people together in the space as it works best with six. As you step inside, projected before you is a boldly coloured tree-like figure.

As the numbers grow, each person is represented by a tree. The more motion, the wilder the trees become until the leaves fly off and the space before you empties.

Bristow says it's about spirituality and mathematics, a piece about loss as it separates the rich and intensive quality of bringing people together with the emptiness once they leave and are no more.

While Stern's work was developed as a body, Bristow's works were created out of specific moments, and not deliberately as an interrelated whole.

Unsaid is a response to the 2009 elections. You stand before the screen, an upright microphone prompting you to say something. As you speak your face is covered with a Jacob Zuma mask, your words are thrown back at you and the phrase "leave it unsaid" flashes across the screen. Bristow says it's the third incarnation of this work.

"This is the first time I have put faces on the masks directly. I was very frustrated by a real sense of a lack of agency. There was this feeling [at election time] that we were contributing so heavily to something. Everyone was tweeting and Facebooking but in the end I was looking at what power do I actually have. What can I as a small individual within the technology realm actually contribute? And does the technology dissipate or actually contribute to that sense of agency?"

She calls it "quite a nasty piece".

"It's horrible to you. It says say something and when you do it gives you a short moment and immediately cuts you off, shushes you up. It creates a constant loop of never being gratified, ever." Politics summed up in a moment.

The exhibition creates an exciting and thoroughly disobedient gallery space that encourages you to move your body and to gesture wildly to get a desired response.

It's fascinating for its appeal to adults and children alike. Beyond, or as part of, the complex layers of meaning created by the symbolic images, interactivity, performative aspects and the humanising of technology and programmed code, you are compelled to perform funny walks more reminiscent of Monty Python, rather than to view it in the dignified manner of someone appreciating art.
Meaning Motion is at Wits Art Museum, corner of Bertha and Jorissen streets in Braamfontein until August 18.

all texts, Body Language, elicit, enter, Meaning Motion, review, scripted, stuttering, Wits Art Museum press

The 8'oclock Buzz: Nathaniel Stern: Back for More

Nathaniel Stern is an Associate Professor in Arts Tech at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. He joined the Buzz on Monday, July 1st to discuss his interactive art and give us an update on "Tweets in Space".

In February 2013, Stern joined the 8 O'Clock Buzz to talk about his project Tweets in Space. The archive of that show can be found here. As the system is 22nd light years away, it will take 44 years for us to hear back from any of the Tweets. Still, Stern is excited and hopeful.

In addition, Stern discussed his latest interactive art. He currently has an upcoming art show in South Africa called Meaning Motion. He has hopes that a gallery in Wisconsin will display a Meaning Motion exhibit at some point in the future, to bring some of his work closer to home. He also just finished a book on interactive art, titled Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body As Performance. His theory of art is to invite people to interact with his work. All of his "paintings" are displayed on white boxes, digitally programmed, until someone walks in front of or into the box - at which point the art comes alive. Each art piece, therefore, is unique depending on who interacts with it.

According to Stern, body and language both require each other. Bodies make language, and language makes bodies. His work is intended to spark discussion about how we relate to and interact with ourselves.

Download the mp3 (20 mb), or listen to the entire interview with sub-host Tony Casteneda:

Related artworks: movement, meaning, gesture, scripted, elicit & en/traced, stuttering, enter
Other related texts: WORT fm, Meaning Motion press, Mail & Guardian, Body Language, Business Day

all texts, Body Language, elicit, enter, interview, Meaning Motion, participatory, radio, scripted, stuttering, Tweets in Space, Wits Art Museum press

The politics of meaning and voice
This article by Chris Thurman appeared in both the online and print editions of Business Day, South Africa

ART IN MOTION: Stuttering by Nathaniel Stern, part of the Meaning Motion installation at the Wits Art Museum.

TWO weeks ago, I referred to the TV show, The West Wing, that popular bastion of liberal US politics created by Aaron Sorkin. So it is with some reluctance that, at the risk of sounding like a Sorkin acolyte, I mention his latest undertaking, The Newsroom. Its second season hit South African TV screens this week, and I can't get it off my mind.

In the US, the season premiere was watched by about 2.2-million people - good news for the number crunchers at HBO. The critical reception suggests that many viewers who had disliked the show for its preachiness are relieved that "the second season is just going to show how the news is made". Others, however, can't bear the prospect of yet more "wit and dazzle" from the "insufferably high-minded characters" who populate the show.

This is an objection that could be applied to many of Sorkin's scripts, including those for the short-lived series, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (another exercise in meta-TV, a putative behind-the-scenes look at satirical sketch shows such as Saturday Night Live) and for acclaimed film The Social Network. Nobody is consistently as eloquent as Sorkin's characters, as mentally sharp, as cool under pressure, as impressive in their general knowledge.

Sorkin admits this. The Newsroom hinges on actual events of recent years so, he observes, "the audience knows more than the characters do" - but it also gives him the chance to make those characters "smarter than we were". Like The West Wing, the show was conceived as an "idealistic, romantic, swashbuckling, sometimes comedic but very optimistic" depiction of two professions about which we are (often justifiably) cynical: journalists and politicians.

But the fact remains that, while we may be enthralled by Sorkin's verbal fireworks, we don't find the repartee realistic. Our daily conversations are, by contrast, fragmented, repetitive, disjointed, interrupted, fraught with miscommunication and not very gratifying - unless we give them our considered attention. This is the kind of dialogue represented in Nathaniel Stern and Tegan Bristow's Meaning Motion, installed at the Wits Art Museum (1 Jan Smuts Avenue, Braamfontein) until August 18.

The exhibition is dominated by six blank walls - blank, that is, until visitors approach them. As a series of motion sensors are triggered, so the walls come alive with colourful projections, tracking the movements of the viewers. Letters and words appear, briefly cohere and then dissolve, accompanied by sound bites echoing or extrapolating from the written text.

The possibility of "meaning" is thus simultaneously offered and withdrawn by every "motion". Yet the works also show us that, if we move very patiently and deliberately, studying the effect of our actions closely, the words are less chaotic. Bristow and Stern want to "find alternative routes of making meaning through and with embodiment", asking: "Can we use our bodies to listen and communicate with more care?"

Stern's "Stuttering" is the most direct manifestation of this aim. The faster you move, the more the work itself will "stutter in a barrage of audiovisual verbiage" - instructions, descriptions and assertions crowd the screen and shout from the speakers. Cautious movements invite measured responses. In "Scripted", visitors attempt accuracy in plotting out lines and curves to "write" letters on the screen.

"Enter" has participants reaching for phrases that seem to float in the air; once they are touched, the words come alive in a spoken utterance.

Bristow's work also encourages this physical and linguistic playfulness, but there is a dark political undercurrent in her piece, "Unsaid". Here, we are invited to approach an open microphone. As we do so, we see ourselves projected in black-and-white video footage, but our faces are blacked out or replaced by those of Jacob Zuma and Julius Malema. The words we speak into the microphone are repeated, but fade as they merge with other voices - questioning, Bristow notes, "the effectiveness of the voice of the individual in the larger world of politics and power struggles".
See this article on the Business Day web site or in print.
The Games Artists Play: Performance and Failure This article by Mary Corrigall appeared in both the online and print editions of the Sunday Independent

Once inside the Wits Art Museum, it's an unexpected relief to be confronted with what appears to be large blank canvases on the gallery walls. This may have something to do with having waded through a cacophony of studenty-art at the exhibition of the work by the long-listed candidates for the Absa L'atelier Award earlier in the week.

That experience alone could test anyone's desire to be an art critic, though ironically such "bad" (read: lame, contemporary art-by-numbers) work affirms the need for critics - someone has to outright reject it if competition adjudicators can't be relied upon to do so.

At Meaning Motion, a joint exhibition by Tegan Bristow and Nathaniel Stern, the viewing experience seems to rest in the hands of the viewer, rather than the artist. This could be said to be the case any time you observe an artwork but in the context of this show, it's not just how you look and interpret it that will shape your experience but how you move. You have to stand close to the screens (they appear like large canvases) to trigger the technology that facilitates the interactive work and most of the works rely on your physical gestures to determine how the images, signs, or letters, in the case of Stern's work, are animated.
This means the work relies on your presence to exist, to have some sort of visual life. The moment you step away from the screen, the work becomes dormant.

This is an attractive idea for viewers, especially critics, because it means you can silence or end the work at will. In this way the artwork is not imposed upon you, you choose when, and for how long, you want to engage with it.

This isn't usually an option when viewing conventional art shows or performance art. The latter relies on this; performance art doesn't only test the endurance levels of the performer but the viewer too. Enduring something as it takes place live is vital in our understanding of an embodied experience - that is gaining knowledge through an awareness of our bodies. And this should be more than feeling the back of a chair stabbing your back.

Stern and Bristow take this element of performance art one step further by jolting viewers out of their comfortable passive positions and encouraging them to feel the experience of looking and making, thus it is a kind of embodied observation and interaction that attempts to blur the boundary between viewer and participant. In a sense you are simply watching a self-reflection that has been mediated by different computer programmes written by the artists.

The underlying premise of this show is to generate a set of images with your body, turning you into an involuntary performance artist of sorts, though the intended meaning of the work, the outcome and structure, has been determined by Stern and Bristow. So, it's an illusion of control that they are really offering, under the guise of free will or interactivity. This idea is particularly pertinent to Bristow's Unsaid, which appears to be set up for a participant to express themselves: a microphone is placed in front of a screen. However, as you approach the microphone a black square pops up over your face on the screen, erasing your identity and the words "left it unsaid" appear in the box.

In this way once you begin to "make" the work, you realise you have been "written out" of it.

As a result, you walk away feeling quite helpless in the face of the technology that is mediating this live interaction with yourself. This seems to fly in the face of interactive experiences, which are predicated on the idea that the participant gets to enjoy some level of control; this is, after all, the main payoff.

Stern's Stutter pic by Christo Doherty

Participation and interactivity are usually marked by immersion too, a temporary forgetfulness of who and where you are, but quite surprisingly, while this exhibition appears to be set up for interactivity, the activities aren't immersive or gripping in a traditional sense. It's almost like each work is a new toy and once you have figured out how it operates, you move onto the next one. Perhaps this is because most of the interactive works are quite simplistic in terms of what they offer and the graphics, and visuals too, which have a sort of retro or crude digital aesthetic. This kind of mismatch between sophisticated technology and basic visuals emphasises a disconnect between the real and the intangible digital realms and what occurs when you try to make the invisible visible. This is best illustrated by Bristow's Sound Prints - naive hand-drawings connected to small circuits via wires. Beautiful, slick or hyperreal graphics would not have relayed the divide between the complex programming and technology and the end product. Bristow's Chalk vision; a black screen where your silhouette is rendered in an ethereal chalky line, is also crude but visually compelling. But mostly, the ideological pay-offs are more interesting than the visual or experiential aspect of the works, which may well be in contradiction with what this show sets out to achieve.

Take Stern's notion of the body writing words or eliciting text - for a writer this is an especially thrilling idea, as few seem to understand how performative writing is; not only is it something the body produces but it is informed by a certain persona and is usually engaged with relaying the experiential and desire to fix it to the page faithfully.

It is no surprise then to learn that in the work Elicit Stern employed an extract from a text by Marcel Proust, the French novelist famous for his enhanced recollections of reality. When you stand in front of the screen where this work appears, letters from the text appear in order. The faster you move and the closer you are to the screen, the quicker they are generated. In theory if you moved slowly enough you would be able to read the text.

Bristow's Unsaid pic by Christo Doherty

"Every pixel the sensor sees as 'moving' in every frame births yet another character, and so we usually get a sea of erupted text. I love this. We get a 'sense' of meaning, but can only 'feel' it," observes Stern.

It is a highly evocative text where Proust details how the aroma of fresh scones triggers memories of his grandmother. Yet this sensual aspect, this intangible physical experience (smell) that is described in this text is withheld from the viewer, so while we can "feel" and control the letters, what they mean is completely beyond our grasp. Stern clearly intended this to be the case; he wants his viewers to get past the "words" and their literal meaning, allowing them to come into contact with a more abstract engagement with language that is triggered by a physical gesture/vocabulary.

After all is this not what Proust does to some extent; it is through conjuring a scent through text that the reader and writer are able to penetrate beyond it - into the physical world and those intangible qualities that allow for nostalgia.

Ironically, this idea sounds better on paper than an experience of it. While the body is immersed in the work in the sense that it is required in order to generate it; you never penetrate it; Proust's text is broken into visual units, motifs that don't necessarily allow for a more physical or experiential encounter. What occurs is disconnection: your body is reflected back at you in an unrecognisable form; the shape of letters, words, or motifs (in Bristow's Dissonance at Six). In other words you become words and shapes and a kind of disembodiment occurs - you become separated from yourself, when confronted with the real-time digitised representation of yourself that is out of your control.

This, of course, seems in contradiction with this being an exhibition centred around interactivity and the body. But somehow this chasm, or failure, and the exhibition's general inability to completely deliver on interactivity and control, is perhaps what makes it significant, particularly in an era where "immersion" in various kinds of digital realms has created the illusion that we are more connected to what is happening and are able to shape our experiences through it. It also draws to attention the difficulty in bringing performance into the gallery and the power dynamics of participation, which has become such a sexy concept in art making, and something that has driven the digital era. Stern opens an interesting discourse on text and the body, though perhaps it can't be resolved in an aesthetic or visual plane.
Failure seems to be a prerequisite for performance artists.

Moys (in red dress) tries her hand at ballroom dancing
pic by Paul Greenway

Anthea Moys's grand multi-performances at the National Arts Festival in the work Anthea Moys vs the city of Grahamstown was as its title suggests set up to fail; its hardly likely that Moys would have been able to "beat" the city, which was represented via various teams or groups engaged with different extramural activities.

Failure should be an unpredictable outcome of a performance rather than the driving objective. This may have been why Moys is said to have spent around three months in the small Eastern Cape hamlet training and learning how to play chess, soccer, sing and dance. In this way she would be seen to be trying her utmost to win in the face-offs with the various teams or individuals. The assiduous pursuit of acquiring all these skills would also make her appear like an over-achiever, as obviously winning the inaugural Standard Bank Award for performance art would also infer. The irony of pursuing failure, or setting herself up for failure as the work she would produce for the award, was not lost on her, it may have even given rise to it. The work the winners of the Standard Bank Young artists produce at the festival is always heavily scrutinised, particularly by their contemporaries and critics, who use it to measure their suitability for the award. So what better way to navigate this obstacle by admitting failure from the outset? Of course, the sense that she would most certainly be defeated by Grahamstown - quite a ridiculous and absurd notion in itself - also meant the work would fail on an artistic level too; as the outcome would be predictable - would there be any point in watching, when we knew what the result would be?

In a way, you found yourself willing her to fail too. Moys's bubbly gung-ho vibe seems to invite failure in the sense that you want to see beyond this artificial performer persona she seems to consistently wear in this work, and previous ones. This sense of inevitable failure built into her performances proved an almost insurmountable barrier to it; if she did fail, which was inevitable, surely she would be succeeding because that is what she set out to do? It became obvious by the second or third performance that going through the motions of failure is more complex than it appears; it can be rewarding and there are different kinds of failure.

By turning competitions into performance art pieces she set up and juxtaposed the two competing notions of success and failure: to fail in a performance art piece is considered an achievement (evidence that you understand the underlying difficulties of performance), while failing in a competition is not.

As the performances progressed, however, the hard line between the two blurred; when she didn't dance well during a ballroom face-off did this make her a bad performance artist? Those who were present at her face-off with a choir were quick to remark that her singing voice was awful.

Each of the competitions demanded different kinds of skills, so the success of the performance was reliant on different qualities each time she performed. Strategising was quite important in the chess game, while getting into character was considered of value in a historical re-enactment, where the winners and losers were also predetermined. In this way Moys's OTT work was a richly layered one centred on understanding predetermined failure, not only in relation to performance art but in everyday life, particularly in these amateur groups where presumably losing at a chess game doesn't have any consequences - the payoff is in cultivating a sense of belonging to a community, losing might even further this end (as it did for Moys).

Ultimately, and quite satisfyingly, the theme of failure driving Moys's work almost made it beyond scrutiny. As she kept shifting the measures by which to assess her performances, she obviated the need for judgment, questioning its validity to the point that it seemed superfluous. - published July 28, 2013, The Sunday Independent.

The Meaning Motion exhibition will show at the Wits Art Museum in Joburg until August 18.
See the online and print editions of this article from the Sunday Independent.

Viewers make the art work
Laurice Taitz

Tegan Bristow and Nathaniel Stern's exhibition Meaning Motion reminds me of the question of whether a tree falling in the forest, with no one there to hear it, makes a sound.

When you enter the main chamber of the Wits Art Museum, all is quiet and the space appears empty. It's a nonexhibition, until you approach one of the walls.

From then on it's magic and mayhem, as each piece is responsive and you trigger the artworks. This is no place for passive observers. The artists expect you to be active in giving the works meaning, cleverly breaking the implicit rules of "looking" at artwork in a gallery setting.

The interactivity relies on cameras and motion sensors and clever programming code. Bristow and Stern use the technology of the Microsoft Kinect - a motion-sensing device that comes with the XBox video game console - in their work to capture movement and then to translate it into digital expression, projecting it as a large-scale artwork.

The exhibition is comprised primarily of seven distinctive interactive works. Bristow says: "Many people think that interactive art is limited to a certain way of doing something ... but the work comes from such a different place and we both use the medium in very different ways."

Stern comes from a performance background. His four works, grouped as Body Language, explore his concern with the relationship between the body and text, and how we perform text. He sees language as a physical object, and language and text as being part of who we are as a body.

The impetus for a joint exhibition came after Stern used Bristow's work as a central reference in his upcoming book, The Implicit Body, based on his PhD research. Stern is an associate professor of art and design at the University of Wisconsin [Milwaukee].

Bristow lectures in digital arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. A painter, she changed career direction after mistakenly attending a computer science lecture.

"I had my class down for the wrong day and was blown away that you could write programs," she says.

Her work combines her engagement with surface and visual aesthetics with the maths of digital code.

Taken together, the works talk to and across each other.

Stern's elicit is about the agency of movement. He wrote it for a dance performance and it responds to how fast or slowly you move across the space, emitting spurts or great gushing streams of letters to form a poem that you can never read.

In stuttering, your movement induces a series of phrases, repetitious sounds and the static associated with being lost between radio channels.

If you slow down, you get to explore the screen more fully, as one would quiet a stutter.

In enter, red dots outline your body as phrases float around you. When you grab a word from the screen you hear a line of poetry being recited or a choice phrase such as: "If there's one thing to get in the way of a good time it's other people."

Bristow's Chalk Vision is a subtle piece that explores the visual and material quality of programming code and how it understands motion.

She says: "It's an aesthetic exploration of what's called computer vision, how the camera sees because the camera is our primary sensor."

Her Dissonance at Six encourages you to get more people together in the space as it works best with six. As you step inside, projected before you is a boldly coloured tree-like figure.

As the numbers grow, each person is represented by a tree. The more motion, the wilder the trees become until the leaves fly off and the space before you empties.

Bristow says it's about spirituality and mathematics, a piece about loss as it separates the rich and intensive quality of bringing people together with the emptiness once they leave and are no more.

While Stern's work was developed as a body, Bristow's works were created out of specific moments, and not deliberately as an interrelated whole.

Unsaid is a response to the 2009 elections. You stand before the screen, an upright microphone prompting you to say something. As you speak your face is covered with a Jacob Zuma mask, your words are thrown back at you and the phrase "leave it unsaid" flashes across the screen. Bristow says it's the third incarnation of this work.

"This is the first time I have put faces on the masks directly. I was very frustrated by a real sense of a lack of agency. There was this feeling [at election time] that we were contributing so heavily to something. Everyone was tweeting and Facebooking but in the end I was looking at what power do I actually have. What can I as a small individual within the technology realm actually contribute? And does the technology dissipate or actually contribute to that sense of agency?"

She calls it "quite a nasty piece".

"It's horrible to you. It says say something and when you do it gives you a short moment and immediately cuts you off, shushes you up. It creates a constant loop of never being gratified, ever." Politics summed up in a moment.

The exhibition creates an exciting and thoroughly disobedient gallery space that encourages you to move your body and to gesture wildly to get a desired response.

It's fascinating for its appeal to adults and children alike. Beyond, or as part of, the complex layers of meaning created by the symbolic images, interactivity, performative aspects and the humanising of technology and programmed code, you are compelled to perform funny walks more reminiscent of Monty Python, rather than to view it in the dignified manner of someone appreciating art.
Meaning Motion is at Wits Art Museum, corner of Bertha and Jorissen streets in Braamfontein until August 18.

all texts, Body Language, elicit, enter, Meaning Motion, review, scripted, stuttering, Wits Art Museum press

The 8'oclock Buzz: Nathaniel Stern: Back for More

Nathaniel Stern is an Associate Professor in Arts Tech at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. He joined the Buzz on Monday, July 1st to discuss his interactive art and give us an update on "Tweets in Space".

In February 2013, Stern joined the 8 O'Clock Buzz to talk about his project Tweets in Space. The archive of that show can be found here. As the system is 22nd light years away, it will take 44 years for us to hear back from any of the Tweets. Still, Stern is excited and hopeful.

In addition, Stern discussed his latest interactive art. He currently has an upcoming art show in South Africa called Meaning Motion. He has hopes that a gallery in Wisconsin will display a Meaning Motion exhibit at some point in the future, to bring some of his work closer to home. He also just finished a book on interactive art, titled Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body As Performance. His theory of art is to invite people to interact with his work. All of his "paintings" are displayed on white boxes, digitally programmed, until someone walks in front of or into the box - at which point the art comes alive. Each art piece, therefore, is unique depending on who interacts with it.

According to Stern, body and language both require each other. Bodies make language, and language makes bodies. His work is intended to spark discussion about how we relate to and interact with ourselves.

Download the mp3 (20 mb), or listen to the entire interview with sub-host Tony Casteneda:

Related artworks: movement, meaning, gesture, scripted, elicit & en/traced, stuttering, enter
Other related texts: WORT fm, Meaning Motion press, Mail & Guardian, Body Language, Business Day

all texts, Body Language, elicit, enter, interview, Meaning Motion, participatory, radio, scripted, stuttering, Tweets in Space, Wits Art Museum press

The Games Artists Play: Performance and Failure This article by Mary Corrigall appeared in both the online and print editions of the Sunday Independent
Once inside the Wits Art Museum, it's an unexpected relief to be confronted with what appears to be large blank canvases on the gallery walls. This may have something to do with having waded through a cacophony of studenty-art at the exhibition of the work by the long-listed candidates for the Absa L'atelier Award earlier in the week.

That experience alone could test anyone's desire to be an art critic, though ironically such "bad" (read: lame, contemporary art-by-numbers) work affirms the need for critics - someone has to outright reject it if competition adjudicators can't be relied upon to do so.

At Meaning Motion, a joint exhibition by Tegan Bristow and Nathaniel Stern, the viewing experience seems to rest in the hands of the viewer, rather than the artist. This could be said to be the case any time you observe an artwork but in the context of this show, it's not just how you look and interpret it that will shape your experience but how you move. You have to stand close to the screens (they appear like large canvases) to trigger the technology that facilitates the interactive work and most of the works rely on your physical gestures to determine how the images, signs, or letters, in the case of Stern's work, are animated.
This means the work relies on your presence to exist, to have some sort of visual life. The moment you step away from the screen, the work becomes dormant.

This is an attractive idea for viewers, especially critics, because it means you can silence or end the work at will. In this way the artwork is not imposed upon you, you choose when, and for how long, you want to engage with it.

This isn't usually an option when viewing conventional art shows or performance art. The latter relies on this; performance art doesn't only test the endurance levels of the performer but the viewer too. Enduring something as it takes place live is vital in our understanding of an embodied experience - that is gaining knowledge through an awareness of our bodies. And this should be more than feeling the back of a chair stabbing your back.

Stern and Bristow take this element of performance art one step further by jolting viewers out of their comfortable passive positions and encouraging them to feel the experience of looking and making, thus it is a kind of embodied observation and interaction that attempts to blur the boundary between viewer and participant. In a sense you are simply watching a self-reflection that has been mediated by different computer programmes written by the artists.

The underlying premise of this show is to generate a set of images with your body, turning you into an involuntary performance artist of sorts, though the intended meaning of the work, the outcome and structure, has been determined by Stern and Bristow. So, it's an illusion of control that they are really offering, under the guise of free will or interactivity. This idea is particularly pertinent to Bristow's Unsaid, which appears to be set up for a participant to express themselves: a microphone is placed in front of a screen. However, as you approach the microphone a black square pops up over your face on the screen, erasing your identity and the words "left it unsaid" appear in the box.

In this way once you begin to "make" the work, you realise you have been "written out" of it.

As a result, you walk away feeling quite helpless in the face of the technology that is mediating this live interaction with yourself. This seems to fly in the face of interactive experiences, which are predicated on the idea that the participant gets to enjoy some level of control; this is, after all, the main payoff.

Stern's Stutter pic by Christo Doherty

Participation and interactivity are usually marked by immersion too, a temporary forgetfulness of who and where you are, but quite surprisingly, while this exhibition appears to be set up for interactivity, the activities aren't immersive or gripping in a traditional sense. It's almost like each work is a new toy and once you have figured out how it operates, you move onto the next one. Perhaps this is because most of the interactive works are quite simplistic in terms of what they offer and the graphics, and visuals too, which have a sort of retro or crude digital aesthetic. This kind of mismatch between sophisticated technology and basic visuals emphasises a disconnect between the real and the intangible digital realms and what occurs when you try to make the invisible visible. This is best illustrated by Bristow's Sound Prints - naive hand-drawings connected to small circuits via wires. Beautiful, slick or hyperreal graphics would not have relayed the divide between the complex programming and technology and the end product. Bristow's Chalk vision; a black screen where your silhouette is rendered in an ethereal chalky line, is also crude but visually compelling. But mostly, the ideological pay-offs are more interesting than the visual or experiential aspect of the works, which may well be in contradiction with what this show sets out to achieve.

Take Stern's notion of the body writing words or eliciting text - for a writer this is an especially thrilling idea, as few seem to understand how performative writing is; not only is it something the body produces but it is informed by a certain persona and is usually engaged with relaying the experiential and desire to fix it to the page faithfully.

It is no surprise then to learn that in the work Elicit Stern employed an extract from a text by Marcel Proust, the French novelist famous for his enhanced recollections of reality. When you stand in front of the screen where this work appears, letters from the text appear in order. The faster you move and the closer you are to the screen, the quicker they are generated. In theory if you moved slowly enough you would be able to read the text.

Bristow's Unsaid pic by Christo Doherty

"Every pixel the sensor sees as 'moving' in every frame births yet another character, and so we usually get a sea of erupted text. I love this. We get a 'sense' of meaning, but can only 'feel' it," observes Stern.

It is a highly evocative text where Proust details how the aroma of fresh scones triggers memories of his grandmother. Yet this sensual aspect, this intangible physical experience (smell) that is described in this text is withheld from the viewer, so while we can "feel" and control the letters, what they mean is completely beyond our grasp. Stern clearly intended this to be the case; he wants his viewers to get past the "words" and their literal meaning, allowing them to come into contact with a more abstract engagement with language that is triggered by a physical gesture/vocabulary.

After all is this not what Proust does to some extent; it is through conjuring a scent through text that the reader and writer are able to penetrate beyond it - into the physical world and those intangible qualities that allow for nostalgia.

Ironically, this idea sounds better on paper than an experience of it. While the body is immersed in the work in the sense that it is required in order to generate it; you never penetrate it; Proust's text is broken into visual units, motifs that don't necessarily allow for a more physical or experiential encounter. What occurs is disconnection: your body is reflected back at you in an unrecognisable form; the shape of letters, words, or motifs (in Bristow's Dissonance at Six). In other words you become words and shapes and a kind of disembodiment occurs - you become separated from yourself, when confronted with the real-time digitised representation of yourself that is out of your control.

This, of course, seems in contradiction with this being an exhibition centred around interactivity and the body. But somehow this chasm, or failure, and the exhibition's general inability to completely deliver on interactivity and control, is perhaps what makes it significant, particularly in an era where "immersion" in various kinds of digital realms has created the illusion that we are more connected to what is happening and are able to shape our experiences through it. It also draws to attention the difficulty in bringing performance into the gallery and the power dynamics of participation, which has become such a sexy concept in art making, and something that has driven the digital era. Stern opens an interesting discourse on text and the body, though perhaps it can't be resolved in an aesthetic or visual plane.
Failure seems to be a prerequisite for performance artists.

Moys (in red dress) tries her hand at ballroom dancing
pic by Paul Greenway

Anthea Moys's grand multi-performances at the National Arts Festival in the work Anthea Moys vs the city of Grahamstown was as its title suggests set up to fail; its hardly likely that Moys would have been able to "beat" the city, which was represented via various teams or groups engaged with different extramural activities.

Failure should be an unpredictable outcome of a performance rather than the driving objective. This may have been why Moys is said to have spent around three months in the small Eastern Cape hamlet training and learning how to play chess, soccer, sing and dance. In this way she would be seen to be trying her utmost to win in the face-offs with the various teams or individuals. The assiduous pursuit of acquiring all these skills would also make her appear like an over-achiever, as obviously winning the inaugural Standard Bank Award for performance art would also infer. The irony of pursuing failure, or setting herself up for failure as the work she would produce for the award, was not lost on her, it may have even given rise to it. The work the winners of the Standard Bank Young artists produce at the festival is always heavily scrutinised, particularly by their contemporaries and critics, who use it to measure their suitability for the award. So what better way to navigate this obstacle by admitting failure from the outset? Of course, the sense that she would most certainly be defeated by Grahamstown - quite a ridiculous and absurd notion in itself - also meant the work would fail on an artistic level too; as the outcome would be predictable - would there be any point in watching, when we knew what the result would be?

In a way, you found yourself willing her to fail too. Moys's bubbly gung-ho vibe seems to invite failure in the sense that you want to see beyond this artificial performer persona she seems to consistently wear in this work, and previous ones. This sense of inevitable failure built into her performances proved an almost insurmountable barrier to it; if she did fail, which was inevitable, surely she would be succeeding because that is what she set out to do? It became obvious by the second or third performance that going through the motions of failure is more complex than it appears; it can be rewarding and there are different kinds of failure.

By turning competitions into performance art pieces she set up and juxtaposed the two competing notions of success and failure: to fail in a performance art piece is considered an achievement (evidence that you understand the underlying difficulties of performance), while failing in a competition is not.

As the performances progressed, however, the hard line between the two blurred; when she didn't dance well during a ballroom face-off did this make her a bad performance artist? Those who were present at her face-off with a choir were quick to remark that her singing voice was awful.

Each of the competitions demanded different kinds of skills, so the success of the performance was reliant on different qualities each time she performed. Strategising was quite important in the chess game, while getting into character was considered of value in a historical re-enactment, where the winners and losers were also predetermined. In this way Moys's OTT work was a richly layered one centred on understanding predetermined failure, not only in relation to performance art but in everyday life, particularly in these amateur groups where presumably losing at a chess game doesn't have any consequences - the payoff is in cultivating a sense of belonging to a community, losing might even further this end (as it did for Moys).

Ultimately, and quite satisfyingly, the theme of failure driving Moys's work almost made it beyond scrutiny. As she kept shifting the measures by which to assess her performances, she obviated the need for judgment, questioning its validity to the point that it seemed superfluous. - published July 28, 2013, The Sunday Independent.

The Meaning Motion exhibition will show at the Wits Art Museum in Joburg until August 18.
See the online and print editions of this article from the Sunday Independent.

Viewers make the art work
Laurice Taitz

Tegan Bristow and Nathaniel Stern's exhibition Meaning Motion reminds me of the question of whether a tree falling in the forest, with no one there to hear it, makes a sound.

When you enter the main chamber of the Wits Art Museum, all is quiet and the space appears empty. It's a nonexhibition, until you approach one of the walls.

From then on it's magic and mayhem, as each piece is responsive and you trigger the artworks. This is no place for passive observers. The artists expect you to be active in giving the works meaning, cleverly breaking the implicit rules of "looking" at artwork in a gallery setting.

The interactivity relies on cameras and motion sensors and clever programming code. Bristow and Stern use the technology of the Microsoft Kinect - a motion-sensing device that comes with the XBox video game console - in their work to capture movement and then to translate it into digital expression, projecting it as a large-scale artwork.

The exhibition is comprised primarily of seven distinctive interactive works. Bristow says: "Many people think that interactive art is limited to a certain way of doing something ... but the work comes from such a different place and we both use the medium in very different ways."

Stern comes from a performance background. His four works, grouped as Body Language, explore his concern with the relationship between the body and text, and how we perform text. He sees language as a physical object, and language and text as being part of who we are as a body.

The impetus for a joint exhibition came after Stern used Bristow's work as a central reference in his upcoming book, The Implicit Body, based on his PhD research. Stern is an associate professor of art and design at the University of Wisconsin [Milwaukee].

Bristow lectures in digital arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. A painter, she changed career direction after mistakenly attending a computer science lecture.

"I had my class down for the wrong day and was blown away that you could write programs," she says.

Her work combines her engagement with surface and visual aesthetics with the maths of digital code.

Taken together, the works talk to and across each other.

Stern's elicit is about the agency of movement. He wrote it for a dance performance and it responds to how fast or slowly you move across the space, emitting spurts or great gushing streams of letters to form a poem that you can never read.

In stuttering, your movement induces a series of phrases, repetitious sounds and the static associated with being lost between radio channels.

If you slow down, you get to explore the screen more fully, as one would quiet a stutter.

In enter, red dots outline your body as phrases float around you. When you grab a word from the screen you hear a line of poetry being recited or a choice phrase such as: "If there's one thing to get in the way of a good time it's other people."

Bristow's Chalk Vision is a subtle piece that explores the visual and material quality of programming code and how it understands motion.

She says: "It's an aesthetic exploration of what's called computer vision, how the camera sees because the camera is our primary sensor."

Her Dissonance at Six encourages you to get more people together in the space as it works best with six. As you step inside, projected before you is a boldly coloured tree-like figure.

As the numbers grow, each person is represented by a tree. The more motion, the wilder the trees become until the leaves fly off and the space before you empties.

Bristow says it's about spirituality and mathematics, a piece about loss as it separates the rich and intensive quality of bringing people together with the emptiness once they leave and are no more.

While Stern's work was developed as a body, Bristow's works were created out of specific moments, and not deliberately as an interrelated whole.

Unsaid is a response to the 2009 elections. You stand before the screen, an upright microphone prompting you to say something. As you speak your face is covered with a Jacob Zuma mask, your words are thrown back at you and the phrase "leave it unsaid" flashes across the screen. Bristow says it's the third incarnation of this work.

"This is the first time I have put faces on the masks directly. I was very frustrated by a real sense of a lack of agency. There was this feeling [at election time] that we were contributing so heavily to something. Everyone was tweeting and Facebooking but in the end I was looking at what power do I actually have. What can I as a small individual within the technology realm actually contribute? And does the technology dissipate or actually contribute to that sense of agency?"

She calls it "quite a nasty piece".

"It's horrible to you. It says say something and when you do it gives you a short moment and immediately cuts you off, shushes you up. It creates a constant loop of never being gratified, ever." Politics summed up in a moment.

The exhibition creates an exciting and thoroughly disobedient gallery space that encourages you to move your body and to gesture wildly to get a desired response.

It's fascinating for its appeal to adults and children alike. Beyond, or as part of, the complex layers of meaning created by the symbolic images, interactivity, performative aspects and the humanising of technology and programmed code, you are compelled to perform funny walks more reminiscent of Monty Python, rather than to view it in the dignified manner of someone appreciating art.
Meaning Motion is at Wits Art Museum, corner of Bertha and Jorissen streets in Braamfontein until August 18.

The 8'oclock Buzz: Nathaniel Stern: Back for More

Nathaniel Stern is an Associate Professor in Arts Tech at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. He joined the Buzz on Monday, July 1st to discuss his interactive art and give us an update on "Tweets in Space".

In February 2013, Stern joined the 8 O'Clock Buzz to talk about his project Tweets in Space. The archive of that show can be found here. As the system is 22nd light years away, it will take 44 years for us to hear back from any of the Tweets. Still, Stern is excited and hopeful.

In addition, Stern discussed his latest interactive art. He currently has an upcoming art show in South Africa called Meaning Motion. He has hopes that a gallery in Wisconsin will display a Meaning Motion exhibit at some point in the future, to bring some of his work closer to home. He also just finished a book on interactive art, titled Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body As Performance. His theory of art is to invite people to interact with his work. All of his "paintings" are displayed on white boxes, digitally programmed, until someone walks in front of or into the box - at which point the art comes alive. Each art piece, therefore, is unique depending on who interacts with it.

According to Stern, body and language both require each other. Bodies make language, and language makes bodies. His work is intended to spark discussion about how we relate to and interact with ourselves.

Download the mp3 (20 mb), or listen to the entire interview with sub-host Tony Casteneda:

Related artworks: movement, meaning, gesture, scripted, elicit & en/traced, stuttering, enter
Other related texts: WORT fm, Meaning Motion press, Mail & Guardian, Body Language, Business Day

all texts, Body Language, elicit, enter, interview, Meaning Motion, participatory, radio, scripted, stuttering, Tweets in Space, Wits Art Museum press

Viewers make the art work
Laurice Taitz

Tegan Bristow and Nathaniel Stern's exhibition Meaning Motion reminds me of the question of whether a tree falling in the forest, with no one there to hear it, makes a sound.

When you enter the main chamber of the Wits Art Museum, all is quiet and the space appears empty. It's a nonexhibition, until you approach one of the walls.

From then on it's magic and mayhem, as each piece is responsive and you trigger the artworks. This is no place for passive observers. The artists expect you to be active in giving the works meaning, cleverly breaking the implicit rules of "looking" at artwork in a gallery setting.

The interactivity relies on cameras and motion sensors and clever programming code. Bristow and Stern use the technology of the Microsoft Kinect - a motion-sensing device that comes with the XBox video game console - in their work to capture movement and then to translate it into digital expression, projecting it as a large-scale artwork.

The exhibition is comprised primarily of seven distinctive interactive works. Bristow says: "Many people think that interactive art is limited to a certain way of doing something ... but the work comes from such a different place and we both use the medium in very different ways."

Stern comes from a performance background. His four works, grouped as Body Language, explore his concern with the relationship between the body and text, and how we perform text. He sees language as a physical object, and language and text as being part of who we are as a body.

The impetus for a joint exhibition came after Stern used Bristow's work as a central reference in his upcoming book, The Implicit Body, based on his PhD research. Stern is an associate professor of art and design at the University of Wisconsin [Milwaukee].

Bristow lectures in digital arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. A painter, she changed career direction after mistakenly attending a computer science lecture.

"I had my class down for the wrong day and was blown away that you could write programs," she says.

Her work combines her engagement with surface and visual aesthetics with the maths of digital code.

Taken together, the works talk to and across each other.

Stern's elicit is about the agency of movement. He wrote it for a dance performance and it responds to how fast or slowly you move across the space, emitting spurts or great gushing streams of letters to form a poem that you can never read.

In stuttering, your movement induces a series of phrases, repetitious sounds and the static associated with being lost between radio channels.

If you slow down, you get to explore the screen more fully, as one would quiet a stutter.

In enter, red dots outline your body as phrases float around you. When you grab a word from the screen you hear a line of poetry being recited or a choice phrase such as: "If there's one thing to get in the way of a good time it's other people."

Bristow's Chalk Vision is a subtle piece that explores the visual and material quality of programming code and how it understands motion.

She says: "It's an aesthetic exploration of what's called computer vision, how the camera sees because the camera is our primary sensor."

Her Dissonance at Six encourages you to get more people together in the space as it works best with six. As you step inside, projected before you is a boldly coloured tree-like figure.

As the numbers grow, each person is represented by a tree. The more motion, the wilder the trees become until the leaves fly off and the space before you empties.

Bristow says it's about spirituality and mathematics, a piece about loss as it separates the rich and intensive quality of bringing people together with the emptiness once they leave and are no more.

While Stern's work was developed as a body, Bristow's works were created out of specific moments, and not deliberately as an interrelated whole.

Unsaid is a response to the 2009 elections. You stand before the screen, an upright microphone prompting you to say something. As you speak your face is covered with a Jacob Zuma mask, your words are thrown back at you and the phrase "leave it unsaid" flashes across the screen. Bristow says it's the third incarnation of this work.

"This is the first time I have put faces on the masks directly. I was very frustrated by a real sense of a lack of agency. There was this feeling [at election time] that we were contributing so heavily to something. Everyone was tweeting and Facebooking but in the end I was looking at what power do I actually have. What can I as a small individual within the technology realm actually contribute? And does the technology dissipate or actually contribute to that sense of agency?"

She calls it "quite a nasty piece".

"It's horrible to you. It says say something and when you do it gives you a short moment and immediately cuts you off, shushes you up. It creates a constant loop of never being gratified, ever." Politics summed up in a moment.

The exhibition creates an exciting and thoroughly disobedient gallery space that encourages you to move your body and to gesture wildly to get a desired response.

It's fascinating for its appeal to adults and children alike. Beyond, or as part of, the complex layers of meaning created by the symbolic images, interactivity, performative aspects and the humanising of technology and programmed code, you are compelled to perform funny walks more reminiscent of Monty Python, rather than to view it in the dignified manner of someone appreciating art.
Meaning Motion is at Wits Art Museum, corner of Bertha and Jorissen streets in Braamfontein until August 18.

The 8'oclock Buzz: Nathaniel Stern: Back for More

Nathaniel Stern is an Associate Professor in Arts Tech at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. He joined the Buzz on Monday, July 1st to discuss his interactive art and give us an update on "Tweets in Space".

In February 2013, Stern joined the 8 O'Clock Buzz to talk about his project Tweets in Space. The archive of that show can be found here. As the system is 22nd light years away, it will take 44 years for us to hear back from any of the Tweets. Still, Stern is excited and hopeful.

In addition, Stern discussed his latest interactive art. He currently has an upcoming art show in South Africa called Meaning Motion. He has hopes that a gallery in Wisconsin will display a Meaning Motion exhibit at some point in the future, to bring some of his work closer to home. He also just finished a book on interactive art, titled Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body As Performance. His theory of art is to invite people to interact with his work. All of his "paintings" are displayed on white boxes, digitally programmed, until someone walks in front of or into the box - at which point the art comes alive. Each art piece, therefore, is unique depending on who interacts with it.

According to Stern, body and language both require each other. Bodies make language, and language makes bodies. His work is intended to spark discussion about how we relate to and interact with ourselves.

Download the mp3 (20 mb), or listen to the entire interview with sub-host Tony Casteneda:

The 8'oclock Buzz: Nathaniel Stern: Back for More

Nathaniel Stern is an Associate Professor in Arts Tech at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. He joined the Buzz on Monday, July 1st to discuss his interactive art and give us an update on "Tweets in Space".

In February 2013, Stern joined the 8 O'Clock Buzz to talk about his project Tweets in Space. The archive of that show can be found here. As the system is 22nd light years away, it will take 44 years for us to hear back from any of the Tweets. Still, Stern is excited and hopeful.

In addition, Stern discussed his latest interactive art. He currently has an upcoming art show in South Africa called Meaning Motion. He has hopes that a gallery in Wisconsin will display a Meaning Motion exhibit at some point in the future, to bring some of his work closer to home. He also just finished a book on interactive art, titled Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body As Performance. His theory of art is to invite people to interact with his work. All of his "paintings" are displayed on white boxes, digitally programmed, until someone walks in front of or into the box - at which point the art comes alive. Each art piece, therefore, is unique depending on who interacts with it.

According to Stern, body and language both require each other. Bodies make language, and language makes bodies. His work is intended to spark discussion about how we relate to and interact with ourselves.

Download the mp3 (20 mb), or listen to the entire interview with sub-host Tony Casteneda:

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Wits Art Museum Archives - nathaniel stern

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Meaning Motion was a duo exhibition (with Tegan Bristow) of interactive art, at the Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, June - August 2013. It took up two floors of the museum, and featured 8 installations of work, including the international premiere of Stern's scripted , and the first full exhibition of his Body Language suite of work - all with new, updated code.

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In February I went to Minerva works for Digbeth first friday and saw this work where it would print out tweets that mentioned a certain word. Cant remember what the word was, but maybe we could have something similar in that when people tweet something it is said in an automated voice to the plants? There is evidence that saying nice things ( or maybe just talking to plants in general) helps plants grow better.

I realise the link I've included isnt a credible source and would have to find a credible one if we went ahead with this, but yeah.

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In a study performed by the Royal Horticultural Society, researchers discovered that talking to your plants really can help them grow faster. They also found that plants grow faster to the sound of a female voice than to the sound of a male voice. Other studies have experimented with different sound levels and even the kinds of things that are said to plants-do they respond better to compliments or insults?

In the month-long study, the Royal Horticultural Society recorded 10 people, including both men and women, reading from either literary or scientific works. Each recording was played through a set of headphones that was attached to each tomato plant's pot (so, one tomato plant per person). The same tomato variety was used, same soil, same care regimen, etc. They also included two plants that were not read to as a control.

At the end of the month, the plants that had been attached to female voices grew an average of an inch taller than those attached to a male voice. The overall winning tomato listened to Sarah Darwin, great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin. Her plant grew approximately two inches taller than the rest.

Asked about her plant's favorable response to her voice and selection, Sarah Darwin commented, "I'm not sure if it's my dulcet tones or the text that I read from On the Origin of Species [her ancestor's seminal work] that made the plant sit up and listen, but either way I think it is great fun and I'm proud of my new title."

Researchers went into the RHS study with the idea that the male voice would make the plants grow faster, and they were surprised by the results. They said that they are unsure why the female voice worked better, positing that it could be related to women's greater range of pitch or tone that affects the sound waves that hit the plant, and that sound, just like any other environmental factor, has an effect on plant growth.

The results of the RHS study have been supported by other studies and theories, yet the exact link between the human voice and plant growth remains elusive. Here are a few other studies and findings of interest:

The TV show "Mythbusters" conducted a study in which 60 pea plants were divided among three greenhouses. In one greenhouse they played recordings of humans saying nice things to the plants. In another, recordings sounded insults at the plants. The third greenhouse was silent, with no recordings played. After two months, the pea plants showed greater-but roughly equal-growth in the two greenhouses with the recordings, and they showed the least growth in the control greenhouse with no sound.

Researchers with the National Institute of Agricultural Biotechnology in South Korea found that plant growth is stimulated by music, and the growth appeared to be linked to two genes related to how plants respond to sunlight.

Charles Darwin himself suspected a link between plant growth and vibration. In an informal experiment, he had his son play the bassoon to seedlings, but the results were inconclusive.

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Does Talking to Plants Really Make Them Grow?

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In a study performed by the Royal Horticultural Society, researchers discovered that talking to your plants really can help them grow faster. They also found that plants grow faster to the sound of a female voice than to the sound of a male voice.

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I was thinking about how we could make a living sculpture like an ongoing group project thing that people woud have to interact with. So maybe like a garden that people can plant things in, so we'd provide the seeds/seedlings or whatever and people would have to plant them and create a garden together. At the same time, the garden would be live streamed so people can see the garden from wherever they are in the world?

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Here are some things we could look into.

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25 things you might not know about Coventry - Coventry City Council

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Twenty-five things you never knew about Coventry

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Here are the art trails for the Cov City of Culture.

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Coventry Trails

Walk in the footsteps of musicians, artists, rebels and activists. Explore the haunts of poets, writers and stars of stage and screen. Uncover the very beating heart of the city.
At your own pace, under your own steam, we invite you to discover the sites of interest, the levels and layers which have made Coventry the fascinating city it is today. Featuring: The Best in 20th Century Architecture, The Beating Heart of the City inventions trail, A Real Page Turner literature tour, Cov on Screen, a historical If These Medieval Walls Could Talk, The Tale of 2-Tone and the Alive After Five cocktail trail.
Follow the routes at the end of the guide and don't forget to check websites under the maps for opening times if you want to see inside the buildings. Whichever trail you choose, you can be sure of a fascinating feature at every turn.

All available in the book of trails below, collect in person for FREE at attractions around the city and at the Tourist Information Centre.

Don't let the trails stop there, go beyond the book and sign up for a walking tour around the city with any of the tour operators below

Tourist 2 Local & Hideous History Tours

Including: Bodysnatchers - The Resurrection Tour, Death & Darkness, Creepy Hallow, Executions & Hanging, Haunted Horror, Hideous History Mary Ball Talk, Time Gone By Ghost Walk, Anti-clockwise Ghost Walk, Watch Museum After Dark, Medieval Spon Street Tour, April 1941 Forgotten Air Raids, Unknown Tour, Ramble Around Radford
Tourist 2 Local & Hideous History Website
Godivas Footsteps

Including: Around the Goose Ford, A Thousand Years of History, Canals, Coal, Cars and Cloth, Ball Hill & Binley Road
Godivas Footsteps Website
Paul Curtis Walking Tours

Including: 1000 Year History Winter Walk around Coventry's Historic walls & gates, The Longest Day in History Guided Tour with Town Crier, Tudor Tour of Coventry, The Great Elephant Hunt, 1300 Years History Walk with Search for Lady Godiva
Paul Curtis Eventbrite
Guiding You

Including: Coventry Blitz Walking Tour Experience with Blue Badge Guide, Ghost Walks
Guiding You Website
Ghosts Unlimited

Including: Berkswell Haunted Woods Ghost Adventure, Coventry Ghost Hour, Coventry Paranormal Ghost Tour
Ghosts Unlimited Facebook
Curious About Coventry (self-guided walks)

Including: Two self-guided heritage walks (Canal Basin to Cathedrals and Cathedral to Gardens)
Curious About Coventry Website
University of Warwick

Including: Follow that Hare Art Trail
Follow that Hare Webpage
Talking Birds

Including: Walk with Me Guided Tour
Walk with Me Webpage
Do you run a trail in the city that isn't included on this list? Let us know by emailing info@coventry2021.co.uk and we'll add you to this page.

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Coventry Trails - UK City of Culture 2021, Coventry

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Coventry Trails Walk in the footsteps of musicians, artists, rebels and activists. Explore the haunts of poets, writers and stars of stage and screen. Uncover the very beating heart of the city. At your own pace, under your own steam, we invite you to discover the sites of interest, the levels and layers which have ...