Knots in our heads
Concept Maps are ‘graphical tools for organising and representing knowledge’ They were developed by Joseph D Novak at Cornell University to help students visualise how their new learning could be assimilated with their existing ‘cognitive structure’. Sowa places them within the context of knowledge visualisation diagrams, alongside Semantic nets and Mind Maps. When making a concept map, concepts represent...
On Libraries
My Grandmother visited her local library, unless the weather was particularly dire, every Tuesday. This weekly pilgrimage to exchange one book for another persisted for over two decades. Why she devoted this trip to a Tuesday is beyond my reckoning, though I could guess that it was because every other day was already ascribed a task (washing,...
Fairy Light & Wizard Electric
The Special Collections and Archives at the University of Liverpool brims with manuscripts, early editions of Children’s literature, finely printed books and unique science fiction collections which (as a student) I am gratefully able to access. Much of the initial research for my placement with Re-Dock will be manifesting within these library walls, as it...
Graham House Project
Last month, I did a three weeks research in London working with artists Mark Whitelaw and Robin Whitmore on a potential Duckie project with Graham House, a homeless hostel for chronic alcoholics in Vauxhall, London, looking at residents lives and looking at routes into recovery. Duckie has a regular performance night with at the Vauxhall Tavern,...
Hello Chici
This is my first blog post, as part of the Child Computer Interaction at the Chici Lab in the University of central Lancaster. There aren’t many other artists at the ChiCI Lab, so thought I’d spend this first post explaining why I’m doing an Mres in this subject area and not in digital art. For...
SYNTAX: Coding for Writers
At the end of June Mercy will deliver a new iteration of “Syntax: Coding for Writers” in the form of a two-day intensive skills-based workshop, which will be presented as part of FACT’s Open Curate It programme. SYNTAX was originally devised in 2011 by John O’Shea and Nathan Jones as a framework for writers and...
Visiting Octopus in Cumbria
At the beginning of March I made a trip up to Barrow-in-Furness to meet with Glenn Boulter and the rest of the team at Octopus Collective in Barrow-in-Furness to discuss our shared challenges of running a small art organisation. Re-Dock worked with Octopus last August when they commissioned “Swan Pedalo Broadcasts” (a new collaboration between...
SYNTAX (Mark 1)
SYNTAX: A speculative 1-day workshop, looking to explore how poet/writers and coder/artists can bring their skills together to make new experimental work. or Coders and Poets Unite! This initiative was a collaboration between Re-Dock and Literary Arts Collective Mercy, prompted by conversations between John O’Shea and Nathan Jones about the potential for overlaps and interesting discourse...
Electric Cinema, Birmingham
END OF CINEMA? Last week I went to the Electric Cinema in Birmingham to attend a seminar on the Digital Funding Partnership – a scheme to allow independent cinemas to get on board the ‘digital revolution’. It seemed to me to be both a revolution and an apocalypse, depending if your cinema survived. Either way,...
Hull Residency
Wow! What a brilliant week! I spent all of last week in Hull taking part in the Digital Media Labs touchscreen residency along with 9 other artists it was excellent. This opportunity was mastermided by Benedict Philips who is lead artist for a new NHS health centre in Hull. There are so many positive things...
Foregrounding Context
Cultural Heritage Network workshop and presentation: The process of collectively mapping and modelling, memories and ideas forms a core strand of Re-Docks methodology, and, over the past few months we have been contributing to a series of discussions relating to landscapes, memories and cultural practices, co-ordinated by Liverpool University. A workshop in February aimed to...
Re-Dock Research
Over the coming year we want to make it possible to share more of the things that we discover in the course of our research led practice – our processes, data and source material. As a starting point for this we have recently begun researching alternative models for cinema screenings in order to establish possible...
