Exhibition at FACT - 17 May – 2 June 2013

+ Artists talks 18 May, 2pm – 4pm, FACT Connects Space (Free)

(Press Release Download: Re-Dock_PR_CYHMICSY )

Can You Hear Me? I Can See You! has been inspired by early theatrical techniques for creating ghostly apparitions (like the Peppers ghost effect), 20th century versions of apparitions, teleportation and the video-phone expressed in popular sci-fi cinema (examples of which can be seen projected in the space).

Presented as an open sketchbook, the ideas shared in this exhibition are ‘in-process’ with the opportunity for you to test things out.  Through an experimental workshop process, a series of prototype devices have been constructed which investigate questions such as: “When did we begin communicating via laser? What happens if you take in LCD T.V. apart? Can you Skype through time?

The sessions which we devised and delivered in collaboration with the FACT/tenantspin team have acquainted the resident groups with iPads, Skype and aspects of social media and online research tools, whilst drawing inspiration from people’s memories and experiences of the early days of electronic communications technology.

Can You Hear Me? I Can See You! is inspired both by historical technological innovations and their impact on society, as well as fictional devices such as time-travel and visitations.

The aim is to allow visitors to explore a range of approaches to telepresence, but also question how these could impact on the everyday lives of the residents.

The exhibition will feature work by artists Dave Lynch, Jon Astbury and our own Sam Meech, as well as documenting the sheltered housing scheme workshops.

Supported by the Baring Foundation, Can You Hear Me? I Can See You! is the result of an artists’ commission by FACT to promote digital and online activity among those who would not normally have access to new technologies.

Skype Advice Portal is an interactive video installation, created for the ‘Can You Hear Me? I Can See You!’ exhibition at FACT Liverpool.

If you could send a message of advice to someone in the future or the past, what would you say?  To whom and to when would you send it? Send your 20 seconds of wisdom through space-time using Skype Advice Portal. All you need is a device with a webcam, mic, and of course, Skype. Here is a step by step guide:

1. Sign into your own Skype account and call Advice Portal (username: adviceportal).
2. You will be greeted by a portal resident, and asked to leave your message
3. make sure your head is in the oval frame
4. Leave your message after the beep – you only have 20 seconds – so choose your words wisely
5. watch your message back, then hang up

All messages sent through the Skype Advice Portal are collated and automatically (and randomly) re-presented within the FACT Connects exhibition space as a sci-fi inspired video installation.

Portal guardians reserve the right to remove or edit offensive or inappropriate messages, so please, respect this amazing space-time technology and use your words for good!

Feels a good time to write an update about the Moston Small Cinema project - the community screening facility we built in a former miners wash-house in North Manchester. The festival last October launched the cinema, but also marked the end of the first phase of the project. Since then, the onus has been on the local community to operate the cinema and author the activity therein. I’ve still been involved, facilitating events, and helping to set up a committee and bank account, but I’ve also been careful to let the people involved do things their own way, with some interesting results.

Initially it started well, with two events – a screening of a climbing documentary, and an evening of Sigur Ros music videos – getting some good promotion, pulling in new, very different audiences from far and wide. This was followed by a few unsuccessful experiments in ‘eekly programming aimed at providing free screenings of recent films for the immediate community. This didn’t work so well perhaps because we weren’t identifying an audience with each film, and there was a lack of promotion / lead in time.

Then followed a series of really interesting, independently run, successful events, aimed at music fans and programmed by Howard from the miners. The Twisted Wheel documentary sold out 3 screenings in a single day, and audiences were also treated to a Northern Soul disco in the main function room. Punk fans came next for the Cramps documentary screening, and classic car fanatics followed for screenings of Two Lane Blacktop and American Graffiti. All the films were tapped into specific communities and interests that Howard and the Miners knew well, and brought an extra element to the screenings, through the dicso or the amazing vehicles that filled the car park. My role has simply been to support these activities through promotion on the website / email / twitter.

A couple of weeks ago I attended another screening – a documentary about the FC united Womens team – as part of International Womens Day. Again, independently organised by the Miners, in collaboration with local filmmakers Richard Searle and Kay Phillips, the event was very successful. It was great to be a punter, watching a film by local people, about a local subject, shared in a great facility in their own community. It really started to hit home that the cinema as an experiment was beginning to work.

This week we are screening Ken Loach’s new documentary The Spirit of 45. Its a bit of a new venture – working with a proper distributor (Dogwoof) to show a new film as part of it’s national release – but it seems to be working well. It’s a film which attracts a socially / culturally engaged audience who are will to travel. In addition, the cinema committee and the Miners have all worked really hard to promote the screenings – distributing flyers, getting press releases out, even landing a two-page spread in the Manchester Evening News. Although I was the one who initially proposed to book the film, hosting the event has felt like a real collaboration, with everyone chipping in to promote and run the events. And its worked – once again, new audiences in good numbers.

So far then, some great signs. The next few months will see some more screenings, chosen by the committee, supported by Creative England, which will take the risk out of trying some more new ideas. The challenge will be to sustain activity as volunteers, but be ambitious in programming and reaching audiences. More updates to follow.

As part of the PORTAL project, we’ve been working with Tenantspin to deliver workshops supporting sheltered housing residents in using iPads. Our approach to this has been to frame the device as the latest step in a series of technological innovations experienced in the life-times of the residents. We have also been discussing possibilities of telepresence, and the ideas expressed through science fiction literature and film, to question to what extent these devices are now present in our everyday lives.

This week we looked at using the video camera function of the iPad, with a view to recording video messages.

Moving image recording technology has evolved immensely over the life-times of the residents, from film cine-cameras, to home video, then digital cameras, to a point now where it is integrated into other devices as a default. The pervasiveness of video recording, as part of a mobile phone or an iPad, is enhanced further by the fact these devices are designed  to share media that is created (or collected), and also integrate various functions (eg – using video across apps).

Introducing residents to the video camera function on the iPad may seem like a small step, but it was a powerful experience. I’ve tried to break it down into four aspects:

1. Simply turning the camera on.

This transforms the iPad into a window, a portal by which the outside world can be framed, immediately placing the user in the role of author. The scale of the iPad image itself is not too far removed from the real world as viewed by our own eyes, creating an odd kind of harmony between the image and it’s surroundings. It was a remarkable scene, with 6 residents sat in a circle, all viewing each other through the iPad camera, looking slightly enchanted.

2. Switching between front and reverse cameras

This gave the residents control over roles as presenter / director. It’s sometimes a bit of a shock for us to see ourselves in the magic mirror, but it’s also captivating. There is an odd reflexivity to recording yourself and seeing yourself at the same time – it’s something that Skype users will be familiar with. The value is in being able to send your self to another user, with all the detail that comes from reading a face.

3. The ability to move freely with the iPad.

It is enabling – we are not peeking through a view finder – it’s size makes it easy to handle and guide it smoothly. The residents conducted tours of the home, gliding round the space, speaking about the details as they went. Exploring a familiar space through a lens, knowing it it being captured, and narrating it for an intended viewer – these things create a real engagement with your surroundings.

4. Playback and sharing.

Seeing something you just recorded is enjoyable – sometimes the moment captured can feel more real than being in the moment itself. It can be replayed, scrutinised. Most importantly it can be shared. As soon as the residents had recorded their videos, they did two things: played it back to themselves, then played it back to someone else. The size of the screen makes this immediately accessible. Bill even clocked on that we could play it back via the tv using a hdmi adaptor. Sharing something that you witnessed is as old as cave paintings, (or perhaps slideshows at least!). It creates community.

The residents really got something out of exploring the camera. With some we created video messages  – a video answer phone – and with others we used it as a tool to explore the home. The value in immediately creating your own media is apparent, and the iPads fusion of the camera / screen make this incredibly accessible for older people.

VISIT THE PROJECT BLOG

Outline – A permanent cinema installation in Moston, North Manchester, developed through community research, film commissions and a festival.

Partners – Buddliea, Manchester City Council, Miners Community Arts and Music Centre

Background – The Moston Small Cinema is the most ambitious expression yet of the Small Cinema project, working with volunteers over 12 weeks to create a permanent screening space in the heart of a community. The  result: a 70 seater cinema, replete with authentic cinema seats, built with donated materials, housed in a former miner’s wash house. The project combined community engagement, research and film-making to inform an ambitious plan to develop a cinema facility and hold a 10 day festival of screenings and workshops in November 2012.

The project was commissioned by Buddleia and funded by Manchester City Council, as a means to explore the impact of longterm artist residencies in North Manchester. The cinema continues to be developed as a volunteer-run facility with support from Re-Dock and stakeholders from the community, and has hosted local film premieres, documentary screenings, children’s matinées, theatre shows and fundraising events.

read more about the Moston Small Cinema project

Links

Story of Moston Small Cinema

Moston Small Cinema blog

Launch Night blog and film

Our Club, Our Rules film

Fine Casting film

Adelphi Cinema film

Granada Reports broadcast

Moston Small Cinema in pictures (pdf, 1.2mb)

When making a concept map, concepts represent things or ideas and are described visually by being contained within simple shapes like rectangles or ovals. Links are used to define the relationships between concepts and are described graphically using a small amount of text on a line between two concepts.

It is the freedom to describe the relationships between concepts in your own language that differentiates concept maps from other knowledge visualisation notations such as Semantic Nets. This is also what makes them so much more revealing, they ask the person making them to explain how they connect the dots.

They have been used extensively in education and business settings as a way to measure learning, share expertise and solve problems. Within this context subjectivity is often identified solely as naive theorizing, for example as in this objectively incorrect concept map describing the water cycle.

There has been little exploration into the use of concept maps to represent the positive aspects of more introspective and emotional forms of knowledge. So as part of an assignment for my ChiCI Mres, I decided to see how concept maps could be used as a tool to aid introspection. I asked some people I know to use CMap Tools to create a Concept Map to visualise a problem in their personal lives.

I learnt a lot about which aspects of the CMap tools interface work well and which don’t but that’s another story.

Most of the participants said that as their map grew they started to consider them as aesthetic objects as well as functional visualisation. This may be because they were mostly artists, and so look at most things  this way, but it also supports my hunch that there is scope to develop the aesthetics of knowledge representation in the similair way that the aesthetics of information visualization has been transformed over the past couple of decades.

Suggestions for improvement included that the software gives you an answer like a magic eight ball, or that there be a way to get a response from someone else to help you with the problem.

One participant said that.

It’s useful to have it all the things you tell yourself laid out there, then you can decide if you still want to believe that or not.

Another participant told me that..

 It reminded me of the poetry of R.D. Laing reflecting on his experiences as a family therapist, his poems are full of all these knots that people get themselves tied up in. They show often you can try to untie one knot, but then that produces another one over there.

 

 

How do I get a better more fulfilling job?

 

Do I buy a new television?

 

Iteration

The Small Cinema project has been developing over 4 years now, with various iterations in different places, all exploring the idea of how might cinema spaces be created in relation to communities. Manifestations of the idea have, until now, been temporary – one-off events and ‘pop-up’ screening spaces – and so never fully tested the central conceit of the project.

The Moston Small Cinema is the most ambitious expression yet, working with volunteers to create a permanent screening space in the heart of a community. The  result: a 70 seater cinema, replete with authentic cinema seats, built with donated materials, housed in a former miner’s wash house. The project combined community engagement, research and film-making to inform an ambitious plan to develop a cinema facility and hold a 10 day festival of screenings and workshops.

Opportunity

My feeling was that if we were to create another Small Cinema project, then I wanted to explore creating a semi-permanent facility to leave as a legacy for a community. This was partly informed by my knowledge that I would be able to get hold of actual cinema seats being made available by the Plaza, Liverpool. The seats felt to me like the corner piece of a jigsaw. The other key parts would be space, community and support.

We were approached by Buddleia (arts agency working in North Manchester) to develop a Small Cinema project in North Manchester, with support from Manchester City Council. The initial reccies around Cheetham Hill Rd proved spaces was pretty hard to come by, and so we turned to Moston, where-upon we found the Miners Community Arts and Music Centre.

Run by Lou Beckett and his father Joe, along with various volunteers, The Miners is a formers wash-house and social club that had been neglected for many years until Lou had the idea to develop it as a space for artists. Over 2 years, aided by volunteers and donations, they have slowly made parts of the complex functional again, opening up a cafe, a gallery and a function room. When we approached them about the cinema project, they were really keen to see it happen there.

Research

We began as usual by collecting memories of cinema from people in the area. The Miners became central to this activity, hosting a pinboard where people could write down their experiences. These were collected, and then later shared through tweets, blog posts, and even lasercutting lolly sticks!

I attended numerous coffee mornings, residents meetings, a knitting group and events and meetings with FC United, a fan-owned football club who are soon to build their new stadium a stones-throw from the miners. From these discussion we began to learn about the area and what cinema and community meant to people. We met some great characters – Brian Lever showed us round the former Adelphi Cinema (now a DIY store) and also shared his memorabilia with us; the NEPHRA knit and natter group became regular collaborators in developing experiments around knitting and the moving image. FC Utd also became a key partner, passing news through their network of fans, and also letting us make a documentary on the club. We also spoke to businesses on Moston Lane, in the heart of the African Community, about what cinema meant to them, and learnt that the VCD is alive and well in Nollywood!

All of these discussions helped us to understand the landscape in North Manchester, but also to spark the discussion across the community about our ambitious plan to develop a screening space. Would word of mouth translate into hands on deck?

Transforming a space

The space we chose to host the cinema presented a huge challenge – no electric, fire-damage, peeling walls, and full of rubbish. It did, however, have potential – a bar area, its own access and egress, space for toilets and plenty of space for seating and a screen. Developing this space would effectively add another wing to the Miners Community facility, rather than just fitting in (or taking over) an already functional space.

We began by clearing out the space, and a call out for volunteers saw a small group pitch in over a weekend, filling a skip  and moving stacks of furniture and carpet tiles to new homes. It was a big job, but once the space was emptied the potential was obvious – we had a blank canvas for our ideas.

‘Building Week’

12 weeks later…

Local Press

Festival

Legacy

Library-day was often the highlight of my pre-school years and thereafter, every long Summer holiday which I spent at her house. This was not only because we went by bus, which my four year old self thought to be a great adventure, but because I believed that all the books in the world lived in that particular, tiny, library.

Even the books in my Grandmother’s dining room, closeted inside a very dark, very wooden, glass-fronted cabinet, had library tickets glued to the insides of their first pages. Years later, when I realised how odd this was, it was revealed that my Grandfather had been a notorious hoarder, who was banned from said library after en-massing an impressive collection of ‘overdue’ print.

Presumably, being able and encouraged to access a variety of resources; literature, audio-books, games and later, computers, for free throughout my childhood, will have enriched my character and quality of life. We were not a wealthy little family, but I was spoiled rotten with books.

As an English student, I use the University of Liverpool’s Sydney Jones library (both digital and physical collections) at least once a day. Without which I would be bankrupted by the cost academic tomes and journals. I also regularly utilise the free e-books made available by Project Gutenberg to download most of the texts which crop up on my reading lists. Although they are increasingly seen as ‘throw-away’ items, I do not believe that the books sold in high-street stores are cheap.

On the subject of reading; it seemed sensible to familiarise myself with the history and production of Chapbooks before delving into the Special Collections & Archives; who, on an unrelated note, have launched their very own blog today.

My research began by combing through the University’s library database and then staggering from aisle to aisle, trying to balance an insensibly heavy pile of hardbacks on one arm. I did not expect texts which concern themselves with such small printed objects to be so obscenely large, but I was glad to lug them home and peruse their pages.

Through my initial reading, I have been especially interested to learn that Chapbooks were not the printed literature of the uneducated, as has been wrongly assumed by some scholars in the past, but the only form of print which agricultural and urban laborers could afford. Even then, it was probably only the more comfortably-off of the working classes who could afford to buy Chapbooks on a regular basis.

Being poor does not mean that you are unintelligent, but it does restrict your access to prestigious resources and books in the 17th & 18th centuries were very expensive to purchase. Laborers could not necessarily invest their time in education, even when it was freely available, since nearly every hour of their lives was spent earning enough to survive. However, those who could read would often do so aloud so that members of their family or community could share in the experience.

Imagine a world in which it was a luxury to own a printed publication, no bigger than a single piece of broadsheet newspaper, despite your ability to read. As it is unlikely that we are all descended from the affluent upper classes, this was the reality for most of our ancestors.

As my research into Chapbooks continues, I am reminded of how fortunate I am to be living within a society which provides opportunities for education, and services such as public libraries, which enable people to access resources such as literature and technology, for free.

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 concerns pocket-sized booklets called ‘chapbooks’ of which the SC&A have a large selection.

This interest in chapbooks was sparked by their seeming simplicity. Imagine a single piece of card, folded and printed with the alphabet, fairy tales, prayers and illustrations – sold for a penny to children and adults who could perhaps neither afford, or read, more prestigious publications. My expedition into the history, form and purpose of chapbooks has yet to begin – but I have been meandering through the wider collection of Children’s Literature, keeping an eye out for anything weird or wonderful which maintains the essence of those tiny publications.

My favourite find so far has been The Story of Fairy Light and Wizard Electric which is a hybrid board-game, fairy story, poem and educational dip into the history of lighting – from the moon and stars to gas lamps and light bulbs. Although the ‘game’ is branded Siemens and clearly advertises the wonders of Siemens electricity, it did not possess a date, so I endeavored to find one. My first course of action was to contact Siemens, who very kindly sent  the following response -

Following World War Two, when the company’s UK assets were sequestrated, Siemens Brothers was acquired by GEC in 1958, and the Woolwich site – its major factory – closed down in 1968. At that time, sadly, virtually all of the material in the Siemens Brothers archive was lost or destroyed.

Although the company is attempting to re-establish a small archive, this will take many years, so as of yet they do not have much in the way of product specific information. My backup plan was to analyse the language of the Fairy Light & Wizard Electric poem; for example the “Racer” is either the famous roller-coaster or a British plane, both of which were notable in the 1920s. From this subsequent research, a circa date of 1926 was applied to the game by a SC&A cataloger.

Strange games from the past aside, I am going to utilise resources within the Special Collections & Archives to inspire and inform my placement project. After establishing a body of research based on these historical artifacts  I can start to explore potential modern manifestations and variants of chapbooks; such as pamphlets, leaflets  and zines.

I will be posting all of my research for this project online here.