The Paper Orchestra

Berit Greinke and I will be taking part in the Connected Communities symposium next week 12-14Sept hosted by Culture Lab in Newcastle. We've been developing the Paper Orchestra idea, which we first tried out at Future Everything in Manchester back in May, now taking it to the next stage. We're running two workshops where delegates will be invited to play and test this model. They will be broadcast on Culture Lab Radio, hosted by Ko-Le Chen and Rachel Clarke. Monday and Tuesday 12:30-13.20 (GMT). Expect loud and messy.
http://culturelabradio.ncl.ac.uk/

We'll also be talking as part of the Wednesday session about co-creation.

We're looking forward to seeing and hearing what the other delegates are up to aswell.
Should be a fantastic three days. Maybe see a few of you there?

FLOW: Interchange

FLOW: Interchange - From Cosgrove to Wadenhoe and back again!

Three artists, two weeks, one boat!

Well tomorrow I'm off to take part in a two week residency on a narrow boat with Simon Woolham and Jo Roberts. Invited by Fermynwoods Contemporary Art we'll travel along a section of the Grand Union canal and river Nene in Northamptonshire knowledgeably led by our captain Jim. He is actually called Jim and is very knowledgeable.

Amongst other things like steering, avoiding crashing into other boats and trying to work locks..we'll be making work tracing our journey, collecting sounds, songs, words, books; and debating and possibly even singing in waterside hostelries; inviting folk to join us on board and on shore to create together and to share stories about the canal, its people and learn some traditional making skills, such a cabin crochet.

On the 23rd July I'll be joined by Jason Singh for a live sound performance as we travel through the 2 mile-long Blisworth Tunnel.

If you happen to be in that area, please feel free to come and say hello and join us for a cup of tea on board. You can follow our progress on the FLOW website, where we'll be posting regular updates of the journey.
http://flow-northamptonshire.com/events/interchange/

Here's an extract from a great song to kick the journey off, courtesy of the wonderful Songs of the Inland Waterways website. Captains of the Waterways by Jon Raven, taken from the Bold Navigators: the story of England's canals in songs.

Fingers crossed that the weather holds out and that three artists sharing a small space for two weeks doesn't end up like an episode of Big Brother.

I'm looking forward to being on the water, slowing down, taking our time, being in the moment, exploring the environment, having time to think, reflect and make, learning more about canals and the people and cultures surrounding the waterways, and sharing the experience with other people.

Re-cap of May in Manchester - Part 2

On the Saturday following the Pairings Conference Jason, Berit and I headed down to the truly wonderful Victoria Baths to take part in FutureEverything's Handmade event.

Handmade aimed to celebrate and showcase the new maker community that is emerging, "connecting the culture of traditional skills and materials with modern-day digital production, distribution and interaction techniques." It explored digital hacking, interactivities and DIY culture in a new forum for Crafters, Hackers and Digital Innovators. A place to share ideas and practice with each other and the wider public. Alongside the sixteen or so stalls at the all new Craft Fair, there were performances, workshops and installations.

Led by Berit, we presented our Paper Orchestra prototype, which involved hacking a beatbox stylophone. We wanted to explore the idea of creating a social instrument that could be played by more than one person, so we turned an instrument normally played by one person into an instrument that could be played by a group of people. We wanted to test this out by seeing what would happen when different people who did not know each other came together to form temporary groups to play the instrument.




First off, visitors created a folded paper shape: which became their control button for playing the stylophone, and using graphite pens, pencils and powder made contact marks on their folded shape. The graphite marks act as conductive points. Using conductive threads we attached the control buttons to wires that controlled each key of the stylophone. As a result each player was responsible for a single key and therefore beat of the stylophone. It was fascinating to see what shapes people created and which of those worked best.



Groups came together at varying points during the day to play, and it was really interesting to see how people started to construct rhythms with each other. Whilst people were playing Jason was sampling the sounds live, using Abelton Live, then looping, distorting and composing. The players then responded to Jason's composition adding new beats and layers as the sound built, Jason responding and so the circle continued. There were moments of chaos and some magical moments when the whole thing came together.



People seemed to really get into it, inviting their friends to come and have a go, and it did work as a social instrument. People were playing, laughing, chatting, constructing and composing together.



You can check out a review of the day, what other people were up to, and see photos of the baths on Crafts Magazine's blog.

Our plan is to develop the idea further. We'll be presenting the Paper Orchestra prototype no2 at the Connected Communities Symposium organised by CultureLab in Newcastle in September.

We had a blast. Thank you to everyone who came along and took part. All in all a great day, meeting great people, with great ideas, in a great venue. What more could you ask for on a rainy saturday in Manchester.

Re-cap of May in Manchester - Part 1

Well we had a fun packed few days in Manchester in May.

To kick things off, we took part in the Pairings conference organised by MIRIAD at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU): The conference explored the three themes of Conversation, Collaboration and Material. On Thursday, I spent a wonderful morning in the embroidery machine room at MMU recording sounds of students and staff working on various machines. The machine room is such a fantastic resource that should continue to be cherished and developed. A huge thank you to Jill, Ben and Laura for helping out playing the machines.

I then took time to sample and loop extracts of the recordings. The plan was to include these sounds in our performance. We gave a 30 minute live performance on the Friday evening to mark the end of the two day conference. Four members of the collective worked together: Jason Singh, Yusra Warsama, Berit Greinke and myself.
We wanted to create an improvised piece based on the themes of the conference:"conversation, collaboration and material", so we could present a live piece that was a collaborative conversation between the four of us through using voices, analogue and digital machines, needles, threads, microphones, samplers and loop pedals, and physical material such as cloth. The themes also gave us the idea of exploring threes (even though the conference title was Pairings! and there were four of us.)
I've been re-reading Walden by Henry David Thoreau recently, and in one of the chapters he talks about three chairs. He says that one chair is for solitude, two chairs are for friendship and three chairs are for society. Thoreau's quote seemed a perfect way of summing up the nature of different people meeting in different contexts and some of the potential strengths and difficulties of collaboration. We used the quote from Walden as the start of the performance. So at different points throughout the performance there are single conversations, two people conversing and three or more. We start and end with the solitude of one.

You can listen to the performance on our soundcloud page here: http://soundcloud.com/sampler-culture-clash

Thank you to Alice, Helen and everyone at Miriad and MMU for inviting us to take part, for making the conference a great success and for helping to make the performance happen.

May in Manchester

During May, we'll be camped down in Manchester for various collaborations, workshops and performances.

First off, Jason Singh and I will be working with a group of textile students from Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) on a collaborative sound project.

Next up, also at MMU, we'll be performing as part of the Pairings conference: conversations, collaborations and materials. The conference is on Thursday 12 and Friday 13th. All being well, we'll be doing an improvised performance at 5pm on the Friday as part of the finale to the two days. You can find out more info on the conference and how to book tickets here: Pairings.

The next day, Sat. 14th May, we'll be taking part in Handmade at the wonderful Victoria Baths as part of FutureEverything. There will be sixteen stalls all exploring how crafting, hacking and DIY are informing the development of digital technology. Please come down, see what people are up to and take part in our collaborative paper stylophone orchestra experiment.

Hope to see you at anyone of these events.

Textile Music

In December last year I was very kindly invited by Becky Earley to take part in the University of the Arts, London's Textile Futures Research Centre's event Textile Music. You can find out more about the Centre's previous and current research by clicking on the link above.

I was asked to run a short one hour workshop with various members of the research group, exploring the question "what does our research sound like?" and to put together and play a DJ set of music referencing textiles and textile related words. Songs and band names were suggested by members of the group, some of my friends, and members of the sampler-cultureclash facebook group. This included traditional songs, songs sung whilst making textiles and, well anything connected to textiles, such as the theme tune to the TV series "Are You Being Served". You can listen to a selection of the songs via my you tube page: It's eclectic to say the least!
Textile Songs

My favourite was "anything by Fred Astaire"!! thank you Mr Gates for that one!
Please feel free to add suggestions. There's a page on the sampler-cultureclash facebook group in discussions.

My personal interest is traditional textile songs from Lancashire, where I grew up, which I've been researching over the last few months. Many of which I've discovered via the English Folk Dance and Song Society's amazing library and archive at Cecil Sharpe House in Camden, London.

For the workshop, participants discussed and explored the Centre's four themes:
1. Design-Science Textiles
2. Digital Textiles
3. Sustainable Textiles
4. Identity; Reflection

They then came together to create a new collective pixel drawing inspired by these discussions. In the evening the pixel drawing was played back through the piano player as a whole piece, and then played again this time sampling and looping sections using a loop pedal over the top of various drum breaks to create a new improvised piece of music. The "performance" was filmed so I'll post it when it's ready.

In the meantime, here's the piece in full


and here's a sound recording of the piece played in reverse, which I actually prefer.


I'll be experimenting with the piece, sampling and looping sections to see what else I can create from it.

A huge thanks to Becky and everyone at the TFRC for inviting me to take part and to everyone who suggested music and songs, in particular Helen Carnec, David Gates, Mark Alder, and Deirdre Nelson.

Nottingham Lace Part IV

As promised here's a short film comprising looped samples of sound recordings of various embroidery machines in action during the workshop. I've just used a simple audio visualiser to turn the sounds back into visuals. I particularly like the looped section where the machine starts to sound like a human breath. I'd advise listening with headphones to get the full range of sounds.
warning: the film contains repeated flashing images.