LoVid

- LoVid are based in NY and started up in 2001
- Their work is semi-narrative- documentary/ electronic music
- Circuit bending- take electronic device and bend wires- touch differents parts of the circuit- make things do something they weren't originally planned for
- Often uses archaic devices- old mixers/ drawing machines- to create experimental video
- New media- not traditional- web-based work/ concepts and themes that relate to technology

- 'Video Wear' 2003- patching different commercial devices- feeding them back and forth onto 14 different LCD screens embedded in protective sports wear to add a seemingly dangerous look to their work
- Breaking signal/ using glitchy signals- static equipment is always breaking down so play on its own nature
- Interested in how electricity if regulated- set of constraints- physical nature of the electrical signal
- Narrative- parralel universe- media is a tangible thing- play on the idea of 'wireless' technology so to create 'wirefull' works
- Not smaller but larger technological equipment- they use a lot of fabric and 100sft wire (working electrical veins)- used in live video feeds
- Dematerialised into a video world- textile, wearable thing- series of photographs- body and electronics interacting
- Collages and drawings- play with organic and technological world
- Body as an extension of technology
- 3D prints are also used as part of the process
- Aggressive vs tender/ Hardware vs software
- Romance and spirituality- they use technology as the metaphor

- 'Experimental TV Centre (2003)- used an old analog video system- continuous yet fragile electronic signal
- A whole room was turned into an instrument
- A patch was connected to the electrical equipment- very reminiscent of video art in the 60s and 70s when one would make their own instruments and not use internal editing
- Analogy- political/ nostalgic
- Also heavily anti- Consumerist- decided to not play with new 'toys' - created personal restrictions and restraints
- Have to enforce very tight manifestos nowadays to make your work seem personal
- The couple commissioned a 3m wide, 1/2m tall table, the length of the room, so to build their own electronic models into it
- Also added suface etchings onto the table's surface around the modular sncyronisers
- Kept 'wirefull' idea by exposing the wires by using clear acrylic around the equipment
- By creating your own electrical equipment- they believed you were able to know the sounds and colours produced by the instruments on a deeper level

Office of Subversive Architecture

Office of Subversive Architecture- All eight of the architects work for OSA on a part-time basis, as they all have other jobs, mainly teaching or working for another architectural agency
- Met each other at university and wanted to realise projects as a team and negotiate the costs and procedures themselves- less weakening of the original concept

'The Accumulator'- Leeds, Feb-March 2008:
- Were given a brief to design the space in the international swimming pool area inbetween when the pool was to be drained and when it was to be knocked down
- OSA liked the idea of giving the public space back to the public one last time- allow the users a chance to say goodbye
- The architects decided to do something abstract as they liked the idea of an empty big basin- chose to design a funnel-like installation, so it appears water would be collected through the ceiling
- Therefore working with the existing structure and character of the space to help transform the area with a minimal effort

'Intact'- Shoreditch, London- 2003:
- When walking through the East End of London- two of the OSA architects stumbled upon a disused signal box, which had had the bottom level taken away to prevent squatters using the premises
- Contacted Network Rail to ask permission- the company was interested but not committed to their suggestions for improvement as the signal box was situated in an area of controversy
- Climbed over before dawn, dressed as council workers (so to not attract attention) and did it anyway
- Before converting a space there are two main questions: what level of sensitivity is needed and shall we try to retain the initial structure?
- Re-painted the signal box, planted geraniums and a little front garden and installed a light, motor battery
- Idea was to draw attention and refurbish a derelict space- create a dream-like image in a decrepid area of London
- Also the OSA has to consider whether to change the public or urban area temporarily or permanently
- This 'subversion' was labelled Guerilla Architecture- though guerilla architecture usually refers to destruction rather than construction

'Hoegarden'- Liverpool Street, London- 2005:
- Used for advertising purposes, though all OSA had to do was incorporate a few logos
- Decided to really contrast the space with its urban surroundings- covered the area with blankets of grass and painted an architectural plan of the area onto the lawn
- Natural idea with a comic side; 'Please Keep On The Grass'
- Also displayed in Manchester between derelict buildings- OSA thought this venue was actually more fitting for the concept

'Launch'- Kassel, Germany- 2007
- 100year old casino- change the space into a lounge temporarily
- The room had a lot of windows so the area was easy to neutralise
- Brought cheap IKEA sofas, projected an video of a sitting cat, Julia, which looped every five minutes
- One half of each drink's table was reflected onto the other side using a variety of lights

'Kunstulle'- Liverpool Biennial- 2006
- Asked to create a new dynamic for the roof of these three art warehouses so it was clear that this was a venue during the Biennial
- To create a beacon and help draw people to this region- revitalise the area- 'Soho-isation'
- Focus on the character and the potential of the space- design was to follow the interesting roofline- minimal intervention as it was a temporary intervention
- Decided to not use doors or windows for the outside roof space- instead the OSA team hung drapes of translucent and red PVC from a metal scaffolding
- Depending on the sky's light- the colour in the room changed- very atmospheric- cosy and intimate.

Claire Barclay

CLAIRE BARCLAY’s sculptural installations use craft and industrial processes, composing precious and everyday materials into poetic and menacing installations. She views each exhibition as a ‘pause’ in an ongoing project: objects are grouped and re-grouped from one installation to the next, refining and adding to a growing vocabulary of forms. 'Barclay uses traditional craft materials such as wood, clay and wool in a traditional way but combines these elements to create powerful works. Often balanced around wooden or metal frames she explores the idea of ‘thinking and making’ through the construction of pots, screen printed cloth, weaving, basketry and other processes. The installations themselves move beyond the innocuous connotations of these acts and arrest the viewer with a quiet sense of unease.’ (Kirsteen Macdonald)

- Gained an MA at Glasgow School of Art
- Represented Scotland in the Venice Biennale in 2003
- Her sculptural pieces should be treated as a whole, but could exist separately
- Interested in the reduncy of museum objects and their ambigious qualities
- Began by creating found object installations- often the found objects would infer the reference, i.e. broken pottery would allude to domestic violence
- Barclay now uses only self-created objects in her installations- believes that by working with the materials one gains a greater knowledge of the object's properties and its creative scope
- However, she has to hire an engineering company when wanting to work with aluminium- therefore the model drawings are very much a collaborative piece
- Barclay's work is very interested in space- often encloses a section of the gallery, using 'barriers of space', to repel the visiter
- She also constructs the sculptured form in the gallery so there is a strong relationship to space
- Some works portray a fragility, which contrasts to the sharp edged forms that have a 'sexualised quality'
- Recently Barclay has incorporated fabric, as she believes by incorporating representational imagery, a psychological dimension is added to the work
- Her drawings do not sit within the installations and are often exhibited in the exhibition's corridors
- Her silk- screen prints often show knot designs, which draw attention to the tightness of space within her work
- The sculptured forms have a seemingly functional appearance, though for different reasons they could never be used for that purpose, i.e- chair legs are different lengths, the bed is unstable etc.
- Barclay constructed the framework of a dining table to mirror the gallery's historical decor in that section of the exhibition- alluded to greed and vanity
- A silk screen of intestines and stomachs was thrown over some of the beams in the dining table structure- from far the design looked floral
- Barclay's Bristol project rejected the viewer from the space by confronting the viewer's entrance with heavy wooden planks
- She also created some smaller sculptural pieces of Bristol's landmark municipal buildings, which dominate the skyline
- Barclay says her work negotiates with space, it does not interact or engulf space- it is more detached
- Her sculptural forms recently have a precarious quality, of balancing or pulling, which adds tension to the work

Paul O'Neill

PAUL O’NEILL: Curator, artist and writer. His practice is interested in addressing the systems of interpretation that are involved in making sense of the world around us, as much as he is concerned with the compulsions that lead to interpretation and meaning itself. He was Gallery Curator at londonprintstudio Gallery between 2001-2003 He is Artistic Director of MultiplesX an organisation that commissions and supports curated exhibitions of artist’s editions, which he set up in 1997 and exhibited at spaces such as the ICA, London; Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin and The Lowry, Manchester. He has curated over 40 exhibitions and projects, that include recently: Tonight at Studio Voltaire, in London, Coalesce: With All Due Intent at Model and Niland Art Gallery, Sligo and Are We There Yet?, at Glassbox in Paris.

-Working towards a PHD in Curatorial History from Middlesex Uni- this course was first created in 1987, so still relatively new
- Curatorial anthologies have been a major publication since '96- O'Neill's favourite being 'Thinking About Exhibitions'
- 4 Considerations when approaching Curatorial Practice:
1) How useful can I be?
2) Is there a system or a form of enablement that I can use as a creative strategy to produce an opening out rather than a closing down of my own 'usefulness' in the given context?
3) How can I incorporate failure as part of the project?
4) How can I use 'lots of people'?

- Artist/curator- skill needed when thinking about juxtaposing one's work- helps the practitioner to think about spacing, lighting, walls and spaciality
- Artworks already exist in the world- idea behind his exhibition, 'All That Is Solid'- as artists were invited to add artistic epherma to the gallery space
- O'Neill believes the typical white cube gallery is out-dated and restrictive- believes curating should be 'an invisible gesture'- give up autonomy
- Curating helps the work interact with the viewer and subtly imposes a route for the visual spectator
- His conclusion, that the exhibition space was always divided into the background, middle area and foreground, was quite interesting. The background not allowing interaction with the spectator- just offering a visual aesthetic. The middle area offered partial interaction, whilst the foreground interacts fully with the viewer- something I had not considered...

Simon Callery

Simon Callery talks about his current painting in relation to the Thames Gateway Project – a research fellowship he is currently working on. These painting constitute a response to a landscape that is the subject of a major regeneration scheme. The work is informed by time spent on excavation sites with Oxford Archaeology in the Thames Gateway region.“The paintings are characterized by an ambition to confront landscape as a material and temporal environment. My experience of this landscape calls for a multi-sensory response challenging the entrenched traditions of landscape-based art that place an emphasis on the visual - the domain of the eye - above all else. The dynamic of change taking place across this landscape has acted as a spur to develop new forms for painting to represent the experience of contemporary landscape.”

- Studied for a BA in Fine Art from Cardiff Uni, then travelled around the States and the Middle East for five years

- Callery thinks it is the painter's duty to create an experience and that artwork is the output of formalised/ academic research

- Every project informs the next- organic process

- Work is often large in scale as he likes to create a link to architectural grammar, as well as painting

- Does not like to paint pictures, as he does not feel the need to represent the world or establish an art language, instead he often paints the canvas lead white, then strips the surface, so to remove any trace of the canvas

- The size and surface of these luminous white works helps the viewer to become aware of himself

- Callery also creates canvases that lack rigidity. By creating a bulge on one of the vertical sides, similar to the slight curve in a Greek column, the artist believes a relationship is more easily formed between the person and work

- Callery attended a six week dig of an Iron Age hill fort in Oxford, as he wanted to reassess his interest in landscapes

- The uncomfortable conditions caused the painter to collaborate with a photographer, Andrew Watson, and together they created trench aerial shots. After photographing the area, they 'sewed' the images together using an image software programme and created an image with a 20x40m dimension

- Callery commissioned the making of a large pan chest, so to place each individual square print into a drawer, as he wanted the viewer to have to open the drawers to physically move across the surface

- By increasing the viewer-work interaction, Callery hoped the visitor would gain a better grasp of the archeological dig's surface and it would help prolong the experience of the artwork

- Callery also used material from the site, as he got casting experts from the local foundry to cast the walls of the trenches. The dimension of this work was equally large- 20 x 2m wide.

- The artist then approached English Heritage and they agreed to house this large casted piece in Dover, so linking the white clay cast to the white clifts of Dover.

- When presenting the work, Callery carefully pieced together the squared casts and displayed them along a commissioned frame, which had to mirror the curves in the dig's trenches. This work had a very similar physical dimension to his lead white paintings

- Recently he has moved back to his studio practice and painting, though his work has a much greater physicality, which goes well with his newly discovered use of warm colours

- It is interesting to note that had I seen an image of his lead white paintings, then his clay casted wall installation, then his current circular, protruding warm paint works, I would never have seen such a strong correlation as I do now after his talk.

Oliver Richon

OLIVIER RICHON: Artist, and professor of Photography at the Royal College of Art. Olivier Richon’s work addresses various themes such as the desire for the exotic, the pleasures of imitation, the function of the object in the still life, quotation and appropriation of art history. These are slow images, where time stands still. Anti-naturalistic, they address the dream-like nature of representation as a frozen tableau, which may be deciphered slowly in the manner of a hieroglyph, yet which resists interpretation.

- Swiss artist that has been exhibiting for over twenty years
- Has always been fascinated by the page- Laurence Stern's first modernist work had a complete black page for pg. 61- alluded to an excess of writing 'a black page soaked in ink'
- Reminded him of photographic darkness- not meant to be read as text but you can do
- His work is not triggered by the image but by the allegorical reading- Platonic idea of imitation
- Multiplication of copies- 'mimesis'- Richon's realm of art
- Velasquez's painting- very allegorical- excess of signs to be deciphered- 'melancholic burden to show all the signs'
- Interested in how to paint or capture emptiness as a content
- Made a sign for 'Inventing', which commissioned him to create a design for a large billboard in America- His two signs read:

The unveiling of the presence of nothing and The concealment of the absence of nothing

- Follows his idea that photographic images always have an absence, something which is outside the image- the signs were therefore a commentary on advertising
- Richon's work also addresses the Still Life genre- a genre about closeness, that dispenses with people and landscape, and focuses solely on the close-up, a world of objects
- I thought his reasons for shying away from depicting the human figure were particularly accurate- 'humans still the show, everything then becomes an attribution to the human'
- Uses a direct image for inspiration- the table in a still life becomes organised as a microcosm
- The trompe l'oeil effect is used to destabilise the viewer

- Colour functions in an allegorical context- sometimes mirroring the correct colour function, other times also using colour to destabilise the viewer

- The use of colour also follows the gender differention- colour= feminine (the make-up artifice)/ drawing= masculine (monochromatic, basic structure)

- Richon loves how the appearance of an image can be 'out of place' or deceptive, through concealment- why he uses front projection devices

- Idea was inspired by Robert Morris' 'Steam Sculpture', 1995- the work inscribed a temporality, Richon's 'Bubble' photograph was a response to Morris' work

- More recently, Richon has been influenced by the work of Braco Dimitrijevic, who has been using live animals in his installation works since 1981. His following exhibition in the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris, placed twenty of his works in cages with zoo animals, such as lions, jaguars, dromedaries, crocodiles and bison- Richon likes the added dimension of danger to Dimitrijevic's work

- Richon has begun branching away from using controlled, inanimate objects in his studio setting, and has recently begun placing placards outdoors and photographing them

- Richon also touched upon his thoughts regarding studio space, which has been a discussion in our weekly seminars. He stated that studios were strange places, as you can bring things in, but it is only alive when lit. It has no prior reality and as an artist you are working within 'a rogue space'

Elly Clark

ELLY CLARK: Artist and a former student of the School of Fine Art. “I am interested in using photography to illustrate different perspectives on the world and alternative ways of seeing. By involving other people in the image making process, I step away from the traditional role of the photographer as outside spectator. Instead I am forced to interact with the community or cultural context I am working with(in).. .” October 2007 - January 2008: “Moscow to Beijing - The Journey”, Gallery West, University of Westminster, London

- graduated 9years ago, after beginning a Curating MA Course at the Royal Academy, only to switch to a Fine Art MA Course at Central St. Martins
- Very interested in research and practice/ video installations/ follows a mostly photographic practice/ inspired by modern day travel and communicability and how it affects space and relationships
- Her work also travels, thus ironically adding to the journey concepts within her work
- Clark's work was heavily informed by conceptual writing and literature. I was really interested by the David Rousset (1912-1997) extract she read, about how the French writer's diary was a recording of his wanderings around Paris as in these 'hours of solitude, he was his own master, what nature made him to be'.
- Clark's work reflected her enjoyment also in fluidity, as her art practice often had an unpredictable ending due to the methods she implemented
- 'Everything is fluid, I like to capture these notions of presence and absence'- therefore allowing her work to portray Clark's and her participant's mental and physical travel
-Her initial work was inspired by the internet, as Clark felt threatened by the ability to publish or find anything, the lack of personal space, the reduction in individuality etc.

'Broadway House Photo Project', 2002-3
- Lived in a large council estate in East London and wanted to gain a sense of her neighbours
- Those who agreed to participate in her project, she lent a camera to for a week
- Asked the participants to take a photo of the view from their kitchen, lounge and bedroom window, and a photo of something they liked in their appartment
- Exhibition of the photos held in a nearby gallery- participants got to take home their photos
- I thought the idea was relatively simple, but the organisation due to Clark's particular methodology, meant the final images were really thought-provoking and subtly informed the viewer of the participant's character and thoughts about how and where they lived


'The Trans-Siberian Photo Series', 2005-6
- In some ways, this was a continuation or enhancement of the Broadway House project, as this too mapped an area, though one from Moscow to Beijing
- To fund her travel, she auctioned photos even before they had been taken on Ebay- I thought this was ingenius
-Asked already assembled and translated questions to the passengers on the train and if they agreed she took a photo of them. She also gave cameras out to willing participants who agreed to take photos of their journey and send the camera back to her
- the cultural and linguistic gap made the project a really interesting way to document the differences