Explore Our World Through Art
Items about place and offline worlds
The Super-Continent Pangaea that Existed 300 Million Years Ago, but with Modern National Borders. What Political Issues Would this Make? In these circumstances, The USA would have land borders with Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal and Cuba. Brazil would be neighbours with a number of African nations and Antarctica and India would enjoy the same climate.
I came across Yoni Lappin through the Mura Masa video, 'Move Me.' Move Me conveys a strong sense of place, urban Britain at it's best. There is a great feeling of performers coming from a whole number of different backgrounds, professionals and amateurs, and that performance is a day to day occurrence for the people involved. This connects a place and performance nicely and introduces people and artists for whom every day is art and theatre, which is why Britain (as with other mixed cultural places) produces such talent and innovation in the arts. Then looking at other video's it's clear that this mix is not just British. The world is a mix of people. The world is full of talent.
Sorry. I posted this and somehow deleted it, so posted it again
Very interesting radio show, particularly for any outdoor educators. It explores animal and human ability to sense direction and evidence of magnetic sensitivity in the brains of animals and whether it is present in humans. Our brain can sense magnetic fields but this is reduced by radio signals. Whether this sensitivity allows some people to sense north is not yet proven. But anecdotal evidence suggests that they are but only in times of physical stress, ie when the cognitive function is compromised by fatigue or stress. This could be interesting to people doing extreme sports, or undergoing rigorous activity needing a sense of direction ie lost on an expedition. It also confirms that when lost we walk in circles.
A stunning outdoor performance...
Richard Long changed my life. I was doing an urban outdoor programme in Liverpool, England, and went to see the first ever show at Tate Liverpool, called Starlit Waters - British Sculpture. An International Art 1968 - 1988. Saw Richard Long, Anish Kapoor, Alison Wilding, Hamish Fulto, Barry Flanagan, Tony Cragg, Art and Language, Ian Hamilton Filay, on and on... The man who walked into that show was a different man to the one that walked out. I did hiking for my job and here was a guy who made hiking into art. I was renderd speechless. It was the sheer physicality of it and that it was objects I would have never thought of as 'sculpture'.
Article about an old chip shop being turned into a theatre. Has lots of interesting aspects. The localness of a theatre occupying a space that would have been a well known and well used local amenity. It is also described as a 'lab' so a place where people can experiment with ideas. The arts need incubation spaces for young artists to try out their work without too much financial or cultural burdens. The creator, Julia Negus, says 'Its flexibility means it can become what you want it to be and its hire structure is priced so it’s affordable for the one-offs - the experiments, scratches and failures.'
This links to ideas by James Bridle, that we use the internet on our pc's and devices, and it inhabits 'The Cloud' and forget it is a physical thing. All our data is on a server somewhere, which means it is on a hard drive in a building owned by someone somewhere. The building will be remote from whatever location you are in, so it has to be transmitted through devices in the real physical world. This is a great bit of art as research, in terms of the photographer researching the internet as a physical, offline, entity.
Wonderful idea and execution of art as an exploration and expression of experience. The knitting tells a story, makes a record, bears witness to events, serves as a warning.
Outdoor experiences are an antidote to the web. The way online worlds creep into our offline worlds is worthy of examination. This is a theme I want to come to a lot and it drives some of my outdoor art making. I like that, by and large, if you leave your device behind, and navigate with a map and compass, you are invisible to the inernet. The art you make with marks on paper or canvas is invisible to the internet. The outdoors is the analogue world our ancestors evolved in. There is a lot of stuff about Shoshana Zuboff out there but at 50 minutes this is neither too long nor too short and is visually interesting, better than watching her lecture. The other really good person on this is artist and journalist James Bridle.