silence, noise and the physical effects of sound

For our next unit, 2nd project I have decided to put away things for this one and focus on being, on creating your own world within the world we already inhabit and especially in the cities we find ourselves, well  at least I find myself in. I want to map a quiet city, find and create peaceful places and quiet  spaces in the city and beyond. I have no idea how it will turn out, even if it will work but it will be an interesting experiment.

The world has become a noisy place, a cacophony of  sounds clashing and competing for your attention, I want to find ways to shut that out, to avoid or ignore it if even for a few moments at a time or, indeed longer.

The first thing I came across while looking into this was someone in my home city of Adelaide Australia had done a very similar thing. He created an app that showed people where to go for quiet place, I find this pretty interesting really, that it would be someone from Adelaide which in my experience of noisy places is not that at all, in fact there is a lot of peace and quiet to be had in the city of churches, we have some lovely parklands and green spaces not to mention the hills, but that is a tangent I shall  not go into just yet.

So, how to go about this, well.... stay tuned as I investigate and attempt to create a quiet way to inhabit Manchester, a very unquiet city.

November 30th
It occurred to me that the reason I am drawn to this idea is that sound, noise, audio, what have you effects us physically and emotionally, sound waves and vibrations can and do move matter so I want to look at how this relates to me in that I prefer silence to the usual barrage of noises that most of us seem to have become very used to.
There have been a number of studies done that look at how we are  physically affected by sound and I want to look into how we can create more healthy environments considering this.

Mapping towns and cities in a sounds based way is a really nice way to look at this so some field recordings are on the cards for sure.
 Future posts on this project will be tagged psychogeography project.

Pecha Kucha

Pecha Kucha presentation for 4 week project. my project is at the the lantern slides and new ways to use and view the old technology, alternative ways to present images on glass and how to alter the images to recreate something new.
Images:

Two images on slides that I played with in PS and AI

Slideshow project

A project based on images from the Visual Resources Centre ( the slide library) at Manchester School of Art. With a couple of others in my class we are putting on an exhibition at the Salutation on the 19th of November, this is in response to a group project where we were asked to come up with a campaign to raise awareness of the existence if the slide library, the project was hypothetical but we found out the threat of closure to the library was real so decided to take it further and do a real campaign.

I created a few pieces of work, titled "Now and Then" that essentially combine old and new images, methods, tech and equipment, I have recreated lantern slides in A4 fomat but instead of the usual two sheets I have done 3 layer versions, these are not intended to necessarily be projected but are perfectly happy just being looked at!
I used original vintage lantern slides which I then photographed on 35mm film, developed and then manipulated with Photoshop and Illustrator, combined with some mobile phone photos that I overlaid and then sandwiched together. I wanted to use a combo of new and old tech to create /recreate images of the same places. I used laser printing, risograph printing and letterpress as well as the physical glass pieces.
Some of the work is focused on the city of Manchester and some of the machinery that formed the indistrial past. The point of this is to highlight the fact that our history is always important and worth remembering and hanging onto.

here are a couple of the images I have done:

http://interactiveartsblog.wordpress.com/2014/11/24/the-view-through-ashs-work-in-the-link-gallery/

 
Making the large sized lantern slides

my little vintage Kodaslide machine, one slide at a time goes in the top and the previous one pops out the bottom, fantastic gadget but it does get very hot.

A couple of the images I produced for the project using old imagery and new technology, not the newest idea under the sun but relevant for this project and really fun to do.

Some work in progress

I scanned in this Arabic Phrase and made this with it in Illustrator

vine project

Vines workshop from October, here you will witness the world famous AwfulBad CamelVines among other masterpieces of the genre, not my finest hour to be fair. But you can't tell a camel what to do, as we all know. Some are mine, some I am in others etc.

 

Crazy Golf

So after the Liverpool Biennial the idea was a group project where we made crazy golf courses and clubs based on what we had seen, it was interesting, here's what my group did, it was kind of a cityscape, going along the roads and across the Mersey into the Tate and teh Biennial at the end, it was great because we had to be very resourceful, found a pallet in the skip and went from there.

two of us in my group won joint first for best golf putter, it was a moment of true glory.

This is the golf club that I made, surprisingly it worked really well, ridiculous thing it is.

Liverpool Biennial

A couple of things from the Liverpool Biennial this year, really did't see everything I weanted to to but that's going to happen I guess.

 Below are images from A needle walks into a haystack at the Old Blind School

Mural of Edward Rushton in the Old Blind School

 This one below was one of my favourites, Adiran Henri

 Below are some images from the Bloomberg New Contemporaries, a great deal of that exhibit was video based.