Design Yourself: I Never Found Her

In the sixth and final workshop of our Life Rewired inspired Design Yourself project, the Young Creatives worked with artist and writer Erica Scourti.

Erica shared her practice with the group and explored Optical Character Recognition software and speech to text translation processes, to interrogate how identity and human understandings are influenced by these now everyday filters.

Cosima Cobley Carr worked with fellow member and composer Pietro Bardini on a soundscape using a sax line shared by Nayla Chouaib. The video shows us phone portraits of Vangelis Trichias along with Cosima, lip-syncing along with text to speech software. Pietro Bardini created the backing soundscape by taking Nayla Chouaib’s saxaphone recording and taking it through several layers of resonators, reverbs and distortions.

More information here: https://www.barbican.org.uk/read-watch-listen/design-yourself-i-never-found-her

Design Yourself: Feeling the Gallery – Making sound and music out of visual data

In the third workshop of the Life Rewired inspired Design Yourself project, the Young Creatives worked with artist Matthew DF Evans in a workshop that turned the Barbican into a composition using pixel sonification.

Using Matthew Evan’s pixel sonification method to turn the Barbican into a composition, we considered the physics of sound and how it passes through you. We are active gestural instruments, technologically enhancing sounds without even noticing. Our mouths filter sound: through every obstructive piece of biomatter, we create resonance and sound decay. We have suppressors in our ears that dampen sound as a means to protect ourselves. In this way, humans are substractive sythesisers.

More information here: https://www.barbican.org.uk/read-watch-listen/design-yourself-the-barbican

Design Yourself: This home was not built to last

In the second workshop of our Life Rewired inspired Design Yourself project, the Young Creatives worked with artist Laurie Ramsell who led a practical workshop exploring the concept of ‘human’.

Through exploring trans-human and post-human philosophies, the group looked at examples of Laurie’s work which examine construct of personhood and how it has been imbued into our culture. Together they created new work that explores the notion of what makes us human and imagined how the label of ‘human’ could be applied in an increasingly digital future. As a response to the workshop artists Pietro Bardini, Tice Cin and Hector Dyer worked with Antonio Roberts to create This home was not built to last.

More information here: https://www.barbican.org.uk/read-watch-listen/design-yourself-what-is-human

Design Yourself: Augmented Bodies

In the first session of our Life Rewired inspired Design Yourself project, the Young Creatives explored how people are augmenting their bodies with technology.

We looked at examples in science fiction and current day of people augmenting their bodies with technology. Currently a lot of this exists as wearable devices that read our bodily functions, present us data and affect our bodies on an external level. Before we started to look at technology implants I invited each participant to create a mask that would act as a piece of wearable technology that would change them somehow.

More information here: https://www.barbican.org.uk/read-watch-listen/design-yourself-augmented-bodies

Design Yourself

Throughout 2019 and the early part of 2020 I led a programme for Barbican’s Young Creatives called Design Yourself.

What does it mean to be human?
Can technology be used to replicate the pheromone communication of ant colonies?
Can we use technology to mimic the camouflage abilities of chameleons?
Can movement be used as a language, similar to the waggle dance of honey bees?

Inspired by Life Rewired, a collection of young creatives from our Barbican Young Creatives and BA Performance and Creative Enterprise will respond to these questions to explore what it means to be human when technology is changing everything.

Mentored by visual artist Antonio Roberts and in collaboration with four guest artists, the group will create new digital work that explores how scientific and technological advances could allow artists to become ‘more human’ by heightening our natural and creative instincts. As a group they will explore technological impact on sound, movement, language and aesthetics and share their findings through new imaginative works.

The eight participants from Barbican’s Young Creatives were Tice Cin, Zack Haplin, Cosima Cobley Carr, Pietro Bardini, Nayla Chouaib, Evangelos Trichias, Hector Dyer, and Cleo Thomas.

I had the pleasure of inviting some of my favourite artists/art groups to deliver workshops to the participants exploring lots of issues surrounding our relationship with technlogy and the future of humanity. Invited artists were: Laurie Ramsell, Matthew DF Evans, Yoke Collective, New Movement Collective, Erica Scourti.

Over the next few days I’ll be sharing the videos we made over the year and some photos from each session.

Congrats to all of the participants on creating such great work, thanks to the invited artists for delivering engaging workshops, and thanks to Chris Webb for inviting me to Barbican again to work with their Young Creatives 🙂

Basquiat’s Brain, 12th – 28th January 2018

From 12th – 28th January a series of animated portraits, developed in response to the Boom for Real Basquiat exhibition, will be on display at Barbican.

Barbican young creatives, along with artist and curator Antonio Roberts, present a collection of work in response to Basquiat: Boom for Real

Artist and curator Antonio Roberts worked with a group of Barbican young creatives over three months to create artwork in response to the exhibition Basquiat: Boom for Real currently showing in the Barbican Art Gallery.

Over the course of four sessions the group examined artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s explosive creativity and imagined the techniques and methods he might use if he was still creating art today.

The resulting animations combine more traditional methods of creation such as photography and collage, with more experimental practices such as glitch art, digital collages, animated gifs and projections. Each animated selfportrait reflects the identity of the artist who created it.

Artists:

  • Max Baraitser Smith
  • Isabella Barbaro
  • Alex Cole
  • Hector Dyer
  • Antonio Roberts

The animations will be projected near the exit of the curve exhibition space where people are often studying. It’s hard to miss as it has my big face on it.

Many thanks to the Barbican Creative Learning team for inviting me to do this 🙂