The year that was...
It’s that time of year for reflection, the ‘round up’ of the last 12 months, and I can honestly say it’s been a great year for me, working with Stand + Stare in the Stroud studio and joining the Pervasive Media studio community in Bristol, as Stand + Stare’s Creative Producer. I love the variety of work I get up to as a Producer, and if variety is the spice of life, then there’s definitely been a piquant flavour to my year!
Working alongside Barney, we spent many months planning and refining delivery of the Barbican Archive Jukebox, for London’s iconic art centre, drawing on the history of the buildings, the architecture and the some of the residents who’ve populated the coveted Barbican estate for 40 years. Highlights for me included the interviews we conducted with the centre’s house manager (Christopher Sharp), the daughter of one of the architects (Polly Powell) and a long-term resident (Kate Wood) who kindly showed us round her home, complete with all the original Brooke Marine fixtures and fittings. “It’s just a normal kind of house” she said as we entered through the concrete car park and descended a spiral staircase for a view over the Barbican lake and waterfall.
The design process for the Barbican Archive Jukebox was a joy, passing scrappy drawings between myself and Barney as he worked them up into professional 3D images. While he’s been a life-long lover of the Barbican’s Brutalist aesthetic, I’ve always had a nerdy interest in the properties of materials and so researching composite concretes, light-emitting perspex and formica surfaces that can handle projections was actually a joy, as was driving down there with the unit and setting it up in it’s new home.
As a pop-up unit, it’s been designed to move around different locations, which has been a theme of our work this year. A more sombre topic of colonial slavery has also occupied our minds as we were commissioned to design and build a touring exhibition for the Movement of Justice and Reconciliation (MJR), in memory of the Zong slave ship. Whilst most of the research and content was provided by the client, we still took time to contemplate the contemporary legacy of slave merchants, as evident all over Great Britain; images of which provided the basis of short animations for the interactive desk and artefacts accompanying the exhibition. It’s set to tour across the UK in 2020 and MJR are still taking bookings, so if you’d like to bring the exhibition to a venue near you, contact: http://www.mjr-uk.com/exhibition.html
Our third touring exhibit this year, the Rebellious Sounds Archive, was conceived and created in 2018 as a commission for Dreadnought South West. Throughout 2019 the freestanding listening booth (designed to look like a voting booth) has visited 20 different locations. This audio archive is a unique resource housing oral stories of women’s activism curated and collected by the project’s Co-ordinator Carmen Talbot. It is the first of its kind in the UK and it reached thousands of people. One participant, Sophie Hodge tweeted “I'm so proud to be a part of this incredible project.”
The Rebellious Sounds Archive has now finished its 18 month tour of the South West, culminating with a performance of 6 newly commissioned songs inspired by the archive at the Cornish Life Museum in Helston in July. Some of the stories have been archived at: http://dreadnoughtsouthwest.org.uk/
As well as creating interactive touring exhibitions, we’ve also been busy with talks and workshops this year. This is something I’m keen to develop more of. Our breadth of workshops currently include our ongoing work with Tangible Memories, an app and book-making project that was developed through AHRC funding. There have been a few groups working with Tangible Memories this year, and we hope to be engaging more older people in this interactive memory process in the year ahead.
We’ve also been using our special blend of objects and story-telling to inspire audiences young and old via the Mayfly Sound journals, stickers and sound-recording app. We enjoyed working with Rife Magazine work experience students to capture sounds around Bristol harbourside using Mayfly, and had a great day out at Rural Media in Hereford, engaging industry professionals in some amusing group story-telling activities. We’ve also been part of a round-table debate for Dr Ruth Farrar, Senior Lecturer in Creative Media & Enterprise & Director of Artswork Media at Bath Spa University, who kindly said, “I have repeatedly booked in Barney and Lucy from Stand + Stare to speak to students and staff at Bath Spa University as they are really engaging, reliable and inspiring guest speakers. Their fascinating portfolio of interactive design for industry clients ranging from Carnegie Hall in New York to Royal Shakespeare Company mark them as truly innovative creative makers in their field."
There’s a whole bunch of exciting ideas bubbling around at SS HQ and a lot of excited chatter with old friends and new partners as we concoct an array of interactive experiences to keep stretching our imaginations and enriching audiences in the South West and further afield. Stay tuned to see what we’re up to with English Heritage, to celebrate the delivery of a very playful jukebox for the Brigstow Institute and to see what wonderful prose Lucy Telling creates for Paper Nations as winner of their Digital Stories commission. We we are also engaging in a second round of academic collaboration with University of Bristol’s School of Education and keeping a few projects under our winter hats until we see what’s confirmed in the new year.
2020 will undoubtedly be a roller coaster ride, but we’re determined to keep pushing the vanguard of the interactive arts and engaging audiences in bringing archives to life and sharing heartfelt stories of people’s real lives.
by Debs Hoy