Signals From Another World

It is rumoured that throughout the early 1970s a group of anarchist proto punks formed a transitory community that lived in woodlands across the Courland region of Western Latvia. As the group intentionally shied away from public scrutiny, little is known about them - there is almost no record of their existence beyond anecdotal stories, and a few unverified fogged Instamatic images of partially constructed pod-like dwellings, fabricated out of salvaged timber and metal sheeting. 

The pods were scattered throughout Courland, intentionally hidden from view, in ravines, crevices and wooded areas. If discovered by locals the pods would be disassembled and moved to a new location ensuring privacy and solitude. The dispersed collective met infrequently and instead used CB radio to broadcast music, stories and poetry and to educate each other in methods of resilience, foraging, fire building, and water purifying - preparations for daily and future scenarios. These broadcasts would occasionally be picked up by truck drivers travelling between Riga and Roja, and it seems the group were obsessed with reimagining the future through Sci-fi, afro futurism, and electronica. 

These weird and futuristic stories became a talking point amongst Trucker communities, and the group were given their own handler ‘Signals from Another World’. The last reported broadcast was heard in 1978 and no sound nor sighting of the group has occurred since. 40 years later this story is little known, and as such is almost erased from public consciousness. Although it exists only as anecdote and rumour, Ray & Webster proposed to use this partial, hidden story as the starting point and catalyst for their project at Roja Art Lab, Latvia. 

Their intention was to practically explore this little known narrative by re-fabricating a full-scale escape pod structure, experimentally replicating structures from the photos and documents they had found. Using salvaged timber boarding, recut to size, they basically repurposed a geodesic structure so that it became a pod-like structure. 

Working with architect Oskars Redbergs and curator Maris Grosbahs, a remote location was found as a place to site the pod and used for daily broadcasts of stories, songs, lectures, and live readings. Writers, musicians, and artists from Latvia, USA, UK and Germany were invited to contribute materials for the daily broadcasts. Ray & Webster were particularly interested in using the broadcasts to share content which dealt with unofficial stories of and for the marginalised. This included materials that had been overlooked, relics that have been forgotten and ignored and they broadcast these daily as web streams, as “signals from another world”.

Listen to the streams here:

Day 1

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Day 3

Day 4
 

Day 5  

Day 6         

 

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101 Songs of Soil

101 songs with soil in the title played back to back for the duration of a 1980's disco weekender

Over four days at Falmouth University, UK, the RANE research group in collaboration with The Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW) ran a project called the Soil Culture Forum.

The forum was part of a programme of events which included exhibitions, residencies, workshops and socially engaged activities, which proposed to re-examine the cultural and environmental importance of soil.

A key focus of the forum was to investigate ways in which the arts can help to raise awareness for the plight of global soils. The forum contended that enthusing people through art and literature on environmental issues can do what orthodox activism often struggles to do: inspire and open minds to creative possibilities that can engage communities.

Referencing weekender discos from the 1970’s & 80’s, 101 Songs of Soil was devised as an online broadcast that would stream continuously over the 4 day duration of the Soil Culture Forum. The work also exists as an actual 80's style mobile disco, which is available for weddings, bar mitzvahs and garden parties.

Listen to the streams here:

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3 

Day 4

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The Chromatic Colour Jukebox (R.O.Y.G.B.I.V)

In 'The world has too much art—I have made too many objects—what to do?', John Baldessari dealt with questions about the relationship between colour and form, and sound and image, by suggesting we might ‘collect old 45 rpm records of pop tunes with a colour in the title. i.e., Blue Velvet, Mellow Yellow, Deep Purple, and arrange chromatically on a juke box. One can choose his own colours, composition etc.'

Baldessari's proposal formed the basis of a series of shows devised for radio, his original suggestion transformed to become 'The Chromatic Colour Jukebox - an unspecified number of tracks with a specific colour in the song title played back to back for the duration of a 2hr radio broadcast.' 

The shows were first broadcast on local community radio in Falmouth, Source 96.1 FM. Listen to the Chromatic Colour Jukebox here:

Show 1 

Show 2

Show 3

 Show 4

Show 5

Show 6

Show 7

Radio Tours

In July 1989, maverick inventor and environmentalist Emily VandaChan set off in her homemade houseboat to sail the short distance from Pulawat towards Pulpap Atolls. A storm and failing navigation system caused her to changed course and subsequently the houseboat hit rocks on a reef close to the uninhabited Pacific island of Pikelot Yup. Storm surges carried the boat onto the shoreline and its contents were almost completely destroyed. Amazed that she had survived, VandaChan believed she would be found quickly, however, her solitude would last for much longer than expected and it would take over 8 months to be rescued. Chan and her boat were found by chance, as divers searching for pearls had only decided to land on shore to photograph the wreck as it seemed so unusual. 

Inside the houseboat VandaChan managed to salvage a few personal artefacts, which included an old Readers Digest atlas, a cassette player and a broken ship radio, and most importantly, for her, a box of recordings of radio broadcasts by world music specialist Andy Kershaw, which accompanied her on every expedition. The on board radio was completely irreparable but she managed to salvage and repair much of the onboard solar panel system so as to power the cassette player, and even occasionally boil a kettle. To pass time, and what would become a daily routine, Chan would browse through the atlas whilst playing the music tapes. Although she had found herself marooned and in complete solitude, the music she played became a catalyst for imaginary travel, taking her from continent to continent. 

Almost ignoring her situation Chan found herself engrossed each day by taking imaginary journeys. Being guided by Kershaw’s love of world music, especially from Africa, she would listen to a song by Kenyan band Oriango & Kipchamba, and begin an imaginary journey travelling across east Africa. Kershaw's playlist would lead her to music by Chako Ni Chako II - Special Buruti International and become the inspiration for the next part of the journey. By the time she is listening to Orchestra Star de Mozambique, she had travelled right down the east African coast. 

Whilst marooned and isolated Chan’s collection of Kershaw tapes became a readymade material for travelling, and undertaking journeys. The tapes were no longer simply a collection of world music songs but a material that prompted her to move from place to place. It was as if Chan had little say in where she went - Kershaw had become the tour guide, his playlist defining the route and direction of travel. VandaChans’ plight, the impossibility of actual travel produced the need for a kind of endotic travel, where she no longer had any option but to look to her own imagination. Like the imprisoned figure in Xavier De Maistre’s, A Journey Around My Room (1829), she found that she could travel across continents without leaving the confines of her own local space.

This remarkable story of imaginary travel taken whilst in solitude formed the starting point and inspiration for ‘Radio Tours’ a series of show devised for radio broadcast by Andy Webster. Each show followed the route of a historical or fictional journey, so, like VandaChan, each journey had a guide that determined the direction of travel. 

The first tour followed the route taken in Dervla Murphy’s book ‘The Ukimwi Road’, the second recreated the journey taken by Che Guevara in the book ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’. The third tour followed the route of the Pan American Highway starting in Alaska and finishing in Argentina. The fourth tour followed the route taken in Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road.’ Each book determined the route for the journey. 

All of the music used for each Radio Tour show was compiled by using soundtracks that people had uploaded on to the internet to accompany their own footage of journeys between the villages, towns and cities found on the routes of the places described in the books. These soundtracks were edited together so as to make complete journeys. The shows were first broadcast on a local community radio station in Falmouth called Source FM.

 Tour 1 - The Ukimwi Road

Tour 2 - The Motorcycle Diaries 

Tour 3 (part 1) - The Pan American Highway 

 

Tour 3 (part 2) - The Pan American Highway 

 

Tour 4 - On the Road

 

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Droppers

Gene and Jo Ann Bernofsky and Clark Richet, University of Kansas graduates founded a settlement in Colorado known as ‘Drop City.’ Drop City and its inhabitants, ‘Droppers’, became a space for artists, inventors, and free thinkers who wished to celebrate and practice experimental ways of living, free from the conformities of mainstream life. 

The Droppers built dwellings inspired by the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, in particular his advocacy of geodeisic domes. The domes were improvised, using salvaged materials including car parts, waste ply and reclaimed timber. The Drop City domes deviated from Fuller’s precise architectural vision, acting as kind of free-form mutation of his ideals. 

Reflecting upon and practically exploring the Dropper’s approach to shelter building formed the starting point for the project and ‘Droppers’. Ray & Webster produced a large scale dome replicating and reenacting many of the processes used to build the original structures. These processes became a platform to reflect on the Droppers approach to life and art, to consider how this might be relevant today or what might be the contemporary embodiment of this? The dome structure produced a space for discussions, workshops, psychedelic discos, film screenings, and to house a library and jukebox, each aspect contributing to ongoing questions about counter culture, psychedelic consciousness and its relation to the contemporary context. 

Droppers was a collaboration with Darren Ray and first shown at the Old School Room Project Space, Somerset, UK, as part of the OSR Projects Lobster Trap Commission. 

Listen to the Psychedelic Jukebox stream here:

Psychedelic Jukebox (Part 1)

Psychedelic Jukebox (Part 2)

Psychedelic Jukebox (Part 3)

Psychedelic Jukebox (Part 4)

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Scratch Record Collective

The work consists of 12 record turntables, 12 amplifiers and speakers and a collection of 133 vinyl albums. The inspiration for the format of the project was the work 33 1/3 by John Cage which he first performed in 1969. For 33 1/3 Cage requested that a dozen or more turntables should be set out in a gallery with 200 or more vinyl records. Visitors to the gallery were asked to act as dj's and play several albums simultaneously to create a real-time improvised musical mix. Cage conceived the works score as being performed by audience participation. 

The catalyst for reworking Cage's project arose from finding out that almost every album in the record collection had been damaged by damp, was scratched and basically unplayable. As each album was played the needle on the turntable would stick at certain scratches and drop into a repetitive loop. The work explores and exploits the points where the needle sticks, and where the repetitions begin. Picking up from Cage's work, several albums from the collection are played simultaneously across a dozen or more turntables. A simple rule guides the unfolding of the work and specifies that the volume of a record is kept down until the needle becomes stuck. At the point of sticking the volume is turned up and it becomes part of a real-time scratched mix. 

Several performances of the work have taken place and recordings of these have been published as vinyl records. They are also available as digital streams. Listen here:

From Hammond To Miles

From Dizzy To Xmas Bells

From RipRip To Stung

From Singing To Order

From Mas To Amitri

From Gabriel To Smith

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Crazy Tourist

Crazy Tourist - A day spent searching for and collecting lost balls whilst walking to the source of a river.

Crazy Tourist is an installation of 98 lost balls collected during an expedition from the Welsh Harp reservoir towards the source of the Dollis Brook, London, and a film that documents this made with collaborator Jon Bird.

The expedition was steered by the constraints of searching for and collecting lost balls, and this resulted in a very particular encounter with the river and its environs. The majority of time was spent foraging through overgrown undergrowth, wading through mud and filthy waters and exploring under and around bridges, sluice gates and hedgerows.

An objective was to explore how such constraints might structure and organise one’s actions so as to alter the way one walked through, perceived and was present in the landscape.

Balls were bagged and carried up stream until night fall. After several hours of travel 98 balls had been were spotted and collected, many others were no doubt missed.

The work was completed through the balls being released / scattered across the gallery floor.

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A Minor Miracle

A Minor Miracle consists of 13 letters shaped from salvaged plywood boards, 3500 LEDs, and 35 solar panels.

Battery packs within solar the panels are charged throughout the day and as daylight fades the LEDs light up to illuminate the text. The duration of the illumination is dependent on the amount of sunlight that has charged the solar panels during the day. If there has been plenty of sunlight, then the lights work well and the letters can be clearly seen at night. However, if it has not been sunny, then the lights begin to fail and the text becomes unreadable. The failing of the text, its subsequent illegibility demonstrably reveals the contingencies of the technologies used and also appears to signify the failure of the intentions of the work.

The work was made during a residency in Miterdale Forest, Cumbria, UK, as part of the ‘Good Life’, a project devised by artists Derek Tyman and Emma Rushton in collaboration with Lanternhouse, Ulverston, UK. The location of the residency was a reconstruction of Thoreau’s cabin built by Tyman and Rushton and situated in the heart of Miterdale Forest. Using the writing of 19th Century American philosopher and abolitionist Henry David Thoreau, they invited artists, activists, writers, musicians and others to respond to his ideas on self-sufficiency, politics and nature.

Reconstructed cabin, Derek Tyman and Emma Rushton

Solo Drum Solo Drum Solo - An unspecified number of drummers playing solos outdoors in the woods.

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Inflate / Deflate

Inflate / deflate consists of eleven inflatable letters created from stitched Oxford fabric. Solar panels trickle charge leisure batteries which power electric fans to inflate the sculpture.  The frequency and duration of the inflation and deflation of the work is dependent on the amount of sunlight available each day.  When the batteries are fully charged they drive the fans to inflate the work, however, the work collapses when the charge is lost or insufficient.  The work is often encountered in its collapsed state and only fleetingly experienced when fully inflated. As a consequence of this the work and its technologies may be perceived as lacking, failing and under performing.

The perceived flaws and failings, as embodied by the sculptures floppiness, may act as a catalyst for discussion and reflection on ideas about failure, success and problem solving, and possibly provoke many more questions than if the work was constantly inflated.  The works material realisation is also problematic as it is made out of several metres of vinyl material, manufactured and shipped to the UK from Hong Kong. As such the use of plastic embodies and performs many of the problems associated with unsustainable living. This may act as a further provocation to discussions about what should and what should not be considered as sustainable.  

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