Daniel Hunt's Class
//– Walking , audio tour or instructions
– Interactive/Pervasive – partcipants are told.- Sculptural – and object/occurence that can and has changed the site. Static Art.
– One to one. Performer and audience.
– Video, film, create a performative film.
– Digital – sound files
– Inhabited/Process driven
Rebecca Elizabeth Bierton
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Finding time to pick up a good piece of fiction and get lost within the story is rare. In fact the only time I find myself lost in any form of fiction is when I’m asleep, in an allusive non-realistic dream.I know this is the case with a lot of university students. We often find ourselves only rummaging through book after book to gain factual knowledge or understand different theories or interpretations.
Therefore I decided to a create a book of fairy-tales.
Why fairy-tales? With the stress of deadlines, research and performance – it is nice to sometimes just follow a story that seems utterly unrealistic. More importantly, a fairy-tale book can be read anywhere, it isn’t attached to a particular site.
I thought back to a time of when fairy-tales really meant something. Childhood. However, there’s little use reading a fantasy story now and hoping to get lost within it like I did when I was eight.
I decided to look into the original series of Grimm’s Fairy-tales, first published in 1812.
I wasn’t thinking of the commercialised versions with happy endings such as Hansel and Gretel killing the witch and finding their way home, but the real true publications which were censored and some banned for being far too violently descriptive and frightening for children. In these versions, Hansel and Gretel brutally murder the witch, never find their parents and are forced to live a life in the woods…alone. Perhaps too frightening for children, but perfect for students aged 18 upwards.
I was set on this idea, but I still needed to make something that was interesting to look at, but practical in terms of time. I decided my book must have many pictures (after all, a picture is worth a thousand words), short snippets of fantasy text and be visually stimulating.
I went back to my thought of dreams. If the only time I managed to get lost in a story was in a dream, then I would have to create a book that could be read when sleeping. Impossible. Or not…
In fact there is a huge market of ‘books’ which cater to sleep and dreaming. Baby mobiles! Often having different characters, shapes, colours: all in order to create a story, sort of safety blanket to encourage happy dreams if a baby does stir from sleep.
I began to create my own, with string, burnt paper and dead flowers -using characters from Grimm’s fairy-tales. A scary picture of Hansel and Gretel pushing the witch into an oven, a boy who had lied so much that his nose became too big for him to walk, and his parents abandoned him and short sections of text all about the consequences of being bad.
My art book, on the contrary to traditional fairy-tale books is specific to site.
It can only be read to its full potential hanging over a bed. This is because its full potential would mean engaging with it when stirred from sleep, with the hope it might influence your dreams.
//https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBkwUfNulcg&feature=youtu.be
In response to someone’s drawing of part of the Library, I decided to draw it again but blindfolded. The intended idea is to experiment whether it is possible to recreate a drawing by memory rather than by sight.
Paul Chappel
//Forced entertainment did a project in 1995 called Nights in this City. It was a guided tour on a bus through Sheffield. The performers guided the tour but “avoided facts in search of a different truth.” (Tim Etchells, Certain fragments – Eight Fragments on Theatre and the City) They told imaginary stories which put the city into a different light. A certain place can have one official name, history and function, but any individual could look at it completely differently. It may hold a particular memory or have a feeling attached to it. One can take a space (as we did with the library) and over its actual map, draw another “map” – one of emotions, thoughts, memories and associations. In Certain fragments – Eight Fragments on Theatre and the City Tim Etchells says: “Did I tell you that up on West Street someone has written on a burned-out building GET WELL SOON? Did I tell you that in some parts of the city the phones in the call boxes ring to empty streets at regular hours of the day and night? Are these events connected? Are there persons here, working in concert? In the city as in all the best performance, I`m left joining dots, making my own connections, reasons, speculation.” This paints a picture of the city as a place of lots of little wonders and of people who create them. It is up to each person to find connections between them and to give meaning to them. Krzysztof Wodiczko said about the city: “What are our cities? Are they environments that are trying to say something to us? Are they environments in which we communicate with each other? Or are they perhaps the environments of things that we don’t see, of silences, of the voices which we don’t, or would rather not, hear. The places of all of those back alleys where perhaps the real public space is, where the experiences of which we should be speaking, where voices that we should be listening to, are hidden in the shadows of monuments and memorials.” (quote from the PBS art21 website: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/krzysztof-wodiczko) Krzysztof Wodiczko takes buildings and monuments and projects images and videos unto them. The images he uses comment on or criticize political issues. The architectural structures he chooses for the projections can make the images seem very controversial. Concerning war memorials Wodiczko said: “We still have to see those symbolic structures, war memorials, in relation to contemporary situations.” (https://www.nfb.ca/film/krzysztof_wodiczko_projections) In 1988 he projected images of homeless people on the war memorial in Boston. The average person passing by a war memorial might take a moment to remember the victims of that war. However, at that very moment there are similarly tragic things happening that people don`t regularly think about or avoid to think about. Wodiczko`s projections transform spaces people frequent every day into meaning something different, into bearing a message. People are led to think and talk about the issues presented and “to open up and speak about what’s unspeakable” (http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/krzysztof-wodiczko).
//The third floor of the library is very atmospheric. The only thing you can hear when sat down is the quiet tapping of the keyboards, and the whirring of the computers. This creates a sort of eery yet concentrated environment that reflects the hard working passion of the students that inhabit it. Compare this to the history of the building and it would have been a very different story. The typing and flicking of pages, would be swapped for the banging and crashing of the Railway Goods Warehouse. From the picture below, you can see the clear time jump between the past and the present. The way they have managed to maintain the history of the building, while also adapting it for modern day use. This combination of old and new creates a unique location for performances.
