Future Exhibitions

ALT-W SHORTCUTS

3rd March - June 2012

The Travelling Gallery’s Spring 2012 exhibition will be a group show of artists whose practice has been supported by the Alt-w Fund. The Alt-w Fund supports experimental and interactive practice which makes use of technology as both platform and medium, and recognises the changing role that digital culture has in our society.

There will be a digital element to the artworks but this is encompassed within a range of other media including sculpture, drawing, film, animation, sound, photography, tapestry, installation and song. The exhibition therefore will appeal to a broad audience of all ages and including visitors with visual impairment.

Alt-w Shortcuts: The Artists

Yann Seznec

Droplets

This installation will use rainfall to create a constantly changing sound installation inside the Travelling Gallery. The roof of the bus will be fitted with a series of hand-built water sensors. These will be attached to wires that will go inside the bus to an Arduino microcontroller. When a droplet of water hits the wire mesh the two pieces will be connected and complete a circuit, sending a signal to the Arduino. This signal will be used to control individual glockenspiel notes fitted with solenoids which will fire when a sign The result will be a delicate palette of sounds generated whenever it rains, or is extremely foggy. When there is no water the installation will be silent.

Simon Yuill

Stackwalker

The Stackwalker project is an exploration of themes of language, land, law and human labour developed through a comparison of Scottish crofting communities in the West of Scotland and Eastern European migrant workers in the food and fishery industries of the North East. The video material from the project played back from computer using software written by the artist. This uses a three screen display onto which different combinations of footage are shown, some restricted to a single screen, other spanning all three. The video footage is accompanied and interspersed with audio extracts from the interviews and the songs of Hanna Tuulikki.

~ in the fields

roto gravur (Nos. 14, 16 and 18)

roto gravur (Nos. 14, 16 and 18) are inspired by spinning machines, gears, toothed wheels, transmission, Duchamp's rotoreliefs, bobbins, thread, weaving, fabric and moiré patterns. They are from a wall-based installation of 20 printed, transparent double discs, which rotate when people pass by. Within the series of discs the patterns grow more and more complex. The last ones are geometrically organised like zillij-patterns. When the discs rotate, the closely spaced lines start to create different moirés due to the change of angles.

David McAllister

Mercenary

The Manga style Apache pilot with his head in an evil cloud is starting to explore a duality created by our increased emersion in the internet or networked culture and a blurring of the physical with the non-physical worlds that we co-exist in. In many respects flying an Apache helicopter, commonly considered as the most dangerous vehicle in the sky, shooting at graphically enhanced enemy threats, is not dissimilar to playing a computer game. I am interested in how this duel existence changes our accountability and attitude to life.

Kirsty Stansfield

Table Phonograph

Based on the same principles of Edison’s wax cylinder phonograph, Table Phonograph was intended as a prototype hand-held device with which people could listen to their household furniture. For this exhibition we will use the inbuilt video camera in a Smart Phone and run as an Android App downloaded from the internet. Visitors will be able to use the camera on the phone to move across the surface of a table, listening to the sounds it produces. The device will translate the texture and surface of the tabletop into sound, revealing an otherwise hidden physicality and character of the table, the intention being to encourage the user’s heightened awareness and engagement with everyday household objects.

Thomson and Craighead

Flat Earth

Flat Earth is a desktop documentary, which takes the viewer on a seven minute trip around the world so that we encounter a series of fragments taken from real peoples' blogs. These fragments are knitted together to form a kind of story or singular narrative. The visual effect is not unlike that of Google Earth, although significantly here, nearly all of the visual material for, Flat Earth is taken from satellite imagery freely available on the web.

Mandy McIntosh

Weaving and 3D rapid prototype dome

Space is a sea of stars, suns, burning relentlessly and furiously and at dimensions I cannot accept as a human. So I resort to craft as a form of solace and order. I am making analogue drawings/paintings of suns and their signals, scanning them and pushing them digitally to a place I can’t manage physically. Then I will physically weave these images back into a simple binary system. I am also interested in looking at 3D rapid prototyping of 2D drawings rebuilt in 3 dimensions.

Donna Leishman

Red Riding Hood

Leishman's playful retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale makes use of comic book vernacular, limited forms of explorative interaction, optional narrative paths, and a jazzy soundtrack. RedRidinghood is the type of Flash piece that suggests the potential for complex forms of interactive storytelling without typographic text.

Wendy McMurdo

Early Research Robot

'Early Research Robot (i)' is from Wendy McMurdo's project exploring the development of artificial intelligence, especially in the form of robotics.
The image of the robot has traditionally embodied our longing to create what Asimov first described as the electronic other. Now, however the ‘embodiment’ of so-called nurturent technologies into our physical lives creates new feelings and new relationships. ‘
Early Research Robot (i) is one of a series of works which explicitly reference the world of ‘social' robotics, questioning how far we are willing to welcome robotic agents into our lives.

(Please note that much of the artwork in the exhibition will be commissioned by the Travelling Gallery and has yet to be produced. The creative process may result in the final work being slightly different to what has been described above.)

IMAGES:
Top image: Yann Selznec - 'Droplets'; water, sensors, wood, wires, notes.
Middle image: Thomson & Craighead - 'Flat Earth', single channel video, 7'09''
Botton image: Mandy McIntosh - 'You are the sun I am the moon', tapestry weave: wool, cotton, ribbon, mohair.