Vox pop-up

 
A quick note to say that Voix Prioritaire - a textual installation we've created with the MTP football fanatics and Tipi's party animals during our residency at les grands terrains - will be ready for it's private view on Thursday 7 June. Come to the Espace Culture on the Canebière between 17h and 18h to see the poetic, canny and cantankerous voices of Marseille wrestle with the idea of identity on our diy dot-matrix sign. Afterwards, follow us up to les grands terrains for a drink and to see the rest of the installation. If you can't make Thursday, there will be performances on Friday and Saturday too, but everything will be gone on Monday so catch it while you can.

Swallow takes flight

 So, The Last Swallow has flown the nest. For 48 hours hundreds of visitors to La Friche Belle de Mai experienced life, death, the contraction of time... and, we hope, some beauty in between. Not bad for a wet weekend in Marseille. For those who stayed for hours and transformed the space into a hushed hybrid of church and maternity ward, here's a few photos to remind you what it was like.
While we're here, a huge thank-you to all the folk from Sextant et plus (and their assorted offspring) for being such faithful guardians throughout the weekend. And not forgetting our special guest star, John-Mark, who showed up for part two of the installation when we collected up the cans that didn't make it to the exhibition and filled a recycling bank with the detritus from around the Cathedrale de la Major.

 

48h chrono

 
If you're free, and in Marseille, on May 17,18 and 19, come along to la Friche for their 48h Chrono. There will be exhibitions, installations, workshops, midnight feasts, concerts, debates, a ball... And there will be The Last Swallow – an ephemeral installation that we're creating specially for that weekend. Hatching and hoping, eroding and erasing, the pleasure of a sunset and a mouthful of beer, The Last Swallow will be brought to life by the body heat of the people who come to see it. Be one of them!

Brain Jarred

So, hopefully the 4,000 of you who turned up on Saturday will agree with us when we say we think that that Brain Jar was a happy success. We hope you were astonished, entertained, surprised, excited and found stuff out. It warms our hearts that people will queue round the block for both knowledge and the chance to be taught to walk like the undead.
A huge thank-you goes out to our artists and anatomists: Wes White (and Headway) with his ephemeral school of phrenology – congratulations graduates; Dr Emma Welsh of the Cochrane Collaboration doling out dubious brain tonics; Sally Marie leading zombie deportment classes; Dr Zarinah Agnew presiding over head-to-head games of Operation Brain Surgery; Mafalda da Camara performing a live trepanning on Little Robert; Jon Clarke and Richard Wingate and their team of anatomists from Kings College London.
And a special thank-you to Valerie Brown of the Wellcome, who made curating an event involving hundreds of amateur zombies and several actual human brains run much more smoothly than it should have.
Photos as soon as we have them.

Dog-star

A little heads-up to say that Afterlight, which we art directed, has been given a special mention at Dogville 3D Film Festival – well done James, and all the crew!
P.S. Craig, you look very handsome in your red-carpet shot.

About time

  
Just a quick note to say that we're very excited to have been chosen for the 2012 Cité des Curiosités artists residency in Marseille. We'll be working with the people of la Bricarde and Sextant Et Plus as part of Marseille 2013 to create a permanent sculpture, a limited edition art-book and a short film – all on the theme of time. You can find a description of the whole project here on Sextant's website, but in brief, this is what we're planning:
The sculpture, Fin, will be a working sundial made from perspex-fluo, a translucent orange plastic, specially designed to absorb light and let it out along it's edges, so that it looks lit-up inside. Through the middle of the sculpture there will be a line of all the dates of birth of all the people we work with there. The sculpture will be sited in one of the Cité's public spaces.
The book, Time Machine, will be a photographic and textual record of how time passes for the people who live in la Bricarde, including the series of ephemeral interventions we're going to create with different groups out there. The pages will be uncut, so each person will make their way forwards through the book in their own way – as with time, there's really no going back. And there will be 366 copies; 2012 is, as they say here, une année bisexxtile.
The short film, l'Arret, will be made in the calanques with a group of young people from the Cité, and will show them cliff-jumping – but not the falls, the moments before, the quiet tension of teenagers preparing to launch themselves into the void. We'll project the film onto the walls of one of the tower blocks for the the autumn equinox, when the sculpture and book are due to be launched.
So all that should keep us on/off the streets for a little while!

Grey matters

A very quick note to say we've been asked by the Wellcome Collection to curate an event in April for their Brains exhibition. We'll fill you in on more nearer the time, but we're really looking forward to working with a bunch of brilliant artists, performers, writers and scientists to put together a day that we hope will leave you brainier than ever.

Home for Christmas?

So, those of you who pass by there on a regular basis may have noticed that Home is currently being installed at the Fabrik building on Coldharbour Lane. It's still a building site, and obviously with such a big project there are a whole lot of things going on, so we can't be certain of a completion date but we're expecting it to be finished early in the new year - maybe even in time for Christmas...
We've also been working on the final edit of 116 Coldharbour, the 3D film that we've made about the project. We showed a 2D preview version of it at the NEOutopia conference at the Centre for Creative Collaboration and got some great feedback, so we're looking forward to a proper 3D screening of it in the spring – we'll let you know as soon as we know exactly when and where that's going to be.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for yourself as everyone's words go up – we know some people have already searched out their own contributions, and if you're not up there yet it's only a matter of time!

Pop heart

So, a very last-minute heads-up to say that just in case we didn't have enough going on with Home, Gethan is performing I, Heart, a spoken word piece, at Green Man this weekend.
Part love story, part biology lesson, part call to arms, I, Heart is about the thing inside your chest – whether yours is sick or stony, faint or fierce, attacked or irregular, most of the time we struggle to follow it, let alone understand it. Gethan's been working with cardiologists and medical researchers at Kings College Hospital, as well as anatomical manuscripts, ancient myths, villanelles and sonnets in a bid to help you know yours.
Find her on the Solar Stage in Einstein's Garden at 2.45 on Friday. 

Now see the movie

Latest news on the Home front: as well as the huge, 100m artwork, the 1,000+ participants and the one-off Coldharbour font we've also been making a 3D film to share the project with the world!
A cross-section of the many people who gave us beautiful answers to our Home question were invited to be part of a 3D documentary. Over two days we interviewed over 40 people. As with the artwork, the focus was on their prize possessions and the stories that make them so special: Louisa's phial of 35-year-old baby teeth (above), Adedayo's pictures of his mum, Elin's fennel plant, Michael's dominoes, purple-obsessed Saurell's violet chandelier, Amun-Ra's Lambeth Tigers kit, Cejay's Mum's spring rolls...
Next comes the edit – and trust us, that extra D adds a whole other dimension of trouble in the edit suite – and then the grand premiere. More details to follow, but for now we're looking at a screening (or three) this autumn in a local cinema. Huge thanks to Craig, Andy and James for their three-dimensional genius.

Font of all (local) knowledge

Here's a quick preview of Coldharbour: the font we've been developing for Home (see below). Essentially, it's a homage to the chaotic, uninhibited, Helvetica-free signage that helps makes Coldharbour Lane like no place on earth. For those who don't know Coldharbour, it's one of the major arteries in Brixton and South London, a place where the character and individuality of the area is unescapable - Oxford Street it certainly isn't... It's also the site of the fabrik development where Home will be unveiled later this summer.
Each character is drawn from a letter on a shopfront somewhere along the mile-long street - in this sense, Coldharbour is a 'meta-font', sourced from the vernacular styles that enliven the whole area. As well as celebrating the independent, non-corporate nature of all the shops (and their graphic identities), the font acts as a typographic treasure hunt - encouraging local people to look harder at the signage that surrounds them, to appreciate its eccentricities, and to try to work out what comes from where.
We're now in the final stages of making it a fully-functioning font. When that's done, we can start using it in all our final designs for Home.

Home is where the work is

A brief update to let you know why things have been a bit quiet from us. We're currently right in the middle of Home, a huge project – as far as we know, the biggest participatory art project in the country this year (over 1000 community members involved, over 100m long and with a proper fabrication budget that means it will live on for the next 20-30 years).
As many of you will know, we've spent the past few months talking to hundreds of people from the neighborhood around the new Skanska / Notting Hill development on Coldharbour Lane. We've asked them all one question: What object in your house makes it feel like home? This question – and a bit of judicious prompting here and there – has already elicited a beautiful, complex, multi-layered representation of a community through the things they hold dear. Bikes that can never be ridden, letters from the dead, lucky spoons, 40-year-old baby teeth, worm menageries and symbolic toasters... The objects and the stories behind them have left us smiling, given us lumps in our throats and made us marvel at the hundreds of different ways in which people have made their homes here.
We're going to be collecting answers until the end of May, so don't expect to hear much more from us until then – seven hundred and ninety one responses so far, still a good few to go (the image above is just one of the many response-sheet-towers now gracing our studio).

Then that

A big thank you to everyone who turned up to Chelsea Arts School for If Not, Then What?... last Saturday. Our Random Slogan Generator was in full flow, creating absurd yet apposite slogans for the politically active and the politically confused alike. Below are some pics to show what went where...

The Blindfold of Goodfaith (top), worn by all voters as they make their choice on the indecipherable ballot sheet (above, left) with the Pin of Cynicism (the coloured flags hiding above VOTE HERE). All voters were subjected to at least 10 seconds of (physical) spin before making their choice.

The generation game: a selection of the RSG's stencil elements used to create each voter's hand-crafted slogan poster... Et voila! Some of the finished posters hung out to dry.

If not, then this?

If you're affected by government cuts or frustrated with the current political situation (ie if you have a pulse), then If Not, Then What? is for you. It's curated by Cecilia Wee and is a week-long art installation and creative-think-tank exploring possible alternatives to this mess we're in.
For their closing event (Saturday March 12) we've created the Random Slogan Generator. Maybe you've got your convictions, but you’re not a bona fide political entity until you’ve got your own slogan. But how do you decide what to say and which issue to focus on? The Random Slogan Generator does all the work for you, colliding existing slogans to create absurd, oddly perceptive new ones. Simply cast your vote on the special ballot sheet (don’t try to understand what you’re voting for, you’ll never get what you expect) and the RSG will generate your slogan and paint it onto a one-off poster for you to take away, so that you can go forth and spread the word.

Trying and trying and (hopefully) succeeding

 
What do you get if you cross a neuroscientist and a beatboxer? How about an evolutionary mathematician and an electro-pop duo? An art-rock band and a medical physicist? A classical music ensemble and an epidemiologist? A cellist and a cellular biologist? You get Trying and trying and trying – a sci-art-music album that we hope will make you laugh and cry, think and dance.
This project was funded by the Wellcome Trust and involved working with six different UCL bio-medical scientists (Dr Alex Dedman, Dr Sam Tazzyman, Dr Zarinah Agnew, Kara Cerveny PhD, Dr Nandi Simpson and Dr Martin Austwick) to write truthful but poetic explorations of their research, then taking the lyrics to six exciting, innovative and award-winning musicians (birdengine, The 9000, Reeps One, Hannah Marshall, Workers Union Ensemble and The Overdrive Orchestra) and working with them to record six unique new songs. In each, the science feeds directly into the music: one song uses electric guitars to copy an optical frequency graph with their noise levels; in another song about genetic codes, A and D notes are inverted ; and in another, a beatboxer channels an MRI scanner.
This project has been ticking along for about a year (ticking along means trying to arrange the lives of twenty musicians and six scientists so that they coincide at the same time and place every now and then) and now you can listen to the results here:

The launch was at Jamm on February 23, and at it all six acts performed their track (and a couple of bonus ones) live. The whole thing was brilliantly presided over by Wes White who managed to make sense of the project and hold it all together. Huge thanks to everyone who came along - anyone who couldn't make it, we still have some CDs so get in touch and we'll lob one in your direction, and to show you what you missed here's some tasty pics that Myles did make.

Steve from The Overdrive Orchestra on full (charm?) offensive. 

Gethan with megaphone, Hannah with her more refined instrument

No instruments necessary for champion beatboxer Reeps One

birdengine busy breaking hearts - all in a night's work

The 9000 busy breaking beats - see what we did there?

Of sex and yeast - Gethan's grand finale

Nail polish

A big thanks to all those who turned up for our nail art extravaganza at the Wellcome Collection last Friday. The evening was a big success, with three-and-a-half hours of nail-based beauty being dished out to visitors to Wellcome's Hands event. For those who couldn't make it, a quick recap: Wellcome asked us for something handy, playful and beautiful for their event; after much head-scratching we decided to open a nail bar in the gallery, bringing a bit of London street culture into the space; because nail adornment is all about attraction and display - and to draw on Wellcome's scientific roots - we created nail designs based on polarised light micrographs of the hormones of attraction (adrenaline, serotonin and dopamine); finally, to make sure the designs looked as good on the nails as they did on paper, we enlisted the help of the nail techs from Wah Nails... We hope you'll agree, the girls did a pretty amazing job.

PS. the event also saw the unveiling of our now world-renowned 'knitted kneon' - well, a nice American lady did say she was going to take the idea back to Berkley... Virtually unbreakable, remodelable whenever and however you like, and with the carbon footprint of a sheep, we think it's the greatest invention since the wheel. Possibly.

Bluewater?

Just a quick note to say that Brighton's brilliant l m n o p is now stocking Memories of Water - as well as loads of other beautifully-crafted booty (including Myles' photography book Colour)... Somehow, the book finding its way to the seaside makes us particularly happy. Oh, oh, and Memories... is also now available at the equally fantastic Book Art Bookshop in London. 'Buy now while stocks last' etc etc...
And here's a farewell look at the installation – which has now been painted over (all good things come to an end...).

Home sweet Home

Exciting news. We've just been confirmed as the commissioned artists for a major new public artwork to be installed on Coldharbour Lane (South London) early next summer. The work is called Home and will surround a ground-breaking new housing development being built by Notting Hill Housing Trust and Skanska (lots of eco credentials and made of huge designer Lego as far as we can tell). More details to follow, but basically Home will transform a large chunk of Coldharbour Lane using the words of 1000+ members of the local community, a CMYK colour palette (the building blocks of print) and a simple optical illusion. We're working on the project with local 'makers' MDM (who work for the likes of Anish Kapoor and the Chapman Brothers). And it'll be over 100 meters long. All good stuff. More info to follow soon.

Memories of Water

Well. What can we say? After many months of graft, sleepless nights, frenzied thinking and even more frenzied making, Memories of Water is finally a real, tangible entity... We didn't dream it. It lives and breathes! (well, for us it does anyway). Initial responses have been very good, and it's selling fast (it's in a limited edition of 100, individually numbered copies - all lovingly signed by both of us - and goes for just £15 a copy... not bad for 130 pages of love, genius and madness). If you like what you see, feel free to drop us an email and we'll give you full details. For now, here's some pretty pictures (cue parental cooing from g&m as they watch their new-born take it's first tentative steps... Sad, but true).