A blog by Impossible about our projects. We're a participatory, live and digital arts organisation based at the Watershed in Pennine West Yorkshire. Hello!
Video from our 3D camera tests. We’ve been experimenting with the Kinnect 3-D camera and how we can harvest the data it produces, and you can see some of the results here.
We’ve been interested in developing an interactive element to LightWeight, our 4m diameter inflatable outdoor projection ball. Until recently sensors capable of helping this were either fantastically expensive or too basic to give useful information.
These camera’s though provide really good 3D information, and can even distinguish between people and objects, really useful for us. The challenge now is to get a 360 degree picture and to make the video and sound responses appropriate and engaging. More posts will follow… Chris
A very early test of the Kinnect 3-D camera which we’re planning on using… (well 2.5-D at least).
Think it looks pretty interesting and at last we have an affordable way to track where people are around the structure.
LightWeight seen here as a part of the WingBeats performance in Bridlington and Leeds during September and October 2011.
Jolly Dance
Wool is often at the heart of a great story. The wool-making industry has historically provided a wonderful springboard for the imagination, and a wide range of visual motifs have been borrowed by storytellers through the ages from the golden fleece to the spinning wheel. It has also driven the industrialisation of areas like Slaithwaite and the surrounding Colne Valley, leading to its world-wide fame in producing fine worsted cloth.
Our projections at tonight’s Moonraking Festival in Slaithwaite make use of this rich creative tradition and will be projected onto the surface of our big beautiful moon, Lightweight. Here’s a sneak preview of one of the films we’ve edited together from very old archive footage of the local wool industry.
Slaithwaite Moonraking Festival: smugglers, narrow-boats & the art of a slow, graceful getaway.
(Slaithwaite Moonraking Festival 2009: Photograph courtesy of Tricky/Rick Harrison. For more visit flickr)
Slaithwaite Moonraking Festival takes place every two years. A brilliant community celebration with a fascinating *history* it happens in our own backyard in Slaithwaite, and we’re very pleased to be involved again. The festival has asked us to put together a series of projections that respond to the theme of ‘Wool’, that we will beam onto the surface of Lightweight, our big lunar-like beauty. The projections will mark the culmination of a week of storytelling, knitting, film-making and lantern-making workshops, in preparation for the evening procession through the centre of Slaithwaite, on Saturday 26 February from 6.30pm.
If you’re new to the concept of ‘rekkin’, the story behind the Moonraking Festival goes back to 1802. Picture an era of rampant smuggling & tax evasion…the kind of taxes levied on the supply of alcohol, tobacco and tea. Imagine a time when there was such a glut of smuggled-in ‘mother’s ruin’ that historians now believe it was used to clean windows. Imagine how annoyed that would make the government….
Cut to Slaithwaite. So the story goes, a local smuggler had made a slow, scenic journey along the Huddersfield Narrow Canal to Slaithwaite. He spotted the ‘law’ (or 5 0’s as we now know them post-Wire) and slung his cargo of spirits overboard into shallow reeds, in order to make a slow, graceful getaway.
Later that night, with a bright moon in the sky, a handful of soldiers spotted a small bevvy of local lads standing in the canal, raking it, and asked what they were doing? The men pointed to the reflection of the moon on the water and explained that they were ‘rekkin the moon’. After some (possibly not very discreet) sniggering, the soldiers went on their way, chiding the *fools* who believed the moon on the water was real and had fallen out of the sky. Contraband saved!
Every two years, Slaithwaiters celebrate the art of playing the fool, with a festival involving a team of local rekkers, a moon (sometimes transported by barge, sometimes carried by ‘gnomes’ around the town), and a parade of lantern-wielding locals. It looks beautiful and is a great all-ages evening event. Come and join in!
Slaithwaite Moonraking Festival, 21-26 February 2011. Lantern Procession & Festival Finale, 6.30-8.30pm, Slaithwaite, 26 February. Free. www.slaithwaitemoonraking.org
To take part remotely with Lightweight, tweet a message, comment or question to us using #moonraking and we’ll include your tweet amongst the sequence of projections displayed on Saturday night.
Take a look through the Flickr photographs captured in previous years here.
In November 2010, the Sun newspaper reported a mysterious orb over the skies in Scarborough. Now, on this day in February 2011, we can concur, that a mysterious orb is indeed, navigating directly towards the East Coast seaside town of Scarborough. If that is where it is headed, we estimate it will be due to land, based on its current speed of travel, and by our hurried calculations, by around dusk on Friday.
The large spherical object is emitting electrical impulses. It is not armed. It does not appear to be a flying machine. It appears to be something organic, perhaps alive but as yet, we have no way of knowing if this is a sentient being, or a remotely piloted organism, or neither. We aren’t afraid. It’s actually quite mesmerising.
We will watch and wait. Please use the above chart to assess what you are seeing in the sky above. Thank you.
Q&A with Chris Squire about Lightweight
Hello Chris, who are you & what do you do? Well the first bit is easy - I’m Chris Squire, co-founder of Impossible Theatre. I sometimes see myself as a problem solver - ‘Can we make an automated presentation booth?’ ‘How can we engage with this disenfranchised community?’ ‘Why isn’t that document printing? At other times I feel like a removal operative.
We combine visual arts and media technologies, mixing technology with aesthetics. I personally enjoy practical problem solving involved in working with materials and locations as much as I do finding creative and intellectual solutions to problems. But you try explaining that to the insurance agent when they ask me ‘Occupation?’
Tell us about your current project? Lightweight is a giant, 4.5-metre high orb. It beams pictures, stories, voices and sounds out into the night sky. It’s very playful and social with those who come to visit it, and as this unidentified organism pulses with movement, it almost seems alive…
Alive…? You will see stories and ideas flash across it, as it tries to understand the environment it has accidentally happened upon and as it learns how to communicate with visitors around it. We are interested in creating a magical, ethereal experience for visitors of any age that you can enjoy on many levels – and interpret exactly as you wish. We hope people will come and help us identify it, communicate with it, find out where it came from?
How does Lightweight work? One of the things I love about the piece is its apparent simplicity and effortless grace. Of course under the hood there’s a lot going on involving both mechanics and programming, but the only way to really find out what those things are is to come along, say hi to us then we can fill you in a bit more – sorry!
Some of the local archive footage we’ll be using at Coastival is great – we’ve got a wonderful travelogue of Scarborough in 1960 and we’ve pulled together a sequence of high-board diving from the 50’s – soaring stuff. But its the more abstract moments that I really like – putting colour, movement and music together in a way that cam be quite mesmeric.
How did the idea for Lightweight come about? We came to the first Coastival two years ago with the ChromaVan – our exploration of colour inside a re-modelled caravan. That went down really well and continues to be pretty popular – with Greenwich and maybe Munich coming up later this year. The ChromaVan is a lovely intimate experience – but only for 5 or 6 people at a time, and after that I wanted to make something on a much bigger and more public scale, something that could become a focal point for many more people.
The actual idea for Lightweight started with shadows – we were thinking of casting living shadows onto public buildings. In the end we came around to thinking that touring our own structure would provide a more dependable canvas. The idea changed a great deal, but several features survive from that early exploration:
1. Video projectors are a great source of focused light that cast crisp shadows.
2. Inflatable structures can make large, quickly assembled objects that still fit inside the van.
3. Protecting the electronics inside the structure is a great idea especially when touring the British Isles outdoors during the darker, winter months.
The first incarnation saw a projector on a mechanical arm, sweeping around the surface of this perfect 4m diameter ball – and someone pointed out that a sphere is a one of those simple, pleasing shapes that Plato identified as a having great aesthetic beauty and symmetry. But once we saw video appearing on it, it just seemed that we needed video all the way around, which is what we have now. Of course that simple sentence hides an age of struggle and trial to achieve - but now it works - images and video swim around the surface (nearly) seamlessly.
What or who are your influences? Well in developing Lightweight I think I found a resonance with Olafur Eliasson (who created the mirrored ceiling sun piece ‘The Weather Station’ for the Tate Turbine Hall). He talks about the role of public art as being to create ‘not a picture but a space … (because) space has dimensions – has time ..this makes the space tangible – your actions make a difference’. I really want to push the ways this piece can work and how people can interact with it, and his words neatly express the place and role for street arts as we move forwards.
As we have developed the Chromavan and Lightweight I’ve became more aware of James Turrell and his work with light and space – such lovely simple beauty and power that can leave room for personal reaction and reflection. Also some of Brian Eno’s recent video pieces seem to work in this area, though I’ve never seen them live, they seem to chime with his ambient music work.
Overall I’ve started to agree with my old college lecturer Tony Yates and his perspective that I dismissed at the time but really has one of the highest priorities. As we made each new significant and provocative piece he would ask “Yes, but is it beautiful?” Hopefully you’ll answer, “Yes”.
What do you associate with Scarborough? A mix of things. I love seaside towns. I came as a kid and we went on one of the speedboats that was both exhilarating and anti-climatic in equal measure. We did a show on the beach in the 90’s. Half-way through the long set-up the donkey-ride guys warned us we were below the high-tide mark, even though the sea was some way off. But the end of the increasingly hurried show featured an unplanned inclusion of a number of swimmers and canoeists along with wavelets around the stage. And a wet get-out.
If not at The Spa watching over Lightweight, where will we find you this weekend? Probably in a bar, seeing some of the other festival events, on the beach (I do love the beach) - or most likely with my nose in the laptop.
Lightweight, Friday 18th - Sunday 20th February, 5-11pm daily, at The Spa, Scarborough. Free. Details here.
Twitter: @ImpossibleArts
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We’ve been looking through bundles of archive film footage to find out how Scarborough has been represented on film and to find the right content for the Coastival festival projections. We loved this on first sight - a 1960s Tourist Board film, showing people enjoying their free time in sunny Scarborough. Here’s a clip..
