Three weeks left!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah! So much has happened, we have not had time to blog.

- Had a National Trust volunteers day in the Pervasive Media Studio and chose 10 brilliant candidates to man the dome at the festival.

- We visited one of the geodesic domes the other day and it looks amazing.

- We had a bit of rain trouble

- Most of the bits of furniture have been made by Brody, Ben and Will and are nearly finished.

- Helen and I have been sanding, filling, painting, thinking, lifting, calculating, shopping, stressing, glueing, cutting, moving and talking a lot and still are.

- We did a tree test today and it is very impressive.

Too little time, too much to say, I am just going to dump some photos with captions here.

Looking for leaves and the biggest bird in the world decided to poo on me. 

 

Our studio with some of the bar pieces, the sign and the trunk structure on a low rig.






























Ben pulling some weight

Sewing bits of wood on metal wire

Branches are not the easiest to work with...

Hard to see, but the trunk and the branches are up! Not under tension though.

Sound Recording

Andy has been out and about collecting sounds for the Two soundscapes. This shot was taken at Lydford Gorge.

The conditions for recording were ideal, with the trees absorbing a lot of the wind sound allowing for beautifully clear recordings of the rushing water on  its way to Devils Cauldron.

After the recordings had been logged Andy and I spoke at length as to how to compose a narrative from found sound without loosing the interest of the listener . Speaking with reference to Chris Watson and BJ Nilsen's collaboration; Storm, a full length album which follows a Storm's journey across the North Sea- we threw around ideas about creating a sense of movement and rhythm from field recordings. Inspired by this, we moved onto the topic of merging field recordings with synthesised sounds/ samples to complement the recordings sympathetically. With such an abundance of interesting sounds everywhere (nod in Silence to Cage) we both felt that it would be better to use only field recordings - and through the composition create melodies = think Reich inspired phased minimalist-esque melodies.

Lets see how it pans out.

Paper mache test

I am testing ways to create green, droplet, organic shapes from tissue paper. In my mind I can see fragile rough shapes suspended in clusters that are transparent enough to let light seep through.

Using various sizes of balloons and a nice pva/water mix I went about trying approaches to creating these shapes. Including incorporating thread, using the paper mache as a moulding substance and simply laying sheets over the balloons.

I look forward to popping them today to see the resultant shapes.

More quick experiments

More quick experiments. As with all quick turnarounds there will be problems...it is obviously not possible to create more than a 1000 objects within our budget and time...plan B is to go back to plan A and create a mixture.

One of what is going to be many resin experiments

Tree felling for our project

Mark Courtiour and Rob Stephens felling trees.

In case people should question the need for cutting down trees, this has not come from a wood, but is part of the scrub removal work to return Cheddar Cliffs to species rich limestone grassland.

How it all happened and what we are doing

Aaaaaaah, too much to say. In a large nut shell: I was alerted by someone in the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol about the National Trusts's call for artists for Glastonbury festival 2010. I called Helen Bentley because I like working with her: she has bouts of energy, hands on approach, a twinkley cheeky resourcefulness  and plenty of oomph under her belt (not in that way) and NO VOLUME CONTROL! I talked through some of the themes I was exploring at the time and she was game.

Back in April we met up with the lovely Colette and Jess from NT at Watershed to do a braindump and they were as excited as us. Proposal went in, we pitched, several other artists pitched - we WON! 

There was a very short turnaround on all of this and we had somehow  managed to go from some loose themes to a week later with nearly fully shaped ideas. At this stage we had already rounded up some of our finest contacts to check some of the feasibility and financing and one of those guys was Ben Irwin. Ben is an exceptionally skilled carpenter, sculpturer, designer and builder and several other amazing things. He's currently working with the Invisible Circus on some of their highly complex sets and installations . And now he is ours ;-) Ben has put together a crew of artist builders and carpenters who all work with the Invisible Circus, Brody and Will K.

I am not going to write up the tedious process and nightmarish admin involved with trying to get certain types of insurance and a business bank account: done.

So what are we doing? Well, that would be telling. Let's just say that we are creating an Outside Inn in a really busy spot at the festival near the Bandstand and Cider Bus. The Guardian's take on it is this (even though we feel that it does not sound that great compared with what we are producing). http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/may/01/glastonbury-festival-national-trust-debut 

What we can reveal is that we are designing and delivering everything for the inside of a beautiful canvas double geo dome (yes, we are filling 1000m2 with stuff and activities) with the help of an increasing number of people. We only had official sign-off on 5 May 2010 and the check won't clear until 13 May so the pressure is on! Most people think that we are absolutely mad for doing this, but we are.

Hopefully we will keep up the blogging from now on and post lots of pictures of process and trial and error etc. until we have finished!

xx V