Katie Walters reflects on their Remote Nest Residency in early 2021
Last year was a very difficult time to be a performer. Because of the pandemic, my world quickly became a sea of cancelled gigs and indefinitely postponed plans. As someone whose life revolves around the energy of crowds, it was really disorienting to find them abruptly and unceremoniously outlawed. Last year was also a very difficult time to be a disabled person. As someone who is very vulnerable to COVID, I have been stuck indoors far longer than most people, unable to take advantage of the brief gaps between national lockdowns. From care rationing policies that would deny me ICU admission, to the difficulty I’ve faced in accessing the vaccine, it’s become very clear how little the government value my life, and the lives of the people I hold dear. All in all, it’s been a profoundly alienating experience.
But if there’s one thing the pandemic has been good for, it’s writing. Vast stretches of unfillable time, for me, at least, were a great opportunity to sit down and work on things I’d been far too busy and stressed to make time for. Feeling freshly alienated by the total collapse of life as I knew it, the time felt right for me to pick up Planet Alex; a play about isolation, communication, and a literal actual alien. It’s a show I’ve been working on for quite some time, and a story I’ve been wanting to tell for even longer. In 2019, Talking Birds gave me the office space and financial support I needed to write a first draft (you can read my first blog here!), and in 2020 I was fortunate enough to be awarded a second Nest Residency, which allowed me to write vastly superior second and third drafts. I spent a total of four weeks writing, spread out over several months to suit my access needs, with invaluable input from Ola Animashawun, without whom the play would not be nearly as good as it is. Once it was written, Talking Birds also arranged a rehearsed reading of the script in full [performed by Adaya Henry and directed by Tom Roden], which gave me the chance to properly see how the whole thing fit together, and get some feedback from a small and supportive audience.
My second Nest Residency was a lifeline during a very difficult time for me both as a person and in my career. It gave me work during a time when work was very scarce, and gave me purpose when I felt directionless. Writing during the pandemic afforded me a newfound appreciation for why Planet Alex is such an important story for me to tell. It’s a solo play about an autistic teenager who meets an alien living in her back garden, and a coming of age narrative that reflects the struggles and joys of life as an autistic young adult. I describe it to others as the story I wish I could have heard when I was younger, and I’ve been driven to tell it because I want to improve authentic representation for autistic audiences. But after reading news stories about DNR orders that were imposed on autistic adults without consent during the pandemic, it’s become increasingly apparent to me that this story is important for neurotypical audiences too. Autistic people are literally fighting for our lives. Of course, we shouldn’t have to make great art for people to understand that we deserve to live, but until they do, plays that show how wonderful and complex and brilliant autistic people are feel very important to create. We live vibrant, human lives. That’s something the world needs to know.
The future of Planet Alex is looking bright. Through my Nest Residency, I was able to spend some time talking with producer Pippa Frith, to figure out the best way to take the project forwards. I’ve assembled a modest all-autistic creative team, in director Sam Holley-Horseman and composer Taka Owen. I’m planning to act as assistant director, too, because I really want to learn some new skills.
A four minute proof of concept film for the show is going to be shared at China Plate’s First Bite Festival later this year, and we’re looking for opportunities to spend some time experimenting with the format of the show. Sam is really interested in finding ways to integrate a “sensory diet” into the performance. Plays for autistic audiences tend to assume that we are all sensory avoidant, and need quiet environments with simple lighting to be able to concentrate. And that’s important, but lots of us a sensory seeking too, and we need things to be really stimulating to be able to pay attention to them. So we’re looking at using lighting, music, projected images, all sorts of things to make the show properly engaging for sensory seeking autistics. It’s a really exciting area to be exploring.
Honestly the biggest takeaway from my Nest Residency (apart from the playtext I suppose!) is just confidence. Having dedicated and specialist support from such a kind group of people, and the faith that those people seem to have in me, it’s left me feeling like I’ve got something really special here. Something with a lot of potential. I don’t feel that way very often! But I’m feeling really ambitious right now. I think we have a chance to make some real change in the industry, and that’s super exciting.
Elizabeth Hudnott reflects on her recent Remote Nest Residency.
Me
Hi! I’m an artist who makes interactive digital artefacts which seek to create complexity from simple rules. I love geometric shapes, bold colours, mathematics and computer programming. I invite the reader to become an integrated component in my creations by customizing the pieces to produce your own unique renditions.
The Environment
I’ve built a software environment that contains a selection of sketches, which are at varying degrees of development. Each sketch contains two parts. Obviously there is computer code containing drawing instructions necessary to produce the artwork as I intend it to be. But when you load a sketch you only see one configuration of the artwork among many. Each sketch also creates a user interface that bestows the observer (or rather the participant) with the ability to adjust many parameters that feed into my code to extract one chosen image from a near infinite sea of possibilities. Indeed, it’s a requirement that the participant explores the parameter space because the default settings just replicate textbook images.
My creation effort is divided into two distinct parts, the sketches and the environment in which they operate. The latter provides functionality that is shared between sketches, such as video rendering.
The Sketch
Now that the larger stage has been set I can say that I took a single sketch that began simply and that this particular project mostly focussed on my journey to seek out increased complexity and variety for that chosen sketch. Truchet tilings have the property that every line that touches a tile’s perimeter does so at one of a small number of permitted points on that perimeter and furthermore rotating the tile through any multiple of 90° retains this property. For example, if we choose to allow lines that pass through any corner of a tile then rotating a tile will cause a line to point towards a different corner. Strictly speaking, the definition of Truchet tiles is limited to the particular collection of four tiles that Sébastien Truchet designed, but it’s this particular property about his designs that fascinates me. Cyril Stanley Smith developed alternative designs inspired by Truchet and my designs are an extension of Smith’s.
The sketch originally used three tile designs, two of which replicated a pair from Stanley Smith’s work and the third was a blank tile. An obvious way of extending the concept is to design more tiles. I began by sketching eight sets in a paint package, each consisting of several dozen designs. Two of those sets were taken forward to the coding step. These two sets are interoperable with one another because they only differ with respect to whether straight lines or curves are used to connect the points of interest. The new designs have lines touching the perimeter at the mid-points along the sides of the tile. This switch to different anchor points and away from the corner points which I had used previously will become significant later. The term “anchor points” is not a mathematical term but is rather a piece of linguistic innovation created by my internal monologue. Another of the eight sets of designs is an extension of the original diagonal scheme, so the prior work will be resurrected at some point in the future. Eventually I hope to have all eight schemes implemented.
Some of the new tile designs.
I decided to use my design drawings purely to collect my thoughts together and communicate them to the Talking Birds team. I could have loaded these graphics directly into my software but I want more flexibility than than fixed graphics allow. Therefore I had to add written descriptions of each tile to the program, expressly mentioning each line or curve and the coordinates of its start point and its end point. Although through judicious use of If… then… else… this was actually realized as a single giant recipe with multiple branches that can produce almost any tile design in the set. Implementing the new designs involved reorganizing the code as a whole. Previously the layout of the code was very simple, as the following pseudocode demonstrates. Pseudocode is made up language that’s more rigid than English but isn’t sufficiently detailed to be a runnable program.
r = random()
If r < threshold then
Draw a leftward leaning line
Else
Draw a rightward leaning line
End If
This would have become unwieldy as more designs were added and the tile selection process became more complicated. Therefore I replaced it with a model where one section of code describes the design of a tile and the drawing commands needed to produce it but isn’t aware of any details about how the tile is being incorporated into a larger design. A second section of code arranges tiles into a design but doesn’t contain any drawing commands. A third section of code sits halfway between organizing tiles without knowing what they look like and being a tile graphic without a context. That third position represents a specific tile that’s involved in the layout and it has particular colours chosen for it. The tile designs themselves are expressed as abstract lines without colours, although they can indicate suggested or prototypical colours. More on that later. The three parts have to communicate with each other in very precise ways to ask questions of one another and supply answers. For example, the layout algorithm will want to ask a tile design how many of the four possible anchor points it uses and which ones those are. This sketch expanded to become my largest sketch yet in terms of the number of lines of code needed. Therefore, developing a competent engineering design that adequately supported my artistic aspirations was definitely a piece of this project and these two sides, artistic and technical, grew and expanded together. That said, my code does mostly just flow off the tip of my tongue in whatever way I feel expressing my artistic creativity, and while there certainly are software architectural decisions involved the product is certainly not designed with the kind of robustness required for a business application or teamwork project.
Morphing
My master to-do list for this sketch has a section about incorporating different tile shapes. I’d like to add hexagon shaped tiles and even Penrose tilings into the mix. But hexagons work differently from rectangles. Grid lines are particularly easy to calculate for rectangular grids and so for now hexagons remain something for the future. Squares, rectangles, parallelograms and chevrons all share a property that makes them easy to lay out. Hexagonal and triangular tessellations aren’t excessively difficult to implement but my methodology is to build out in successive generalizations, one at a time. I was about to implement a rectangular grid but I knew the next logical generalization of that component would be extension to incorporate parallelograms and chevrons. As I sat down to write the line drawing instructions for the new tile designs I also knew that if I calculated the coordinates of all the points using an assumption of a rectangular grid then it would be particularly fiddly and cumbersome to go back and edit the code to make a parallelogram or a chevron generalization later. So I went ahead and implemented them straight away. During my meeting with Talking Birds it had been said that I shouldn’t feel constrained by my original pitch and it felt really good to be able to do what was best for my overall project vision without feeling I was going against my supervisor’s wishes, as would have been the case under a more conventional business relationship. I hate cognitive dissonance, so avoiding that was definitely a plus.
Unfortunately the parallelogram shaped tiles initially turned out to be a massive flop that failed to live up to my over inflated expectations. My reaction when I first saw them was, “Well done Elizabeth, you’ve put the whole picture into italics! What good is that?” At least, that was my initial impression when I viewed the early parallelogram based images having “Random” colouring and 100% colour flow, which are two parameter settings I’ll describe in the next section. Applying those terms to this early stage of development is anachronistic however, because all the lines were being drawn in a single colour at this point. I recently discovered that other people have the ability to see images in their mind’s eye but I do not. I’d always assumed the phrase was just a figure of speech that people say when they’re intensely concentrating on something. So aphantasia sounds like a good excuse for my minor failure and I’m going to roll with that whether or not it was truly the cause of the mishap! But it’s interesting to see how these parallel journeys that I’m on intersect, growing from a hobbyist into a “proper artist” while also developing understanding and coming to terms with my disabilities and trying to think of ways to adapt things to work better for me, but also valuing the things that do come easily for me. Early on I quickly and easily got this complex sketch mapped out, with its many desirable features and components categorized and organized hierarchically in my “Master To Do List”, and that’s a different kind of visualization.
Parallelogram shaped tiles used in an unsubtle way.
In contrast to the parallelograms, the chevrons were a spectacular hit from my perspective, which was totally unexpected as I mostly threw them into the game plan for completeness and I had felt they’d be inferior to the geometric purity of rectangles and parallelograms. Clearly I learned nothing from reading Flatland! Chevron shaped tiles gave the images a kind of non-uniformity that had been missing up until this point. And they have a pleasant flowing, calligraphic look about them. So I’m very pleased that I went on the detour to make chevron shaped tiles. I’d really like to build further on this feature in the future. Tiles will tessellate with any kind of extrusion glued onto the basic rectangular shape so long it’s created by cutting out a correspondingly shaped intrusion from the opposite side, as was done so spectacularly by Escher. The parallelogram and the chevron are just the most basic examples of this. I think a quadratic curve would be the next logical step. So far I’ve been distorting my square tile designs to fit other shapes, but specifically designing other shaped tiles could also be an option going forward.
Chevron shaped tiles.
As for the two parallelogram parameters, which may be adjusted via the controls labelled “Bottom” and “Right” on the Grid tab, which are short for, “Bottom edge x-offset”, and, “Right edge y-offset” respectively, they’re still there and they aren’t completely useless. In retrospect it’s quite useful to be able to shift a little bit away from rectangular tiles by adding a slight slant to break up the 90° angles. The same controls can be used to refine the chevron shape also. It’s just that the parallelogram isn’t the radically different alternative shape choice that I thought it was going to be, whereas chevrons are.
Flow
Previously the sketch only supported two colours, one for the leftward leaning strokes and another for the rightward leaning strokes. These colours were customizable and each “colour” could actually be a colour gradient that blended between two colours. But essentially there were two colours and wherever a particular tile design occurred in the tessellation it was always drawn in the same colour. The colours didn’t consistently follow the lines as they passed off of the edge of one tile and onto the next, twisting and changing directions.
I wanted to make the colours flow. Implementing this proved more difficult than I expected but I don’t remember why. If I’d retained the diagonal lines then the task would have been slightly more complicated still, because a line that goes to a corner can abut up against three other lines drawn on adjacent tiles in the maximal case. Using the mid-points as anchor points constrains each anchor point to have just one corresponding anchor point on one adjacent tile (or none at all at the edges of the picture). The right side of one tile connects to the left side of another, etc.
The sketch now supports both colouring modes. In the “As Designed” mode, which is the default, the layout algorithm takes the prototypical colours offered by the tile designs as uses those as the actual colours. Colours don’t flow from tile to tile, not all of the time anyway, although the specific details of the designs and particular organizations of tiles may permit some small localized flow of colour to occur occasionally. In “Random” mode the prototypical colours are ignored and the system picks a random colour and makes that colour flow onto any adjacent tiles, then their adjacent tiles, and so on.
Colours flowing seamlessly from one tile to the next.
Prior to this project I discovered it’s often a bad idea to create parameters with discrete options because they produce sharp transitions during animation, which sounds like an obvious thing but the reality is more nuanced than that. Moreover, I discovered a discipline of reimagining things that I initially thought of as discrete parameters as continua instead. This discipline led to the conception and subsequent implementation of a parameter that controls the probability of colour flow. When set to 1 then colours always flow from tile to tile. When set to 0 a new colour is always selected when a line crosses a tile boundary, which looks similar to but differs in construction from the “As Designed” mode. Then the feedback process from idea to thought to code to visualization and back to a new idea led to a refinement of this flow / no‑flow concept. Rather than selecting any new colour from the palette when a no-flow situation occurs, I instead decided to organize the colours into groups so that a yellow line can change into a blue line but not into a green line, for instance, because green is grouped with red. This involved another new parameter to decide how many colours should be in each group. I find the final result quite pleasing.
Non-deterministic colour flows with colours grouped into pairs.
The flow probability slider did not resolve my struggles with animation though, because “As Designed” versus “Random” wasn’t the only sharp contrast hanging around. Unlike my other sketches, this sketch has many aspects which involve forms of interconnectedness that produce drastic changes between successive images as a result of only small changes to the input parameters. Animations become trippy messes without narratives. Consider this change that’s easy to visualize. The “Random” colouring algorithm works by answering the question, “Which tiles are connected to each other?” As in, “Is it possible to trace a line from this tile to that tile, possibly via some other intermediate tiles?” But if I change one tile from depicting a vertical line to having a horizontal one instead then suddenly lots of tiles that were connected to each other are no longer connected and simultaneously it could be the case that many tiles that weren’t previously connected now become connected. It remains an open question as to how many of these animation issues can or could be resolved by making some adjustments to the algorithms. In the previous example we could potentially force the modified tile to incorporate a no-flow rather than always deciding randomly and that would mitigate sudden changes in colour. But then what if the two shapes which are becoming connected previously belonged to two different colour groups? The interconnectedness makes designing and implementing this sketch very tricky. Ideas that sound simple turn out not to be so.
Colour Palette
I wanted the sketch to have a retro computing feel. I really like the way that people made compelling video games in the 1980s on machines that restricted artists to 4, 8 or 16 colours. I like the bold colours of the blocks in Tetris and I remember the sixteen colours of the default EGA palette. There’s something wonderfully symmetric about powers of two and having three primary colours and three secondary colours, together with black and light grey for a total of eight colours, then having a second set consisting of eight brighter versions of the same. The plan was to permit the user to create pieces with between two and sixteen colours and to let them choose the colours because that’s an obvious way to add parametrization. And the current version does indeed permit between one and fifteen customizable colours plus a background, which can be either another colour or an image.
Even though the colours are customizable, I still wanted a default palette that I liked. My plan was to take the EGA palette and tweak each of the colours so they were somewhat displaced from their usual positions but retained their boldness without being recognizable. I experimented with tweaking the colours for a considerable amount of time without being satisfied. Until the realization suddenly clicked that it wasn’t the EGA palette that I desired but it was the colours of the London Underground map that my brain was craving.
Another consideration was how to parametrize colours. I could have gone with the three primary colour RGBA system (Red, Green, Blue and Alpha, i.e. transparency) but in the end I settled on the HSLA system (Hue, Saturation, Lightness, Alpha). I’d originally wanted to flow not just blocks of colour from tile to tile but also have fading between say lighter and darker versions of the same colour along the length of the line. I unfortunately haven’t managed to pull that one off yet, but one day it will come. I needed to make a colour chooser and I was already considering how the existence of colour fades would affect it. Unfortunately the HSLA system isn’t great for producing smooth transitions of colour because fading along the hue axis will generate rainbows. Which is great for my inner gay but sometimes one does want to be able to fade between red and blue without passing through orange, yellow, green and turquoise! Fading between opposite colours like blue and yellow in the RGBA system will produce a a bunch of muddy greys in the middle. I find the HSLA system very useful for my artwork because its concepts like saturation are pretty easy and intuitive to grasp, though the RGBA system is acceptable too. But neither is great for colour gradients. This issue affects my other sketches too. My sketch that draws Julia Set and Mandelbrot Set fractals sometimes produces weird colour gradients because it’s based on HSLA. Another colour space is needed. CIELAB (Luminosity, A* and B*) seems promising but the A* and B* dimensions are less intuitive than HSLA and at the time of writing web browsers don’t support LAB as a built-in feature (but future support is planned). If I wanted to use it today then I’d have to program the necessary calculations to convert numbers from LAB into RGBA myself.
Another issue which afflicts both RGBA and HSLA is that until recently computers have been able to display bright reds and greens but their range of blues has been more limited. It doesn’t make sense to place red and blue measurements on the scales we’ve always historically used, which is a particular problem for HSLA because hsla(0, 100%, 50%, 1) and hsla(240, 100%, 50%, 1) don’t just differ because the former has a red hue and the latter has a blue hue as should be the case because that’s what those descriptions say. But in reality they also differ in brightness because 100% saturation and 50% lightness doesn’t mean the same for red as it does for blue, because the measuring system is based upon the historical limitations of displays rather than the full range of human vision.
Probably the eventual solution to my needs in the medium term will be to continue accepting input in HSLA colour space and then convert those colour measurement into LAB space, perform my colour gradations and animations in LAB space, and finally convert into the computer’s native RGBA space to generate output. But there’s more to this sketch than the colour gradations that I didn’t end up implementing and HSLA is good enough for now. Valuable research for future work though.
There’s currently a glitchy behaviour associated with the alpha colour dimension. When you have a line meeting a curve on the same tile and the colours aren’t fully opaque then you get an effect that’s like looking through two overlapping coloured lenses and the intersection piece comes out darker than it “should”. I did regard this as a bug, though it could also be considered a feature. It warrants further investigation for creative potential.
Tile Designer
Originally the plan had been to use my initial drawings of tile designs as thumbnails and have users choose tiles from a broader catalogue of designs. But the number of designs had grown quite large and I became concerned that if I implemented the catalogue approach then the user interface could end up being cumbersome. Noting that my designs are built from simple components, I determined there would be sufficient constraints imposed on the user that creating a tile designer widget and embedding it inside the sketch would be eminently feasible and would provide a more direct way of engaging in tile construction than scanning through a list. And so I implemented the tile designer widget. You can click in any of eight areas to toggle lines on and off, convert lines into curves, or change colours. And I think it’s a great success because very quickly I was playing around and creating new designs that were not on my original list.
A design that wasn’t in my initial collection.
Initially the tile designer only supported drawing lines in a single colour. When it came to extending it to support multiple colours I hit upon a new challenge. My original designs adhered to a discipline whereby whenever two lines on a tile touched one other then those lines were either the same colour or they crossed over one another clearly at 90°. But now that I had created this open ended tile designing interface it would be arbitrary and difficult to impose the same restriction on others. So I had to go back to pen and paper and draw out every possible tile design and decide how the different coloured parts were going to mesh together. Then I went back and rewrote most of the tile drawing code so it could accommodate the necessary new additional design elements.
A multicoloured design that wasn’t in my initial collection.
The tile designer has some limitations. Sometimes it’s a bit fiddly to use. When it’s not doing what I intend then I find I need to click a little further away from the middle of the tile and a bit closer towards an edge or a corner. Sometimes creativity may lead you to attempt something that the tile designer won’t let you do. In order to work with the “Random” colouring mode every line needs to connect with one of the tile’s anchor points so that it has somewhere where colour can flow in from. Sometimes you’ll attempt to say draw a yellow line but it’ll insist on drawing a blue line instead because a blue line already exists in an adjacent position on the tile. However, there isn’t a good reason for imposing this constraint when the tile designs are being used with the “As Designed” mode. This problem also suggests that a hybrid mode would be desirable, whereby when the “Random” method is chosen then colours would flow in from the anchor points whenever possible but any inaccessible lines would be rendered “As Designed”.
Furthermore, what application of colour in the tile designer even means with a “Random” colouring mode is not explained clearly within the software, so I’ll explain it now. If you have a design with some red lines and some green lines then it means that red lines will be drawn in the same colour as one another and the green lines will also be drawn in a consistent colour. However, what those colours actually are has nothing to do with which colours were used in the tile designer were because the whole point is that the colours are chosen randomly. So red and green or blue and yellow, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that two colours are being used. When the tile is placed into the picture “red” and “green” may even end up being the same colour! Though it might be handy if there were some way of choosing whether or not to force the system to choose two distinct colours. Enforcing additional constraints is a broad area that offers a rich tapestry that’s ripe for further innovation, as we shall see.
The tile designer permitted new designs that weren’t in my notebooks (on paper or digitally). But conversely I also had a few designs in my notebooks that didn’t fit within the simplistic expectations of the tile designer. I think the best approach going forward will be to offer a smaller catalogue of “specials” that can supplement the tile designer when needed, but I haven’t quite reached that stage yet.
Gradients
By this point I was close to reaching the suggested time commitment for this project and I’d achieved all of the objectives I set myself in my pitch except for one thing, which is that I wanted to have lines with fading transitions of colour. But when I started thinking about how I would achieve this I realized that it wasn’t very straightforward and would involve editing many different portions of the program. I didn’t want to run out of time and have the task half completed because half complete code doesn’t look half complete, it just doesn’t run. So instead I decided to look for low hanging fruit. I added a second line width parameter so that horizontal lines can have a different thickness to vertical ones, which enhances the calligraphic feel. I also wanted to address an issue that I had on my master plan as a later follow up item but which became a pressing issue now that the algorithms were close to producing images that looked a step up from where I’d started.
The biggest challenge to adding colour gradients is that lines often loop back on themselves, so getting seamless joins at every point of intersection requires some thought. Secondly, each tile doesn’t contribute an equally long piece to the total line. A horizontal segment is as long as the width of the tile, a vertical one is as long as its height. A diagonal line will follow Pythagoras’ theorem. That’s assuming rectangular tiles, but what about those parallelogram and chevron shaped tiles? Then there’s the curved segments. They look like quarter doughnuts but that characterization is an approximation because I actually draw them using cubic Bézier curves and in the future I want to give users the ability to change them into different looking curves by moving the control points, much as you would do in a program such as Photoshop.
Constraints
Introducing colour flows had started giving my images some form. But there were often instances where a tile didn’t connect with any adjacent tiles. For example, these could be curved pieces that didn’t connect to anything at either of their two ends. I named these tiles “wispy bits”. I wanted a way of ensuring each tile looked like it had a purpose, so I devised a plan whereby I would be able to configure a minimum number of connections for each type of tile. This allows me to express, for instance, that a straight piece or a curved piece should be connected to something at least one of its two ends or that a T-junction should be connected at least two of its three points.
A design with several unconnected “wispy bits”.
Implementing this proved more difficult than I’d anticipated because the layout algorithm selects tile designs to go into spaces by scanning from left to right and top to bottom, but sometimes it would get stuck in a situation where none of the tile designs in use could be placed in a space because the combination of tiles around it didn’t permit it due to the constraints. I adjusted the algorithm so that when it gets stuck it will now go back and make a fresh tile selection for the space to left of the current one. And if that strategy also fails then it’ll make a fresh selection for the space above the current one. But sometimes even these accommodations are not flexible enough, in which case my algorithm just gives up and violates the constraints. It’s intellectually dissatisfying knowing that there are cases where a valid picture exists which meets all of the stated requirements but my algorithm isn’t sophisticated enough to discover it. On the other hand these failures usually occur when it’s presented with a limited choice of tiles combined with high degrees of constraint, which isn’t the norm.
Adding constraints took a bit longer than I expected because my initial attempt contained some programming errors, as tends to happen, but ironing out the creases in this particular section of code was more difficult than usual because there was a lot of data that wasn’t easily visible concerning combinations of tiles that were being tried and which ones were being accepted and which were being rejected, and all of these decisions happen before anything gets drawn on the screen.
The result is partially satisfying. Wispy bits in the original sense can now be avoided when desired. However, it’s still possible to form very short lines that only span two tiles. More sophisticated kinds of constraint will be needed before a level of control can be attained which fully satisfies me.
Enhancing The Environment
My long term goals for the software are:
To add more sketches, and to add more parameters to existing sketches.
To add social elements that will let users can share their creations with each other.
To grow the user base and increase product recognition.
To facilitate users to create their own sketches.
To enhance the sensory experience using sound and motion.
Before the Covid-19 lockdown hit I was doing voluntary work teaching women and non-binary people from non-computing backgrounds to code. Naturally, I was wondering about building a code editor and coding tutorials into my environment. I decided to use the final hours of this project to experiment with this idea. I’ve always taught text based programming languages because they’re the ones professionals use and they permit expression of greater complexity within a smaller amount of screen space than the alternative. However, I concluded that a mouse driven graphical language would be better in this case for several reasons. Firstly, because the obvious idea would be impossible to implement securely, which would be to have users express their sketches using the same language as the software itself is written in. This conflicts with another of my long term goals. If I were to give users an ability to save their work and I also added a JavaScript code editor then it would be trivial for a user to send another user a sketch that deleted all their work. Secondly, designing and implementing some other text based language as a bespoke venture takes a lot of work and renders third party learning resources useless. Thirdly, the free flowing nature of text makes it easy to make mistakes that prevent the text from being interpreted as a valid program. Creating tutorials to illustrate geometry using a text based language is a lot of work and would duplicate what’s already been done elsewhere in the context of other programming environments. Learning a text based language takes commitment from the user to follow a course that begins with a lot of trivial examples. But this environment is a fun, entertaining thing for users to dip into, so a mouse driven programming interface that clearly presents a library of commands and prevents syntactical errors is more appropriate. I familiarized myself with the Google Blockly framework and built a basic proof of concept that demonstrated that it can be done and I have the skills to progress it further. This isn’t integrated with main environment yet.
I envisage my software will arouse interest for four purposes, which I definitely hope are not mutually exclusive. In no particular order:
To produce abstract art pieces that are shown and appreciated online or in print like other art.
To offer a space to experiment, visualize, develop intuitions, form personal theories and learn the maths behind the sketches, for those who have an interest in recreational mathematics.
To provide sensory stimulation for sensory seeking neurodivergent individuals with conditions such as autism, as a relaxing activity.
To stimulate interest in coding.
To satiate the third need I would like to add an ability to translate the evolution of musical qualities into changes to the visual parameters. I think synchronization with music along with the ability to control parameters using hand gestures would be two really fulfilling features for me to enjoy as a person with neurodivergent traits and for others like me.
I’m not currently knowledgeable on the topic, but I wonder if my music visualization aspirations could also be adapted into a useful tool for deaf and hard of hearing people. As a hearing person I remember around the turn of the millennium when products such as Microsoft Windows Media Player 7 were launched and music visualization algorithms were an exciting new way of understanding music. But the novel element wore off quickly. I’m seeking to create a much richer experience in terms of customizability and personalization but I need to research if there’s genuine potential to communicate useful information in an accessible way or not.
So far the tool has been entirely grounded in me and my needs. There’s still a considerable amount of work to be done in terms of engaging with online enthusiasts, teachers, and other disabled people.
As an artist I’ve got many ideas for new sketches that I’m eager to get stuck into. But taking the environment to the next level by making it into something special will/would be exciting too. It frustrates me that I can’t be working on both simultaneously!
Evaluation
When I began this project, the sketch had five limitations that I wanted to address.
Only one set of tiles was available and that tile set only included two tiles (plus a blank tile).
There were only four points available on each tile (the corners) to join lines between tiles.
The lines were always straight.
The colours didn’t always flow naturally from one tile into another.
The computer code was rigid because it was written to draw those two shapes only. The code didn’t contain an explicit model of the high level properties.
And now:
Eight styles of tiles have been invented and two of these are available for use. They’re now styles rather than sets of tiles because the tile designer interface doesn’t constrain the user to a small predetermined collection anymore.
There are still only four anchors in active use, though they’re different ones from previously. Internally however though the code has been rewritten in an abstract way so that it may support any number of anchor points in future, with sixteen already defined.
Lines can now be straight or curved.
Colours do flow naturally from one tile into another, though not with colour gradients yet.
The code is more flexible. New tiles can easily be coded separately and plugged into the general algorithm.
Chevron and parallelogram shaped tiles are possible. Users can design their own tiles using the built in tile designer and refine the layout by imposing constraints. An initial proof of concept for user programmed sketches has been created.
Overall, the project has been a success. The next task is to keep the momentum going and plan what comes next. Working with Talking Birds has boosted my aspirations and raised interesting questions about possible future directions for my work.
Holly Clark reflects on her 3 day remote Hatching Residency in Winter 2020
I am Holly, I am a theatre maker based in the West Midlands. I took part in a 3 day digital Nest residency. It was to explore a new solo show idea about being dyspraxic and neurodivergent. I knew I wanted to use movement in the piece (as it is known as the ‘clumsy syndrome’) to celebrate the way I move and also to highlight parts of dyspraxia and for it to be autobiographical.
My first talk with Janet about my piece, theatre, and about lockdown was so refreshing. As we know due to the pandemic, this was a rare experience to talk about art and ideas with someone new. I came away with inspiration and ideas and actually put in an Arts Council bid off the back of it. I also tried some ideas and thoughts we had created and discussed.
I then got really stuck. I found making and creating at home really uninspiring and the things I was making didn’t feel right or of any quality. I was getting in my head about it. I was regularly doing automatic writing and trying to imagine what the work could be.
The chats with Janet each time were encouraging and sparked new ideas. She gave me articles on how to reinvent the daily walks and focus on things other than the work in order to relieve the pressure. It worked. I let go and just tried to generate rather than analyse.
I actually got the Arts Council funding for an R&D for the piece. Those three days allowed me to have time and pay to do it. Even though work that was made didn’t go any further it laid the groundwork. The conversations with Janet helped spark ideas of what the piece has begun to be and helped shape it.
It was such a valuable experience to have the mentoring time and support. I encourage you to apply to be part of the programme.
Alex Hilton reflects on their Remote Nest Residency:
For my nest residency, I wanted to explore reimagining work, using a framework of mutual space
So many inequalities exist in access to work, and so few people feel they have the space to be themselves at work. At the same time, so much work is extractive – creating pollution, contributing to climate change, contributing to inequalities, reducing the space for other beings to flourish in the world. What would it mean for work to be spacious for the people doing the work, and space-creating for wider society and the ecosystems around us?
I’d been thinking about these issues for a while, related to my own jobsearch as an autistic person and my concerns about environmental issues. My housemate suggested that art would be a good format for exploring these issues in a broader way.
As a new artist, it was wonderful to have the space to explore my ideas which the Nest residency provided. Initially, I really noticed how nervous I was about the project. Would I write the ‘wrong’ thing? Would what I made ‘count’ as art? This felt the opposite of spacious. But once I got into the flow of working, I found it easier.
I thought about how art could be used to communicate that elusive sense of how mutual spaciousness would feel when you haven’t experienced it. It can often be easier to see what’s wrong than to see how it could be right. So I thought of the role of art in imagining and inspiring the best of what society could be. This feels especially relevant in the year of the pandemic and the need to reimagine what a better future could look like.
Janet was really supportive and it was really helpful to talk through how the work could be developed. We settled on creating a postcard prompt to get contributions for a future zine/ exhibition. Janet introduced me to Andrew Moore, who helped to create a design for the postcards which really got my ideas across and was eye catching.
I’m hoping to get contributions and include a wider range of voices in a zine/exhibition later this year exploring reimagining the best of how work could be.
Imagine Spacious Work is an art project to make a zine and exhibition on the topic of re-imagining work. This will happen in Coventry in Summer 2021. We’re looking for creative contributions on the theme of re-imagining work. This includes paid and unpaid work, childcare, homemaking etc. If you’d like to contribute writing, drawing, audio or video on this topic please get in touch via ImagineSpaciousWork@gmail.com
Being a musician for many years, I’ve often witnessed Discrimination on many levels, and I thought if I could turn this into a play, theatre piece this could be good. For me it had to be done very differently to what I had seen on stage in the past, it would need to grab people’s attention, make them sit up, be involved somehow – and then of course go tell their friends, post on social media to get more people to come and see.
So the idea came and a few days later a friend posted online about ‘Talking Birds Nest Residency’ I had an idea that needed exploring, researching, bouncing around, talking through with a few theatre professionals. I grabbed my tablet made a few videos, picked the one I thought described what I wanted to do best and I applied for the scheme.
Tick tock time went by and one day I see a reply from them, my heart starts beating faster, getting anxious, scared of opening the email I put the kettle on and made a coffee. Grabbed one of my drums to feel calm again and 2 hrs later I slowly took my mouse, clicked on the email . . … Nearly fell out of my chair with the biggest grin, I got it! No Match Funding needed! I was going to be a Nest Resident, and so it started with a meeting with Janet and Derek. To be honest I couldn’t believe it, but they believed in me to get this started.
‘When Instruments come to Jam’ has at its heart the idea of using instruments as a metaphor to show discrimination on many levels. So I started to focus on the conversations instruments would have if they communicated with each other, (as humans would) the fun, laughter, judgemental, good/bad thoughts, gossiping, sarcasm, joking around and then of course discriminating!
I’ve not written a play before, so Talking Birds they got me a meeting with Ola Animashawun to help me start to sketch out the story I wanted to tell – this was a chance for me to start sounding out my ideas with a theatre professional/dramaturg, and for me this was again all new territory. Within a short time I’d realised there was a lot of work to be done by myself – he left me with provocations regards my idea which going forward would help me structure my idea/my play. I had conversations about my idea with musicians and animators and they all helped influence the way the idea shaped up.
About a month later my partner and I were off on a short break to Bulgaria (sadly not part of the residency!), the weather was great and I found this wonderful beach bar. The laptop came out and for the first time I was inspired to start writing the beginnings of ‘When Instruments come to Jam’, for some reason the beach bar provided the perfect conditions, the sea, sand and gentle breeze.
How do you write about ‘discrimination’? It’s simple, you draw on your very own experiences from the first day at school to today! Remarks about colour/size/abilities/being too good/being too bad/ethnic background/standing up for yourself/for your friends/not being white! And to be honest not all was that bad – especially because most remarks/insults around ethnic background were wrong (for some reason very few people could actually truly insult me about this since they never take the time find out what my ethnic background actually is!)
Transferring this to instruments at first was difficult but then surprising enough started to become easier as even instruments have a make-up. Colour/size/background/abilities/the sound they produce/presence and they too have feelings. It’s hard to explain that although music has no barriers, the musicians choose to put up barriers.
As the title says, the story starts ‘When instruments come to Jam’ – although I have an idea of how the story plays out, I want to develop it collaboratively over time, maybe once a week with an open call to musicians to attend; building up a group producing great music regardless of knowing or ever having played alongside each other…. that’s where the trouble starts!
Without this Nest Residency, I would not have been able to get started on this project – the funds and support allowed me to schedule time in to my work specifically for this project/idea, think about why I wanted to tell this story, and who it was for. Being a full time musician means I have to generate my own income and anytime spent on ideas, looking at new projects in my own time would mean I’m not earning. The Nest Residency meant I could afford to spend time on this and explore this idea of mine: contacting artists, writers, audience development specialists. I wanted to see if, firstly, this kind of delivery has been done in theatre, have instruments been used as a metaphor and the main point was would audiences be open to a play without spoken words and just music? I’ve spent a lot of time wondering, experimenting, and being ‘brave’ in order to develop the idea further.
The next step for this project has been to apply to (and be shortlisted for) the We are Unlimited/City of Culture Trust commissions, taking this to the next level of applying for an Emerging Artist Award in theatre. My time as a Nest Resident exploring this idea needs to end to move forward. I’d like to thank Talking Birds for their time, guidance so far and hope that we’ll continue this on the next step as it starts to take flight . . .
From November 2020 i collaborated with T, this experimentation did not go as planned because of external factors (pandemic, family challenges, uncaring processes, race, gender, ableist dynamics…) and internal mechanisms within our exchange on which i am about to expand audio-visually and verbally in this performative sharing.
i am including some of the correspondence emanating from me in the blogpost as a sort of a mixed modal and fragmented essay. You are invited to take as much and as little as you wish from this buffet. The video shows me reading the letters i delivered to T for the first time. There is an audio version of it as well that i recorded on my phone simultaneously for those who have had enough screen for the day. The tone of this entry is self-reflexive but it is not only a sharing of feelings and post-collaboration analysis but also just a sharing space. Only unedited documents are shared, because i believe in the force of self-exposure, i believe it tells a lot about the context and the re-contextualisation of creative processes and about oneself. Welcome in the bits and pieces of a ‘process that went wrong’ and made me grow on multiple levels.
As i am solely elaborating from my proudly subjective perspective my last Nest residency has been a much needed grounding work on collaboration. It literally brought me down, and pushed me to my limits. Reflecting on it i am grateful it happened yes if i were to choose, i would do it in similar ways again.
i have tried to collaborate outside of my political practice and it ended up in exhaustion. i wrote to my collaborator in one of my correspondence: ‘i was exhausted before (anyway)’.
In the context of a global pandemic and under lockdown restrictions adding up extra difficulties to a state of things already hard to navigate in was a doubtful choice that guided me to learning more about my limits.
This collaboration beyond the initial excitement quickly turned out no longer serving me but rather weakened a friendship, my mental health and future possibilities to collaborate as a free spirit. In one of the letter i regretted that i did not : ‘appreciating the distance between us. Same city, different contexts, different bodies.’ prior to this experimental process.
i got trapped in the process:’there is no start nor ends just complexity’
Can setting up new collaborations be taken lightly or ahistorically? My current self would reply with the negative to this question. Power forces have been neglected in this experimentation. My only desire was to stop worrying, stop caring about my collaborator, stop the guilt of not caring as i should, just stop. Stop, observe, and learn from the unfertile ground from which we started and from which we did not manage to grow a healthy exchange.
That went wrong because that was wrong from the beginning. Consent checklist, management of expectations, and regular checking that the other part does understand your struggles, needs, and claims are essential for me even more so now.
This experience has furthered my understanding of myself, reasserted the importance of informed consent when collaborating and highlighted my limited capacity to expand emotional labour here and now. Which is a shame but it is also the ugly truth of what it is. Reflecting on the process and gathering some thoughts has proved to be helpful to start to repair and look at this scar right in the flesh so far. i take away my need to say no without solely pondering the validity of my need on consensus to be able to stand still. i use my practice as a liberating force, i understand better that there are deviations that i should not take if they do not bring joy.
i dis-placed one of my hair jar at T’s home during the creative process. When it came back i started to gather my strength back.
During this period of investigation we have sent threads of thought and element of practice to one another that ended up in a nonsense collection of letters and things that mismatched with each other but did narrate our impossibility to collaborate. i had extreme difficulties making peace with the imbalanced exchanges, and my refusal to self-censor. The issue was that refusing to self-censor did not help the other half of the research to feel welcome nor to find ways to play in the process.
My love goes to Talking Birds to Janet and Philippa for their kindness and never failing support and to Dr. Bharti Parmar and Janet again for gentle and transforming mentoring sessions. i am sending love to my collaborator towards whom i directed a spectrum of feelings and thanks to whom i learnt to appreciate failure and found joy and contentment in unexpected spaces and challenging times.
About me My name is Patsy Browne-Hope and I am a Birmingham based choreographer, rehearsal director and freelance lecturer. I am currently researching and developing a short dance film based on the postpartum experience.
Transition I am an ex-professional dancer who toured nationally and internationally with UK based companies and decided to step away from the profession in 2015 to start a family. Having my children and a break from the industry was like pressing a huge reset button. There wasn’t much time to really think about dance at depth during this time but to be honest, this was welcomed. We started a family knowing I wasn’t entirely certain where I would end up work wise on the other side and I found this an exciting prospect.
As it turned out (2 children later) my passion for movement and dance had not dimmed – I had just felt stifled creatively and needed a bit of time to lead a life not so consumed by dance after 12 years of constant training and working. Before my children I was feeling exhausted by the industry, a bit lost with direction and a bit low on self-esteem. After having my sons I gained perspective, cared less about what people thought and once sleep became a ‘thing’ again I felt ready to start trying to make sense of the world through my craft… I decided my first stop with this would be ‘Postpartum ‘…..
‘PostPartum’ is a short dance and movement film with original music that intends to highlight, celebrate and normalise the postpartum experience which sadly can be tainted by huge societal pressures. Both pregnancy and early motherhood had unexpected surprises for me. Strangers shared unwanted opinions on my body shape and I regularly heard ‘Mom shaming’. Comments on how a woman was raising her baby, when they chose to start a family, opinions on how much she works or doesn’t work, how they fed, how they slept. Nothing seemed to be off limits.
As new mothers we can find ourselves spending hours on end with a screaming baby, a body that doesn’t feel like our own and, thanks to raging hormones, a mind we don’t recognise. We should probably ask ourselves if the intense scrutiny of mothers is really all that necessary…
Why My desire is to create some compassion through film; at a time when a woman feels most vulnerable, we hit her hardest with our attitudes and judgements.
I want to create something where new mothers feel a little less alone and a little more understood. How do so many first time Moms not know about all the bleeding, the colic, the mastitis, the intense sleep deprivation and the detriment this can have to her mental health, the loss of self and the knowing that eventually, you somehow manage to work it out.
Perhaps if they were armed with some knowledge, championing and solidarity they would cope a little better and be a little kinder towards themselves?
Talking Birds Due to the sensitive nature of the topic and my desire to work with women from the community to help research this I was looking for an opportunity to test these ideas out on a small and intimate scale.
I was thrilled to be selected for a Fledgling Residency to help explore this. As a result I was able to develop a private research group on social media and run an online community workshop led by Lindsay Jane Hunter (Therapeutic Art Practitioner). I undertook deeper research into the ideas and themes found here and was then able to collaborate with Katy Rose Bennett (Composer) and Oliver Whitehouse (Filmmaker). Dancer, Lucie Labadie, came on board to help me test and explore movement language specifically for film.
Reflections This is the first time I have been able to so closely communicate with collaborators on my own project idea. It has opened up many more questions for me and the vision I have for the work going forward which is incredibly exciting. I recently secured Arts Council funding for a larger phase of R&D into PostPartum and this development opportunity with Talking Birds has been the perfect precursor.
I am going into my ACE activity more informed about how we develop this work, how I successfully communicate my ideas to the collaborators involved, what works, what doesn’t and just how far I hope to push the visuals for the final film.
Mentoring The final part of my Talking Birds support was concluded with mentoring from Janet Vaughan. I was able to spend time discussing the process, the outcome, what I would like to do differently and most excitingly, potential life for the final film. We discussed, at length, various venue ideas including unusual and outdoor spaces as well as partners to be considered and approached for the film development. This will be hugely informative to my next planning stages and I very much look forward to updating Janet on the project life!
Have you ever thought about the concept of ‘throwing away’? Neither had I, until I had a very interesting Google chat with Dominic of Ludic Rooms (a company based right here in Coventry). The gist of the conversation came from this concept of ‘throwing away’? What does this even mean? Where does all this stuff go? Stuff just moving from one to place to another. To quote Jerry Seinfeld, ‘all things on earth only exist in different stages of becoming garbage’. I pondered this on one of my now regular walks along Coventry’s Canal path. I had not long discovered the small minority in the city who ‘magnet fish’ in the murky waters. What on earth is that, you may ask? I indeed had the same question. The man made canal, built for the purpose of transporting/exchanging goods from county to county and once functioning as an additional life line to the city, has now become somewhat of a dumping ground of antiques and lost treasures but for the most part, a passing place of plastic and takeaway boxes. This bothers, but the silver lining is Coventry’s up and coming rise and it’ll be interesting to witness the Canal’s placement in all these developments.
Having these interesting and dynamic conversations with Dominic about Coventry’s relationship with water formed a unique focal point to explore – as for the most part Coventry is pretty much land locked.
On a not so particular day, I walked out of my front door and realized that I just about walked every direction out from my front door. I then remembered the entry to the canal – bridge number five to be specific. Off I went and set off for a new adventure. It was around about midday that I realized everybody and their mother was outside using their government issued hour – so it was not so much of the solitary walk I’d envisioned, but on that given day that’s exactly what I needed. Like a radio frequency all the bars within me had gone from red then slowly orange/yellow and just like that, green. The spring in my step restored as I gazed upon the boats, whistling with birds, dodging fast paced cyclists in balletic pirouettes as if living some sort of alternate musical reality.
The feeling didn’t last too long as I approached the long and dimly lit tunnel towards Gallagher – did I mention it was long? The solitude I’d initially hoped for somehow became very apparent. Then I saw the light at the end of the tunnel and kept moving. I began to think back about how I discovered the Canal, it was about two years after we’d moved to the city. It’s an easy miss but there’s a life force of its own that runs underneath the city. Back then the waters were clean-ish (well there wasn’t as much rubbish everywhere). Though this first walk was initially relaxing but the rubbish was always drifting in the corner of my mind.
A few months later, my sister and I took a walk in the opposite direction on a sunny day. The clear blue sky reflecting in the man-made waters, ducks in a row flowing in a steady stream and somehow coinciding with the piles of takeaway boxes, plastic bottles, foil paper and blue off licence bags.
One object in particular called out to me the most and I thought it’d be really interesting to explore the Canal for my Talking Birds residency. Particularly the scattered blue bags from off licence shops and Coventry market that have somehow found their way to waters. Blue in association with water usually represents serenity but the murky waters of the Canal were anything but, as the blue drifting around posed a looming threat for all the natural creatures trying to cohabit with the trash in this space.
Walking along and also noticing the reflections and shadows cast in the water inspired me to further explore the Canal’s essence.
Though scenic for the most part and providing a sense of ease and solace with a gentle movement of current, every so often that is disturbed by litter. Beer bottles, takeaway boxes and strikingly blue off- licence plastic bags (which I found particularly interesting as blue is Coventry’s color and often associated with water.) I explored this further – particularly in how the nature of the canal has adapted to this.
The materials used to create the puppet were a blue off licence bags with a plastic water bottle (magnet) fished from the water to create the bodice, synched in with the cuff of a Culture Coventry uniform.
I then painted a background of hues on foil paper that feature a silhouetted crowd representative of the people of Coventry.
To add to the final layer of the piece- I used a blue marker to draw some of what Coventry is best known for, for example-: the statue of Frank Whittle, the logo for Coventry FC, Lady Godiva’s statue and an Outline of the Coventry Cathedral.
It was crucial to use materials that would cope with being submerged and not affected by the water- much like the litter found in the Canal.
Final projections
Filmed with a highlighted plastic bottle lens cap to create a filtered effect whilst in a way symbolically filtering Canal waters and revealing the beauty of the city. I hope to further explore this project with the help of the amazing Talking Birds company with the first flight residency and collaborating with Ludic Rooms. My aim is to help clean the canal, magnet fish and create sculptures from what I find in the water and rebuild the art trail. Time to to unclog our cities vessel and clean up the Canal!
“There is just wonder right in front of us, and we don’t spend enough time thinking about it.” — Michael Pollan
My artistic practice heavily involves the exploration of shadows, reflections and silhouettes. I’ve always been draw to these elements because that is the only way we can physically view ourselves. On a bright sunny day your shadowed figure mirrors your movements in synchronicity and is always right behind you. When you look at yourself in the mirror it is merely a reflection of you but somehow we’ve become accustomed to how we view ourselves this way.
As Coventry is formed of different energies, cultures and communities – I began to view the city more like a body and how the canal is a vessel. I began to value its importance and need for it. Spending a lot time around the canal has made me become consciously aware of its unconscious clogging. The level of plastic is suffocating to the environment. To detail my process: I knew I was searching for a solution and there were all these pieces of the puzzle hovering in the air, waiting to be put together. The canal is forgotten. The Art trail is abandoned. Almost as if the pieces of it were drowned in the water.
On a now regular walk along the canal path- I took my scooper and reusable bag and began my first round of magnet fishing. I picked up a lot of treasure – a blue off license bag, a plastic water bottle, foil paper, cling film and many other items but these in particular are the ones I decided to use.
Initially I had aimed to show reflections of the canal on iconic structures in Coventry (and I still might) in hopes of commenting on how, as ‘the body’ of Coventry, we view the city. I then came up with the idea of drawing iconic landmarks and statues of Coventry on cling film as I’d seen a lot of its scrunched presence surrounding the waters. I took a liking to the transparency of it but when I tested the sketches in the water, I realized that it was mainly the base of my tub that was bringing out these images. The practicality of it became unfeasible at this stage because one wouldn’t be able to see the projected images.
It was around about this time the foil paper stuck out to me, I began to think about how this would provide a perfect foreshadowing to the sketches of cling film. I thought about just having the sketches on foil paper and decided against it as the floating, threatening motion of the plastic in water differed from any other material I had found.
What can we do to make the city more ‘green’? In Coventry’s case, it’s more like, what can we do to make the city more ‘blue’? Blue like the sky or water. Blue represents clarity, stability and tranquility. In a city full of wheels and fast motion, the canal represents a break away for its residents or a moment of pause for the locals.
The lens I created from blue and pink highlighters and the bottom of a water bottle helped create the filter used in the final projection. The video itself metaphorically symbolizes the filtration of the waters whilst the sculpture, sketches and foil papered backgrounds represent the sources of materials that can be used to recreate the art trail.
When I first started this projected I’d hoped to run a lot of the tests by the canal but the sun set way late as it was still summertime then. My only other choice was to test these images in my tub – which in a sense follows suit with the man-made essence of the canal. Granted I didn’t have to adjust myself as I would have, testing outdoors but I rather enjoyed the solitary experience of forming my findings of what I had discovered from Coventry’s vessel.
[Sinead Brady reflects on her remote Nest Residency]
From my home in the UK, I recently collaborated with Berlin based theatre maker Caroline Galvis and Dublin based theatre maker Katie O’Byrne in a ‘Hatching’ Remote Nest Residency to explore the theme of home. Caro, Katie and I met while studying an MA in Barcelona. We found a common interest in reshaping and reframing our collective history and formed international Rule of Three Collective to create theatre that celebrates togetherness.
Before the pandemic, whilst Katie and I were visiting Caro in Berlin, we began questioning what home means to us. Since then we have had lots of time to think about our surroundings in lockdown in three different cities. Whilst working from home, we have each been adapting to physical and political changes on a private, local and global level. This has led us to pay more attention to our own rituals and routines and question our delineations of space: What do we consider home? Why does home exist within these parameters? What is our relationship to our home, the planet? Having started previous creative processes by writing together, we decided that this time we wanted to try to begin from a visual perspective.
At the start of the residency we had an incredibly stimulating mentoring session with Janet from Talking Birds, which helped us consider how to approach the process visually. We were inspired to draw floor plans of our houses and maps of our local areas with places which were important to us. We took each other on virtual tours of our homes and neighbourhoods. Along our routes, alternating who would lead the way, we found similarities but also many differences.
We then began to explore our ‘home rituals’ through movement and were interrupted by all of the unpredictable things that can happen when working from home such as wardrobe doors flying open when jumping on old, creaky floorboards and little neighbours determined to finish their beginner’s level recorder practice.
We ended up paying a lot of attention to the sounds in and around our houses, comparing the different bird song we wake up to… do seagulls fighting outside your bedroom window count as bird song? Another theme which emerged in our mentoring session was the idea of building and destroying a home or the contents of a home. Experimenting with this idea fascinated us – it was tricky to explore from a distance, but it is something we plan to look at when we are physically together.
The Remote Nest Residency helped us carve out space and time and provided us with the support to come together to experiment and create. The fact that we were given no specific deadline or end product goal was invaluable and really encouraged us to keep on exploring, sharing thoughts and working in ways we would not have felt as free to do otherwise. The residency has enabled us to reconnect and refocus. We have found new ways of working together at a distance, which will have a great impact on our creative process when we are able to be physically together again.
**If you are an artist based in or near Coventry and you have an idea you’d like to explore, please consider applying to our Nest Residency Programme.**
For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with space! Although not so much in the way that you might expect from an autistic person; I have very little interest in the science of it all. I don’t know much about nebulae (I had to google for the plural), or space travel, or the names of any stars beyond our own. But my artist’s brain has always loved the *idea* of space. I like how big it is. The incredible potential of infinite planets! The possibility of aliens! And how very small and insignificant that makes our Earth.
When I was 15, my interest in space was thrown into starker clarity when I received a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. The diagnosis itself was unsurprising. I’d always moved through the world in my own strange way, and by the time I was referred for diagnostic assessment, I was thoroughly alienated from my peer group. I already knew that I was different, and, more problematically, all the other kids knew too. But what did surprise me was how my diagnosis made me feel. Suddenly I was able to understand myself. It was like someone had turned on the lights. When I looked back over my life, for the first time, everything made sense. One of the many things I came to learn about myself was why I was so obsessed with the idea of other worlds. I wanted to believe in a world where I could make myself understood.
This is where Planet Alex came from. Planet Alex is a terrible novel that I wrote as a teenager in the aftermath of my diagnosis. And, thanks to my Nest Residency, it’s now a (hopefully less terrible) play!
Mainstream stories about autistic people usually have a few things in common: they’re about boys or men, they’re written by people who are not autistic themselves, and they address autism as a problem to be overcome. That’s a problem, because autism is not a monolith – the autistic community is vibrant, diverse, and thriving. I wanted to tell a story that was true to my experience of autism, which is strange and difficult, but ultimately very positive. As I grew older and moved on to other projects, I never stopped believing in the idea at the core of my terrible novel. I kept trying to find the right way to tell Alex’s story. My Nest Residency was the perfect opportunity to bring her to life.
I found out about Nest Residencies through a digital flyer on twitter, and knew right away that I wanted to apply. There was no pressure to produce anything, and the time was intended for experimentation. I didn’t need to worry about getting things wrong, so I was free to write something strange and new, and the opportunity was intended for disabled artists, so I knew that my access needs would be met.
As well as autism, I have a chronic illness called Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME). It’s a complicated condition, and how it impacts me can vary day to day. Because it’s so variable, it’s very important for me to be able to work flexibly, take regular breaks, and take time off if I need to. Talking Birds provided me with a private space to work in, where I was able to set up a makeshift bed so I could work lying down if I needed to, or even take a nap! They were also very understanding of my strange work hours, which I keep because my ME seriously disrupts my sleep and makes it very difficult for me to maintain a regular sleep pattern.
Because of the support that my Nest Residency offered, I was able to make a really solid start to Planet Alex as a play, and I have a great foundation to build on moving forward with the project. I’m really excited to find out what’s next for Alex and her alien friend, and I hope that I’m able to bring her story to as many people as possible.
Melissandre Varin reflects on her Work From Home Nest Residency:
This text and selected moving and still images are an autoethnographic account of my first art residency with Eole, 16 months old. I would not have the pretention to speak for Eole, thus I wish to highlight that articulations are mine.
I discovered about home-based Nest Residencies offered by Talking Birds during the first F13 Zoom meeting following COVID-19 lockdown. I was immersed in the image of feeling/being underwater at that time. I was partly feeling this way because I thought that I will be incapable of managing my multiple roles. I was not wrong.
Making nearby Eole (melissandre varin and Eole Varin Vincent April- May 2020)
I self-define as a Black queer artist-researcher PhD student doing Practice As Research while mothering 16 months old Eole. There is no strict order nor hierarchies to my roles, except that I am always other than a mother while caring 24/7 for Eole. COVID-19 lockdown forced me/us to act upon burning issues from the inside.
I re(-)member how it felt growing up both as a witness and a recipient of domestic violence – behind closed doors. Being/Feeling under the water I had to work around traumatic memories challenging the reasons why I would spend money I do not have in day care to maintain a distance between Eole and I or as I used to disguise it “to make sure that they have social interactions with other little ones”. I had to unpack the limitations of Eole’s and I’s mothering relationship, we played, with it during our residency. I ended up having a significant transformation of what I consider work, and how I perform, and I value it.
The experience of making nearby Eole was intense for the least. Eole and I were, in our own ways, challenging and articulating counter-hegemonic ways of holding conversations in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s terms (2012). In doing so we were also (re)valuing the labour it takes to breath, be, perform, together, as I distanced myself from reading (except children’s stories) and writing (ethnograffiti-interruption) – weaving embodied dialogues instead.
In this experimental approach to making nearby Eole, I facilitated ways for us to archive our work beyond our embodied memories. I took still and moving images alternatively with a smartphone or an old home digital camera as they were both sitting there, part of our home.
Early afternoon with Eole or late at night with Jb, my partner, we collected the remaining of our everyday performances at home gathered in ritualistic balayage (sweeping) followed by a jarring-process. We used a broom, a stainless dustpan and empty jars that were part of our home. This process brought me back to a master’s dissertation I wrote using a vibrant materialist approach when I was being trained in Environment and Sustainable Development. I have never undertaken paid work in this field but always felt that this baggage followed me in many ways. Here is another manifestation of it as Eole was leading the way in allowing me to lay down and critically observe the details of our living space and by extension of our relationships in/to the space.
Home was not the ultimate location of domesticity. I reduced its potential, as I (ab)used of this space attempting to domesticate it in order to construct a place where I finally belong. Divides between being with Eole in private and working in public were the heritage of a colonial/ capitalist/ white/ heteronormative/ patriarchal delimitations of my (im)possibilities. One of the roots of my complicity in partaking in this divide was my attempt to escape from what happened behind closed door during my childhood and still reproduce itself when I close my eyes.
My biggest challenge has been to have proper time to read and write. However, the fact that Eole have repeatedly negated me time to read academic books and articles gave us the opportunity to be attentive and focus on senses that I had underestimated in my artistic research. We sat together apparently doing nothing as we deepened our listening practice, listening to birds as spring unveiled, and we looked at each other. It can be framed as a political intervention into my PhD research journey as Jane Bacon write about her sitting practice (2010).
I noted that we share stories some of which have not yet been told but make us the different beings that we are. After Jenny Odell’s How to do nothing (2019), another book which I did not manage to read during the residency, but an online audio-visual presentation that Eole and I listened to, my practice is not so much embedded in a modernist idea of making but of finding. During this precious time, making nearby Eole, I found ways to take time and make space for us to be.
“I collect words from others’ mouth, fingers, and bodily performances. I re-call my present from observing my body and contemplating the most beautiful creation of mine/theirs be their own assemblages of us/them/its. I lay my body down and occupy space that I have had the privilege to imagine, to walk in, and I interrogate those who created them against marginalised others/us I ask – what if life did not have to be so complicated – for us too?
I thank you Eole for reminding me that there is more to life than throwing ‘garbage’ away by picking up, being amazed, paying your respect to the smallest, putting ‘dirt’ into your mouth, and protesting in front of me. What if I/They was/were wrong to forbid you/us to be, what if I had to learn from you to reconnect to our story, to the environment?” (nap time autoethnographic note, time: 11.23 date: 16/04/2020 location: CV56GQ)
Closely collaborating with Eole we worked around practice/notions of maintenance after performance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, in-betweenness both from Homi Bhabha and from Fleur Summers, and Angela Clark (2015) and deviant (Charles Esche 2011) mothering. My practice has been politically strengthened, gradually gained in gentleness and cracked into fluidity. Eole and I have started to pave routes for us to challenge gender norms as I walked/ran shirtless as a local urban intervention inside and outside during our daily physical exercises. We have contested monolithic discourse around figures of mother and on children inspired by Haircuts by children by Toronto-based Mammalian Diving Reflex. I have devised performances making visible gendered-racialised labours to which Eole added an extra layer of complexity https://vimeo.com/408973998.
We have immersed ourselves in flour and earth, queering conventional use of these materials to interrogate what life happening within four walls is ultimately about, drawing on racial, gendered, classist charges for a Black femme mothering a mixed-race being.
Documentation of “Of flour and Earth” (melissandre varin and Eole Varin Vincent, 2020)
We have performed for smartphone and cameras and for one another impatient to open the doors of this space to others when it is safe to do so. Eole and I spent a certain amount of time singing/screaming, laughing/crying, being as never before, and it seems appropriate to add that none of us have been hurt in the process.
I am extremely grateful for Talking Birds for supporting this deepening in my/our practice at the fictious interstices of public/private divides. Eole and I lived fully every moment of our first collaborative art-residency.
Sharing the love (chronologically):
Spivak, G. 2012, “Who Claims Alterity”, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p. 57.
Bacon, J . (2010) Sitting/Walking/Practice: Reflections on a Woman’s creative process, Gender forum, an internet journal for gender studies, Gender and performance. Theatre/ Dance/ Technology, Edited by Prof. Dr. Beate Neumeier
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York and London: Routledge.
Summers, Fleur and Angela Clarke. 2015. “In-Betweenness: Being Mother, Academic and Artist.” Journal of Family Studies 21(3):235–47.
Esche, C. 2011, “The Deviant Art Institution”, in C. Esche et al. (eds), Performing The Institution, vol. 1, Kunsthalle Lissabon, ATLAS Projectos, Lisbon.
Holert,
Emily Woodruff reflects on her Work From Home Nest Residency:
My artistic practice had always been somewhat loosely defined, dabbling in acting, performance art, spoken word and music. After receiving an ASD diagnosis in my late-20s I found new ways of working. I developed a better understanding of how I process information, allowing me to start the transition from bedroom-headspace-artist, brimming with ideas but lacking the navigation system to see any through to completion, to an early career artist with an active practice.
When I saw Talking Bird’s Nest Residency programme it seemed like the perfect first step into a more professional practice. The knowledge that the Talking Birds team regularly work with and offer mentorship to disabled artists gave me a sense of freedom and confidence in approaching them. Not only would it give me the opportunity to work alongside a team well versed in the arts sector and local arts community, but I would be given the space and time to develop ideas in an environment where I knew I’d be able to communicate any additional needs I might have.
By the time the residency rolled around the world was operating in a significantly different landscape. I was given the option to postpone my residency or continue as planned on a work-from-home basis. I decided to focus on an alternative project I had been developing in order to allow me to get the most out of my time with Talking Birds, whilst working at a distance and in the smaller space of my spare room, and pushed on.
I’ve always been intrigued by biology and how our anatomy plays a role in how people see their own role in the world. This has developed into bigger and more cohesive ideas about the dance between corporeal reality and our inner narratives. How do our bodies inform our sense of self and shape our identity? With neurodivergence salient in my mind I began to think about how experiencing the world through a ‘different’ neurotype might also hold its own geography for how an individual experiences their identity and how the world reacts to their bodily (neurological) configuration. It had become increasingly clear to me that there was a phenomenon to be further explored in relation to receiving a late-in-life diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorders and shifts in an individual’s identity. I wanted to explore people’s experiences of this and identify key patterns or changes that seemed consistent throughout these experiences. In doing so I hoped to gather the qualitative and emotional data required to produce an artistic response.
The mentorship I received was invaluable. The advice encouraged me to approach my time management with a view for longevity. This is something I’ve often struggled with, so to have someone to check in with now and then really helped me to stay on course. I started to think about how to incorporate a dialogue that extends beyond the final display of a piece of artwork into the development phase of a project.
With this in mind (and having found that questionnaires often don’t translate well for neurodiverse individuals), I started to have conversations! I put out a call online and directed it towards the neurodivergent community. Fortunately I already had a few contacts who were happy to have a discussion with me and explore their own experiences of late-diagnosis of autism. I dipped into artist Rees Finlay’s book ‘Reaffirmation: Coming to terms with an autism diagnosis’, (title says it all really) and had a great extensive call with Rees to really dig into these experiences. I also discovered the video performance by artist Kimberly Gerry-Tucker (with credit to her son Silas for filming and producing the work), Mime Project: Masking. The piece deals with autistic masking and finding acceptance, and one line really stood out to me, a thread that runs through many of the conversations I’ve been having; “I paint the squelch of Broken Sounds and TRIBE, upon my face”.
TRIBE! A word that kept seeming to float to the top of these conversations, along with a sense of transformation in finally ‘finding your tribe’. I started to further explore these patterns.
I found L.A Paul’s book ‘Transformative Experience’ and started to delve into the nature of significant shifts in identity, or, transformation. In one passage Paul discusses how some members of the Deaf community do not support the use of cochlear implants in young children. Some feel the implants alter the sensory landscape that the child was born with and prevent the child from truly experiencing the world as a Deaf individual, a unique way of being in the world that allows shared knowledge and experience as a member of the Deaf community. I considered how this distinct sensory configuration for perceiving the world, and the value that is found in knowing others have this experience too, is akin to being neurodiverse. Just as “a deaf child constructs her world in a different way, perhaps radically so”, so do ASD individuals. Therefore, just as “participating in this unique and valuable community and culture gives a deaf person a unique and intrinsically valuable experience and fosters a community that provides support for a historically oppressed segment of society”, being able to access the knowledge that you are neurodiverse may provide similar experiences to such individuals. TRIBE!
After reading of published works that deal with the subject matter and some rich conversations about first-hand experiences I began to see several phrases/key concepts arising: tribe, grief, transformation, self-acceptance, revelatory experience and vindication.
I knew I wanted to capture these ideas in a visual way – neurodiverse individuals are often very visual thinkers and communicators, sometimes better able to capture emotionally complex responses in swashes of colour than structured sentences. I also wanted my depictions of these key concepts to both connect to the real-life human experiences I’d been exploring, whilst being relatively ‘faceless’. These are almost archetypal journeys that can be accessed through a wide array of human experiences, and I wanted a wide array of experiences to be able to be brought to the table by the viewer.
As such I started to experiment with abstract portraiture, capturing gesture and emotion, not ‘pinning down’ too many distinct facial features:
I also spent some time researching colour psychology. I drew inspiration from scientific data on the effects different wavelengths can have on the brain, historical artistic uses and regional/cultural associations to play with colour to create different sensations. For example, an overabundance of yellow can give a sense of sparseness, isolation and distance from society; it’s often been used to depict outcast figures. Green is often
considered to imbue a sense of peace and a higher preference for it is seen in ASD boys compared to ‘typically developing’ boys, it’s speculated for its calming wavelength.
With my mentor’s advice about thinking ahead ringing in my ears I put together a preliminary plan as to how I could produce the response, including potential funding sources and how the work might eventually be displayed.
After playing with some quotes I’d selected from my research by adding breaks in the sentence to create alternative or multiple interpretations, I produced a ‘sample’ that incorporated the abstract portraiture and colour techniques I’d been developing.
I spent a lot of time during my residency contemplating my own artistic practice, how I operate, what works well and what changes could benefit me. I had time and ‘space’ to explore and play with techniques I may otherwise have struggled to carve out the time for. Through this reflection and my mentor’s guidance I am also taking away a very clear understanding. Dialogue with the world and potential viewer is an inherent part of the making process, not a final event.
However, I’m also taking away a sense that there is still a hegemonic narrative, a script, for how these conversations should be conducted. These scripts won’t work for everyone. Some may deal with cognitive overload in face-to-face coffee mornings that doesn’t allow for authentic expression to take place. Some may be non-verbal. Some may not be able to physically access the designated space. There are many ways of communicating that are as rich and ‘on par’ as a spoken engagement that may not be accurately translated into language. When thinking about the experience of distinct neurological configurations, L.A Paul suggests it may “…give them a unique and untranslatable, hypervisual cognitive style…”
As access to the ‘art world’ is changing, we need to reconsider alternative modes of being, processing information and constructing dialogues to provide that access.
I’d like to thank Talking Birds for the opportunity and support, and my mentor for crucial and enlightening conversations!
Jarring (melissandre varin and Eole Varin Vincent, 2020 + LaRi witnessing)
Documentation of “Of flour and Earth” (melissandre varin and Eole Varin Vincent, 2020)
Words from the Birds 