#curious2016

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OUR JOURNEY TOWARDS CURIOUS - by Amber Weerasinghe 

3RD YEAR BA (HONS) GRAPHIC DESIGN STUDENT - CENTRAL SAINT MARTINS

 It’s nearing the end of June, and all of a sudden we find ourselves eight days away from show day! As we begin our intense week of work at Sophie’s studio, there has been a palpable change of pace. Spending most days sharing audio and visuals, planning the physical elements of the show, feeding back to other groups and running off to try out the next steps, the place has developed a great buzz of creative productivity. As one of the Visual Artists taking part in the project, It’s safe to say that I am exhausted (as our Graduate Degree Show has also just opened to the public), but even more excited to be surrounded by the lovely, talented and inspiring people that have made our journey towards ‘We Astronomers’ so enjoyable thus far.

I have been teamed up with Maya Khaldi; a super talented singer with a love of Palestinian folk music. Soon after meeting my faah-bulous collaborative partner we bonded over homemade sage tea, and the mutual opinion that “zoos make us feel sad”, and realised we were well matched.

Working along the themes of time, memory and moments of poetic beauty, our collaborative work soon developed a powerfully emotive emphasis. This also led us to reflect upon the similarities in content between our two (traditionally very different) areas of practise.

Throughout our shared creative journey, we have been consistently involved in what may have previously been considered as the other person’s territory. We have strived to work together on both audio and visuals, preferring to think of the piece holistically, rather than assigning each creative to their own medium. This has worked fantastically well for us, and has led to a more organic creative process; along with some huge learning curves and a real appreciation for one another; both as professionals and as people. 

 As for our working dynamic, I find myself agreeing with the afore-mentioned; “11 Steps to a Collaboration”, as defined by Leadership Student, Kate, in her previous blogpost. Especially steps number ‘3: Woah this is awesome!’ and ‘10: Oh no! We need to rethink everything’, which Maya and I have developed the uncanny ability to ping-pong between, several times throughout a single conversation. Admittedly though, we have also developed the ability to repeatedly unstick ourselves from such cycles, which is something that we are both very grateful for. It is a rare occasion to discover a person you click with so effortlessly on a creative and personal level, and we have been fortunate enough to do just that.

Recent leaps forward in the development of our piece, and the freeing up of of our schedules, is proving for a very exciting week to come. These small breakthroughs have further ignited our passion and energy for the project. As such, I’d say that puts us solidly between stages 8 and 9 of the collaborative process, hoping that we can avoid too many more brushes with stage 10 before the week is up!

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Creative Lab: Curious - Freedom & Control, by Martins Baumanis

Creative Lab is a a dedicated experimental space within our course. It brings together a highly diverse selection of artists and lets them be in the same space for 3 hours every week. It is a place where expiration and inspiration happens at the same time – somebody expires an idea and then we all get inspired by the sheer magnitude of possibilities that 10 completely different artists can interpret each other's ideas.

 Voice, Didgeridoo, The Oud, Double bass, Percussion, Trumpet, Keyboard, Spoken word, Flute - all became just a starting point, we were moving beyond musical expression. We also put our different backgrounds to a test – rather than to stick to our guns, we were decisively open to adapt our practice and enquire deeper into it through meaningful collaboration.

 Even before the announcement of the theme for the Curious gig event on Wednesday 6 July, our group naturally gravitated towards exploring different roles and intentions when creating an artwork. Our experiments included changing our artistic roles throughout a process, following a fixed instructions. e.g. Director to Performer to Critic to Audience. We also devised different stages of improvising e.g. 4th stage would mean not listening to oneself and others, 3rd stage would mean listening only to oneself, but not changing what one plays, 2nd stage would mean listening and extracting what one likes, and 1st stage would mean listening and responding to others. This generated fruitful questions and made us aware of the subtleties and hierarchies when making an art piece.

 Step by step we narrowed our search for materials and processes and focused on the notion of freedom and control, following a prison metaphor and tried to figure out what are the crucial controlling things in performance, and how to show the contrast of freedom against it. That's all we will explain. To hear the final product of our extensive processes, we urge you to attend this year's Curious festival.

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OUR JOURNEY TOWARDS CURIOUS, Part 2 - BY RODRIGO VITERBO, MMus LEADERSHIP YEAR 1 STUDENT

Two weeks only for the big day! On the 4th of July we are presenting our pieces created over the last weeks. This has been an incredible process and a strong learning curve for all of us. In our group things are still not moving as fast as we would like. Picking from Kate’s last post, “11 Steps to A Collaboration” I find us in step 5. This can be scary from one side but from the other it makes us think more deeply about collaborative work and ways of coming together as artists from different art forms.

 As an instrumentalist I’m quite used to enter the room, have a discussion and go straight into testing things, providing sounds and notes for the group discussion. Because of how easy it is to get back to that material, by simply playing it again, I’m not so afraid of editing it or deleting if it proves not to be what’s needed. Both Nicolee, our visual artist, and Simon, the electronic musician rely on technology to create material and that technology has a set up time, choices to be made in terms of what software to use, the time to load and export material recently created. We find ourselves learning how to manage these differences in working whilst dealing with other calendars and deadlines.

 Sometimes it feels like a journey through darkness but hey, isn’t exactly that what our brief is about? Journeys, vastness, uncertainty and awe!

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OUR JOURNEY TOWARDS CURIOUS, Part 2 - BY KATE SMITH, MMus LEADERSHIP YEAR 1 STUDENT

Here we are diving into the second month of our work for the Curious Festival and the big day looms two weeks away. I’m starting to get both excited and nervous. While there is still so much to be done to realize our ideas, by now I have a good sense of the arc of the process of collaborating.

11 Steps to A Collaboration

Step 1: getting to know each other

Step 2: stumble through initial experiments

Step 3: woah ,this is awesome!

Step 4: take a break

Step 5: return, what were we even doing in the first place, who are you again?

Step 6: start to narrow focus, revisit best bits of previous work

Step 7: become overwhelmed by the pressure of creating something awesome – talk too much

Step 8: make a choice to make something

Step 9: pull together the bits – Frankenstein moment

Step 10: oh no! we need to rethink everything

Step 11: no more time for edits – perform it!

 I’d say that Taka and I have made it to Step 7 so far. As we push forward into Step 8, I can see how instrumental the past two months of experiments have been in helping me slowly test out new roles; for instance, I’ve begun working with sound editing software and composing for multiple voices. Likewise, I think Taka has enjoyed trying his hand at contributing to the sound – I’ll be using recordings of his voice in the final project! Of course, the crunch is yet to come, and surely our collaboration as well as our individual mettle will be tested. Regardless, at this point I’m just excited to start committing to our choices and looking forward to seeing our vision come to life!

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OUR JOURNEY TOWARDS CURIOUS - BY RODRIGO VITERBO, MMus LEADERSHIP YEAR 1 STUDENT

Musicians, Visual Artists, Electronic Music and Composers. What an interesting mixture of crafts and experiences. This has been very present in this years’ edition of Curious.

We share a brief, we share the expectation for the Festival and we share that common goal, but we are all so different and diverse. We all have different ways of working and approaching work and that has been one of the main areas of learning in this collaboration.

How do we start creative work in a group formed by an electronic musician, a visual artist and a didgeridoo player? How relevant is it to share a specific sound of the didgeridoo and see how the visuals respond to that and how the sound manipulation interacts with everything?

There is also a different pace of material development, we find ourselves giving more time to the material to develop, almost as if we could play with it for more time. 30 seconds of video turn into 3 minutes of sound experimentation and it feels rewarding to be immersed in this process.

There is still a lot to go and to happen! We look forward to seeing where this is all going to take us...