It was great to hear and in some instances see what the other
teams have been up to. The final meeting of Parallel Practices made me even
sadder that I was unable to get to the other meetings as I feel that I have
missed out on the sharing element of the process to some extent.
Anyway – it was in another great new space in London that I
had no idea existed – the Life Science Museum within the Hodgkin Building. To
get to it we walked through a labyrinth of endless shelves with thousands of bottles
of unfamiliar body parts , then past the oddest folk art I have EVER seen (see
above) into a room where we sat a large table surrounded by glorious examples
of skeletal structures. I and Naomi were first up and we talked about new
tools, thinking space, open-endedness, mapping the process, creating taxonomy, although
Richard named the activity. http://www.naomimcintosh.com/
Celia was great and the idea of carving out space for
reflection and thus her revelation that at the core of her work was the idea of
care was beautiful. She spoke very movingly about respect and responsibility
around the bodies she had worked around. http://celiapym.com/
Karina was very focused like her project and she spoke
eloquently about the role of the machine with and verses the hand, the value of
what she was doing as a maker and how stitch and textiles or at least
non-robotic materials could become a part of robotics ‘teaching’. I love the
precision of how she uses language, supporting the finding of the right word
after my questioning of Celia’s comment about the ‘ordinariness’ of her
practice, rather than its extraordinariness in the world of the throwaway. http://www.karinathompson.co.uk/
Tamsin had her workbench nearby and was able to show us all
sorts of wonderfulness; exploding ceramics infested with calcium, crystal
growth on ‘bones’ and a see-though blue mouse. Listening to her and Richard
talk about providing access to the space was empowering. http://www.vanessendesign.com/
There were so many areas where we overlapped – although it
was more of a constellation of possibilities - I could have listened all day.
Some notes I made which I have to think about – it opened a door to what I
don’t know, technology adding a new dimension, anatomy as an act, the
supervised machine, sometimes I can sometimes I can’t, the idea - no the
feeling of ownership, enabling others to rethink what it is that they do, I’m never
going to know what I mean, negotiating a re framing of practice.
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