Category: The Impossible Constellation

SE Barnet

If the contemporary age is one where the fluid nature of singular remembrances easily overlaps with cultural memories, Barnet asks how we come to know each other, and ourselves, in this landscape. Her ambition in considering such questions lies in an exploration of new ideas concerning self-knowledge, learned knowledge and knowledge that is sponsored through seemingly unconnected narratives of place and time.

Barnet’s attention is aimed at the overlooked and obsolete aspects of daily life, often from her own and other collected reflections on personal experience. In her current project she engages with the archive of Mass Observation, the British movement begun in the early 20th century. Relying on randomness and association towards uncovering an experiential picture of the world, her work with Mass Observation employs the archive materials towards re-appropriation and détournement. The project also offers a look at an early complicit engagement with surveillance and the relationship between diaristic self-exposure and its resultant surfeit material. This is in light of our current experience of extensive private and state-run mass surveillance.

Biography

SE Barnet is an internationally exhibiting artist previously based in Los Angeles, now a Research Fellow at Birmingham City University and an Associate Lecturer at Central St. Martin’s in London. She completed her PhD at Kingston University in 2012 with the exhibition The Story of Elsewhere at the Stanley Picker Gallery. Barnet works across film, performance, and installations to create intimate visual essays on everyday pursuits. She is currently at work on a project with archival material from the British movement Mass Observation, the subject of two recent solo exhibitions at Five Years in London and of a forthcoming artist’s book published by the Everyday Press.

sebarnet.wordpress.com / www.sebarnet.net

Joanne Thomas

Crystal is designed both for concentrated listening and also for installation. One can walk in at any time and capture phrases, or simply sit and listen to the whole work. It captures an experience of listening in on the inner workings of the synchrotron. The space itself captures a sense of timelessness and the aim was to reflect this in the form of the music.

The work was commissioned and published by Diamond Light Source, composed in the electro- acoustic studios of University of Wales Bangor, with support from a research grant from the University of East London. It is a sound work composed directly from frequencies generated by the electron storage ring, a particle accelerator. It also uses binaural recording from locations inside Diamond’s experimental hall, storage ring and beamlines. The aim was to write a work reflecting both the actual content of the spectrum of the space and also the metaphorical content of the sounds.

The Diamond Synchrotron is a rich, multi-spectral sonic environment, with a cacophony of sounds generated by machines which hiss pure nitrogen, pump air from vacuum chambers and cool high-powered magnets. Most of the sounds heard in this work are those of electron injections pumped into the particle accelerator throughout the day. As an artist I listen to the micro tonalities in the streams of injections, and develop detailed micro melodies which appear and disappear not unlike the atom injections.

Biography

Jo Thomas is a London based composer who produces live and studio-based work all over Europe. Current work includes San Rocco Sound Installation, Bergamo (2014, commissioned by Contemporary Locus), and the album Sunshine over Nimbus (2014, commissioned by Scumbag Relations). She received a Qwartz nomination for her album Alpha (2011), and won the Golden Nica for Digital Music and Sound Art at Ars Electronica (2012) for Crystal: Diamond Light Source. Her work has been commissioned by Diamond Light Source, Be Open, ACE, Sound and Music, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, GRM Paris, Milton Keynes Gallery, and Sonic Arts Network, and she has presented music in venues such as Café Oto, the ICA, and Sound fjord. Jo teaches sound design, composition and music technology at the University of East London.

with guest speaker Richard Shenton of the Media Archive for Central England

Artists from the University of Lincoln, UK, have been delving deep into two historic archive collections to source inspiration for a pair of new exhibitions, which will open to the public this summer. The Tennyson Research Centre and Media Archive for Central England (MACE) have each been a catalyst for a diverse range of artworks.* The artists have been granted unique access to these valuable resources as part of a project to discover imaginative new ways of presenting historic materials.

Located on the University of Lincoln’s Brayford Pool Campus, MACE holds a 70,000 strong collection of film, tape and digital material showcasing the history of the Midlands. In 2013 it became the first UK facility of its kind to achieve the National Archive Service Accreditation. Accidents Need Not Happen is an exhibition inspired by MACE which will take place in the University of Lincoln’s newest gallery space, Project Space Plus, from Wednesday 25th June – Friday 11th July.

It will include artwork created by postgraduate students from the University of Lincoln’s MA Fine Art programme, with MA Contemporary Curatorial Practice students curating the exhibition. Artists and academics from across the University’s School of Art and Design will also present their work.

You are invited to the private view of Accidents Need Not Happen, from 6pm-7:30pm at Project Space Plus, with guest speaker Richard Shenton of the Media Archive for Central England.

*Some One Had Blunder’d, an exhibition inspired by Lincolnshire poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, runs at The Collection’s Courtyard gallery from Thursday 3rd – Saturday 26th July.