electric angel /design for life

live, last night, sold out!

thursday evening, as a dreary, misting of dank weather engulfs the town, a small gathering of surfers, designers, poets and artists got together for the second of our ‘tiny poetry’ gigs at the electric angel gallery – tonight was the turn of landscape poet mark dickinson.

mark’s work is intrinsically linked with his surroundings, his time spent in the natural environment, be it fishing or surfing. he says more important to his poetry than these activities is walking. his great knowledge of natural environments, geology, history and words create orchestral poems that build and ebb and flow as if a part of the landscape themselves. mark read from a decades worth of work ending with the epic trods which follow.

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our next poet, john clarke, attended (who you can see next thursday, 26th august), along with local filmmaker ollie banks, who works with mark on many surfing related projects, and james koppert, another of our poets who’ll be performing on thursday 9th september.

two weeks in to our tiny poetry gigs and they seem to be going down very well indeed.

culture and wellbeing

we’re pleased to announce the launch of a new website: www.cultureandwellbeing.org.uk

this new site, commissioned by the uk’s major arts and health organisations has positioned itself as the definitive uk arts and health website with case studies, resources and a directory of practitioners. which reminds me, we must add ourselves due to work such as the hull and york medical school artwork and our current lifts project with rachel welford in york hospital.

the culture and wellbeing website is a collaboration with ross kendall who built all the functionality. tree reflections courtesy of a sunny day.

catch up

if you don’t follow us on twitter [links to the right of this article] there could be some news you’ve missed out on. so here’s a quick round up before we get back to showing you what we’ve been working on…

it’s our first ‘tiny poetry‘ night this evening. one ticket left at the time of writing.

adrian has been accepted on the ‘leadership unleashed‘ cultural leadership programme and can be spotted in london, manchester, leeds and elsewhere over the next six months being all dynamic, like. or skulking in corner depending on quality of rail travel and quantity of fizzy drinks consumed.

he’s also psyching up for a sideline doing more public speaking.

james has a new surfboard and is very pleased with it. less so with the lack of waves right now.

and he’s been doing a lot more photography.

creative coast received funding to deliver a civic pride public art scheme teaming local residents with poets, designers and artists to transform empty shops in the town (more on that one soon).

CHART Scarborough maps are out and about the place and getting some great feedback. you can pick them up from the library, art gallery, ymca theatre, woodend creative workspace and from the sjt as soon as we’ve assembled another stand, plus from all the independent galleries.

we finished designing those school uniforms we tweeted about – will blog that soon.

we had this idea for an art trail in crescent gardens, floated it around, people liked it, and it’s happening! more on that soon too. if you’re a local artist and haven’t heard about it – get in touch NOW! deadline is tomorrow.

we’re currently working with scarborough museums trust, the ferens gallery in hull, beverley literature festival, scarborough borough council, coastival and york nhs.

oh, and there’s other stuff such as…
james and jenny are getting married in november.
adrian and rebecca are expecting a baby in november.
gonna be a busy month, that one.

[photo by james - from the CHART Scarborough project]

york press business awards

we’re delighted to have been selected as finalists in the york press business awards 2010 in the ‘best employer and education link’ category.

the other two finalists are harrogate & district nhs foundation trust and firmenich uk ltd of thirsk. we’re in fairly hefty company alongside a business with 53 employees and an organisation with 2300, but if nothing else i hope our nomination shows that small businesses can engage with education too and that it’s essential for the creative industries (where just about everyone is a small business) that they do.

you can read the york press article on us here. the award ceremony when the winner will be announced is on november 18th at york racecourse.

tiny poetry

what’s the point of having space if you’re not going to use it? ok, so we only have a tiny little space but let’s use it anyway. so as seen as our current exhibition is all on the walls (literally – see here) we thought it would be fun to use the gallery floorspace for some poetry gigs while it was on. there’s the loose theme of the sea/surf/coast to tie in with the exhibition, but we’ve told the poets ‘do what you want’ and we can’t wait to hear what they do.

for full details download a flyer here.

pyschogeography, postcards and place

to accompany the production of the CHART Scarborough map and to follow the success of the workshops with local residents which amongst other things, sought to identify the essence of scarborough, a postcard project was launched. this teamed local residents – a mix of teenagers and older adults – with a poet and photographer to talk about and photograph the places that had resonance for them.

photographer tony bartholomew took the final photos used on the postcards and john w clarke shaped the verbal and written material into prose and scratch-poems for the rear of the cards relating to that place. some poignant, some playful, the wordplay also extends to the minutiae of text often seen on postcards such as the publisher – we designed logos for some. each is addressed as if travelling to the place but using ‘mind map’ directions, not a conventional address. we designed each card in a slightly different style based on postcards we randomly found, the ‘postmark’ and ‘stamp’ linking them into a set and to the map.

the cards are scattered around public buildings and cultural venues in Scarborough, there are 12 to collect if you fancy hunting them down. the 12th will give you the CHART Scarborough map references of the places the photos were taken so you can visit for yourself.

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more CHART

a couple more pics of the CHART Scarborough map (that’s Culture, Heritage and ART Scarborough) to show the size. it folds down to normal DL leaflet/envelope size but with the photographic side we hoped to create something that was interesting/attractive enough to be a poster too. which way up you display it is up to you – it’s designed so there is no top, bottom, left or right (although personally i’d snip off the cover before framing).

CHART Scarborough map

here’s the job that’s been consuming much of our thought and time over the last 6 months. it’s been a big project, not just in terms of time but also the thinking and research that has gone into its production.

it’s a free map intended to encourage visitors and residents explore the town from a cultural perspective. for this to work, we researched cognitive mapping theory – the idea that you can draw maps that aid people to build better mental pictures of places and thus navigate them in a more intelligent way. this works if your map can show in an instantly recognisable way, the key places and spaces that the brain uses to remember and form journeys.

as well as using workshops with residents to identify how people currently move around the town, we’ve deliberately ‘loaded’ our map with cultural landmarks to try and encourage use of those places as an aid to navigation, thus subtly changing patterns of movement in the town by those who use the map. that’s the idea anyhow – as far as we know this hasn’t been tried before. we’ve also added a few theories of our own, particularly about the use of colour in communicating sense of place.

the reverse side further encourages exploration by using a ‘map’ of photographic images (all taken in-house) that we hope will prompt exploration of a town that often suffers from predictable patterns of movement. poems by two local poets – john w clarke and kate evans – add some context and entice further.

this is stage one of the project. stage two will be an intreractive online version. for now, accompanying trails can be downloaded from the website – www.chartscarborough.com – and more are being added every week. if you would like to know more about the theory, workshops and interventions as part of this project you can also read the project’s blog there. the map itself can be picked up at venues across scarborough (or just get in touch if you’d like us to post you one).

chart scarborough launch

some photos from last night’s launch event.

it began with a visit from william smith and other notables from scarborough’s cultural heritage…

…and finished with a brilliant performance by scarborough hip-hip school.

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visuals were largely the work of our placement student, emma, created from the map artwork. we used 4 projectors to create a wall of constantly changing images.

no boundaries

we have some bad habits at electric angel. we often get so wrapped up in a project that it crosses that boundary between business and pleasure. actually, pretty much everything we do involves not knowing where that line is – that’s just what happens when you’re doing something you love for a job. and so a project that begins in the studio will quite often feature in our leisure time too. this seems to gain us respect from creatives in other disciplines and causes accountants to have fits. (but what do accountants know – if they get creative it usually ends up in time at her majesty’s pleasure.)

anyway, such it is with CHART Scarborough. we’re having to dissuade james from spending every spare hour mapping the rest of the town in microscopic detail (wait until someone pays us to do it!) and i’m on some kind of pyschogeographic tip – one of those occurrences where you’ve been doing something for a while and not realised that it had a proper name.

so here’s some links for you that i’ve come across in my internet and real world wanderings:

phantom city
the blurb: ‘phantom city uses personal digital devices to transform the city into a living museum’. my iphone says it needs a holiday in nyc to check this out. ‘other futures’ is the first such tour – allowing you to wander the city looking at buildings that never were. ace.

soundwalk
beautifully done walking tours of nyc, paris, china and elsewhere by locals for the iphone.

stephen walter
the lovely hand-drawn map art of stephen walter – i first saw his stuff on the recent couple of excellent BBC series about maps and map-making which were perfect timing for us working on CHART Scarborough.

history pin
simple idea but it’s the front page images that capture the imagination – wonder if this could be made to work just like those with google street view?

london poetry game
because in london you’re supposedly never more than 10ft from a speaker of a foreign language, ross sutherland has translated each line of a new poem into a different language. the idea being you find someone to translate a line for you. the finish poem will be assembled from every translation phoned in and broadcast at the national theatre this sunday.

coastival365
scarborough photographer tony bartholomew’s ongoing documenting of the town over the course of a year

blipfoto.com/ah2010
and evening news photographer, andrew higgins’ photoblog

the devils plantation
a story as puzzle, navigating ‘glasgow’s secret geometry’.

and here you can download my own pyschogeographic trail of scarborough, although you could use it with any map of any place really. james is currently writing a trail based on almost-disappeared wall painted signs that we’re often spotting around the town.