AND YOU WERE WONDERFUL, ON STAGE

A few weeks ago I participated in a workshop for this forthcoming performance, at Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge.

The work is currently being performed in New York and I hope to join the chorus for the London edition at the Tate in the new year.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

PERFORMA 13

CALLY SPOONER
AND YOU WERE WONDERFUL, ON STAGE

---

Friday, November 8, 6:30 pm and 8:30 pm
Saturday, November 9, 6:30 pm and 8:30 pm
Sunday, November 10, 6:30 pm

National Academy Museum, New York

---

---

MOTINTERNATIONAL London and Brussels are delighted to announce Cally Spooner's most ambitious production to date: "And You Were Wonderful, On Stage", a new Musical presented by Performa 13, in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Tate Modern, London.

"And You Were Wonderful, On Stage" is a musical for an a cappella Chorus Line, relocated from the margins of the musical form, to take on a splintered lead role.

Spooner draws on the genre of the Broadway Musical to articulate the constructed mechanics of behaviour and a loss of live delivery in contemporary life. Teetering between moments of comedy and tragedy, the production is structured as a series of prologues and overtures, as the Chorus Line ruminate on fallen idols and dashed dreams, channelling distorted media feeds from current affairs. Prominent figures who have stumbled at a moment of liveness or authenticity, appear abstracted and episodically; Beyonce’s lip-syncing at Obama’s inauguration, Lance Armstrong’s doping scandal and public apology, and more besides, become dramatic public moments of standardization or mechanisation. Spooner sets up an interplay between the elegant, authoritative permanence of the National Academy’s architecture, and the ephemeral movement of songs, bodies, and conversations, asking ‘what it takes’ to become, and remain, visible. As the performance continues, the light, gossipy phrases become infected by an emerging language of “high performance” PR speak, which reaches toward sameness and automation, leading the performance to its climactic, spectacular finale.

"And You Were Wonderful, On Stage" is a Performa Premiere, curated by Charles Aubin and Laura McLean-Ferris.

The project is evolving and itinerant, with musical composition by Peter Joslyn and a core ensemble of singers who have been collectively developing the piece with the artist. The preliminary structure was commissioned and produced by the Stedelijk Museum, curated by Annie Godfrey Larmon with Hendrik Folkerts, and will evolve at and tour to Tate Modern in January 2014.

With very special thanks to Annie Godfrey Larmon and Wysing Arts Centre.

Supported by MOTINTERNATIONAL

---

Cally Spooner (1983; Ascot, UK) is an artist based in London.

Using theory and philosophers as alibis to help her write, and casts of arguing characters to help her perform, she produces plotless novellas, disjunctive theatre plays, looping monologues and musical arrangements to stage the movement and behavior of speech.

Spooner’s productions have been presented at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunsthal Charlottenburg, Copenhagen; KW Institute, Berlin; Wysing Art Centre, UK; Jeu De Paume, Paris; Serpentine Gallery, London. She is represented by MOTINTERNATIONAL

---

Work in Progress

"Imperial college has become a semipermeable location where students are also operating as cells within a culture to model possibilities for bioengineering humans to tackle global environmental issues. The project distorts perspective on current and historical scientific philosophies by hijacking reality and manipulating notions of scale through designed ephemera and a semi-fictional walking tour of the 287 foot tall Queen’s Tower at the centre of Imperial's Campus."

Dissertation: DONE

Title - Scalar Ways of Seeing: Perspectives on Perspective.

Inspired by Charles and Ray Eames' Powers of Ten I was interested in how advances in technology have given us new ways of seeing ourselves for example the invention of flight allowed us to see our cities from above for the first time and spaceflight brought with it images of the whole earth. Also, the significance of vertical perspective and viewing things at different scales. I analysed the new types of media that came with these new technologies and how they reflected on socio-political issues of their time. I concluded by debating whether currently we have focused our attention on a microscopic perspective and all of our investigations into events on a micro scale e.g nanotechnology, human behaviour at a neuro level and synthetic biology are in a bid to make them more applicable to things on a human scale.

Project: Post-Apocolympics

Project Blog: http://www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/fictional-sports/
Project Brief: http://www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/fictional-sports/?page_id=2

Project launch with sports ethicist Dr Andy Miah and sports psychologist Dr Katie Dray.
Scenario building and quick film making workshop with Charlotte Jarvis and J Paul Neeley.
Noam took us to the Design Museum to see the new 'Designed to Win' Exhibition and meet the curator Alex Newsom.
Nina took us to see the post-Olympic site, Olympic Legacy, her project Abbey Gardens and meet DI alumni Oliver from We Made That at their newly design playground in East London.

My Project -
Games models are becoming more embedded in our everyday lives.
The Quantified Self community monitor and record their behaviours and actions in a bid understand themselves better and improve things such as sleep, eating habits and healthy living, through incentive and reward based behavioural models. As a result some of their decisions and actions are dictated via perceived patterns in the data they collect on themselves to try and reach goals they set. What if people start to analyse their relationships with family, friends and colleagues in a bid to try and understand themselves better or improve / alter / manipulate relationships with others? What effect will this have on physical interactions with others?

Cally Festival, 16th September, Preparations

We held a pinhole photography workshop by Stephanie Rose Wood at a local holiday club.

We had a drop-in workshop day at the West Library for people to stop by and create decorations for the festival. (Photos by Nadine Harbarth)

And currently we are having a mural of some parrots painted by Louis on Tilloch Street

The Cally Festival is this Sunday, 16th, Caledonian Road, N1, 12-6pm.

Tour of Design Interactions at Show RCA 2012 with Tony Dunne

From Dezeen - http://www.dezeen.com/2012/06/25/movie-tour-of-design-interactions-at-show-rca-2012-with-tony-dunne/

Production City

- The city as a production line, expressed through abstracted and manipulated collected sound. Research from The Mass Ornament project. 

Visited: Heatherwick Exhibition @ V&A

The model I helped to make is now on show at the V&A. See the model and Thomas explaining the project above.

Exhibition information - http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/heatherwick-studio/

Watch a video about the studio here - http://vimeo.com/43975572

Hearing Thomas talk about the Christmas card project is also worth watching -

The Cally Festival 2011 Video

See a penny pick it up

then all day you'll have good luck.

It exists as metal, paper, plastic or sometimes just a number. It determines where you live. Influences who you socialise with. Gets you up for work in the morning and preoccupies thoughts as you fall asleep. Sometimes it has come and gone before you even notice. Money is stitched into the fabric of almost every aspect of our lives.

This penny is intended to be given away rather than spent. Making people consider where it has come from, where it will go and question our current relationship and behaviours with money. It is to encourage pleasure in giving and distract from habitual spending.

http://paradise.rca.ac.uk/?p=90

Developed from our project on philanthropy. Being exhibited at RCA Paradise Exhibition in Milan.

RCA Paradise Exhibition @ Milan Salone 2012

At this year's Salone Internazionale del Mobile the Royal College of Art will present Paradise, an exhibition organised by the Design Products programme including for the first time, work by students from across the College's art and design disciplines.

Paradise contemplates the discovery of something or somewhere wondrous. Rallied by the desire for change and compelled by dissatisfaction with the present, RCA students will author their own atlases of paradise, landscaped by different paths in the quest for a better future. The work exhibited will address three subjects: the exploration of personal dreams and desires; questioning the fabric of the everyday; and speculation on the direction of our future. Product and furniture design will be evident as well as conceptual pieces in a variety of media. The exhibition content has been selected by Professor Tord Boontje, Head of Design Products at the RCA and curated by designer and RCA tutor Onkar Kular.

Paradise will be located in the heart of the Ventura Lambrate district with students taking over the classrooms of a former school building. The exhibition is part of the College's 175th anniversary celebrations and will show an international audience the breadth of creativity coming from the world's most influential postgraduate university of art and design.

"The Design Products programme has been exhibiting successfully at the Milan Salone for several years," commented Dr Paul Thompson, Rector of the RCA. "The opportunity to show a wider selection of student work to an international audience will be a great way to commemorate the College's 175th birthday. Paradise will be a celebration of creativity from across the College, it will reflect the importance of creative thinking and the ways it can alter the world we live in."

http://paradise.rca.ac.uk/

Work in Progress Show

Heatherwick Studio

Over the summer I helped to do a bit of model making at Heatherwick Studio.

http://www.heatherwick.com/

Workshop: Human Factors in Extreme Environments

Run by Charlotte Jarvis and Regina Peldszus

"Last month, I was invited to run a one-day workshop on human factors in extreme environments with 20 Design Interaction masters students at the Royal College of Art, together with Charlotte Jarvis. The workshop participants responded to a fictional but feasible future mission scenario involving a remote duty station in deep space, where a crew member has been experiencing – and initially hiding – a painful medical condition. After a morning of hands-on familiarisation with group dynamics in unusual or extreme settings, the participants plotted different chains of events in the mission scenario, and developed one particular situation with its ethical, emotional or logistical dimension in more detail. The associated issues and implications touched upon in the participants' final responses – in the form of speculative products, systems or services – ticked a number of boxes of exploration-related R&D taxonomies from preventative and onboard medical care, in situ restraint of individual crew members and onboard ambient intelligence to legal issues, risk perception, loss of crew and more." - Regina Peldszus

The Future is Not a Noun, it's a Verb from Charlotte Jarvis on Vimeo.

by Charlotte Jarvis

Cally Festival / Postcard Project

For the Cally Festival we had postcards printed of Caledonian road for people to take home with them. The were kindly printed by Dodd's on King's Cross Road.

We also asked people to give their feedback on the festival on the back of the postcards which were then displayed for everyone to see in the window of the Cally Festival shop / HQ.

See also - http://aminanazari.blogspot.com/2011/08/news-cally-festival.html

The Cally Festival

I helped to organise this. A community festival. 3rd July 2011, Caledonian Road, London. Such an amazing day!

Entrance to the festival. Mario came with 100's of plants!

Street buskers and a juggling granny!

Music stage

Beginnings of the mural on the side of RSPCA shop

This disused shop became a pop-up gallery.

Miles and miles of bunting and flags outside the Cally Festival HQ shop.

www.thecallyfestival.com

Loads more, much better, photos HERE by Steph Wood.

(making something out of nothing)

Graphics for Diversity Choir

Summer concert poster design. Click to enlarge.

Portfolio

2011 portfolio here - http://www.aminanazari.com/

NEWS - (Old and New) Union Street and the London Festival of Architecture

Last year for the London Festival of Architecture 100 Union Street, SE1, London was turned into an Urban Orchard. I helped out a bit with its general maintenance and upkeep. It was a brilliant project which turned a dull piece of unused land into a lovely community garden which also had cafe, put on workshops and events.

http://www.unionstreetorchard.org.uk/

For The London Festival of Architecture 2011 the same space is set to be turned into an Urban Physic Garden and I hope get involved with this new project.

"this year our community garden returns to Union Street, and will be shaped by the hospital and the pharmacy, with a focus on medicinal plants and herbs that heal."

http://www.physicgarden.org.uk/

NEWS - Graphics for Diversity Choir

Summer concert flyer design. Click to enlarge.