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Projects, artwork and interventions

Ghost Parade

Ghost Parade is a project for Marc Rees’ Artists Taking The Lead (Cultural Olympiad) project, Adain Avion.

The project is a large scale collaborative event taking place on the 1st July 2012, along the final mile of Adain Avion’s journey from Swansea to the redeveloped Steelworks site Ebbw Vale.

Ghost Parade is a nocturnal event involving outdoor projections, archival moving image material and mass participation with music provided by a brass band. This collective endeavour will take place 10 years, almost to the day, since the closure of the Steel Works. That occasion was marked by the remaining workforce who staged a symbolic march out of the gates. Ghost Parade celebrates a decade of transition in Ebbw Vale.

Part carnival, part surreal protest, Ghost Parade participants will carry phantom placards and banners. At points along the route, the placards will become a moving, choreographed screen, on which a brief sequence of archival film will…

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Frederick J Fredericks

Frederick J Fredericks from chameleonic on Vimeo.

Frederick J Fredericks was a free one day event which took place in the Brecon Beacons National Park on 30th October, 2011 as part of Powys Arts Month.  The event comprised an artist-led journey on foot, to caves at Craig y Cilau National Nature Reserve. The event  included installations, performances, readings and improvised music. The project’s title is derived from 18th Century graffiti in the caves by Frederick J Fredericks.

Artists, Poets and Performers included:

Video Documentation by Nic Finch, Stills by Phil Martin

Please look at the Route Map for the locations of installations and performances.

Itinerary (times are approximate)
  • 11.00 Guided walk (route 1) leaves Llangattock
  • 1.00 Poetry Performance (point 2) and music by
    Gillian Stevens (point 3)
  • 3.00 Performance by Team Sports…

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The Nihilists

The Nihilists was a one day visual art event, located on the Sugar Loaf mountain near Abergavenny, with a sound performance by Team Sports.

Dusk (8-10pm), Saturday 16th July 2011

Venue: Sugar Loaf, Abergavenny (starting from Mynyndd Llanwenarth Car Park, Grid Ref: SO268167)

The Nihilists is a series of outdoor installations which generate electricity in order to illuminate their futility.

The event comprised two new works:

  • a group of handmade wind turbines which live on a hill. At dusk the electricity generated by the turbines illuminates a sign. The message pulses as the wind picks up.
  • in a gully nearby a solitary water turbine straddles a stream. The turbine powers a sign. The sign is both a homage to Malcolm Mclaren and a flow guage - a visual display of the stream’s rate of flow.

Team Sports (Matthew Lovett, Jimmy Ottley & Ian Watson) is a sound performance that explores the relationship between a musician and their surroundings. Using the physical…

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The Bogey Road

The Bogey Road is a short film, which uses archive, found and ‘orphan’ film, creating a series of vignettes that bring the archive into a sometimes uncomfortable collision with the present.

Commissioned by Safle and Caerphilly County Borough Council, the film was made in Butetown, an unfinished ‘model’ village built to house iron workers in the 1820’s, in the Upper Rhymney Valley, Caerphilly, just off the A465 Heads of the Valleys road. Using archive and found moving image material, the artist replays moments from the archival footage in locations, which resonate or jar with, the original material. This process has required the artist to work closely with local residents, filming in people’s homes as well as pubs, churches, hospitals and the Ffos-y-fran land reclamation site at Cwmbargoed.

The original footage was donated by local residents, historians, Chapter Video Workshop, the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales and the BBC Cymru Wales Archive.

As…

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Hive #2

Hive #2 is a research and development project looking at the development of sonic ecologies and sound environments which respond to the viewer’s movements around a space and which grow and develop over time - either a set time frame such as a day, or over the duration of an exhibition. The intention is to base these ecologies on systems found in nature - hopefully the behaviour of insect swarms, although this information has so far proved harder to come by than the already modelled behaviour of herding animals and flocks of birds (Craig Reynolds’ Boids Distributed Behavioral Model).

The intention is for the work to be responsive to visitor behaviour, not in a way which foregrounds ‘interactivity’, but a more subtle, biological response. Early intentions for the project were to use a series of sensors within the space to record the movement of visitors within the space, but this has…

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Minor Revolt

Minor Revolt was shown as part of ‘State of the Estate‘ at Penpont, a country house/estate and organic farm, near Brecon in October 2009.

The piece was installed in a dimly-lit disused stable block, now filled with unused furniture, a broken piano, dusty home brew equipment, various poles, a giant, green polystyrene head and a barrel of hand painted signs used by the Estate to direct people to the toilets/cafe/camping etc at various past events.

The work comprised an expansion of the collection of hand painted signs, suggesting that some kind of protest had taken place.

The font is Rosewood.

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Storyboard

Text about ‘Storyboard’ from Axis’ Open Frequency:

‘Storyboard’ was commissioned in 2005 by the contemporary gallery g39 for May You Live in Interesting Times, Cardiff’s inaugural Festival of Creative Technology. ‘Storyboard’ provided an opportunity for members of the public to post mobile phone text messages to a Variable Message Sign, a familiar sight in city centres, often displaying news of traffic disruption and road safety. Here, the VMS became the host for a public display of intimate and deeply personal text messages sourced from the people of Cardiff, and the internet:

‘Just as the writer of Doctor Who was signing copies of a new book for fans in a nearby bookshop, the message ‘Bad Wolf’, a reference to the latest Doctor Who series mysteriously appeared on the Stefhan Caddick’s electronic storyboard sign outside. Next a local Big Issue seller was given a helping hand with a message that read, ‘Big Issue for…

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