Artists in the Archive

I've just been involved in a project with the artists from Geodesic Arts again, this time working with the York Museums Trust and Creative York.

The project has involved looking at artefacts in the Yorkshire Museum archive, specifically pieces from the Mesolithic Period. We've then had to create an installation for the studio space at York Art Gallery. You can follow the background to the project on the AITA blog and take a look at the process on the Flickr site.

The final exhibition uses one of the monitors (with PC, Ensemble and sensor) that were previously used for the Me, Myself and MRI project. This time the monitor shows some footage of an archive area filmed using timelapse over several days, and speeded up. When someone steps in front of the monitor, this is faded into one of the interviews that we carried out for the project.

 

I interviewed Nicky Milner (our Mesolithic expert), Andrew Morrison (Keeper of Archaeology at the Yorkshire Museum), James Watson (a flint knapper) and Ben (a PhD student) for the piece. The edited interviews are shown on the screen.

The Ensemble map makes used of the fader, video and variable sensor blocks. We are using an infra red sensor for distance detection, but this is quite noisy (electrically speaking) and is not terribly reliable. You can see me setting up the system in the image below.