After Lethaby has been reworked for installation at the Arts and Craft Story
Central Saint Martins Open Day on Sunday 28 June 2009
Lethaby Building, Southampton Row, London WC1B 4AP
Tours begin at 11:30am, 12:30pm, 2:00pm and 3:00pm
After Lethaby, Lethaby Gallery, Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London, 20 May 2009.
rtsp://stream.node9.org/BA.sdp
We will broadcast live stream from St Martns Central building via Lemurie.cz server. Please enter the stream address into QuickTime player, we broadcast in H264 codec. The stream could be also accessible with VideoLan player.
Video excerpts… a short loops to be used in live piece:
Loop1
Loop2
Loop3
Loop4
A great architecture of a staircase. A lot done about it for the perforamance, (…), corridors, corridors, a ghost places… so many students passing, almost like a ghosts (…), window and frames, almost an exact ratio of a video image. The big part of the performance has been taken with my photo camera, slightly changed in image editor, more precisely re-composed and later re-animated in video editor. I have great pleasure to reduce original material to only a few frames which will be later multiplied and put into various series. And… what is between the frames?
Transposed location, or location research through a media becames recently an interesting point of my personal video and performance work. How much we need to do to capture the important parts of the space? I am trying to use a various techniques, that can capture no only one perspective of the space, but also some things, that resists to be seen through a simple POV shot. The problem starts with binacular vision, which we almost do not know about, but we all have it. Unlike the camera, we have 2 eyes, so we can actually see all objects simultainously from two sides and we compile double vision into one in our mind. Our eye is always moving, although we see still image, and we even can not controll rapid scanning of our vision. I am trying to consider all the variations, that can be used in order to represent the space and time “globally”, not as a single imprint of a vision, but as an extended concept of multiple vision, an open playground which can include color, rhythm, motion, time and space into one image. Lets see how much it will work in this building…
Wednesday live peroformance will be most probably streamed live over the internet. I am still unsure about the address, the link will be posted around tuesday evening. We will broadcast over Lemurie.cz server in QuickTime h264. Stay tuned.
Historical photo series from previous post is an amazing documentary not only for its historical value, but also as a representation of the whole concept of 1930’s documentary photogrpahy of an educational institution. The school is photographed as an activity, an illustration of a process - which is much more rare in late 50s and almost unseen from 1960s. Other kind of documentation I have seen in this context is mostly a photo of students work and/or a portrait photo if the teachers, etc. We found this as an interesting point, which is perhaps going to be used for our piece… The building is not only the architecture, only the artworks being produced, not mainly living place with a special character of temporality, a living place which is public and private at the same time.
I spent some time yesterday in the Central St Martins Museum and Contemporary Collection, found and scanned many interesting historical photographs, mostly dating from the 1930s. Here are some examples of what I found:
photos of groups of students:
many interesting photos of students working, like these from bookmaking workshops:
and students in class:
We might do something interesting with these.
The most interesting thing I found were images from the Christmas dance 1930:
What’s particularly interesting about this is that it is taken in the space that we will be performing in. The room had been decorated with the paintings and the floor prepared for dancing. I have a number of these and it might be possible to construct some kind of panorama which we could project on the walls during the performance, projecting the image of a past moment of the room into the present. The other interesting thing about this is that most of the windows, doors and interior architectural features visible in these photographs are no longer visible as false walls have been erected, to make it possible to use as a white walled gallery space.
It’s very interesting seeing how the building has changed compared to how it is now, and in some ways what hasn’t changed. I think that there might be something interesting that we can do with introducing images from the past back into their original context, like ghosts. I’m not quite sure how this will work though. The images of students working in bookmaking for example, could be animated in some way, maybe using the self-animation patch.
These are photos of the foyer of the building that I took last year. They will give you an idea of the interior architecture. Top is the view of a lobby off the main foyer from the entrance, middle is the view from the gallery door through to the main staircase with the mainentrance to the building to its right, bottom is a view from the stairs straight in front is the entrance to the gallery, on the left the main entrance. The gallery is where we will be performing.
I’m thinking about how we might represent the Lethaby building itself. The interior architecture is interesting, a staircase at each end linked by passages through the building that on each floor take a similar route, but if I remember correctly each floor is slightly different, with different types of rooms, studios, workshops, with differing arrangements and dimensions, so there are variations in the passages on each floor.
Until two years ago we were based in the building, on the second floor in Room 203. Usually I spent most of my time in that room and my day to day activities hardly ever took me to another floor. On the occasions when I did have to visit someone on another floor, I was always struck by how superficially similar each floor is, but with sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious differences. perhaps there is some way we can reflect these sorts of qualities of the buildings interior architecture. There are many other features to explore.
It is also a building that is coming to the end of its life as a art school, in 2001 Central St Martins will be moving to a new location in King’s Cross. There might also be some way that we can reflect the history of the building. Judy Lindsay from the Central St Martins Museum and Collection gave me a list of what the various rooms were used for in 1908 and 1946. The Museum has many historical plans and photographs in its collection. I’m visiting the collection tomorrow so I hope to have some of those images to post here after that.
The building wasn’t actually built by William Lethaby, it was designed and built by W E Riley and a team of London County Council architects. Lethaby was the principal of The Central School of Arts and Crafts, as it was then, and had very particular, some might say visionary, ideas about what an art school should be and how it should function, and had a big influence on the design of the layout of the building, which opened in 1908. More about that later.
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