On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

EAT is a collective of architects, thinkers and doers assembled together from an international background wherein each individual brings his or her own sensability, views and language to the whole. Its central belief is in architecture’s potential to function as a transmitter for resources, culture, ideas and change. The territory e.a.t. navigates goes beyond the conventional definition of architecture, viewing its domain as an edifice which aims to influence the built world that we inhabit today and tomorrow.

e.a.t. exploring architectural territories launch party

7pm Saturday 11 December

the red lion pub
41 hoxton sq
N1 6NH

“Things… made truly Musicall with Art by my correction, and yet plaine, and capable with ease, by my direction.” Composer Thomas Ravenscroft, from Deutoromelia, 1609

At the weekends an eerie quiet descends on the City of London, in offices, squares, churchyards and streets, broken by the occasional sound of traffic and church bells. The silence of the city has inspired artist Susan Philipsz’s first commission in the capital. Her unaccompanied voice resonates through empty streets around the Bank of England, across postwar walkways and medieval alleyways and along the banks of the River Thames.

SURROUND ME: A Song Cycle for the City of London takes inspiration from the heightened presence of the human voice in Elizabethan London. To be heard over one another a natural order and harmony evolved in the cries of the street traders which enthused composers of popular song such as Thomas Ravenscroft to write canons where one voice follows the other in a round. Another popular song form for several voices, the madrigal emerged in Italy in the 16th Century and soon travelled to England where it flowered as the English Madrigal School.

SURROUND ME embraces the vocal traditions of the City of London connecting themes of love and loss with those of fluidity, circulation and immersion; the flood of tears, the swelling tide and the ebb and flow of the river, to convey a poignant sense of absence and loss in the contemporary City of London.

Susan Philipsz has been nominated for the Turner Prize 2010 for Lowlands, a work installed under three bridges beside the River Clyde in Glasgow. Her work is in the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain, 5 October 2010 – 3 January 2011.

This project is supported by Arts Council England, Special Angels and The Company of Angels.

Saturdays & Sundays only, 10am – 5pm
9 October 2010 – 2 January 2011

Change Alley / London Bridge / Mark Lane / Milk Street / Moorfields Highwalk / Tokenhouse Yard

Surround Me is an Artangel commission.

Nicholas Brooks, Graham Hudson, Tim Ivison & Julia Tcharfas, Paul Kneale, Guan Rong, Brendan Threadgill

Private view 17 September 6-9pm

18 September – 3 October
Thursday – Sunday 12 – 6pm

Auto Italia South East
1 Glengall Road
London
SE15 6NJ

Counter Constructs brings together seven artists from the UK and North America in an exhibition exploring strategies of representation and critique of the urban built environment. Responding to the undead ‘regeneration’ of global development projects and the geologic sediment of spatial histories, the exhibition is a series of implicit proposals and contestations. Unfinished maps, unspecified models, unbuilt plans and unbuilding the city – the exhibition is as much about utopia as it is about its folly.
Initially organised by Tim Ivison & Julia Tcharfas around their research-based collaborative practice, Counter Constructs is a way to extend their dialogue on urban space to a wider range of interpretations. The artists in the show are brought together by a shared interest in mining the structures of architectural thinking, taking failure and conjecture as a starting point for productive investigations.

Comprising a number of independent installations, each work forms a part of a circuitous system of associations and digressions. The politics of history and preservation are played out in sound installation and sculpture, while the fetishisation of the suburban is both questioned and consecrated in film. An installation of sculpture, maps and images investigates the unbuilt visions of Edward Lutyens, a détourned architectural pavilion subverts the logic of modern utopias, and a floor-drawing altered daily recalls the paradox of permanent traces in the deep ephemerality of urban space in development an conflict.

Meanwhile other utopias are constructed in earnest in the form of small models and paintings forming a partial proposal towards a liberated social construction. These, and other projects will find space at Auto Italia over the course of the two week exhibition, working towards a negotiation of what we want from out cities, past and future – what is vital and resonant, what is dead and should remain so.

www.autoitaliasoutheast.org
info@autoitaliasoutheast.org

16 SEPTEMBER – 3 OCTOBER 2010
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Repair Manual

An exhibition showing the work of 17 graduates from the MA Photography and Urban Cultures of Goldsmiths University of London and the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR). The possible convergence of urban and social theory with a photographic practice has been taken into practice, explored, celebrated, taken apart, revisited, and deconstructed in order to reassemble all the different approaches within a graduate exhibition.

PRIVATE VIEW – 16 September 5:30-8:30 pm

You are kindly invited to come and visit our private view and opening night. Drinks will be accompanied by Chinese snacks courtesy of Seng Jariangroj.

PLEASE VISIT

www.repairmanualexhibition.net for a schedule of events

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CONTACT

APT Gallery
Harold Wharf
6 Creekside
Deptford
London SE 8 4SA
Open dates: 16 September – 3 October on Thursday – Saturday from 12am – 5pm

Bus: 53, 177, 188, 199, 47
Tube: DLR Deptford Bridge or Greenwich
Rail: British Rail from London Bridge, ten minutes walk to Deptford
Car: Free parking on Creekside

You are cordially invited to the presentation of Translocated – a platform for reflection and artistic practices revolving around urban space and psychogeography.

TRANSLOCATED – EXHIBITION PREVIEW + FORUM

21st / 22nd August 2010

The Alleyway
219 Glyn Road
E5 0JP

The preview will feature projects and presentations from three artists whose work is currently engaged in the issues raised by Translocated, as well as some work in development and an open forum to discuss the boundaries of translocation.

// PROGRAMME ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

// Saturday 21st August
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4 – 5 pm
exhibition preview

5 – 6 pm
presentations
(curator’s introduction, artist talk, open forum)

7 – 8 pm
drinks reception

8 – 10pm
film screening

// Sunday 22nd August
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4 – 6pm
video actions

6 – 8pm
1-to-1 guided walks

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http://translocated.org

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mappiness is a research project created by George MacKerron and Susana Mourato of the Department of Geography & Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), designed to gain a better understanding of how people’s feelings are affected by features of their current environment—things like air pollution, noise, and green spaces.

To that end, a free iPhone app has been developed, regularly pinging its users to ask them how they’re feeling, as well as a few other things: who they are with, where they are, what they are doing. The anonymous data gets sent back to a server, along with the user’s approximate location from the iPhone’s GPS, and a noise-level measure.

The project being in its early stages, the map displayed on the website doesn’t really give an acurate picture of the spread of happiness in the country – a huge proportion of respondants being in situated in London! – though interestingly the real-time hedonimeter shows that London people are slightly happier than the rest of the UK. I’m pretty sure this could easily be challenged, but I’ll leave that to the academic paper that will come out of the survey…

http://www.mappiness.org.uk/

A new outdoor mobile phone game is to be piloted in London on Saturday July 24th 2010.

Exploding Places takes you on a journey through time and space. You arrive in a fictional Woolwich in South East London, create your own community and place them in the real world Woolwich. Over the space of an hour you and your community travel through 120 years of local and global history. The First World War passes in just a few minutes as you play the game to ensure your survival.

You play on the phone screen and through headphones, as you walk the town’s real streets. You can interact with other players, join together and respond to conflict or difficulties in each other’s communities. The ultimate goal is to build a thriving community that grows and creates a new generation, based on health, wealth, knowledge, participation and your contribution to the game. The game will be broadcast on the BBC Big Screen in central Woolwich giving public audiences the chance to watch the games unfold.

Exploding Places is a real world SIM city or Monopoly, played live on the streets of Woolwich. The game offers participants a playful way to engage with London, engaging with its social, community and
regeneration issues. It will explores how new communities come to live in new areas, what happens to them, how they grow, whether they thrive and settle, whether they move on, etc.

Exploding Places is part of the exciting new area of creative endeavour called locative or pervasive gaming, bringing new and emerging technologies into the public realm. It sits alongside the critically acclaimed work of companies such as Blast Theory whose games have received major international awards and BAFTA nominations.

Be the first to play Exploding Places

To play you must first register a place:
Go online: www.explodingplaces.org
or call 020 8858 2825
or Email anna@streamarts.org.uk

Once registered, come to the launch and play:
When: Saturday 24th July 2010, 11am – 5pm
Where: The Tramshed, 51 – 53 Woolwich New Road, London SE18 6ES
Directions: British Rail / DLR: Woolwich Arsenal, then 2 minute walk to The Tramshed

Exploding Places www.explodingplaces.org

Created by Active Ingredient www.i-am-ai.net in collaboration with Greenwich Heritage Centre, Woolwich Polytechnic and Woolwich residents. Active Ingredients locative game Heartlands won the UK and Ireland Satellite Navigation Competition and the Nokia Ubimedia Mindtrek Award in 2007.

Commissioned by Stream www.streamarts.org.uk, the Greenwich based producer of public and collaborative art.
In 2005 Stream produced the Greenwich Emotion Map using bio-mapping technology with artist Christian Nold.
Funded by Arts Council London and Greenwich Council.
Produced in collaboration with Horizon Digital Economy Research, funded through grant EP/G065802/1 from Research Councils UK.

This map shows all trains (yellow pins) on the London Underground network in approximately real time.

Fetching live departure data from the TfL API, and placing it onto a Google map, this live map project was realised in only a short amount of time at Science Hackday on 19/20th June 2010. A small number of stations are misplaced or missing; occasional trains behave oddly…; some H&C and Circle stations are missing in the TfL feed.

The author of the project is Matthew Somerville (with helpful hinderances from Frances Berriman and James Aylett). Station icon by Tim Diggins. Source code.

http://traintimes.org.uk:81/map/tube/

The summer season at Rivington Place proposes new artistic perspectives on mapping: bringing together nine contemporary international artists working in film, installation, print and audio, whose work challenge the authority of the map and question the underlying structures and hierarchies that inform traditional mapmaking and social and political issues surrounding it, or uses maps to examine self-positioning and global geographies.

Maps are often involved in debates around subjects such as resources, territoriality, identity and migration; but in a globalised, trans-national world infused by new technological advances and rapid changes, the two dimensional map has become less adequate.

The exhibition includes three new commissions by Gayle Chong Kwan, Susan Stockwell and Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, alongside recent work by Milena Bonilla, Alexandra Handal, Bouchra Khalili, Otobong Nkanga, Esther Polak and Oraib Toukan.

‘Who Map is it?‘ runs at Rivington Place, from the 2nd June to the 24th July 2010.

Please visit the InIVA website for full listings of events (symposium, talks, panel discussion, tours and workshops) associated with the exhibition.

This spring, Somerset House Trust and Sound and Music will present River Sounding, a major new commission by sound artist Bill Fontana, which will invite visitors on a journey through the hidden sound worlds of the River Thames. Opening on 15 April 2010 at Somerset House, the work will create an imaginary acoustic map of the Thames, taking visitors through Somerset House’s atmospheric subterranean spaces, normally closed to the public, and out to the Great Arch on the Embankment, highlighting the building’s historical connection to the river.

River Sounding at Somerset House features a series of different sound sequences, recorded by Bill Fontana along a one-hundred-mile section of the Thames stretching from Richmond to Southend. Projected through loudspeakers installed at river level, in the hidden pathways beneath the courtyard, visitors will be immersed in the rich musical vocabulary of the Thames, from whistling buoys and steam pumps to hidden underwater sounds and rushing water at river locks. The sounds will be played alongside his video images of the recording locations, which include Tower Bridge, HMS Belfast, the Thames Barrier and the historic Teddington Lock.

As well as revealing the rich and varied sound worlds of the Thames, River Sounding will pay homage to Somerset House’s historical connection to the river. Somerset House was originally built as a grand riverside palace in the sixteenth century and in the eighteenth century became the home of Admiral Nelson’s Navy Office, with boats entering through the building’s Great Arch. River Sounding will return the sounds of the river to Somerset House, highlighting the forgotten shared history of one of London’s most iconic buildings and the Thames.

River Sounding demonstrates the communicative power of sound art, and the commission launches Sound and Music’s new programme, dedicated to championing and developing audiences for new and innovative music and sound. It will be complemented by a series of film screenings and talks by prominent cultural figures including Iain Sinclair and Romesh Gunesekera, Writer in Residence at Somerset House, engaging with River Sounding’s themes, which will take place in and around Somerset House.

Trained as a composer, Bill Fontana (born 1947, USA) is internationally known for his pioneering works in sound, which examine the nature of our acoustic environment. He has presented his “sound sculptures” at leading museums around the world, as well as at iconic locations in many of the world’s great cities, including London’s Millennium Bridge and Big Ben, San Francisco’s Golden Gate and Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. He has received numerous fellowships for his work, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 1986. He lives and works in San Francisco and is represented in the UK by Haunch of Venison.

15 April – 31 May 2010
Somerset House
The Strand
London WC2R 1LA

www.somersethouse.org.uk

Opening hours:
Monday – Sunday: 10:00am– 6:00pm,
Thursdays: late night opening until 8:00pm

Admission Free