Mills Observatory Residency

In 2006 I received a maximum grant throught the Dundee Visual Artist Award, which in partnership with the Scottish Arts Council, helps local artists by giving them financial support to realise new projects. This enabled me to set up a residency for myself at Mills Observatory in Dundee where I was to initiate initial investigations into the cross-over of interior and exterior environments as regards light, sound and the electromagnetic substance. This was a direct follow on from my masters year, where I was researching this cross-over of landscape in a more literal sense, with attention being paid to representations of nature in domestic decoratative designs and how this related to my growing interest in the philosophy of the Sublime.

Dundee Visual Artist Award
Mills Observatory

Annexe Event

Part of my residency proposal was to have a series of site specific installations that would run through the course of the three-month period. Soon realising however that the logistics involved in organising a series of small events was too much, I opted for a single larger event which was called Annexe and was intended to be a fringe event to the larger Dundee Visual Artist Award celebrations happening in the city. For Annexe, I asked other artist colleagues to install work around the observatory and we had a one-off music and art evening that wrapped itself around the normal workings of the observatory; so alongside the Blairgowrie Brownies we had over 150 guests join us on a snowy hilltop for hot soup, music, audio/visual installations and drawings.

Fenducci Neil McIntee Emile Shemilt

Research Evening

As a precursor to Annexe, I invited a group of colleagues and fellow researchers up to Mills to view some test projections. Neil McIntee, a fellow student from the Masters Programme and Annexe artist, came along to try out some experimental sound.

Carpet

Mills Observatory Artist - Andrea Sayers

The idea of ‘home’ as a place of shelter, safety and belonging can be found in fragments of people’s lives throught the resonance of memory, and the imprint of the past left behind on objects and places. In the process of decay, old objects, fragments of belongings and crumbling interiors become reminicient of and intertwined with ancient patterns held within land, earth and sea.

The Stars May Take Me Home

Before setting off to find home, the navigator must first discover the present moment, the place from which to embark. Representing a personal chart of a search for home and belonging, the work focusses on drawings inspired by the shipping forecast, nautical and celestial charts and simple instruments for navigation.

Upper Foyer Swan Lower Foyer Upper Foyer2

Mills Observatory Artist - Emile Shemilt

Disjointed Momentum was a cinematic installation work in progress exploring the differing material qualities between film and digital media. The work initiates with photographic film and is then translated and reinterpreted through digital production. It is informed by the early cinematic experiments in photography and movement, namely the works of Edward Muybridge.

However, unlike the Muybridge works, there is no consistent sequence between the separate figures. The exception is in the form of an element of split light, which overrides the disjointed sequence. As the sequence progresses the split light mixes with digital pixilation. They have an ethereal quality and are not physically malleable, existing only in the image; but in their disjointed momentum the figures seem to react to this distortion. Like split light is to photography, pixilation is deconstructive of the digital image. They are corrosive of the image as a whole, and here they may be equally interpreted as being corrosive of the individual figures as well.

Disjointed Momentum Footage

Mills Observatory Artist - Neil McIntee

The two pieces installed at Mills I see as playful explorations of ideas exploring the acoustics of the building through physical manipulation of found sound. This includes recordings from the solar system and ‘noise’ from our environment not normally audible to human ears.

Techno Telescope

The first installation in the entrance foyer, was created by using sound downloaded from the NASA website and combining it with atmospheric sounds of the Earth collected through tape manipulation and short-wave radio. It is intended as an intriguing welcome to the building and the event. In the second installation, a contact microphone is placed on the Earth’s axis timing mechanism of the main telescope. The sound is manipulated using delay techniques and rebroadcast into the dome, in effect creating a Techno Telescope.

Techno Telescope Audio

Mills Observatory Artist - Lindsay Brown

Space Time

Space Time was a video installation in the Lecture Room at Mills Observatory. The footage comprised of slowed down audio and video footage of the Orrery that stands in the entrance foyer. An orrery is a domestic model of the solar system that looks much like lolipops moving around a lightbulb. This slightly comical footage once slowed down and projected onto a large area, takes on a monumentality of its own where the visual element becomes mesmeric and meditative. Earphones were provided so that this meditative pleasure could be separated from ‘another world’, where the ’stretched’ audio of the Observatory foyer produces a hauntingly spatial experience, reminisient of the sounds of space sent back by the Voyager Spacecraft. These sounds of space, are actually EM radio emissions that are thought to be generated by solar particles coliding with the heliospheres of planets. The frequencies of these waves vary between 2 to 3 kHz and are translated into audible noise by devices on the spacecraft. By slowing time down, the translation in Space Time is not a literal one such as a radio wave to an audio wave, but one of dimension and experience, where the domestic is subverted to transport the listener into the ’silent’ world of space.

Space Time Video Link

Rain

The installation Rain was an interruption of white noise that was back-projected through the umbrella in the planetarium. This interruption appeared as a large planet-like circle that gained in light and sound intensity, peaked then faded away. This sound and audio piece was incorporated into the normal workings of the planetarium, where a projection of the stars in the night sky are formed on the inside of the umbrella by light coming through a specially designed globe. The intention was to contrast this calm atmosphere with the unexpected arrival of bright flickering light and sound; light and sound that mimics a shower of electromagnetic radiation from space. This installation may be developed in the future to be more interactive, and to use live EM ‘noise’ rather than pre-recorded white noise.

Rain

Rain Video Link

Wallpaper

Thinking about the propogation of EM waves through everyday substances like brick and mortar, in effect producing an invisible architecture. Does this mean that we can no longer constitute the wall as a boundary?Wallpaper makes this suggestion, and creates an illusion where the inside is turned outside, a translucent architecture allowing a visible ‘non-boundary’ where the interior light (EM energy) moves past the walls and pushes the wallpaper to the outside.

Mills Observatory Artists - Fenducci

“Fenducci came into being in the East coast of Scotland in 1993. After one or two short range sorties as ‘Spaceman Spiff’, Fenducci (fen-doo-chee) was chosen as the imprint with which all future material was to be stamped. The name comes from the Dirty Harry series of movies (Fenducci is a former partner of Harry’s who is killed on a case prior to the start of the movie), and was one which embodied the groove of cop shows and movies that influenced the creation of the Fenducci sound.

Starting with a Yamaha DX 21, a Roland TR606, an Atari ST, and an SH101 their sound grew with their web of synths and sound making tools, to play mechanized jazz and machine driven soul. Fenducci are car chases on martian roads, shoot outs in space ports, 25th century disco, cybernetic funk, and android punk. They would love to own silver spacesuits, a jet pack, and are still waiting for their food in pill form…..Machines have feelings too…..”