Trajectories is an exciting new three-year programme exploring the potential of creative learning and making to help us engage critically in the current and future issues of the world.

Art, design, and technology support vital skills we will need to be a thriving society, throughout education and beyond: critical thinking, problem solving, the ability to engage creatively with social issues, among others. They help us understand and give meaning to the world we live in.

Through thematic events including exhibitions, workshops discussions and talks, the programme will showcase and explore the great potential of creative learning and making.

Over the three years, the Trajectories platform will provide an opportunity for academics, creative practitioners, students and audiences to consider together these themes.

The Exhibition: Trajectories 2018

The artists showcased in this exhibition were selected through an open call to exhibit new work exploring these themes. The open call invited recent artist graduates and current postgraduate and PhD students in the UK to send work for consideration. In this first year, there is a frequent focus on the nature of truth from fake news to the way we tell historical narratives. There is also a piece that reflects our anxiety around our accelerating lives, seemingly without the ability to stop, and a look at the environmental impact the technologies that we have come to rely on.  In different ways, the work and narratives challenge our way of viewing the world and we hope you will engage in this conversation through workshops, talks and discussions.

The Trajectories exhibition works were selected by Eszter Bircsák, Sara Choudhrey and Irini Papadimitriou.

Trajectories 2018 Events

Exhibition Launch Event and gallery tour with the artists:

Wednesday 24 January, 6.30-8.30pm
Free Event Open to the Public

Trajectories Public Workshops

Saturdays 27 Jan, 3 Feb, 17 Feb. More information here.

Trajectories Workshops for Creatives, Graduates & Students

Saturdays 10 & 24 Feb. More information here.

In Trajectories:

Anarchy Near the UK – Bill Balaskas
In Anarchy near the UK (2016), Balaskas exposes a world in which spectacle has replaced facts, and populist rhetoric has replaced critical thought.  The artist has created a “paper embroidery” by cutting out all the news stories on the front page of the Sun newspaper of 25th January 2016, leaving intact only the headline and its reference to anarchy. By juxtaposing this dramatic headline with material representations of other stories from that day, Balaskas highlights the absurdity of today’s post-truth world. What is the real anarchy after all?  In so doing, Balaskas replicates one of the key strategies of situationism: détournement, or turning the media culture of capitalism against itself, an idea adopted by the punk movement of the 1970s.

DO nothing – Jaione Cerrato and Jon Halls

Through the deployment of a ‘DO nothing’ signpost, Cerrato and Halls draw on the historical purpose of a signpost as a means of orientation, a meeting place and a mean of communication. In our accelerating world, we don’t have time to reflect. The artists have created a ‘DO nothing’ space that challenges this: that allows people to stop, to orient themselves with their own future and thoughts. While ‘DO nothing’ implies passivity, in fact the idea of actively pursuing doing nothing, requires the individual to act contrary to the contemporary standard.

[Manipulated_Painting#7] – Soa J.Hwang

[Manipulated_Painting] is a series of interactive paintings in which the artist explores how computational technology can change the relationship between the viewer and the painting. Built in a game engine, the paintings are programmed to respond to the presence of an audience through various sensors, exploring the meaning of visual truth and how we each see things that are in front of us.

Project Antioch – Matt Parker
In 2015 Apple Distribution International applied for planning permission to build 8x 24,505m² single storey data centre buildings in a forest just outside the small town of Athenry, County Galway, Ireland. For two years objectors held off the construction on this site codenamed ‘Project Antioch’. Following a year of fieldwork, the artist has created a two part sound installation exploring the physical impact of data and the socio-economic impact on communities in Ireland, through a machine learning algorithm.

Fall of the House of Usher – Anna Ridler
Fall of the House of Usher is an animation based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe, where each still image is generated by artificial intelligence. The work looks at the role of the creator, the interplay between art and technology, and also aspects of memory. It is a copy of a copy (film) of the original (book); accordingly, things appear and disappear, are remembered or misremembered or mis-imagined and it calls into question our ability to recall one perfect version.

Pulau Banda – Marta Velasco Velasco
Until the 19th century, the Banda Islands —a tiny archipelago in today’s Indonesia— were the world’s only source of nutmeg, the “Holy Grail of Spices”, and a symbol of luxury and prestige. In their urge to keep the nutmeg monopoly, the Dutch, who controlled all islands except from Run, agreed to cede Manhattan (back then called New Amsterdam) to the English in return for it. Pulau Banda plays with fact, fiction and storytelling exploring new ways of telling this story.

For more info about the artworks and biographies please see HERE

Image captions:
– Anarchy near the UK, Bill Balaskas, 2016, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. A commission by Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Courtesy of the artist and Kalfayan Galleries, Athens – Thessaloniki.
– [Manipulated_Painting#3] – Soa J Hwang
– Fall of the House of Usher – Anna Ridler