AS A CHORUS RECAP EPISODE

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Introduction

Nina Davies

You're listening to Future Artefacts FM , a bi-monthly podcast/broadcast featuring speculative fiction audio works by artists and writers produced and presented by Nina Davies,

Rebecca Edwards

Niamh Schmidtke

and Niamh Schmidtke, on RTM

and also available on podcast channels.

The programme focuses on fictional works intended for broadcast to carve out a better understanding of the now by exploring various interpretations of the future.

Together with guests we discuss the mechanics of different types of storytelling to reveal the complexities of contemporary culture. Let’s get started.

All

Let’s get started.

Artist Introduction

Okay, welcome back to Future Artefacts FM. For this episode, you are just joined by your hosts, Nina Davies.

Rebecca Edwards.

And Niamh Schmidtke. We're gonna be doing a recap episode today of our mini-series As A Chorus, as it's just been completed.

Yeah, I know. We've had four artists on the episode, on the series, starting with our lovely Niamh Schmidtke.

Yeah, which I realized was way back in October. Was that October, September?

Yeah, it feels like quite a while ago. And it's quite funny because the piece from that was made last summer and is now going to a show this summer.

Okay.

So it's like almost a whole life cycle has happened in between.

Yeah. And some of the conversations we've had on this radio show, on this mini-series have been quite helpful in figuring out the work too.

That's great.

But I think that's sort of an ongoing theme across the radio show as well, is that we're always being inspired and influenced by the various people and themes that we have on the show.

Which is very fitting for what we're going to talk about today.

Yeah.

So we had our, the second artist on the mini series was Most Dismal Swamp, aka Dane Sutherland. I mean, Most Dismal Swamp is the artist, well, he's sort of like the collaborative name or the project name, and Dane is sort of the person that oversees the collaboration. I think he described himself as like a creative, he was like, he-

Creative producer, creative director. Yeah.

He had these like fictional characters of creative directors, and he was sort of saying that there was something that he was doing that was quite akin to what they do, but it's sort of different.

Quite a murky place.

Yeah.

In a good way.

A swampy place.

Yeah.

Then we had Rhys.

Yes. Rhys Morgan.

Rhys Morgan with the lovely Sea Shanties, which I'd seen his work at New Contemporaries, which we were both in the same year, and he did a live performance with the Sea Shanty group.

I remember when I saw it, this was a few years ago now, and I was like, oh, this would be great to have on the show. Suddenly when Niamh proposed this idea for the miniseries, I was like, I have just the name.

We know exactly. Then the final episode that we had in this miniseries was Emily Roderick, our most recent episode with Can You Call a Touch on bell ringing, in, well, across the UK but predominantly England and predominantly around her own family's relationship to bell ringing

In Coventry, I think. Near Coventry.

So maybe just before we get into our sort of recap episode, what we thought we'd do is we would read out our sort of statement that we initially wrote out when we were kind of beginning to think about this miniseries. And then what we're going to do is kind of discuss where the miniseries has taken us to. Has it diverted in any way from from what our initial questions were? Or have we answered any questions? Probably not.

But we're going to pick it.

Yeah, we've answered questions with more questions.

Yeah, exactly. Cool. Niamh, take it away.

As a chorus.

How does singing tell a story? How are our bodies intrinsic to the expression of pitch, tone or duration of a note? How do individual voices dissipate into a group of singers?

The volume rising from a crowd of chanters or the controlled unison of trained harmonies and choir?

How does this perspective translate to artists whose collaborative process goes beyond the baseline level of working together to something more akin to developing together?

For this Future Artifacts mini-series, which we've already completed, we're exploring the types of narratives inherent to songs, music scores and group singing.

From Greenham Common Songbook to Nina Simone's Mississippi Goddamn, singing has long been a form of resistance, both articulating the injustice faced and providing an outlet for the violence of that injustice.

A chorus points to both the group of people who may sing these songs together and the impact the repetition has on its listeners.

Singing together has long been used as a tool for synchronization in workspaces, from sea shanties that coordinated sailors' movements to field songs that kept laborers in rhythm.

These occupational songs don't just pass the time, they harness the physical power of music to move ships, shape tasks and unify collective efforts.

Yeah, so I think as you can even see from that first question, how does singing tell a story? I think when we were coming to this mini-series, we were thinking very much about a choir, because of your practice, Niamh. So, you know, for sure, I think this idea of singing or choral practice has evolved into a kind of metaphor for thinking more about collective practice in general, right?

Yeah, I think there was also an interest because we hadn't, we haven't really looked at music and song on the radio show at all. There's been soundscapes, but it's much more conversational and spoken rather than here's a group of people singing. And I think this miniseries in particular, well, I'm thinking of the work I showed, but also of Rhys' work of Seaweed in the Fruit Locker and how the song becomes the vehicle for kind of both the group to come together, but also for kind of the narrative, which is not something that I think we've delved into much here. I mean, none of us are musicians, I don't think. Can any of us read music?

No, I mean, no, I can't, but I was thinking that it's funny that looking back at all the episodes, or not each episode that we did in the miniseries, but we split up the, we kind of did produce each episode a little bit more like a radio show that's like playing tracks where we would play a track in between. And we kind of, I think we did that for everyone, but yours, Niamh. And it was sort of, it just very naturally happened. So even the episodes that weren't necessarily to do with songs, we still kind of broke up in that way. It was sort of very like, it was sort of embedded into the way that we kind of presented the miniseries.

But I think a large part of that was because the things that we were presenting as like these single tracks, they were either research or they were like chapters of a long, a much longer piece of work. Like I'm thinking about Most Dismal Swamp, we kind of took small sections from a sort of three, four hour sort of series of works. And then with Emily, because it was a work in progress, there were interviews with her parents, as well as bell ringing, as well as all of these other things. So I think it did make sense to do it like that. It made the episodes feel more collaborative whilst we were speaking about them as well.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I think the big thing I noticed when we were editing this series also was naturally we've always paid attention to credits and credits of works, and we've had many people who've worked with quite specific sound collaborators in the past. But this mini series, every single artist we've shown, the credits list has been incredibly long.

Yeah.

And I think there's something interesting about that in terms of, you know, technically, all art, like an artwork is never made in isolation. You know, this idea of kind of soul authorship in an artwork has been quite thoroughly broken down, especially, especially most recently, I'm thinking of things like the Turner Prize a few years ago, only nominating artist collectives, you know, the Array collective from Belfast winning that year. But even still, usually when you go into an exhibition space, it's one artist's name as the author, as the author of the work, and then you have the list of credits underneath. And I think for, and obviously we're kind of, we're replicating that in this series as well, kind of we have an artist name and the work at the beginning of each episode. But the credits list at the bottom, now, most artists, the credits list is minimum five names. And these are for quite small bits of sound work, you know, and obviously they're part of quite expansive practices and quite expansive research projects.

But even with Rhys' episode, you know, each song, there was one song where he had rewritten the lyrics and he was performing it as sort of, let's say the lead in the choir.

But the remaining songs that we played, the remaining shanties that we played, were written by different members of that choir. And were performed by different members of that choir.

And I think that was something that really, I'm hoping that we bring forwards into future episodes. And even as we're planning the next miniseries, which is currently in production, there's a similar feeling as well of kind of understanding, okay, how are works made?

Like how is, how does practice form through the groups of people that you're surrounded by? Which I think this miniseries tries to put more, like direct the light on to?

Yeah, and I was gonna say, I think Rhys' work is actually a really good example of like an artwork that create, that the group, the Sea Shanty group didn't exist before the artwork.

It then like, the artwork created this group and then, and then beyond the artwork, the group has still kind of kept, it's kept going. It sort of like maintains it, maintained its structure out.

It's become like autonomous, I guess, from the artwork, which I think is a really interesting kind of way of thinking of working collaboratively. Like, it's something that I haven't necessarily like seen that much.

I think there's like a lifespan. It was, and I think also with Rhys' practice and also Emily's practice, there's something around, and I'm thinking about the work that I showed also because I'm currently developing it for something new, there's a question around socially engaged practice, which can be quite contentious because most often when you're an artist, you're not trained in like safeguarding practices, for example, when you're working with a group of people.

In the case of the work that I made, I was at a town on residency. It's not my locality, it's not the group of people that I know very well. I'm getting to know them well through doing the project.

But part of, in the case of the work that I made, choosing to work with a song that already existed and choosing to work with a singer who was local to the area has meant that when I have later on met people who have heard that song or who saw that performance or listened to the sound work on this radio show, they've sung it back to me. And so I think there's something interesting in that process of collaborative making where you're very explicit about the amount of voices that have gone into making a work, that it immediately has a life much bigger than you.

There's something that I was thinking about in terms of why collective work feels so important or more recognizable now as a thing. I was trying to think about in previous decades, you know, you had this kind of like the solo artist, the kind of the gallery representation. It would be hard to get gallery representation maybe as a collective over being a solo artist and thinking about how the sort of credit credibility or accountability of people's roles within the creation of work. It's completely shifted now. And I was just thinking, you mentioned social practice there, and I'm not going to name names, but there are definitely groups of artists that I've heard of that are in this kind of social practice area who it's very much extractive and they're

working with people that are not paid, for a start, or they're young or they're, it's kind of like a leg up for them. And I'm wondering if this kind of renewed focus on collaborative work is maybe this idea of safety and numbers as well. It's kind of like a resisting of institutionalization. It's kind of like pushing against being read in a particular commercially viable way in something more like a DIY aesthetic or...

I mean, I think, like, because briefly mentioned about the Turner Prize and the Array Collective in Belfast, and I think there's quite...

I'll start this by saying it's interesting when you speak with artists in Ireland, because many artists in Ireland now, when you talk to them about places they want to live or places that are creatively vibrant, the amount of people that have responded to me with Belfast, I'd love to move to Belfast. It's across the island of Ireland. It's not just in the north.

And the thing that's interesting about Belfast, and I'll come back around to talk about the Irish Collective, in terms of why collectives are important, is that it's one of the cities in Ireland where the cost of living has not become astronomical. The price has gone up significantly, but other cities in the country are incredibly hard for artists to continue to live in.

Kind of the three largest cities, Dublin, Cork and Galway in particular, where many people are being pushed out, or you're living in really substandard accommodation, or you're living with illegal contracts because it's the only way you can afford.

I mean, London has this too, right? It's sort of, it's an issue we're all facing globally. With Belfast, that hasn't happened in the same way, partially because of sectarian violence and the troubles, and people keeping fear of that.

The other thing that happens, that's happening in Belfast and Northern Ireland more generally, access to public funding is really difficult, and there isn't a commercial art sector.

So maybe it is about being part of a collective, taking on tasks as a group, it's much more doable.

You don't have the institutions, you don't have the galleries, you make them, and that's too much for one person to do. So you make a collective. And I think that's like a culture that used to exist much more in London, kind of the artist run space, which we're seeing shut down all over the city because the cost of living, less access to public funding, and in a city like London in particular, like you can't really afford to live here without decent income. And so I think the thing that's interesting about Array Collective is they're a large group, they're a very large group of artists. Collective's generally you think are like less than 10 people. Array Collective is, I think over 50, I'm not going to quote how many people. It's a large group of people and they form together because they have to. Because that's how they create the infrastructure for them to remain being artists.

Yeah. It's about the arts infrastructure being different rather than the environment in which they're making within is different. So it calls for that kind of making. Whereas potentially in London, I don't want to say in London that kind of making wouldn't make sense, but there's a slightly different way that the art world works in London.

I think the difference in London is the cost of living is much higher. There's a commercial sector and there's more access to public funding, even though it's incredibly competitive. There is access to public funding, but for example, in Northern Ireland and in Scotland, the public funding for the arts has been slashed so comprehensively that it pretty much doesn't exist.

Yeah, and we've seen closures of spaces like the CCA in Glasgow and all of these things as well. But for me, there's something about, if we're talking about collective sort of making of work, I think there's also something that should be said about specifically digital artists who are making work with computational infrastructure, software, hardware, because you physically cannot make that work on your own. And I'm thinking also about, there's not many artists that exist that have skill sets that run from training AI models to programming, to Blender, to Unity, to all of these different kinds of things that go into making a contemporary digital arts practice that, you need collaborators. You physically can't do on your own unless you're some sort of polymath, which is quite rare.

And then even if you do have those skills, are you going to the schmoozy events? You probably don't have time to then do the other extra labor that is involved in being an artist and the stuff that none of us want to do, but we all have to do, but if you were doing all these other things, you wouldn't actually physically have the time to fit it in.

Well, then is there a question about the expectation of how artwork is produced now requires collaboration? But that's something slightly different, because then I'm also thinking.

Well, I don't know, because I think it would be interesting to… We were just talking before we started recording about expanding what collaboration, like the many different forms of what collaboration can mean. Like, I guess, again, what I don't want to do is label one thing as good and one thing as bad, but sort of be that there are multiple ways of collaborating, I guess.

Yeah, but maybe I have a bit of a pet peeve when people say, oh, ‘I'm collaborating with someone’ where actually what they're doing is paying them to complete a task for them.

So if we're talking about making a digital artwork, for example, generally the artist will have one, potentially two technical sets of tools that they can use in their practice.

So they can probably edit video quite competently, and they can come up with a concept very clearly. I mean, that's their role usually. Maybe there's one other type of thing like they can,

Are we talking about me?

Maybe she can do performance.

Well, but then, for example, let's say there's some kind of 3D rendered object in the video.

It's a huge ask for an artist to then, who can, let's say, for example, if we're taking your practice, Nina, it's like you're already a performer, you're already choreographing, you're already editing the video, you're coming up with concepts, so forth. It's a huge ask, then also ask you to be really good at 3D modeling. That takes years. People do four-year degrees to learn how to 3D model.

But when you're working with a 3D modeler, are you saying, oh, let's have a conversation and let's make a concept together about how this character is going to look? Oftentimes not.

Oftentimes, you'd probably be going to the person saying, this is the film I want to make and I need this character to do this specific thing at this point, and it probably needs to be about this long. Like you're hiring someone to complete a job for you, and to me, that's not collaboration in the way we're talking about in this miniseries.

The way we're talking about in this miniseries is more that there's more of a give and take with the authorship of the work. No one's being told what to do. You're collectively agreeing on what you're doing together. That's why I'm using the idea of a choir because there is a leader, but you're also actively deciding to be a part or not a part of that bit of voices.

We spoke a lot in previous episodes with this miniseries about the lack of hierarchy or the dissolving of agency. Everybody has the same kind of agency within these groups, but I would push against you Niamh just a little bit, because I do feel like, in some ways... Like if I think, I mean, I'm not an artist, I'm a sort of curator, producer, but I would definitely say that the work that I've done very recently, I've been a collaborator on. But I feel like, perhaps in some ways, because I'm paid by these two artists that I've been working with to help produce their show. I feel like I have some agency in it, so I would say that I've been collaborating with them.

But the way that the project has been announced is the two artists in collaboration. But I know that I've had creative conversations with them. So I think there's something, maybe we're getting a bit too bogged down with defining collaboration and collective. They're very, very different.

But I think the whole thing that we're saying is that the artists in this mini-series, it's more about a lack of hierarchy and a even footing on the creative output.

Yeah. I don't feel like being paid or not being paid is inherent to it's a collaboration or not in terms of a few years ago, I worked on a radio play and I worked with a sound designer.

It was interesting to have those conversations with him, but I very much approached it with, these are things that I'm interested in, but what are you interested in learning through this process? And then creatively having a conversation about, would it sound like this or would it sound like that? I think he was getting paid for that work. That doesn't mean that all of a sudden, his collaboration isn't worthwhile because he's getting paid for the work. That doesn't feel like the, but what you're talking about sounds like a credit issue, in terms of how things are properly credited.

I think I've spoken to other people who are curators and producers of larger projects, and I've worked with them myself, and it is this thing of, we've had all these conversations and I'm actively a voice in this work, without my voice being a part of this conversation the work would be incredibly different. And usually the crediting of that - it's never done accurately.

I mean, really rarely is it done accurately.

But then taking my own logic, it's hilarious because if you were to go to that extent, you'd be crediting every single writer that you've read a sentence of, or you'd be crediting Nina, who gave you a really interesting point on the work. It's like, how far does that actually go?

But actually, I think it's interesting because I think Dane's work does that. Dane does do that.

I remember Chris McInnes, who we've had on the show, Chris McInnes gave Dane a line that then he ended up using in the film and still credited Chris for just that one sentence, in a cacophony of sentences that are within the film. So I mean, Dane's probably a really good person to, or most dismal swamp is a really good project to look to that actually does include, it is just everyone is part of it, no matter how big or small the contribution to the project is.

Yeah, it reminds me of the blockchain ledger and making sure that everything is accounted for, and that there's something to go back to and say, yes, this happened on this day and this is why I've said this.

Yeah, exactly.

What are your references?

Well, and also Dane takes his name out, like it's like most dismal swamp is everyone who's involved in the project.

Everyone who's involved in the project gets credited, and the only person that doesn't get credited, the only name that doesn't get credit, I could be wrong with this, is Dane.

Yeah, I don't know about, yeah.

I don't know, yeah. I mean, people kind of know that most dismal swamp is Dane, but.

Yeah, there's something about this anonymity within collectives like the Guerrilla Girls and all of these like previous sort of collective collaborative projects where the point was to not be named.

Like also thinking about Pussy Riot as an artist collective and part of that being, yeah, kind of a protection strategy against Russian politics. I mean, not that it protected all of them, obviously, but kind of that process of the collective being a protective space where if several of us carry this voice, which I guess is sort of what unions do, where it's sort of leaning on the idea of together we rise?

But I think, yeah, there is that aspect of it as well. But for me, it's like anybody could be in a Most Dismal Swamp project. It makes it feel open because it's got no kind of name, but everyone is credited. So it feels very inviting to me as well, like being an anonymous name.

I mean, Dane is just very open and very sweet and kind anyway and whatever. But I think the fact that he's not putting his name at the front and center, it's not obnoxious. It's not kind of ego driven at all. Even though I think in his episode, he said that a lot of his work is very much driven by his own pleasure, taking pleasure in working with people.

Ego and pleasure, I would say, are two very different things. Because that's just someone enjoying other people's work so much that they're surrounding themselves with finding excuses to surround themselves with other people's work.

No, I think a lot because I help run a graduate award and quite often end up having conversations with recent graduates about how do you sustain practice. And one of the things that I think is always helpful to come back to is kind of who are the people that you're surrounding yourself with? How do you talk about your practice with them?

But also, do they make you feel good about the work that you're making? Do you trust they'll call you out if the work is bad and this type of thing? And that's an infrastructure part because you're sort of still getting to the point where the work might be recognized by someone that you don't know, or it might go into an institution, or you might get a bit of money for it, or you might get a grant, whatever that is. Whatever you want the practice to be. And it feels like with Dane's practice, he's found, oh, this is the infrastructure for my practice that makes me want to continue doing it, regardless of what external things are happening in terms of, is it being shown in a specific place? Or am I getting funding for this commission? Or, you know, and he's a very successful artist, thankfully that's not, it doesn't, from the conversation we had with him at least, it doesn't seem like it's an immediate pressure on the practice, but in the meantime, he's creating all the systems that would mean he would do it kind of regardless. And I think there's a question of that in terms of making the collective or like working collaboratively.

It would still be, yeah, most dismal swamp would still exist just on a more low budget. Like it would still be going regardless of who's funding it or if anyone's funding it.

And I think, I mean, maybe it was funny when I was thinking about today, I was also thinking about Future Artefacts FM and this project as a collaborative project, where there's also, it's gone through different points of kind of funding and reach and so forth, but it always comes back to a point of, well, what do we want to talk about? What do we want to investigate? How do we want to investigate that? Who do we want to bring on to the show? And because of that, it helps ride all of those waves. It's like, well, fundamentally, it's a project that we continue to want to come back. We've created the infrastructure that we work best with, and that means that the external infrastructure can sort of, can be more turbulent, perhaps, because the internal infrastructure is good.

There's something in there about, so in Dane's episode, he was mentioning model collapse, or Nina, maybe you mentioned it, but this idea that a system fed on its own sort of generated stuff will fall eventually, and that it needs real data input into it to kind of not collapse. So I was thinking about how these collaborative practices are maybe these kind of models, and with Rhys, with Dane, even with Emily, adding new people, adding new ideas, adding new constraints kind of allows them to propel and continue. But what I was wondering about the sort of stability of these practices, and if they only exist when they're enacted, what happens to most dismal swamp, Dane? What happens to Rhys? What happens to Emily without collaborators, without this newness being put in, or without this external kind of reference points? Do they then become a state of model collapse because they're kind of just existing on their own?

They're feeding on one person. Like I was trying to think, basically, would those practices work if it was just one person?

But my response would be, I don't think, I think most practices don't work if they're one person. As in, you wouldn't be able to do what you do if it's just you. And Nina, your practice as well doesn't, like, it also requires the groups of people that you work with.

Yeah, if I didn't have dancers, it wouldn't, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And as in, I don't, to me, that doesn't, that feels like a strength. I understand what you're talking about with the model collapse and things coming new. I guess to me, maybe I'm getting too meta about it, but it feels like that's how all...

What?

I do...

That's how many, that's how, not all, I don't want to say all, that's how many practices operate. You know, it might not be with people, but it would always be with ideas. And people are usually conduits of ideas.

You can't make artwork in a vacuum. We can't make anything in a vacuum, maybe.

And that's kind of the thing that's sort of hilarious about the collectives being... Like, yeah, you don't really see collectives getting gallery representation.

Yeah, that's what I was kind of getting.

Or even if you're applying for a residency, they'll accept a duo. They won't accept a collective.

But I think it has more to do with making sure people are paid.

But yeah, but you get what I mean in terms of the whole... Even though we all understand as people working in the creative industry that we require the groups of people, the collectives of people, the communities of people to help sustain our practices and our sanity, to be honest as well. In terms of how funding infrastructure, institutional infrastructures and let's say art market in a big in the sky version of it, those systems are not built for that.

Well, I guess it is sort of like the... With the art market being built on speculation as well, suddenly if you put the dynamics of a group working together, which could also not be sustainable like that, like suddenly that's like, yeah, it's more risk, isn't it?

I mean, I don't actually understand how the art market works.

It's not a hat that any of us wear.

No. I mean, I think it's interesting even because I'm involved in a project with a co-op and it's sort of about gaining funding for a much larger amount of funding for a really large project.

And we've ended up putting in a secondary infrastructure of like a charity with a very specific set of trustees, which is more reasonable for a funder than a co-operative, which is acting like a collective, it's a much larger group of people. And so even those kind of institutional structures of how do you get paid? How do you pay other people? How do you pay rent? Those types of things. Very few of them are really set up for working collectively or working with larger groups of people or non-hierarchical decision making. Artist practices can do that.

And usually you'll see collectives running, like artists run spaces quite often because you have to divide the labor and not one person can do all the tasks, as we said at the beginning.

But once you get to a certain level, institutions are not able to apply for the types of money that would need, like for example if Array Collective is showing in an exhibition, is every member of Array Collective getting a thousand pound fee?

I don't know. I would assume not.

Yeah, I wonder what happens to collective practice once you get to a point where you're very well known and you're very recognized. I don't know, I'm just kind of thinking about what we were saying earlier about paying people to do stuff for you, for your work. Like if you're all getting to such a level that you're getting paid so well, or that you've got that kind of recognition. I don't know, collectives to me just feel very, more grassroots than they do in their kind of like art market level. And I don't know if that's just me being really naive, but I think it is because most of them start in a very grassroots way out of necessity and out of urgency.

Yeah. Like I'm thinking about Rhys' practice and talking specifically about needing more queer spaces where he was living. You know, and thinking about queer spaces being in major cities, but not in smaller cities, not in kind of port-side cities, not in Portsmouth. And talking about how, you know, it's become more vibrant and, you know, but that the collective or the community forms sometimes because they're a minority, but more often than not because they need each other because it's kind of, it's filling a gap that people want. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like people want to meet or people want to sing or like whatever the thing is.

Yeah, I was going to add, and we're kind of maybe going on to the point. I think going back to our initial statement about the As A Chorus, we mentioned about the power, of course, we were talking about it in songs, in our statement, but the power of, we say songs, to move ships and what working together is able to achieve. Because I feel like we sort of have been talking about how working as a collective functions in the art world, which is interesting to a certain point.

Maybe more for us than the others.

Well, I'm worried that maybe we've been maybe almost a little bit negative of how could this work. But I'm also kind of thinking maybe moving towards the more positive ideas of how working together, like what does it do outside of it existing within the art structure? What does it do and sort of, I guess, like Rhys's example of like this group kind of, you know, making spaces that weren't necessarily queer before suddenly queer friendly.

And like where this project, even though it starts as an artwork, then this group together suddenly are actually like making change, big or small, doesn't matter what they're doing. And the same with Emily's work with, I mean, again, we're not talking about, like we're not talking about this idea of like the church bells kind of ringing after a long hiatus of not having church bells anymore and the feeling of the village getting its voice back and something like what this sort of, again, like it can be working. I think in Emily's case, it's not talking about collaborative practice within the art world, it's talking about collaborative artistic practice functioning just in the real world, not for art's sake. Yeah, and maybe kind of thinking about, I don't know.

I was just in Helsinki and recording a little short interview, and someone asked me the question of why are workshops important? And I was like, I don't really, I haven't got a prepared answer.

Kind of after I thought about it for a while, I kind of used this example. So I kind of only can ever really use examples of my own work. I did some workshops in last winter, or like two winters ago in Vancouver, and some of the people that I met on the workshops ended up becoming part of my work as performers. And we ended up working on satellite works together that ended up becoming not part of the show, and ended up becoming collaborative works that have existed outside of my work. And I think I said something like, the best workshops are the workshops that never end, and they just keep, and they kind of just keep going. And in that way, I've been able to kind of bring either younger artists, or artists who maybe are getting, someone who's starting to try art, who's never done it before, kind of bringing them in, giving them their own voice. I don't want to toot my own horn here.

The tools to kind of figure out what they want the voice to be.

Yeah, exactly. So I guess this idea of kind of coming together, and like what can coming together do?

It reminds me of like game jams, you know, where people like make video games together in a very short space of time. And that's a kind of collaborative, it's got constraint to it, but it's all about just working together and learning off each other.

Yeah, bringing in different voices, like bringing in different voices, opinions or experiences.

Again, I'm just thinking about unions. In terms of like, what do they do? I mean, I saw something online because we very recently had the Easter bank holiday and saying kind of all bank holidays that you have, all weekends you have, that was a union. And that's kind of people coming together to try and create conditions that are better for all of us. In terms of, I guess also like grassroots, what collectives do or like sort of how groups of people show up together.

I mean, that's going in like a broader.

But I guess sort of what kind of artistic activities that bring people together can kind of create some sort of change in the same way of like singing a sea shanty on a ship actually helps move the ship.

I'm thinking about how the Arts Council really like if you include sort of educational outreach. And I think a lot of a lot of us tend to be like, oh, but that I don't know how to do that. I've not, I don't know how to make that work. But actually, if I think about all of the projects I've seen that include children, you know, there was a great common board.

It was called at the South London Gallery, a kind of great kids workshop series that took elements from quite complicated shows, but broke them down in ways that really young children could understand. Like that felt very positive and again, felt very collaborative in some ways.

I mean, it feels also like an access thing in terms of maybe sometimes when we're talking about art practice as being kind of a sole practitioner who's made the work alone, there's also a sense of no one could possibly understand what I'm going through. You know, as in when we're talking about practices that feel open and you can join in versus practices that feel closed and you're kind of like admiring from afar sort of the genius, I say it in inverted commas.

I also am thinking more about that sense of, you know, art is always kind of quite a significant way in which we're able to understand ourselves and sort of our place in culture and society. And so those things need to be open because how are we meant to understand something that's trying to push us away? You know, in terms of, it doesn't have to be all art is not for all people, obviously, but if you're a public institution in particular and you're doing outreach, it's like, yeah, why should kids not be involved in what contemporary art can be? You know, they're the ones who are going to inherit the arts infrastructure that we're currently kind of continuing on with. So yeah, they should also be given the tools and the ability to engage with it.

I think about like what like some of like the marches for Palestine that kids have been doing on roadbloxs, like these sort of like, I would say, I'm going to call it video game space or like a virtual world, a sort of artistic space in some way. And like these sort of gatherings that happen in these spaces that...

That's just great. That makes me really happy to hear that. I've not seen that. Because I think quite often the rhetoric around these spaces are that they are dehumanizing, they are kind of violent spaces for children to be in. But actually, if you give a child a platform, good stuff is going to come out of it because it's there and the infrastructure is there for them to connect. It's the same kind of a rhetoric around social media. Yes, it can be very bad, but so much good has happened within these collective spaces.

Well, actually, I think I wrote a note of meme making as a form of collective practice. You can obviously make a meme on your own. That's how people do it. But the meme language relies on other memes before it to be able to make sense.

Yeah, or the remixing of it for it to make sense in your world with your interests. I love the meme templates where it's just like the images where you can add your own text. Or, yeah, I don't know, but this collective knowledge making or collective discussion making through something like a meme is interesting.

But it's like the thing with the meme is you're required to understand what the original image is, and then how the text relates to the image, and how that relates to the present. As in, it's requiring that we have a similar maybe knowledge of the present. I was reading an article yesterday, a newspaper article, about what's happening in Iran and with the US, and how there's funding currently being spent in Iran, and I'll preface this by saying kind of don't agree with the Iranian government or the Ayatollah, but I think this is quite an interesting way in which they're responding to the violence and aggression of the US, is they're making memes about Trump. The Iranian military has handed over communications to Gen Z and millennials to make

memes about Trump. They're using AI, Lego films about Trump in order to call them out and make him appear dumb, stupid, incredibly violent, incapacitated as a way to change the messaging around the war.

I mean, that doesn't surprise me because the whole, in my head or in my view, the whole point of memes is to distill something very complex into something that's instantly readable and instantly understandable and that's why I don't understand certain memes because they come from a geneology of information about, I don’t know, FIFA, football games, things I don’t understand. But if you’re in that world you get it instantly, without all of this preamble.

Do you think there's something about then whoever can read certain memes that immediately puts them into a specific kind of collective or community of people in terms of coding to each other? I get this, you get this, we get each other.

Exactly. That's very dark because it is a bit Reddit coded or 4chan coded because they're used in that way. But I do think there is a kind of like, it's a collective, you're in the know, you're in the group, you're in the in-group, you get what I'm talking about. They become like these in-jokes to signify the people that are like you.

And I think it's like also, it's kind of like this weird thing where it's like production and communication like creative production and communication at the same operating at the same time.

Yeah. Maybe then there's a question I want to circle background to with this mini-series. When we're talking about collaboration, where what is the role of the artist or thinking about the artist that we featured on the show, what are their roles in those collaborative practices? So thinking about, if we're talking about memes, for example, obviously there's the original person who has put together this meme, and then there's the person who might do a spoof of that or do a version of that, and so forth.

So the role of the person who's made this first part is quite clear. They are the maker of this object. But as soon as it starts to morph and move and change, their role becomes quite different, like the hierarchy of it breaks down. So I guess, how do those roles maybe morph as the collaboration or the collective grows in time? I think Rhys is quite an interesting example of this. Like he started this choir project, to sort of figure out how queer sea shanties might look, might act, might feel. And now it's become a project almost independent of him. So his role has changed really drastically. He's gone from the main organizer, the producer to now founder.

But I don't even know if he's the... I mean, the artwork is the catalyst, I feel like, with Rhys, rather than him, because he's still part of the group. Like he's sort of still part of the group.

Founder, sometimes I feel like almost kind of almost removes the person from it. I feel like he's very much still part of the group. I don't know.

But I guess those labels start to break apart. Even when we were talking with Dane about Most Dismal Swamp and what's his role. He spoke about being, was it creative producer?

Yeah, something like that. I've definitely slipped up with Dane. I've called him just a curator before and then he's like, actually I'm an artist as well. I'm going like, oh God, sorry. I'm feeling bad, but he's everything.

Yeah. But those labels start making less and less sense.

I would agree with that. I think the further down a project you get, especially with somebody like Rhys as well, I can imagine a situation where Rhys maybe steps aside once this project has gotten bigger. And maybe there's a few different choirs around different port cities, for example, in the UK where there is not this representation. I can see this project kind of taking on a life of its own without Rhys. And I think that's also what's really positive about these collaborations is that they do, because time moves on and they gain momentum. They propel themselves into something else and into something that you might not have even envisioned. I don't know if I could say the same for Most Dismal Swamp, because that is very much linked to Dane. Like Dane is like Dr. Dank to me, like Dr. Swamp, so it's very much part of his practice and what he's into. But with Rhys and maybe even with Emily, I can imagine a situation where these hierarchies, these names given to people within them break down, and it actually is just this one amorphous thing.

With Emily's episode, it's because we've featured it or interacted with it in such early stages. It'll be really interesting to see how it develops. If suddenly her and her family doing a bell ringing performance becomes part of the work, because we don't know how it's going to come together.

Absolutely. I mean, even I'm thinking about the piece I showed on at the beginning of the mini-series and making the original iteration of the work and having a conversation with the curator and being saying, what's my role in this? And when you, I guess, quite often in art school, you're sort of taught more so about authorship, because that's also the way in which you kind of, you sell and you pitch and like, yeah, as we were talking about before, you get the grants or the

shows or all the things that propel a practice. So when all of a sudden, your authorship becomes unimportant, all of that training that you have kind of becomes redundant. Like you need to start, you need to like train again almost in a way. And I think that's maybe part of the precarious thing around collectors is, yes, they're grassroots because they have to be, because you're usually not really taught how to do it.

Or like they're often emerging out of, yeah, we said need but also like immense struggle. Like I remember when we were in Goldsmiths, you know, there was a collective that formed called Black Gold, which was in response to the extreme whiteness of the cohort. I think we had four students of color in a 60-person cohort. Yeah, it's just ridiculous.

And when you think about kind of global majority in Lewisham Borough, where Goldsmiths is based, and so that was that collective, and it was more than just those four students who were global majority, but that collective emerged in response to that. So I think there's a thing of the collectives needing to emerge, but then also when you're an artist, kind of your identity becomes such a big part of how you sell a practice.

So when that stops being important, you have to completely reframe how practice works for yourself, which I think Dane has done really successfully, Rhys has done really successfully, Emily has done really successfully.

We haven't spoken about your work.

Yeah, we haven't.

It feels like it's slightly a different thing because I think with Dane's practice, with Most Dismal Swamp and with Rhys' The Seaweed in the Fruit Locker, and Emily's work, they're very long research projects in terms of the collaboration and the ways in which they work together. Whether as I think the piece, Chanter, you kind of heard it really at the beginning of its life, and it's now turning into something new.

So how has your role changed then? If you imagine yourself at the beginning of Chanter, I don't even know how you would have described your role there, but how has that morphed?

Because I was invited to the residency as an artist, and I think the main way I approached, I didn't even really think about role at the beginning, I more so thought about sensitivity to place, and then that became a way of almost wanting to act as a facilitator. And I think there's an interesting thing, for example, with Emily's work, because she's also a producer and works with Shape Arts, so helps to kind of facilitate accessibility in practices and how to support artists who are disabled. Also, I spend a lot of time kind of facilitating award in my studio building, so that type of, let's say, more production back-end side is quite a comfortable space. So almost like taking that set of tools, learned outside of practice and putting them into practice, into like my art practice for the first time was interesting. And I think now maybe that sort of part of how I see, part of how I see the role of almost like those segments of the project where it's very much I'm facilitator, and then there's segments of the project where I'm very much maker.

And it's almost that the way I'm thinking about like the collaboration is, I'm very aware that in the case of the project, I'm doing, the woman that I'm working with, Bernadette Hayes.

Like her skill set is her voice and her songwriting and her passion for that, and where she lives and how she lives there. I'm not going to ask her to design a piece of sculpture. That makes no sense. That's my skill set. And I think maybe the thing that comes out of working collaboratively or collectively is that you become very aware of the things that you're good at or not. I mean, the other kind of, let's say non-hierarchical thing that comes from that is kind of, I'm part of an artist co-op and one of the things within that is understanding, oh, this person's really good at PR. This person's really good at making a website. This person knows how to write funding language. This person knows how to cook us all lunch. Or this person knows how to beautifully fill in the holes in the wall of the gallery.

It's a skill.

It is. It really is.

And I think there's a thing in, I think, collaborative and collective practices, where you become aware of what are the things that you bring into a project and your own skill set much more so, because I think when you're kind of a sole artist making a project alone, you have to do all the things. So even if you're bad at it, you're going to do it. Whether as if you have a group of people that are making the project together, you can pass off the task. Like it requires more communication, obviously, but it requires more awareness of where your own skill sets lie.

I think that's also quite empowering. Like if I think about our collective, our Future Artefacts collective, if you could call it that, like yes, we all take part in the discussions, but behind the scenes, we all use the skill sets that we've developed over our careers to kind of really

shape the way that Future Artefacts works, I guess, and that it's an empowering thing to be told, you're good at this, so you focus on that. You don't have to think about this stuff that you're not good at. And I guess that's quite addictive in a sense, right?

I think it's that, but then it's also, oh, I want to learn this thing. You know how to do it. Can we learn how to do it together?

I think there's a sense of it doing that as well, which I think generally just creates better projects, because

You do feel a little bit more brave when you're working with someone. Sometimes when you're on your own, you're just a bit like, I have that as an artist working on my own. Sometimes I'm just like, I don't, what if I can't do it? You can get afraid by the idea that you might not be able to do it. And actually, weirdly, even if you're with someone next to you who also doesn't know how to do it, for some reason it's easier. Like when we started the show.

Oh, the first sound edit.

Yeah.

The first, I remember the very first recording we ever did was in, I was living in a house with a conservatory. So glass. And we just put loads of pillows everywhere and put a mic between us.

On a drum.

Like, what were you thinking?

What were you thinking?

I can't even remember. Yeah, it was completely, and we had no idea, but just the audacity to be like, well, we're both terrible. So it's fine.

Yeah.

And sure you look at us now.

OK, I've got, like, a fun fact that I want to finish up with.

Fun fact.

Yeah, I've got a fun fact to finish up with. Because I was thinking, I was thinking about the power of, like, song. So going kind of just like really briefly touching back on the song thing with just a couple of minutes left. The so I have seen a lot of videos online of cows.

Cows.

Cows. Like the animal. No, they really love music. So they like, if you play music, like you can find videos on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram, of like whatever, like people like singing or like playing an accordion. And the cows in the field suddenly start, like they come towards and they just stand there and they just listen to the music. And so I was kind of thinking about, I was like, is music or anything like used when like herding animals?

Like is that like something, because I always like understood like herding animals, like you use dogs and like this. And I kind of went down this rabbit hole basically, and I found this like really ancient practice.

I don't know why, but this is reminding me of the Kentucky meat shower.

Oh. I'm thinking of, well, Peter the Pied Piper.

Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Peckers.

So this is practice called Kulning, K-U-L-N-I-N-G. And it's a Swedish like- Kulning.

Kulning. And it's almost this like, it's kind of like a little bit like yodeling. But it's like kind of got a bit more of like an elven kind of feel. It's a little bit more sing-song-y like. And there's videos online that you can see like people going into a field and like just singing into a valley.

And the whole idea of the song is like the way that you use your voice is that like you do these kind of upward inflections. So it resonates in the valley. So the cows will then come to you.

Was this in the sound of music?

I don't think so.

Okay.

Also Austria.

And like yodeling. Yodeling also I think is like, but then I sort of started looking at like hollering and yodeling like as a form of communication between like vast environments, like where before the telephone or the or any, any, any communicative like device or technology. Like that was a way to signal to people like and communicate with them over that terrain that maybe like was unsafe to walk through. But then I think also in terms of thinking about like herding animals, like there was this thing of like, you know, if you're herding animals in a huge, huge space, like you have to, if you're doing it with dogs, let's say, which is like a really common way of doing it, there's this idea that you have to, the dog has to be kind of behind the animal. So it's like you're kind of pushing, you're sort of pushing them. And I was thinking about this idea of like the song, rather like you stay stationary and you sing, and they come to you rather than like you kind of pushing. And I thought there was something really nice about this power of song as a sort of like attractor, or like a, I felt like it was sort of like a more positive way of kind of herding animals.

I don't really care about herding animals, but I don't know why I'm talking about this, but now I do.

I mean, it's part of our entire agricultural system, which means we get to eat food.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. No, but I just thought there was-

It's a lovely image.

Yeah, and I just kind of thought, I guess in terms of when we're talking about the power of a song and we're talking about it in terms of like human to human kind of relationships, I kind of thought like, oh, there's a kind of example of like a song also operating like from human to non-human relationships and kind of thinking about like, what are the, like where else could, I don't have that answer, but where else could song kind of be used and maybe even like human to objects or humans to technology or how could it function, because it seems to be something that’s attractive

It reminds me of the priests that bless server rooms. Oh, I heard about this.

No, I don't know.

Yeah, if you just Google priest blessing server room, like they, I don't know where they do it. And actually, now I've said it out loud, it might be AI. It might be an AI generated image, but.

Like Swaggy Pope.

Yeah. But yeah, we used, I mean, just thinking about the human and animal relationship, we used to sing to our hamster, we'd sing her the theme tune of Stardew Valley if she was stressed and it would really calm her down. So I think this kind of power of it to transcend bodies is really interesting.

Large Format Transcript

There was a really quite a long time ago, Nina and I did a sound event at South Kiosk Gallery in Peckham with artist Maude Craigie, around her film Indications of Guilt, and I think we've talked about it quite a bit on the show because she said something that just really struck a chord about how when it's much easier for your brain to perceive inaccuracies in sound than in visual. And I've been thinking more and more about this recently, kind of as someone who's become more interested in live performance, thinking about the work that I have on the show, those recordings coming from a live performance. And I think there's something about the physicality of sound. So thinking about also with Emily's work and the bell towers and the bell ringing, you know, there's also like, how does that sound exist in a space?

And that's not necessarily kind of human to animal, but more so kind of human to room, human to architecture. Kind of the first performance I had of the piece that went on the radio show, Chanter, was in a Templar's tower. It's thick walls with no ceiling, but that meant that the sound kind of reverberated really well off the walls of the tower, but also you could hear it outside, which meant that there was this, I was interested in an old abbey because it was also designed for monks to chant within. So there was also a sense of kind of, how are we responding to an environment with song, with singing? One of the names I put down that I thought about when we were thinking about collaboration earlier and also non-human is this Irish artist, Dorothy Cross talks about her practice of singing in collaboration with nature.

And she has this really beautiful film in these, that's shot in these caves in Ireland called the Alliwee Caves, where she is this young boy, kind of like prepubescent boy singing underneath a stalactite, the largest one in the country.

And it's so long that it sort of ends just above his head. And there's a sense of how his voice then reverberates with the cave, with the mountain. And part of that sense of being able to hear that it's real is the physical nature of the sound. So like, what's the power of the song? The song is like, how does it move in your body? How does it move in the space?

And also thinking about kind of how these cows are responding to the sound through the valley. It's the physical movement of the vibration through the valley. Yeah, I think there's something about that. And like, that's quite different to, I think, like what Dane is talking about maybe in his practice. But I think in terms of what Rhys is looking about in terms of the group of voices in a room together, and what Emily is talking about, the group of bell ringers in the tower together, the people in the church listening to the bells, the people in the town, there's like a physical quality to that sound. Like it requires, like the song requires the space and the group. And yes, us as human beings can like identify the words and what they mean, those types of things. But how it feels in the body, like, you don't need to understand the words to understand the feeling.

So I think we're going to have to end there. But I feel like we kind of like, I felt like there was more, as always, there was more to eke out of that conversation. If you haven't already listened to the whole of the As A Chorus mini-series, you still can, though I don't think we've done any spoilers or anything. And yes, so we have a new upcoming series which will be commissioned by the Henry Moore Institute. But we won't say too much. You'll just have to come back and tune in to the first episode of that mini-series.

Coming to you soon.

Until then, goodbye.

RE, ND

Bye.

AS A CHORUS RECAP EPISODE

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Introduction

Artist Introduction