Social Hacking: temporary public art commissions for the city of Plymouth

21-24 March 2007

Social Hacking is a series of temporary public art commissions for Plymouth by international artists’ groups against a backdrop of urban regeneration. The project reflects the ways in which these changes to the city can be further influenced by creative human intervention.

This week I’ve been helping the IAA with their exhibition at the Plymouth Arts Centre which was part of the Social Hacking event. It was quite a controversial exhibition in which in told us about the treatment of America’s prisoners (notably those in Guantanamo Bay) - it was set up very well and was a good insight into seeing how commission based projects go and was a good chance to meet international artists such as the IAA and c6. Although I’ve been fairly busy with other work this week I didn’t have much chance to see the other exhibitions but I made sure I went to see the Mikro Orchestra Project at the Guildhall who put on a musical performance with gameboys. Being a fan of a fair amount of 8bit and chip-tune music, I really enjoyed it and it was good to see other people taking an interest in it. Also, the visuals were quite spectacular and very fitting to the theme which added to the experience.

As the IAA exhibition is running until the end of the month I will head down to the Arts Centre to get a proper look at the exhibition as I was only able to see it in the development stages.

Although I didn’t do the throwie idea because not all of the materials I needed came through on time, I decided to do something different, something that I wouldn’t normally do and is well out of my style to try and put myself into the same mind frame of the artist, using their same styles and techniques.

As I’ve hardly touched any form of tradition art whether it be drawing or canvas painting, I thought it would be a good idea to go down this form of art to try and investigate the ideas and feelings of someone in a different field to what I would usually do.

When I was younger I used to watch a Japanese animated series called Gundam Wing which involved futuristic human shaped robots that would fight each other in outer space. The shapes and styles of these robots had always fascinated me, but nothing came from it. So when I saw Leigh Flurry’s drawing he did it instantly caught my eye and inspired me to recreate it. I am quite sure these characters are where Leigh got his inspiration from in drawing the robot as it matches the style of them in the show.
It’s not a piece of art that’s been planned, had hours spent on and worked till perfection which gives it a raw style sketch feel to it. In a way, that’s what inspired me to recreate it - being able to sketch something so well as if it was second nature.

I noticed that Leigh was using varying pen thicknesses to achieve different type of strokes on the outlines of some details so I had to buy a number of pens to use and a Royal Mail envelope to match the same canvas used. The envelope adds to the sketch idea, as if it was just done randomly.
All of the materials were gathered and it was time to get on with the drawing. At first I had no idea where to start as there are no obvious clues as to where Leigh started with the drawing - in the end I just settled to go logically and start with one of the wings in the top left. One thing I remembered when I was doing drawings when I was younger was that they usually become disproportioned so to combat this I drew up a grid which worked as a frame for me to align all of the body parts together. As Leigh’s drawing was rather symmetrical and aligned it should have fitted well, although in the end I ignored the frame and worked by eye which didn’t end up too bad. I noticed that the shape of the robot is rather symmetrical so it helped to know that one side of the shape is going to be roughly equal with the other. Although I didn’t get it perfect, I feel that I did a better job than I expected to.
I used a pencil to begin with because I wouldn’t have been able to rub out or adjust any mistakes I have made with a thick black pen. The overall shape of the robot was drawn first, getting all of the features of the body together in proportion, and then detail was worked on after. At first you do not notice it, but there is a huge amount of detail in the drawing which posed a problem when trying to fit it all in. After getting a rough shape and some of the detail in with pencil, it was time to start confirming the lines made with a thin black pen. The thin lines were used on some of the inner lines and detail and the thicker black pen was used on shadowing and outlining the robot. As the drawing is a sketch, it shows Leigh didn’t use a ruler and that it was all done freehand, so I did the same. I think some of the lines would have benefited from being perfectly straight because it would’ve helped strengthen the overall piece, however it would then detach from the sketched feel.

When I had finished the drawing, I kept noticing little bits of detail that I had missed so I went back and put them in. It seems that Leigh spent as much time on the minor details as he did with the shape of the robot because there was so much of it.
After everything had been finished, I feel that I did quite a good job in recreating the piece for someone that hasn’t touched traditional art for years. Whilst drawing the robot, I could feel where Leigh had gone in terms of steps throughout creating it as certain shapes within the shape of the body became natural to draw in sequence on the body.

I still would have liked to do the throwie idea (and probably still will do in the near future) because it involves a lot more hands on work and getting into the public and involving an open exhibition which I’ve always enjoyed. Although it was good to flip the tables and learn something new, something I’d not necessarily go near usually. I enjoyed the casual feel to the drawing, as if it was something you would do on the train home or whenever you had some free time. It did feel like a lot of the credit for the design would go to the imagination of what part each part of the body looks like and what details it should have and what size it should be in comparison to the rest of the body amongst other specific details which can only come from the original artist. However I am proud of being able to recreate something to look much better than I expected it to with my own hands.

I’ve finally finished the drawing of the ‘For Office Use Only’ design. It was even done on a postage envelope to match as closely as possible.

Here is a work in progress photo, which shows my stages throughout the drawing;

You can see the final version below;

Overall I am quite happy with my version, although it is not exactly the same (it would’ve been very hard to perfect it because they are both freehand) it got me into the same mind frame as Leigh and allowed me to discover the techniques in creating the design.
Not being a traditional artist, I’m surprised it came out as well as it did. It did take a lot longer than I expected but I took my time and made sure I didn’t make any mistakes as they would’ve been hard to rectify.
There are a couple of things that I was not aware of before starting the design. There is a huge amount of attention to detail, I had to use two different sizes of pens to achieve with Leigh had done with using a finer type pen to create small sized detail and a larger pen to effectively highlight the image and give it a stronger structure.

Here is a final photo to compare my version against Leigh’s.

Using the literal term for a map, I decided to use the street paths to spell a word; taking what was produced on street level which would mean nothing but when viewed from above it all becomes clear.
Even though paint would’ve been much easier, it would be illegal to permanently deface the property. Considering it is legal for street artists to use chalk, I decided that it would be a much wiser idea to use chalk to create the lines on the road.
First of all I used google maps to get a clear map to use to find out what roads I could use to draw chalk on. I used the word ‘neka’ which is an anagram of Kane and an alias I use (hence n3k4.com) and it seemed to fit very well into the shapes of the roads across central Plymouth.

Neka - essentially ‘tagging’ Plymouth

After this, it was time to gather the materials. It was surprisingly hard to find chalk but I got some in the end. Two friends helped out with filming the project and writing some of the chalk. We had a copy of the map in hand to work out where we were going.
The whole thing took a lot longer than I expected and we didn’t finish till it got quite late. It was also a lot of hard work, afterwards my legs were strained and I couldn’t walk up stairs properly!

Chalking across a road

When the chalking was done and footage was collected, it was time to create the video. I decided to use the video format to present the project because you can show how the idea works from both levels, the floor and the sky. I edited the footage in Final Cut, which didn’t require much more than chopping and putting in some transitions and using After Effects to create the motion animations which showed the route of the chalking.

I’m quite happy with the final product, you can watch it below.

Or download the .WMV file from here.

I have decided to recreate the image that artist Leigh Flurry who creates a lot of graffiti inspired graphical designs. I met Leigh a while ago through a friend and although I am not too good at traditional art, his style has always striked me as being something different to a lot of the work that is out there.
One of his images that stuck out most is the ‘For Office Use Only’ design that you can see below. It is a robotic style character that looks very similar to the characters in the animated series Gundam Wing which may have been a source of inspiration for Leigh.

I’ve bought an envelope which will be my canvas and a selection of black pens, time to get to work.

Here are some photos of my workbook. First page has something that resembles breasts, you’re in for a treat.

There’s 20 hours to go before it’s supposed to be in and the magnets haven’t arrived yet. I guess it wasn’t a good idea ordering them from China but there’s now no way I could do the whole project even if they came in the morning. It’s a shame because I was really looking forward to doing the whole thing, the creation of the throwies, getting people together to throw them, documenting it and putting the video together.
I think that when the magnets do come through I will do the project anyway as it would be a waste of materials (unless anyone wants to buy 150 watch batteries and 200 coloured LEDs?) and would be a fun thing to do.
As I’ve got everything else finished, I could quickly do something in the time I have left, although I doubt it would be as good as doing the throwies.

I was using the K2 theme which I liked quite a lot because there was a lot of options I could use from the dashboard rather than having to hardcode most things and it had a lot of AJAX features. However I noticed people were having accessibility issues with it so decided to go with something more simpler. This theme has been modified to suit my needs and works well in terms of aesthetics and access.

I have created the online news report for the watches. It can be found here.

Interface

I feel that the interface of the blog works very well for what it is intended for. There is a lot of space for content on the left, with various navigation sidebars on the right that the user can easily use. When the user clicks on a certain category, all of the posts within that category will show up, excluding any irrelevant posts. This is a very good way for people to find relevant information without having to look through other content. There are various features in the sidebar such as the most recent posts part which gives a brief overview of the most recent posts, links to friends and even a del.icio.us plugin that pulls an RSS feed from my profile to show the most recent sites I have bookmarked (which are usually relevant to the course). I’ve also integrated a Flickr plugin that pulls the photos from my album into the site like you can see here.

Branding and Identity

I haven’t focused much on branding because I change it a lot. Although at the moment I am using the ‘n’ logo to represent ‘neka’, but I feel this will only be temporary until I make something better. I’ve used a portal type page for the root of the site which has various links to other related stuff of mine such as my photography portfolio and web design service I run with a friend. One day in the near future I’ll put them all together as part of my site.

Documentation
At first, for some reason I was documenting every lecture I went to but I later realised this was impractical and not as helpful as I though it would be. I then just documented important lectures, coursework briefs, coursework requirements, trips and any other relevant information. One thing that strengthens this documentation is the photos I took when the moment was appropriate such as the Kinetica Museum visit. It’s good to be able to look back over this and refresh my mind on some of the text I’ve written down.