The Drone Ensemble in Infinity Pitch, an exhibition by Pester & Rossi at The BALTIC

The Drone Ensemble were invited by the collaborative duo Pester & Rossi to host an experimental sound workshop for young gallery visitors during the Infinity Pitch exhibition at The BALTIC.

Pester & Rossi are asking visitors to make, break and re-make the rules of play. BALTIC’s largest gallery space has up to eight live action stations with activities where you can watch, listen, explore, improvise and play along with a number of enormous colourful inflatables.

We had planned a simple workshop structure that involved making megaphones for the children to use to mimic the sounds of the instruments. To make the megaphones we had prepared templates that could be used to trace the outline that was to be cut out of coloured card. Pester & Rossi have supplied rolls of coloured electrical tape for gallery visitors to use to transform the walls and floor of the gallery. This tape was also used to form and decorate the megaphones. The Drone Ensemble would perform a number of times throughout the duration of the workshop, following a score projected onto the walls and getting the children to participate at specific times. However, once we entered the space we soon realised that we would need to reassess our plans due to the existing noise levels, the nature of the space and the sheer number of children who desperately wanted to have a go at playing the instruments.

After setting up the instruments and observing how the space was being used, we had a group conflab and prepared our plan of action. Each of us was responsible for one type of instrument, and we were to demonstrate how to play the instrument. We encouraged the children (and adults) to try playing the instruments, and guided them as they did so.

I was very impressed by the children's abilities to learn how to play a new instrument, particularly the friction drums.

The gongs were extremely popular, and we were able to involve lots of the kids playing the gongs at once as we performed a number of gong parades around the gallery. Pester & Rossi have made a selection of costumes for visitors to wear, and so we encouraged the children to dress up in these. Armed with a gong in one hand, a beater in the other, and dressed in an array of brightly coloured red, green, yellow and blue outfits, we paraded around the gallery in single file making a rather colossal sound. 

The children enjoyed making the megaphones, and this activity was easy to manage as the instructions were very simple and did not require many materials or guidance. This meant that we could concentrate on playing the instruments with the children.

The workshop was a big success and Pester & Rossi were pleased with our contribution and response to their exhibition. We were exhausted afterwards, but would certainly consider doing more workshops in the future.

The Drone Ensemble at BALTIC - The Playground Project: Children'sPreview

Yesterday the Drone Ensemble participated in The Playground Project: Children's Preview at BALTIC.

The exhibition is really vibrant and exciting, featuring a range of works that embrace, encourage and depend upon interaction. The Lozziwurm, a giant orange snake-like tube with cut out windows, dominates the space. Children (and adults) crawl through it, slide down it and climb on it, much to the enjoyment of the gallery staff. This is an exhibition for those who love to play.

There are drawing machines, swings, a giant sandpit, a craft area, a continually growing and changing sculpture, voice performances and The Drone Ensemble were performing and demonstrating a selection of our instruments.



We had an overwhelmingly positive reception. Kids and adults were full of enthusiasm for what we were doing and it was great to see young and old take pleasure from playing with what we had brought. Children were mesmerised by the quirky sounds that they could control, and parents saw a different side to their children as they were so fully engaged in the instruments that they were no longer apprehensive about leaving their parents side. Children had a new found confidence.



There are loads of events happening throughout the duration of the exhibition so it's well worth checking out the BALTIC website to find out more:

http://balticmill.com/whats-on/the-playground-project

The press have also been very positive about the exhibition. Read some reviews here:

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/whats-on/art-kids-cant-touch-no-11616999

http://www.sprogonthetyne.com/blog/2016/7/14/playground-project-the-baltic

http://www.thecrackmagazine.com/view-editorial/3638

The Playground Project is realised in cooperation with Kunsthalle Zürich Including work by Marjory Allen (Lady Allen of Hurtwood), Joseph Brown, Riccardo Dalisi, Richard Dattner, Aldo van Eyck, M. Paul Friedberg, Michael Grossert, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Alfred Ledermann, Yvan Pestalozzi, Group Ludic, Egon Møller-Nielsen, Palle Nielsen, Isamu Noguchi, Sreejata Roy, Niki de Saint Phalle, Josef Schagerl, Mitsuru (Man) Senda, Carl Theodor Sørensen, Alfred Trachsel and more."

Want Your Children to Survive The Future? Send Them to Art School

Want Your Children to Survive The Future? Send Them to Art School

Can you imagine a world in which most jobs are obsolete?

If not, you are most likely in for a rude awakening in the coming decades of radical shifts in employment. This is particularly true for new parents propelling the next generation of workers into an adulthood that many economists and futurists predict to be the first ever “post-work” society.

Though the idea of a jobless world may seem radical, the prediction is based on the natural trajectory of ‘creative destruction’ — that classic economic principle by which established industries are decimated when made irrelevant by new technologies.



When was the last time you picked up the hot new single from your local sheet music store? Many moons ago sheet music was the music industry, with the only available means of hearing pop songs being to have a musician read and perform them. This quickly eroded with the advent of the phonograph, leading to a record industry that dominated the last century and is now itself eroding due to the explosive growth of independent online publishing.

It’s hard to justify using a massive workforce of recording engineers, media manufacturers, distributors, and talent scouts to accomplish a task that a musician can now do by herself in an afternoon with just a laptop. The same goes for the millions of skilled labor and manufacturing jobs that will soon be crumpled by 3D printing technology, the thousands of retailers whose staff and storefronts can readily be supplanted by automated delivery systems, or the dwindling hospitality and transportation industries currently being pecked away by app-based sharing services like Airbnb and Uber.

Never heard of 3D printing, ridesharing, or “post-work” theory? That’s okay; you can just Google them. In fact, thanks to Google we may now add the very concept of knowledge itself to our growing list of no-longer-scarce resources. When anyone can access the world’s greatest library from their cellphone, even the long-revered skill of knowing things loses its marketability.

The Art School Solution


Photo by Jeff White, courtesy of Lowe Mill ARTS & Entertainment


If preparing your kids for a world in which hard-working, knowledgeable people are unemployable frightens you then I have some good news. There is a solution, and it doesn’t involve tired, useless attempts at suppressing technology. Like most good solutions it requires a trait that is distinctly human.

I’m speaking about Creativity.
Send your kids to art school. Heavily invest time and resources into their creative literacy. Do these things and they will stand a chance at finding work and or fulfillment in a future where other human abilities become irrelevant.

Any adult reading this at the time of publication came of age in an era when parents urged children to learn a subject that would funnel straight into a specific career field. Even those parents who encouraged their children’s creative dreams did so with an addendum that we should also consider getting a degree in a practical field that “you can always fall back on if sculpture/philosophy/theater/poetry doesn’t work out”. No doubt this protective instinct was a smart one considering the reality of our youth. An arts education might promise a life of self-discovery but there has always been reasonably assured financial stability in the high-demand arenas of science, education, skilled trades, governments, etc. Surely that dynamic won’t last much longer as more and more physical and mental human tasks are commandeered by machines and software.


Photo courtesy of Lowe Mill ARTS & Entertainment

I don’t say this to dismiss the importance of any field of study. A world without scientists or doctors or teachers would be just as broken as a world with no artists. Without programmers and engineers the very technologies that make life efficient would quickly disappear. But with the abundance of information and tools freely accessible online to a generation of youngsters equipped with computers from toddlerhood, it’s safe to assume that those who want to maintain current technology have few obstacles in learning how to do so — No degree required. The same goes for any pragmatic skill.



The arts, however, are a polar opposite to pragmatism. Cameras have long exceeded our ability to realistically and efficiently render images, but still our love of painting remains to this day. By now we know that the value of a great painting isn’t in its accuracy at rendering a view but in the artist’s unique capacity to convey a viewpoint. Even those uninterested in “fine” art are driven to make purely aesthetic decisions on practical matters such as clothing, shelter, and transportation. Our willingness to pay extra for beautiful clothes, inviting homes, and sleek cars is motivated not by functionality but by emotionality.


Photo courtesy of Lowe Mill ARTS & Entertainment


It’s inherently human to want the objects in our lives to communicate feelings and ideas to us and about us. The constant searching for and assignment of meaning dwells in everyone, but the artist is the person who exercises this muscle regularly enough to control it. The person with creative literacy — a basic understanding of the mental, emotional, and sociological tools used for creative thought and communication — is able to find purpose and apply meaning to her world rather than having meaning handed down and purpose assigned to her. The painting student completes his senior thesis exhibit with a head full of many more lessons than just how to paint. He’s now equipped with an ability to see problems, connections, and solutions where others see only a blank surface. I assure you this ability is not limited to the canvas.

Photo Courtesy of Lowe Mill ARTS & Entertainment

I’m not saying anything new here. These qualities of a liberal arts education have been expounded by its proprietors for ages, but with major industries quickly running out of a need for worker bees it’s becoming clearer by the day that our professors were right.

In fact it’s somewhat amazing that this idea was ever in question. Humanity’s highest-paid workers have always been those who as a result of their innovations created opportunity for others to work.
There’s a reason Steve Jobs became a billionaire, and it’s not because he could program computers.

Of course history is also filled with countless stories of equally creative figures lost in the systemic grind of working for the Steve Jobs’s of the world. We’ve all known brilliant people, seemingly not made for our time, whose potential was crushed by dead end jobs after their work was rejected by the film/music/publishing/anything industries. The excuse of being ahead of one’s time can no longer apply though. We live in an age where a person speaking into a webcam can collectively raise hundreds of thousands of dollars just by telling people about a good idea. The gatekeepers are gone and they are not coming back. Our only remaining obstacle can be lack of good ideas.

It’s time for a revolution in education that reflects our new reality and gives students the necessary tools to survive it. Technological advancements will always outpace the offerings of the traditional classroom, making it entirely purposeless to force memorization of knowledge that may become irrelevant before children even graduate. Instead we should hone the skill that best ensures adaptability and resourcefulness during times of constant change.
It’s time for the creative classroom.



But what about STEM?





Does this revolution require us to toss out math or science or history? Does my ideal future classroom wedge would-be physicists into an endless curriculum of figure drawing classes?

Absolutely not!

Let children pursue their own interests and they will find their way to all areas of study as part of the exploratory process. Let the child who is in love with fire trucks continue to obsess over fire trucks. With proper guidance he will soon find himself learning civics, engineering, history, physics, chemistry, sociology, economics, and everything in between — all of his questions fueled by a simple aesthetic attachment to the pretty red fire truck.

No healthy child is born without an innate sense of wonder about their world. However, this childhood compulsion to explore is a bud quickly snipped by adults conditioned to fear the unknown. The tradition of discouraging unusual questions and behavior in children is so pervasive that we have come to view those who survive with their creativity intact as having a “gift”. What is more absurd is our amazement at the correlation of great artists and mental illness, as if the battle for self-expression which artists so tenaciously endure has no causal link to their psychic well-being.

Photo Courtesy of Lowe Mill ARTS & Entertainment

The change that will secure your children’s safe passage through the future comes when we strip creativity of its mysterious, unearthly status. Artists are not magical geniuses. We are simply people who were either privileged enough or stubborn enough to hold onto something that every living person is “gifted” at birth. Assume that your children have limitless creative potential and begin to nurture it. Assume that your children’s ingenuity is the one true safety net available in times of rapid change. Send your kids to art school and they will have exactly what they need to become anything they might need to be.

I speak from experience.



Photo by Eric Schultz, Huntsville Times

Dustin Timbrook is an artist in Huntsvill

Eames House of Cards

Created in 1952, the most successful toy of Charles & Ray Eames is a series of cards printed with images, that could be built into three-dimensional structures of various shapes and sizes. Charles and Ray's view of toys was that a point can be made and something can be learned by both adults and children. The message is that we have only to look at our immediate surroundings and the things we use and love for a deep and lasting appreciation of art in its truest form.

http://www.monpetitart-boutique.com/index.php?page=119&lg=2

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324216004578483141161803964