BITTER/SWEET Install - Day 2

On my second day of install for BITTER/SWEET, the forthcoming group exhibition at Assembly House, Leeds I was fortunate enough to have assistance from both the curators, Liam McCabe and Emily Garvey.

As Liam and I aligned the projector so that the left half of the design fitted with the right half of the design, Emily cracked on with applying the next colour of paint; powder grey.

Once the projection was aligned, Liam and I marked out the right side of the design on the wall using masking tape.

Frustratingly, we could not completely match the design to the wall, and so I made a few adjustments to the design .

Once the vast majority of the straight edged shapes had been masked and were being painted, I turned my focus to the curved shapes in the design. I found the curved parts around the oval shape particularly challenging because of the large scale and the fact that this area of the design is near the top of the wall, and so involved me working at height and at a difficult angle.

By the time I had completed the curves, some of the other areas of paint had dried and so in the evening I painted a second coat on these areas.

No Niceties contributing artist - Ute Kirkwood

Sweet Chin Music 

The outside world has disappeared, a vague memory.

The world has turned into a microcosmos, a bubble in which only the two exist.

Minutes,  hours, days even months they melt. It is all measured now by the grant scheme of things – a life time?

Fingers are rolling the tiniest amount of skin, nails digging in, rolling again looking for a better position, shifting around endlessly.

Breath in, one, two, three. Breath out, one, two, three, four, five.

For more information about Ute's work, please visit
www.utekirkwood.com

Testing the packing peanuts

I'm really excited about putting the packing peanuts on the floor, but this needs to be the last thing that I do. However, I am eager to see whether they will have an impact on the screen (i.e. if they will reflect onto the white), so I did have a quick scatter of a few to get an impression of what it may look like.

Positioning the monitors

I view the scouring pad animation as a kind of moving painting and therefore it seems appropriate to display it on a flatscreen monitor on the wall.

However, the folding napkin animation suits a more sculptural setup. I want for it to appear like the napkins are being folded on a table, and should be viewed from above, rather like the way in which I filmed them. 

Due to some rather dull technical reasons which I won't bore you with, I am using an old computer to present my folding napkin animation on. Unfortunately there is no way of getting rid of the bulky tower, and so I need to make a bespoke case to fit all the equipment in, and hold the monitor horizontally. I will need access to it on a daily basis and so the box will have a door that enables me to switch it all on and play the video.

I want the box to be as near to the size of the animation setup as possible, and so have decided to use the speakers on the monitor rather than having to house a couple of additional speakers. 

 The box has cut out rectangles in the position of the speakers on the monitor.

I've encountered an unexpected problem; namely that the screen of the monitor seems much darker than it should. The image above shows that the top of the monitor is much darker than the bottom, and the image below shows that when viewed the other way round, the image is the intended colour.

 .....

 In order to rectify the issue, I have tried to rotate the video. The problem with this is that the holes for speakers are now above the animation, and if I align the monitor correctly, the door to the box is at the front and is unsightly. This is a job to resolve tomorrow!                                                      

Projectors are installed

After installing the screen yesterday, today it was time to fix the projectors and BrightSigns into place. The BrightSigns is a piece of equipment that synchs videos. They were programmed the other day, and I tested the synchronisation using televisions.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

In the evening it was time to paint the floor of what will be the audio room.