Week 4

Finishing the Cajon.

Now that the final element of the cajon has arrived we can finish its assembly. Was waiting on the steel drum share which is important for the sound of the instrument.

As you and see inside of the instrument that wooden broomstick comes back into play as its what we need to attach the snare to so it can be pushed up against the inside of the front panel.

A look through the sound hole (not official name) will show you the setup. As you hit the front of the cajon the snare will reverberate inside and create the drum layered sound.

It’s a project about community after all.

Now that the cajon assembly is finished and it sounds just as its suppose to. we tern our precious new instrument over to fellow students. we are living it in the year two hallway with paints, paint brushes and a nice sign asking to paint the cajon.

We don’t just want people to be involved at the performance time but along the way as well we have already got access to a community of artists why not take advantage of that.

Experimenting with materials and makeup.

Racheal started to experiment this makeup and ambient props for the performance mainly with something called Lit a heat and light absorbing paint that will then after absorbing this heat glow in the dark or if its a lot then even glow during the day.

This will be great for say painting runes, faces or other objects to give them the mystic of being magical.

examples below.

Racheal’s face painting examples.

The next instrument.

Now that the cajon is out of our hands for some time we might as well move onto the next instrument.

looking into string instruments like guitars and ukuleles I found a video of people making such instruments out of cheap materials like oil cans and wood and considering I have access to the wood workshop why not give it a try myself.

Bottom left is the neck and head of the ukulele nothing super technical about it creation just cut and sanded wood however there is some easy engineering that I came up with when trying to make a way to tune the ukulele once its all together.

That would be the nuts of the head drilling four holes into the head and sanding down some old paintbrushes so they tightly fit into those holes. now drilling really small holes into those paintbrushes for you to thread the strings through. finally flatten off the ends of the newly made nuts so you can grip and twist them and in turn tune your instrument.

The white and orange elf oil can is one I found on ebay because every location that might have had one (workshop, scrap places, kebab shops) didn’t have any so internet to the rescue.

Needed some cleaning up before working on it.

Bit of health and safety notes at this point. when cutting metal wear eye and hand protection and use a metal cutting shears. (and metal drill bits.

At the top left you can see a small square hole in the top of the oil can that’s where the internals will connect to the neck.

Need to get access to the inside and file down the sharp parts.

More wood for the internals of the ukulele which connect to the neck.

How the internals slot inside.

 

Week 3

Music, Ambiance and collective Entertainment.

Almost all of my friends back home are musicians or play an instrument and after looking at other performance artists who’s work also include music we have reach out to one of my friends to see if he could come play some music for the performance .

Music is a very visceral medium it can physically change a persons engagement with what’s going on and if the viewer want to join in on the merriment then we have also decided to make our own instruments so they can.

The video below is an example of the tone and style of play we are going for and we have shared this with my friend as well.

Gonna start by making a cajon as its a simple instrument with a powerful effect to set rhythm and pace.

below is what it should end up looking and sounding like.

Another example.

 

Making our own music.

Cajon generic measurements and how we will be making ours.

Also all the materials in this instrument where found for free in the wood workshop.

Marking the measurements.

Cutting the side and gluing them together using a right angel vice, wood glue and small pin hammered in for extra strength.

Above right is a wooden dowel or broomstick cut down for reasons you will see later.

Mixing sawdust from the floor with wood glue making a paste that acts as a great wood filler to later smooth down and cover those cracks.

Joining the two sides together more glue and more pins.

Side experiment in the jewellery department.

Moving on a bit and back to the jewellery making. as the box was drying and we didn’t have much to do we experimented with things laying about that we could make use of.

There was some plastic sheets about and we messed about with it a bit cutting and smashing it till we found a technique that produced pieces of plastic that looks like crystal shards so we did that for a bit.

The technique is to cut a bit into the plastic then get a hammer and chisel into that newly cut slot and giving it a good smack.

Closer look at the shards.

The cajon after all but one of the sides are together and fileted also needs to be sanded.

Week 2

Scouting locations for performance.

Thinking about the best environment for our communal stage looking outside the art block there is a big wooded area which would serve really well both for ambiance and for moving the work outside of the gallery space and shadow.

Another great thing about looking outside is we found loads of recently cut trees which gave me the idea that would use them and seating or decoration for our area make it a more aesthetically pleasing location.

One negative when working in performance is not putting your audience and in our case hopefully willing participants in an uncomfortable space and weather is an aspect that could bomb the willingness to be outside and the time of year is unpredictable so we should consider this some more.

Another aspect to performance is not alienating the audience through them not being able to hear you so be load or aided by something to make me loader with minimal technology involved.

Working with the idea through materials.

Continuing with our jewellery making, Racheal came up with an amazing idea when she spotted some scrap telephones.

She decided this was a good opportunity to get cheap materials (as its free) as well as support our theme of COMMUNICATOR AS COMMUNITY CREATOR. For we now use the means for people to communicate great distance to make objects for ritual about communication.

its like poetry it rhymes, oddly satisfying and extremely proletarian.

Stripping that damn wire is a pain in the ass however.

Opportunist that we are but the result is hopefully a really nice looking bracelet as the wire is thinner than any we have worked with previously and is hopefully strong enough.

 

Week 1

The initial Idea with collaboration.

For this project I will be collaborating with Racheal to explore the myth and spoken word. thinking about the roles they played in peoples lives and what we can do to bring some of those aspects into are practice.

we are both into storytelling as a powerful force whether that be stories of old to worn of dangerous places for to sell capital with stories from popular culture. With a key theme informing our discussions and choices being; COMMUNICATOR AS THE COMMUNITY CREATOR as intended in the original meaning of the word.

Ironically the idea is not to have written or recordings of our performance to preserve the importance of the moment however realise that to be graded on this project we need to do the opposite on this blog.

Above is a great piece of writing to analyse and uses for inspirations for are own stories.

That being Neil Gaiman’s retelling of Norse Mythology, in which he combines and alters many different versions of the same myth into his own. Notably framing the Norse apocalypse Ragnarok as something that once happened not as something going to happen like history rather than prophecy. something which we intend to do to these myths making more relevant to a contemporary audience like the one who will be viewing ours.

Jewellery and the Viking weave.

Jumping strait into it we decided to craft some jewellery ourselves.

The intent is we want objects to give out or have almost like a mini workshop going on as the stories are being told get the audience involved more.

So grabbing some copper or any metal wire and weaved the Viking knot a simple one where you loop the wire around itself as shown and is pulled through a draw plate to tighten it together.

A fun and easy way to make your own bling we could mass produce these for people perhaps work using different materials which would reflect the theme.

Pre Week 1

This is my unfinished experimentation with latex in response to a fellow student’s work from last term.  (as shown) my piece, was made using a 3D printing pen in which I would draw/print toothy grins and eyes inside a bowl to capture the creepiness that my fellow student was trying to capture in her work. However instead of using clay like she had I decided to try latex as it has a close look and feel to skin than clay and my intention was to get close to what’s called the uncanny valley. so after the printing was done I put charcoal over the features to make the latex easy to remove, mix in some dark and pink paint into the latex and pored the latex into the bowl wishfully thinking it would act as a mould. It did not I cant show you the result as it was destroyed but here is an illustration of what it looked like after I tried removing it (turns out it wasn’t set yet and I lost all detail).