Category: News

Intro

by Rebekah Ubuntu

Transcript-video-introduction-Rebekah-Ubuntu-2021Download

Hi there,

My name is Rebekah Ubuntu. I am a multidisciplinary artist, musician and university lecturer. My practice explores speculative fiction through a range of disciplines, particularly, sound art, performance, the moving image and mixed reality.

PROJECTS YOU MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN

My work ‘Despair Hope and Healing: Three Movements for Climate Justice’ is available to experience in augmented reality app Unfolding Shrines which you can find here. 

My audio art project ‘Autism and the City: a Sonic Diary’ is due to launch on the BBC next month so I’ll post that here once it’s ready.

You are warmly welcomed to my studio. 

HOW I HOPE TO USE MY RESIDENCY

I’m hoping to use my residency to REFLECT.

I’ll be reflecting on my:

  1. work to date
  2. practice before and during the pandemic

WHY REFLECTION?

My life and creative practice have undergone some major pivots since 2020. My last in-person commission before the pandemic was at Tate Modern in December 2019. I performed my work ‘Despair, Hope and Healing: Three Movements for Climate Justice’ and gave a talk about this work, which featured an excerpt from an interview in the 90s with Black science fiction writer Octavia Butler discussing the speculative impacts of climate change in the 2020s. Now nearly two years into this decade, I am feeling a need to process.

Looking back, I can see that 2020 and the years preceding didn’t leave much room for respite. This residency provides an opportunity for me to reorient my time and energy towards self-reflection, self-nurturance and self-celebration.

I’ll be pausing to be with the themes in my work, particularly belonging, healing and queering as well as disability and climate justice. I’ll be sitting with the scores, texts, and projects that have been on my heart and giving them the time I’ve not had until now.

It feels good to be here, sharing space and reflecting for a month. Please feel welcome to look around my studio and get in touch using comments if you’d like.

Hope you enjoy your visit,

Rebekah

Intertwined – exhibition of work by June 21 artists

by Vital Capacities

Three images in a composite represent three artists' work. Top left: Seo Hye Lee's film Sound of Subtitles - a hand is inside a stone coloured round pot on a spinning wheel, the insides of the pot are shiny. A subtitle reads: sound of reminiscing. Bottom left: Linda Stupart's film Watershed 2.0 - green plants are growing in the foreground, they look like tall weeds. In the background a blurred image of a person in white, a curled claw with red nails is held ahead of the person. Right of the image: Laura Lulika's Body Building film - a sad android sits in a blue room on a blue block, women's heads grow out of the android's back, their body is made up of body massager tools, which are grey, black, purple and pink plastic. A glowing pink ball is held in the android's scalp massager hand.
Artworks from top left, clockwise: Seo Hye Lee, [Sound of Subtitles], 2021; Laura Lulika, Body Building, 2021; Linda Stupart, Watershed 2.0: Pandemic CYOA Cyberspace Edition 2021, 2021 – images courtesy of the artists.

Intertwined is our new exhibition on Vital Capacities, presenting new works by resident artists – Seo Hye Lee, Laura Lulika and Linda Stupart. The works have been commissioned in collaboration with our partners: Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN), Phoenix and University of Salford Art Collection. Intertwined opens on 22 July. See the exhibition now by clicking here.

Care Work with Melissandre Varin

by Laura Lulika

Thinking about the ways that we formed ideas about our bodies and who had influence, especially in relation to our identities, is always a headfuck. Doing this project has been a reminder of this so I wanted to try to include an action that felt more nourishing, gentle and caring than my other research.

I asked a new friend, Melissandre Varin, who I had met through an online performance workshop, if they would have a conversation with me about these body topics. I had attended Mel’s artist talk and I find the way that Mel speaks about bodies and their own personal experiences to be very candidly honest and at the same time generous and kind.

A white background with black braided hair of different thicknesses overlaid and layered over each other.
Image from Melissandre’s Installation Work
Continue reading “Care Work with Melissandre Varin”

Break Time… in resistance of professional hyperability

by Laura Lulika

A meme of a huge muscly videogame monster from the videogame Diablo. The monster has rams horns on it's head and a bald round head with spiky slimy teeth and tusks coming out of the sides of it's open mouth. It's wearing some kind of tight leather wrestler style unitard and it#s holding a staff in it's right hand made of bones with a ram's head on top, in the left hand there is a scithe made of a horn and a metal chain wrapped around the arm. The monster's skin is covered in bulging muscles and veins, there are cuts across it's body with large metal staples in them. The skin is greyish yellow. There is a fiery glow around the monster and a silhouette of a creatur'es body barely visible hanging upsidedown on the top left. Overlaid is some white text with a red glow around it that says 'YES I TAKE MY VIDEO ART VERY SERIOUSLY... THAT'S WHY I POST IT ON...' Below that is the 'Vimeo' logo in blue and on the bottom left is a Vimeo Staff Pick logo which is a black circle with a white leaf wreath border and the text in the middle 'vimeo STAFF PICK', it has been edited so that it is distorted and wavy.
I’m a professional video artist and my favourite videogame is Diablo.

I have really enjoyed occupying this digital studio space and having a dedicated period of time working on a single project. The support from vital Capacities and Film London has been amazing and I am excited to develop all of my research and tests into something to present as part of the exhibition later this month.

I am battling my own internal ableist voices which are telling me that I could have done MORE, posted more, worked more.. I have been resisting the urge to be professionally hyperable.. (yuck). And in many ways I have failed because I am exhausted.

So now it’s breaktime! If anyone needs me I’ll be in a static caravan on the Yorkshire coast for the week and you can speak to my out-of-office autoresponse until then.

Why Throwing?

by Seo Hye Lee

Scene from Sam Hanna's film "Village Potter"- the person who is wearing white shirt and white apron is throwing a round shape of pottery. There is description of what "Throwing" means - "A mass of clay soon becomes an object of beauty in the hands of a skilled craftsman" in simple white font located in centre of image. Behind the person, there is an image of a brown house with small white framed windows and pointed roof.
Scene from Village Potter produced by Sam Hanna 1946-1947

In this post, I’m going to explain why I am using visual of the ceramic throwing process and hands crafting. In the picture above, the definition of throwing is described as “A mass of clay soon becomes an object of beauty in the hands of a skilled craftsman”- this description resonates with my intention of turning the subtitle into something of beauty, and something that should always be included from an accessibility point of view. On a side note: the word “craftsman” should be changed to craftsperson or maker (unfortunately, some old film archives can reveal archaic gender stereotypes).

Craft videos are fascinating as they frequently show pairs of hands making objects from a shapeless form into something beautiful. For me, this formation presents a parallel between the idea of digitally shaping words into the language of subtitles, exploring its poetic nature. I’d like to thank Will McTaggart from North West Film Archive for the recommendation of the beautiful craft films by Sam Hanna—to view these, this website has a compilation of Hanna’s craft films- the link is here.

As we are reaching the end of June residency, I would like to focus on making a visual connection between videos of hands throwing, crafting, intertitles, and open captions using re-written subtitle language.

Future of Live Captioning

by Seo Hye Lee

Remember when the Google glass came out years ago and ended up being not so popular? At the time, I wasn’t aware that the product had been designed to include the function of Live Captioning; while researching this I found this video of the product being used in a quiet setting.

Youtube Video of two people testing Google Glass’s function of Live Captioning. Closed Captions are available on this video.

There are many great resources you can use to transcribe speech to text on apps/browsers online. These resources work by either turning on the live transcribing function or uploading prerecorded audio files – a few I have used in the past are Webcaptioner, Google Transcribe App, Descript. (Each mentioned names are all hyper-linked which will lead you to its own websites)

Continue reading “Future of Live Captioning”

Watershed (the work so far)

by Linda Stupart

Linda Stupart

This video (click above ^^) documents the first part of my walk down the River Cole, as well as a lot of anxieties present in the first lockdown in 2020 in the UK. I made the video for So Remember the Liquid Ground , an exhibition curated by Benjamin Darby, Yoojin Kang, Akis Kokkinos, Angelina Li, Lenette Lua and Louise Nason as part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2020, Royal College of Art in partnership with Gasworks.

Aubree Penny – a friend and also curator – commissioned me to perform Some Men Have Mistaken Me for Death in a sex workers graveyard in London, AND commissioned the film version of After the Ice, the Deluge for An Alarming Specificity at Haverford College in the USA. London

Aubree wrote an audio transcription of Watershed, which you can read here: https://vitalcapacities.com/3108/

And a visual description, which you can read here: https://vitalcapacities.com/3110/

Interview with resident artist Laura Lulika

by Laura Lulika

Jamie Wyld (Vital Capacities’ director): Thanks for being part of the Vital Capacities residency programme! Can you say a little about yourself and your work, perhaps in relation to what you’re thinking about doing during the residency?

Thanks for inviting me. I am a sick and disabled artist, researcher and community cultural worker. My practice challenges the preconceptions of what it is to be sick and disabled. It acts as a reminder that sick and disabled bodies are actively political even in states of what might look like physical inactivity to someone who is able. In reality, ‘resting’ isn’t really rest if you don’t have a choice.

Continue reading “Interview with resident artist Laura Lulika”

Artists from across UK join Vital Capacities as artists-in-residence for June 21

by Vital Capacities

Three images in a composite – top left image: a black rectangular lightbox with a white screen has the word what with a question mark written 3 times on it, black pipes leave the box on the left and right sides. Top right image: a white heart shaped balloon has the words stay sick written in the middle. Bottom left image: a collage of green leaves, white daisies with yellow centres, and stripes of yellow and red streak across the image.
Artworks from top left, clockwise: Seo Hye Lee, What Did You Say?, 2017 (audio-visual installation); Laura Lulika, An Ode to Marge (or how i taught myself to speak again by watching the real housewives), 2018 (installation photo); Linda Stupart, Watershed, 2020 (video still) – images courtesy of the artists.

For June 2021’s Vital Capacities’ residency, we are collaborating with Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN), Phoenix and University of Salford Art Collection. Working with three artists from across the UK, Seo Hye Lee, Laura Lulika and Linda Stupart.

Across June, artists will be researching and developing new work, with work commissioned in collaboration with our partners. Artists will be experimenting with ideas, developing new projects, and sharing work with audiences. The artists are:

Continue reading “Artists from across UK join Vital Capacities as artists-in-residence for June 21”

04 ಕಥೆ Kathe (Story) / Dematerialise

by Vishal Kumaraswamy

a pixelated form of a hand is in the foreground in bright yellow and orange. It is set against a grey checkered background and to its left are an assortment of individual pixels in bright red. Tinges of blue appear throughout the image.
Image still from Dematerialise by Vishal Kumaraswamy

As an artist working with experimental technologies, hacking/re-purposing tools to create artistic works I’m often looking for ways in which I can create intimate shared experiences. Even before the pandemic, a lot of my practice was being conducted solely through computer based interactions due to a lack of funding and other resources. This mode of working allowed me to focus my practice towards making accessible works and I began thinking about the language, technology and context accessibility of my works within a larger contemporary art conversation.

Continue reading “04 ಕಥೆ Kathe (Story) / Dematerialise”

Free workshop by Tzu-Huan Lin – A Train to Utopia

by Vital Capacities

A digital collage with a train in the centre of the image. The train is on train tracks coming from the left centre of the image. The foreground and background is made up of a coastal drawing showing boats, green cliffy lands, water, dolphins, people fishing and on horseback. In the left background is a dark brown train station which the train is going towards. Above the train are two black and white flying fish with wings. In the right foreground is a black and white owl-like creature with a long tail, looking down and sitting on a ledge. Above his head, in the background, a sign reads ‘VTOPIA’ in old-fashioned text. In the bottom left corner of the image is a small 3D drawing of a white building on grass with angular block-like boulders. Across the bottom of the image, in large gold text and black emboss, in capital letters are the words ‘A TRAIN TO UTOPIA’.

Digital workshop on Mozilla’s immersive platform Hubs – imagining and building Utopia by Vital Capacities artist, Tzu-Huan Lin  

A Train to Utopia is a digital workshop taking place on Mozilla Hubs led by artist, Tzu-Huan Lin. Questionning Utopia’s existence (and if we can create it), the workshop explores ideas related to this unknown but longed for place.

Continue reading “Free workshop by Tzu-Huan Lin – A Train to Utopia”

03 your dataset won’t let me thrive / your dataset must die

by Vishal Kumaraswamy

‘your dataset won’t let me thrive / your dataset must die’ are a pair of video essays that seek to counter the mythologies surrounding Artificial Intelligence datasets & algorithms They are carried out as a comparative study of the works of the Black Beat Poet Bob Kaufman and the Kannada Dalit poet Siddalingaiah whose words (translation) are input into the text based neural network GPT-2.  The visual aesthetics of the work are drawn from generative AI imagery of brown faces, creative programming as well as animated representation of the words of each poet alongside text generated by the algorithm. The inability of the algorithm to generate text drawn from sufficient references to Black & Bahujan lived experiences reveal the encoded biases within the dataset and trace their origins to harmful mythologies of Caste & Race.

The works were commissioned by the Mozilla Foundation as part of the Reclaiming AI Futures project for the AI Observatory (https://ai-observatory.in/)

The image is a screengrab from the video 'your dataset won't let me thrive' and contains text laid against a black background with some generative abstract imagery. The text reads 'Abomunists Join Nothing But Their Hands or Legs, or Other Same'
Screengrab from ‘your dataset won’t let me thrive’

The image is a screengrab from the video 'your dataset must die' and contains abstract imagery of an AI generated face set against a dark blue background'
Screengrab from ‘your dataset must die’

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