A Cryptic commission for Cryptic Nights

Documentation from performance in 85A’s Electric Spectacle

2011

Creating sonic shivers, pelvic quivers and suffocating skittish shadows… An old piano, two cellos, eight violins and other instruments come to life with a cacophony of rust and stone, oak and glass, hair and bone towers incandescent.

Taking inspiration from psychological anomaly Folie à deux (shared delusional psychosis), Inducer is an immersive animated environment where musicians and sound sculptures merge into the unsettling realms of the unreal.

Inducer is a commission by Cryptic Nights from Glasgow-based artist Robbie Thomson. Sarah Milne and Jack Wrigley collaborate with Thomson, fusing kinetic sculpture and musical instrument design to create an off-kilter, curious and peculiar world which promises to delight, disarm and disorientate in equal measure.

Co-production by Untitled Projects, National Theatre of Scotland, Tramway and Summerhall

2013

With Untitled Projects

Between 1987 and 1989, in the run up to Glasgow’s tenure as European City of Culture, a young Scottish Director, Paul Bright created a series of radical performances based on James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Mapping the original locations from the classic novel, a series of individual episodes were staged in urban sites and landscapes across Scotland. This visionary project became a cult hit, expanding its budgets and audiences as it progressed before eventually imploding publicly in its insanely ambitious final instalment.

Now in 2013 we at Untitled Projects have been immersing ourselves in the traces of this influential production in an attempt to understand how it all came together and ultimately fell apart. We wish to share our fascination with this Scottish theatrical phenomenon by creating a new piece of documentary theatre that reconstructs Paul Bright’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Using material from the original production such as models and archival video, as well as script readings and personal reminiscence, we aspire to engage a new audience with this historical live performance that, by the very nature of the ephemeral art form we work in, can no longer be experienced directly.

A Cryptic commission in association with Cove Park

Photography: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

2015

Rusting embers of industry litter the slopes of the New Alps, an open air burial on eroded ground above the tailings of mineral extraction. Bauxite may have been refined here at one time, the vast red lagoon is hemmed by a concrete levee that forms an unwavering alkaline shore before the regiments of cliffs. The earth reverberates from the rhythmic charge of automated machinery, burrowing conquerors reigning in a sublime manufactured landscape, emulating purpose in repetition.

Lines define the new topography of these mountains, two nuclear points connect to form a sharp horizon that marches on like an infinity pool. Progress is best sold with a converging perspective. When seen from the side a railway track becomes a chronology of movement, energy, labour and resources, perpendicular to the pursuit of leisure.

The chalet is a bomb shelter, the hydro station is an ornamental tomb. This is a remote place. We are removed from it.

Supported by Untitled Projects, Glasgow Sculpture Studios and Creative Scotland.

Research Tumblr

2014

In collaboration with Jack Wrigley and Emilia Weber

Taking George Bataille’s pornographic novella The Story of the Eye as its starting point, this initial presentation follows a year long creative investigation with academics Fabienne Collignon and Calum Rodger and writer Alan McKendrick.

The work-in-progress utilises robotics, silicone prosthetics, kinetic sculpture, technic poetic text and performance to investigate technological transgressions – focusing in particular on the role of the camera in eroticism, personal computers in modern sexual relationships and how a machine’s motions can simulate erotic acts. Using adult web streaming channels this work explores pornography in the context of live theatre and live theatre in the context of pornography.

Supported by British Council Indonesia

2018

In collaboration with WAFT-Lab and Halaman Garage

A 1990 Mitsubishi Delica converted into a social vehicle for touring workshops, performances and skill shares. The truck featured custom sound, lighting, storage and exhibition systems as well as a drift-trike built from recycled parts.

Constructed on residency in Surabaya, Java, Indonesia.

Commissioned by Cryptic, Portal was made possible with the generous robotics support of bots.co.uk.

Portal was presented as part of Festival 2018, the cultural programme of the Glasgow 2018 European Championships.

2018

Opened in 1963, during the age of the motorway and in the wake of the Bruce Report, the Clyde Tunnel is a monolithic landmark in Glasgow’s infrastructure and 20th Century history. Two parallel bores hewn from the hard bedrock of the river under compressed, dangerous conditions traverse a 762 meter course of cast iron and shuttered concrete that now forms the site for Portal.

Tunnels occupy a mysterious area of the imagination. Their architecture – confined, claustrophobic, linear, underground, reverberant – evokes psychological interpretation as inhuman and transient space, but also as metaphor: from the birth canal to the light, secret passages and string theory. These are the archetypal other-worlds that recur throughout mythology and science-fiction, we can visit them in Dante’s Inferno and the corridors of H.R. Giger and sometimes even within the fabric of the city itself.

Portal explores this interzone and it’s synthetic inhabitants, spectral creatures evolved to live in the stomach of the underpass.

4 Dec 21 – 22 Jan 22, An Lanntair

A multimedia installation which explores the twilight of the combustion engine as a metaphor for our age of consumption.

Reflecting on our contemporary environmental condition, END OF ENGINES uses oil as an alchemical motif. Linking the deep history of the earth to the present moment and our immediate environmental future, oil has the ability to transcend and connect aeons.

The aesthetics of petroleum architecture, Plutonic mythology and car customisation are welded together in an installation comprising of a collection of robotic and sound sculptures.

A Cryptic Commission in partnership with Cove Park

26min single channel video, binaural composition for parabolic speaker, 4min single channel video for LCD screen.

Installation photos by Jack Wrigley

time, take my side

A glacial fiction and an impressionistic vision of the liminal places of perception are explored in this moving image and sound installation by Alicia Matthews and Robbie Thomson.

Told from the perspective of rocks, healing springs, radio, air and emptiness; the work re-imagines an island’s environment and the traces of it’s former inhabitants. Stone monoliths and steel antennas bookend 5 millennia of monument erection, communion and the appeasing / harnessing of invisible forces necessary for survival as well as for metaphysical ends.

The species’ drive towards salvation or destruction in the externality of space underscores both the veneration of the lunar standstill in neolithic society and the hypercapitalist spectacle of Space X rockets in the climate of environmental anxiety that it currently endures. Somewhere between the moon and the water, tectonic plates fold quartzite veins into animism, shale is fractured and the burns erode.

Animatronic armature, bones, bin bags, electronics. Dimensions varible.

Photo Credits:

Surge Festival: Brian Hartley
Green Man: twocatsintheyardphotography

Encounters with an animatronic tulpa born into late capitalism. How does it relate to the world around, and the humans it shares space with?

Commissioned as part of Four Nations Bursary Programme for new outdoor work, supported by Surge, Glasgow.