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.

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 Watershed/Mayk Winter Residency Programme and Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol.

Project page at Pervasive Media Sudio

2020

Work In Progress

Other Animals is a series of public interventions which uses soft robotic sculptures to raise awareness of local ecological issues and the wider climate crisis.

This project was started in January 2020 as part of the Watershed/MAYK Winter Residency program and is currently at the research and development stage.

I’m interested in building synthetic orgainsms which can stimulate an emotional response in encounters with an audience. I want to emphasise a sense of connection to the environment, not to think of nature as something separate from, but rather contingent with our human experience as living creatures and explore the fragility of the systems which support life. The sculptures will be positioned in public places in the city centre, they will have embedded capacity for human interaction and will also be responsive to environmental stimuli.

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.

A Cryptic commission in partnership with the Grand Theatre, Groningen & CMMAS (Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras), Mexico, in association with Cove Park.

Initial development supported by Puppet Animation Scotland – Creative Fund, PRIM (Productions Réalisations Indépendantes de Montréal) Montreal and SAT (Société des arts technologiques) Montreal.

Photography: Louise Mather

2017

Inspired by scales at the limits of perception this work draws on influences ranging from neuroscience to psychedelia, electron microscopy to nuclear paranoia and manifests in a collision of scientific specimens and esoteric machines.

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

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.