What I did in January 2020

[squirmelia]

The month and the year started by throwing a tentacle into the air!

I started a class at Morley College in Sound Art: Installations and Sculptures and it has been fun so far! I also started the Experiments with Sound MOOC with Coursera. I spent quite a lot of January thinking about sound art and trying things out.

I visited Oxford for an Ingress First Saturday and also visited Alice's Shop and Modern Art Oxford and saw an exhibition there.

I successfully did Dry January and Veganuary!

I wandered around Richmond Park one day.

I went to Japan House and and saw the City Lights and Woodland Shade exhibition and my face creepily appeared on a kokeshi doll.

I became a member of the Limehouse Labs and went along a few times. I made Ingress intel map beads one week and varnished Tetris Fimo pieces another. The first evening I visited, I played a card game with divers and explored the building.

I went to Stranger Things Secret Cinema with jacquic and friends and dressed as a rocker from the 1980s and wandered around the Starcourt Mall.

I volunteered to help run another Ingress First Saturday and walked around Greenwich, checking out pubs.

I watched dripping pipes in the Serpentine Gallery.

I went for a walk along the river, to look at the wolf moon, and it was bright and beautiful.

I sung along at Maraoke, karaoke rewritten to be about videogames.

I saw the Moving to Mars exhibition at the Design Museum and also looked at the sound exhibits.

I went to the Winter Lights in Canary Wharf and it was cold and I was there alone, so rushed around it fairly fast, trying to pay particular attention to sculptures that had sound as part of them. The one that had the sounds of thunder was the most memorable from a sound point of view.

I saw Weathering with you at the cinema with friends.

I went to colleagues’ leaving drinks.

I went to the White Cube gallery and enjoyed seeing the tangled cables and then I visited the Tate Modern, looking for sound art. I stared at Babel for a bit, but didn't find that much else memorable. I also watched the sun set from the top and ahh, London looked pretty then.

One Thursday, in class, we attempted recording our own version of "I am sitting in a room" and it was interesting how quickly it deteriorated. We also tried tearing up bits of paper, scrunching it, etc, into a microphone. We also went for a field trip in the rain to the little garden by the college where there will be sculptures and we can put sound art installations for the Waterloo Festival! Another Thursday, we used Logic with flex, and Paulstretch. A classmate shared the stretched version of Justin Bieber: Justin Bieber - 800% slower. I tried stretching the paper sounds and they sounded spooky. I also tried stretching the sounds of a modem. We played with Cecilia. We watched a soundscape video one of the people in the class had made of being on a train.

One Friday, I had lunch with Morwen.

I visited my mum and helped her deliver The Trident. I got out my guitar amp and attached a contact mic and tried moving a wooden spoon on metal springy birds and other random things found in the house. We also tried another variation of “I am sitting in a room” where I read out one of my old notebooks from when I was a child about a wobbly pencil. I varnished the Ingress beads. There was a great sunset on Saturday. The sunsets always seem better in the village. We had an Indian takeaway. Then a pipe burst and there was some flooding and panicking, but we stopped it with the help of a neighbour and a plumber fixed it in the morning.

I went to the Actual Reality Arcade! It was quite a cool set up - in an old mail delivery centre, they had set up real life versions of classic games, such as Pac-man, Space Invaders, etc. I played Space Invaders, where you threw a sack at the Space Invaders that flipped down when you hit them. I played Frogger, where you had to balance a toy frog on your head and avoid the cars and jump on the logs. I played Asteroids, where you shot foam bullets. They had Whack-a-mole, where people pretended to be the mole. They had dressing up as Pac-man and chasing each other around. They had breakout with bats and balls. They also had an exhibition with grains of rice, representing different things, such as the amount of people in the UK that voted leave and voted remain.

I visited the Battersea Power Station lights. There were some colourful buttons to press, there were some big lit up heads, there were some colourful lights. My favourite work there was a neon sign that when you got close to would pretend that it had gone wrong and make crackling sounds and blink the lights.

I made vegan tarte tatin.

I visited the Halcyon Gallery and touched digital butterflies that flew away and flowers. I quickly looked around the Whitechapel Gallery at the Fluxus sound related works. Playing pianos by dropping beans! etc.

Bat and I went to Dialogue in the Dark, which was great. We were given sticks and then walked around in the dark, through a park, across a road, to a market, etc. Afterwards, we ate free vegan ice-cream.

Photos on Flickr: January 2020.