Build Your Own: Tools for Sharing
Date uploaded: April 24, 2015
The exhibition 'Build Your Own: Tools for Sharing' will beon display at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) from the 4th of June to the 31st of August 2015 and will explore how digital technologies come together with traditional processes of production to create new ways of working, sharing and collaborating.
Co-produced by FACT, Crafts Council and Norfolk Museums Service, the exhibition will feature newly commissioned work by leading makers, creative technologists and collectives to be created in Liverpool and Norwich. The artists will work closely with FACT’s award-winning engagement strand to develop projects with various local groups and communities in both cities and provide a major programme of related events and workshops.
Will Shannon and Assemble’s new commission Homework will explore domestic spaces as platforms for experimentation, production and learning by setting up a casting factory in the backyard of a newly refurbished house on Cairns Street in Toxteth, Liverpool.
Linda Brothwell will carry out research within Liverpool’s large Polish community for her project Acts of Care: Liverpool Edition, in order to create paving slabs influenced by traditional Polish paper-cutting techniques and patterns. The slabs will be permanently incorporated into the street in a Liverpool area.
Rachel Rayns’ project Neurotic Machines (working title) developed with the Raspberry Pi Foundation will show us how an ‘Internet of Things’ machine – a Raspberry Pi greenhouse - can help us take care of our gardens.
The hacker and entrepreneur community DoES Liverpool, led by creative technologists Ross Dalziel, Patrick Fenner and Adrian McEwen, will set up an iteration of the Enabling the Future project by the e-NABLE community. DoES Liverpool will set up a production line of 3D printers at FACT, which will supply the components for building prosthetic hands for local people with real needs.
The wide range of projects that fit under the Build Your Own umbrella show that the nature of craft and DIY has changed drastically. The ability to make clothes, furniture and other household goods used to be absolutely necessary to provide for the family, but nowadays we are just as likely to create a website as to knit a sweater. New times call for new skills - but the old ones have an important role too. This exhibition will explore what the democratisation of digital tools really means, whom the emergence of new technologies will affect, and how traditional craft skills can connect with new digital tools.
The projects will be showcased through the exhibition at FACT, a series of creative interventions taking place across the city and an ambitious and inclusive public programme of talks, skill sharing workshops and maker hacks, a summer school for children and young people, a publication and a conference to be held in Norfolk. All activities intend to bring alive the joy of making.
The exhibition is curated by curator and cultural programme director Lauren Parker and creative communications company Thirteen Ways. The curators have a special interest in how the common ground between old and new crafts can be applied in the real world - and how acts of sharing can engage and intersect with individuals and communities. Artists Simon and Tom Bloor will create a bespoke environment for the show along with design studio An Endless Supply.
'Build Your Own: Tools for Sharing' will tour to Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery from the 3rd of October 2015 to the 3rd of January 2016, where the artists will work with local communities and develop their artworks further.
For further information click here.
