exhibition

Peter Polaine at The Pin Mill Studio

by Andy Polaine on July 8, 2008

in General

christmas_dinner.jpg

Christmas Dinner by Peter Polaine

Quick plug for my dad, Peter Polaine, who has an exhibition of his woodcut prints on at The Pin Mill Studio in Suffolk at the moment until the 18th July.

If you’ve ever wondered what Playpen’s dad sounds like, he was interviewed by Georgina Wroe on local BBC Radio today. He told some anecdotes about his time at art college where he studied alongside the likes of Ken Russell and Peter Blake as well as surprising me (and the presenter) by his choice of Banksy as one of the contemporary artists he likes and Brandy Carlile’s The Story for his play-out music. (I’d not even heard of her over here in the 80s music wormhole that is Germany – sigh).

You can listen to the BBC’s RealAudio (why do people still use it?) version of whole programme here or my edited MP3 version with just the interview.

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Tagged as: Art, artist, exhibition, peter polaine, printmaking, prints

Cabaret Mechanical Theatre

by Andy Polaine on April 7, 2007

in Uncategorized

Kinetic Theatre - photo: Chris O\'Shea

I’m super happy to see Chris O’Shea’s post about his visit to the Kinetica Museum to see the retrospective exhibition of the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre & The Ride of Life down at Spitalfields.

I remember visiting their museum in Covent Garden as a child and being enthralled by the automata and mechanical toys. (We still have a couple of small ones that we bought there all those years ago). For me they sum up such a beautiful mix of craftsmanship, ingenuity, wit, British rude postcard humour and surreal visions that are always playful. They are also really the origins of interactivity – much of what we do electronically now has its roots in these automata.

It reminded me of the fascinating presentation at the 2005 Refresh! conference by Gunalan Nadarajan. It was called Islamic Automation: A Reading of al-Jazari’s The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (1206) in which he examines interactivity and automata that are many hundreds of years old. You can watch the archived video stream of it if you’re interested.

Check out Chris’s Flickr set for more photos of the Kinetica exhibition (from which this one is nicked).

[UPDATE: I went to see it myself this week and it's really great. Go to it!]

Tagged as: Art, automata, Design, exhibition, Interactivity, pixelsumo, Play, Research, Technology

Invitation to play at the Game / Play exhibition

July 10, 2006

I recently wrote a catalogue essay called The Invitation to Play for the Game/Play networked exhibition displayed simultaneously at HTTP in London and Q Arts in Derby. The essay explores ‘art games’ and when and why they are successful at engaging players and when they are not (more frequent). This, more often than not, comes down to the artists ability to construct the ‘invitation to play’. That is, to seduce us into playful behaviour and playing with the work – if they fail at that any other message and idea is pretty much lost and why make an interactive artwork in the first place?

More info on the exhibition in the main post…

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COFA Annual (2004)

November 7, 2004

Interaction Direction and Producer for the Annual CD-ROM of over 320 collected student works for the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. This interface worked on set-theory, allowing you to select subject areas and see the appropriate thumbnails. We wanted to show the range of work in one glance, hence the giant array of thumbnails. It [...]

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JAM exhibition (1996)

February 7, 1996

  Nine screen video wall installation for the JAM Exhibition at the Barbican Centre, London. JAM was billed as a “walk-in magazine” and featured current trendsetters across the creative industries. The exhibition was taken on tour internationally. The six screens on the left were separated from the column on the right. The left-hand screens contained [...]

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