In the final episode Iain and Jane talk to the stand-up comedian and radio broadcaster Robin Ince about the Stay at Home Festival and musician, producer and DJ Nabihah Iqbal about her time as Lockdown Herbalist in Pakistan, interrogating what it is that drives people to channel their creative energies and help us feel a little less isolated. We also welcome back Jarvis Cocker who may well send you off to sleep with his Bedtime Stories. 

 

Exploring what we can learn from the people behind these ventures, Iain and Jane ask just what is that we gain from an online hang out or drop in.

Coping Mechanisms is a Somerset House podcast. 

Created by Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard 

Produced by Eleanor Scott & Daniel Breuer

Music by Bernholtz.  

Thank you to all the artists who have contributed to the series.

Exploring whether we can really have a collective experience online, our hosts meet with Carol Morley and Tim Burgess.

Catch up with the brilliant writer and director Carol Morley, whose films include Dreams of a Life and The Falling. Carol has been hosting “Friday Film Club” – each week she chooses a readily available, free-to-watch film. People then watch at the same time and meet up on Twitter to discuss it afterwards.

Similarly, The Charlatans frontman, musician, writer, DJ and record label owner, Tim Burgess launched an extensive series of “Tim’s Twitter Listening Parties”, where fans could come together, with Tim and members of the band, to ask questions and share memories.

Coping Mechanisms is a Somerset House podcast

Created by Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard 

Produced by Eleanor Scott & Daniel Breuer

Music by Bernholz.  

Thank you to all the artists who have contributed to the series

Why is it so many of us paint, draw or in some way turn to creativity in tough times? When we’re told to stay at home, and required to hold our family and friends literally at arm’s length why do we look to the arts to make things better?

 

The comedian Noel Fielding, well-known for his role as one half of The Mighty Boosh, is a comedian, writer, actor, artist, musician and now the presenter of a much-loved TV show about baking. Sue Tilley is an artist. She’s best known as the subject of Lucian Freud’s painting Benefits Supervisor Sleeping and her book written about her close friend Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon.

 

Coping Mechanisms is a Somerset House podcast

Created by Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard 

Produced by Eleanor Scott & Daniel Breuer

Music by Bernholtz.  

Thank you to all the artists who have contributed to the series

How do we cope when our world is unexpectedly turned upside down? 

When lockdown was imposed on the UK, almost all of Iain & Jane's projects came to a grinding halt. With unexpected time on their hands, they discussed starting an online project… but then, like many of us, did nothing else about it.  

 

Fortunately, some did bother, and these online lockdown projects have helped many of us feel a little less isolated. For some, especially performers, it has been about finding ways to carry on regardless. With a new album and tour postponed because of the pandemic, Jarvis Cocker begun hosting a Domestic Disco on Instagram. Here, he discusses spinning records from his living room and inviting viewers to join him for a socially-distanced dance. 

 

For others, the priority has been keeping platforms open and ensuring voices are still heard. Alain ‘Fusion’ Clapham is the founder of Black Man’s Time. At the start of lockdown he was about to launch a new live project, Black Love Stories, an immersive mix of spoken word, art, film and conversation. Determined to create something positive out of the moment, Black Love Stories was swiftly reassembled online, and now airs every Friday night on Instagram Live. 

 

These illuminating and amusing conversations traverse the collective importance of such initiatives; and why we turn to the arts in time of crisis; as well as looking closer at the individuals behind these ventures and learning more about their creative drive. 

 

Coping Mechanisms is a Somerset House podcast. 

Created by Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard 

Produced by Eleanor Scott & Daniel Breuer

Music by Bernholtz.  

Thank you to all the artists who have contributed to the series. 

 

 

Artists explore the non-stop nature of modern life.

Liam Young’s short fiction film Renderlands is set in the sphere of videogame companies and render farms in India highlighting a global network where outsourced workers operate 24/7. In Western design studios, wireframed structures are sketched out for imaginary cities and landscapes, which are then rendered by anonymous workforces in other countries into the high-precision digital architectures of video games and films. Renderlands is a utopia that exists in the screen alone – a virtual city that stretches from Los Angeles to Bangalore, constructed from the remnants of demolished landmarks, alien invasions, and outsourced dreams.

 

Featuring contributions from exhibition curator Sarah Cook and Jonathan Reekie, co-curator of 24/7 and Director of Somerset House. 

 

The exhibition 24/7 - A Wake Up Call For Our Non-Stop World at Somerset House takes visitors on a multi-sensory journey from the cold light of the moon to the fading warmth of sunset through five themed zones and contains over 50 multi-disciplinary works that will provoke and entertain. The exhibition runs at Somerset House until 23 February 2020.

 

Producer: Eleanor Scott

Sound Design: Harry Murdoch

Mixed by Nick Ryan

Featuring excerpts from Renderlands by Liam Young. 

How did you sleep last night? Artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, and writer Stuart Evers paint a possible future for our sleep and dreams in a 24/7 world.

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard discuss their work Somnoproxy, a futuristic bedtime story with writer Stuart Evers, which features as part of the exhibition 24/7. This immersive audio installation centres on the fictional story of someone who sleeps on behalf of wealthy executives, too busy to sleep themselves. It’s a state-of-the-art sonic escape from reality, complete with a dream-machine designed by Brion Gysin, ‘viewed’ with the eyes closed. The pulsating light can produce Hypnagogia, the experience of the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep.

‘Sleep coincides with the metabolizing of what is ingested by day: drugs, alcohol, all the detritus from interfacing with illuminated screens; but also the flood of anxieties, fears, doubts, longings, imaginings of failure or the big score.’ — Jonathan Crary  

Featuring contributions from exhibition curator Sarah Cook and Jonathan Reekie, co-curator of 24/7 and Director of Somerset House. 

The exhibition 24/7 - A Wake Up Call For Our Non-Stop World at Somerset House takes visitors on a multi-sensory journey from the cold light of the moon to the fading warmth of sunset through five themed zones and contains over 50 multi-disciplinary works that will provoke and entertain. The exhibition runs at Somerset House until 23 February 2020.

Producer: Eleanor Scott

Sound Design: Harry Murdoch

Mixed by Nick Ryan

Featuring excerpts from Somnoproxy, an audio installation by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard. Story by Stuart Evers. Read by Enzo Cilenti and Kate Ashfield. Originally commissioned by Moog Sound Lab UK with support from the Adonyeva Foundation.

Artists explore the non-stop nature of modern life.

Mat Collishaw’s work The Machine Zone was inspired by the behavioural experiments of American psychologist B.F. Skinner (1904 – 1990) whose work is widely referenced in relation to the algorithms which drive interactions on social media. Using birds and other small mammals, Skinner’s ‘operant conditioning chamber’ investigated the subconscious primal side of the brain involved in motivated behaviours. He demonstrated that random rewards create a constant uncertainty that encourages a behavioural loop. Collishaw worked with animatronics designer Adam Keenan to create these mechanised pigeons exhibiting obsessive repetitive behaviour. 

Skinner’s ghost has persisted into the modern day, a quiet spectre among our statuses, likes, comments, and shares. Today an average user spends 1/7th of their waking lives on social platforms, and we owe some of this apparent addiction to Skinner’s research. His work followed on from philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s research into human motivation (‘the utilitarian self’ as pleasure seeking and pain avoiding) as demonstrated in Bentham’s ‘Table of the Springs of Action’. 

Over the last fifteen years Hasan Elahi has generated online systems to share personal data and photographic evidence of his whereabouts at all times with the FBI, as a result of their mistakenly putting him on a no-fly list after the events of 9–11. In his work, Scorpion W2, 2019 he mines this ongoing personal database to create large immersive collages picturing all the meals he’s eaten, beds he’s slept in and airports he’s flown to. The overall pattern is the current operational camouflage pattern of the American military – standardized across all divisions, units and countries in 2019 – but Elahi has changed the colours to those that feature in the test pattern shown during a U.S. television emergency broadcast.

Featuring contributions from exhibition curator Sarah Cook and Jonathan Reekie, co-curator of 24/7 and Director of Somerset House. 

The exhibition 24/7 - A Wake Up Call For Our Non-Stop World at Somerset House takes visitors on a multi-sensory journey from the cold light of the moon to the fading warmth of sunset through five themed zones and contains over 50 multi-disciplinary works that will provoke and entertain. The exhibition runs at Somerset House until 23 February 2020.

Producer: Eleanor Scott

Sound Design: Harry Murdoch

Mixed by Nick Ryan

Light and sound pollution from our 24-hour urban lifestyle affects birds, which are singing earlier, louder, for longer, or at a higher pitch to communicate. Some species are better at adapting to survive. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s installation in 24/7, Machine Auguries questions how the city might sound with changing, homogenising, or diminishing bird populations. Solos of chiffchaffs, great tits, redstarts, robins, thrushes, and entire dawn choruses were used to ‘train’ two neural networks – a Generative Adversarial Network, or GAN – pitted against each other to sing. Reflecting how birds develop their song from each other, a call and response spatialises the evolution of a new language, as samples of each stage (or epoch) in the GAN’s training reveals the artificial birds’ increasing realism. 

Melissa Mongiat, co-founder of Daily Tous Les Jours presents I Heard There Was a Secret Chord, a participatory humming channel that reveals an invisible connection uniting those people around the world listening to Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah. Real time user data representing the number of these listeners is transformed into a virtual choir – each online listener represented by a humming voice in the space. These sounds are transformed into low frequency vibrations as you start humming along, allowing you to feel a collective resonance. The work is both a scientific and a spiritual experiment, highlighting the metaphysical connection between people on a common wavelength. 

Featuring contributions from exhibition curator Sarah Cook and Jonathan Reekie, co-curator of 24/7 and Director of Somerset House. 

The exhibition 24/7 - A Wake Up Call For Our Non-Stop World at Somerset House takes visitors on a multi-sensory journey from the cold light of the moon to the fading warmth of sunset through five themed zones and contains over 50 multi-disciplinary works that will provoke and entertain. The exhibition runs at Somerset House until 23 February 2020

Producer: Eleanor Scott

Sound Design: Harry Murdoch

Mixed by Nick Ryan

Multi-channel sound installation 

Machine Learning: Dr Przemek Witaszczyk (Faculty) / Sound design: Chris Timpson (Aurelia Soundworks) / Research/Design: Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Johanna Just, Ness Lafoy, Ana Maria Nicolaescu / Lighting design: Lucy Carter / Associate to Lucy Carter: Sean Gleason / Production: Angharad Cooper / AV: KSO 

With thanks to Chris Watson, Geoff Sample, The British Library, Sara Keen, Xeno-canto, Professor Ben Sheldon, Maria Diaz and Dr John Mansir of Faculty and Karishma Rafferty 

Courtesy of the artist 

Commissioned by Somerset House and A/D/O by MINI. With additional support from Faculty and the Adonyeva Foundation

Extracted from every video appearance Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made between 2004 and 2018, Benjamin Grosser edited together the relative measures that crop up regularly in Zuckerberg’s speeches and interviews: ‘more’, ‘grow’, ‘50%’, ‘a million’, repeated ad nauseum. Grosser’s projects aim to draw attention to Facebook’s accumulative mindset, revealing the inherent design of social media platforms which keep you addicted through showing you how many likes, interactions, and comments you have. As with Instagram, Facebook is also now considering hiding the ‘like count’ as research has shown it creates anxiety in users if their friends’ posts get more likes than their own.

Featuring contributions from exhibition curator Sarah Cook and Jonathan Reekie, co-curator of 24/7 and Director of Somerset House. 

The exhibition 24/7 - A Wake Up Call For Our Non-Stop World at Somerset House takes visitors on a multi-sensory journey from the cold light of the moon to the fading warmth of sunset through five themed zones and contains over 50 multi-disciplinary works that will provoke and entertain. 

With every moment seemingly an opportunity to connect and work, unrelenting pressure to produce and consume, sleep itself monitored and commodified, how we cope is one of the most urgent contemporary issues affecting us all.

Inspired by Jonathan Crary’s book of the same name, 24/7 holds up a mirror to our always-on culture and invites you to step outside of your day-to-day routine to engage, reflect and reset.

The exhibition runs at Somerset House until 23 February 2020

Producer: Eleanor Scott

Sound Design: Harry Murdoch

Mixed by Nick Ryan

Calling planet earth! Artist Yinka Shonibare CBE, acclaimed saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, fashion designer Mowalola Ogunlesi, and Get Up, Stand Up Now curator Zak Ové explore themes around Black futures and afro-futurism. Presented by spoken word artist Joshua Idehen.

Music by Shabaka Hutchings and GAIKA, excerpts from Sun Ra Arkestra BBC Radio 3 session courtesy of Somethin' Else and BBC Radio 3.

Producer: Mae-Li Evans

The series was produced by Reduced Listening and Somerset House

Yinka Shonibare’s work explores issues of race and class through painting, sculpture, photography and film. Having described himself as a ‘post-colonial’ hybrid, Shonibare questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions. His trademark material is the brightly coloured ‘African’ batik fabric he buys at Brixton Market. The fabric was inspired by Indonesian design, mass-produced by the Dutch and eventually sold in British colonies in West Africa. In the 1960s, the material became a new sign of African identity and independence.

Shabaka Hutchings constantly evaluates his music’s relationship to Caribbean and jazz traditions, and sees his role as pushing the boundaries of both. His trajectory started early when he moved to Barbados at the age of six, began studying classical clarinet aged nine, and graduated to tenor saxophone, which has been a regular part of his performances since his return to the UK aged 16. Hutchings has three primary projects – Shabaka and the Ancestors, Sons of Kemet and The Comet is Coming. Between them, Hutchings has gathered a substantial number of awards and nominations, including winning the 2013 MOBO Jazz Act of

Mowalola Ogunlesi founded the menswear brand Mowalola in 2017 to celebrate the African male and culture, sexuality and desire. He was awarded Best New Designer at the 2018 Milan Fashion Film Festival. Mowalola had its London Fashion Week debut in January 2019 with Fashion East and their work has been featured in publications such as Vogue UK, Vogue US, i-D, Dazed & Confused, Surface Magazine, SHOWstudio and W Magazine.

12 Jun – 15 Sep 2019

A major new exhibition celebrating the past 50 years of Black creativity in Britain and beyond.

Beginning with the radical Black filmmaker Horace Ové and his dynamic circle of Windrush generation creative peers and extending to today’s brilliant young Black talent globally, a group of around 100 interdisciplinary artists will showcase work together for the first time, exploring Black experience and influence, from the post-war era to the present day.

https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/get-up-stand-up-now