Friday 18 Nov: A feast — and a family reunion — get washed out, but we make progress on our presentation

In spite of a late night birthday celebration, I find myself waking up at a super-early 4 AM. I guess my circadian clock is not as acclimated to the time zone as I thought. Knowing I won’t settle down, I decide to get up and get some work done. Perhaps I’m suffering from a bit of anxiety after yesterday morning’s workshop, which was peppered with lots of questions and interruptions. I know I need to create some “wrapper” media artifacts for the presentation: backdrops and ambient sound for our evolving “steampunk carnival” theme, altogether some kind of multimedia “glue” to link the four different works the collaborative groups have created.

I decide to keep the backdrops a bit abstract, which turns out to be a good move. Making one for each group, I take an iconic image from each story and superimposing it over circus-like star-burst striping. The ambient soundscape ends up being a historical recording of music in the public domain combined with royalty-free ambient sound of a game arcade and an amusement park fairway. I’ll share all this in the next post featuring the Saturday presentation. I manage to get that all done in about 3 hours of focus time, so I know I wouldn’t have gotten it done later in the day with distractions. Guess I woke up early for a reason!

I couldn’t face another rich traditional British breakfast today, so I opt for sweet waffles. Crunchy, with a well-composed fruit combination topping, it hits the spot, proving once again the Apex is a cut above your garden variety hotel restaurant. After our customary brief orientation meeting with the group, it’s off to DCCS for our work session.

A performative workshop

This workshop is far form ordinary! We meet up with Mary who has brought along Louise Richie and Sarah Smart from the DJCAD. Chris is also there, and he tells me unfortunately Norrie is a bit peely-wally (Scots slang for unwell) and won’t make it today.

Sarah is a tech-support expert and has come with an array of projectors, media players, microphones, and a portable PA system for us to use on Saturday. We’ll be well-equipped thanks to her! Louise is a post-grad researcher in contemporary art practice who is assisting Mary with a workshop on performative presentation, performative here in the artistic rather than political sense of the word. This is very much outside of the comfort zone of all these students, and it’s very interesting to watch the workshop transpire. Most of them get into the spirit of the proceedings. Mary and Louise are coaxing the students to “occupy” the story when presenting it.

It’s not acting, exactly. It’s better understood like this: a presentation can be a situation where saying something is actually doing something, rather than reporting on something that has already beed done. Does that sound like English? An example of something like this is the DeeCAP multimedia presentation model performed by Damon Herd. I will describe in greater detail later on how we’re riffing off of this concept.

Performative presentation workshop

Designing a venue

While the students are busy making a stab at “occupying” their stories, I’m planning out with Stephen and Chris how to use the large space to best effect with the 5 projectors, sound system, seating, as-is lighting, and whatnot. In my installation practice I’ve learned how to quickly “read” a space to see what it’s capable of doing, and how to work with, not against, what available tech will allow. It’s clear that we won’t have many resources to modify the space. We had thought of draping cloth or using large sheets of paper to create “settings” but time and treasure won’t permit a lot of those elaborate shenanigans.

So instead, we’re relying on seating orientation and creating focal points through projection. I hound our hosts for any kind of props we can scare up that might help create mood: a mop, maybe a rubber rat, a top hat, obligatory steampunk goggles, chemistry beakers, other iconic elements from the stories. We do manage to scare up some useful props this way, but fortunately we had brought one along with us from home that would have been pretty hard to find: a 3D-printed prosthetic hand with scary dagger fingers!

Publication brainstorming

In between all this planning and searching, Chris and I brainstorm about what to do publication-wise. This guy is amazingly quick: he’s tossed together a zine-like mock-up of a publication using the as-yet unformatted panel pages. It looks pretty good even in this form. We agree that a future anthology-style impress of the work would be great, and we talk about timing the publication over the summer when things settle down for him. I’m glad this came about, because I knew some students felt, if not exactly betrayed, somehow disappointed that their work wouldn’t get published in the Being Human comic.

Without going into too much detail, in hindsight we instructors realized it was pretty unrealistic to get publication-ready work done from a standing start with only six weeks as part of a course that isn’t even really a proper studio format. The anthology solution guarantees they’ll get the international publication credit they were promised, if they later put in the work to bring it up to Dundee’s standards.

Victoria and Albert Design Museum

The students are done with their performative workshop, and now it’s time for more sight-seeing. Dundee has secured a group entry and light lunch at the new Victoria and Albert Design Museum on the Dundee waterfront. We push against the drenching winds down West Marketgait and across the big plaza in front of the new Sleeperz hotel perched atop the train station. This building is formed in a partial semicircle and today is acting like a wind tunnel vortex generator — did the architects even think to do a wind study on the Tay waterfront? Another umbrella meets its prophesied doom.

The Victoria and Albert Design Museum, on a much drier day | Wikimedia Commons
The gargantuan interior of the V+A | V+A Blog

We shake it off as we tumble into the entry hall of the V+A. Fully half of the museum’s volume seems devoted to this cavernous space. A dramatic staircase rises to the main exhibition floors. At the top, we are introduced to Kat, our museum guide, who looks uncannily like a doppelgãnger of a kid from my kids’ school.

The organization of this museum is quite strange. A permanent gallery is devoted to a collage of Scottish textile, metallurgical, architectural, industrial, graphic, and transport infrastructural design. No particular chronology or taxonomy is evident in this dramatically lit space. We see a Mackintosh tearoom salvaged from a Glasgow demolition smack next to a model of the Falkirk Wheel right next to a traveling play set design adjacent to examples of comics printed in Dundee. The organizing principle for the progression is a salon-style “hey, look, this is all Scottish stuff!” more than any kind of evolution in place or time.

Scottish design?

I come away from this exhibition space thinking they’ve really given short shrift to the impact that Scotland has had on design. A Mackintosh tea-room is nice, but he and his wife Margaret Macdonald were instrumental in furniture, object, and textile designs that could easily find a home here — the museum misses an opportunity to secure Margaret’s long overdue place in that collaborative legacy. What about other members of the Glasgow Four who they hung out with? How has the influence of the Celtic Revival or the Scottish Gaelic Renaissance affected Scottish design? Or, for that matter, iconic folk design traditions?

Glaringly, there is no evolution of, say, the kilt as a garment that starts as an all-purpose utilitarian length of cloth, is banned as an act of cultural repression, later reinvigorated as a Romantic Victorian object of sentiment. Is that all simply too well known and taken for granted? Or isn’t a facility like this aimed at an international audience who may be less aware? What about pre-industrial design by such peoples as the native Picts or occupying Vikings? The selections here seem to suggest that “design” begins only with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. In a Scotland that is currently preoccupied with national identity, I find these decisions to be as as curious as the entry hall, designed at a scale which would make Étienne-Louis Boullée blush. Perhaps all this reflects the Anglo bias of the Victoria and Albert brand?

Plastic

A more coherent exhibition on the evolution of plastic and items formed therefrom occupies the rotating exhibition space. This is thoughtfully curated, with lessons in the forefront about the many uses and abuses of this material.

Plastics, a special exhibition at the V+A Design Museum

After we finish the gallery tours, we are offered lunch. I have a bacon roll, which is a simple but quite delicious sandwich of a soft roll and, well, bacon, and not much else. Not much else is needed! We’re rewarded after lunch with a windy, soaking walk back to campus and a presentation by Mary about the benefits of studying abroad. Fortunately this does not come across as a timeshare pitch, but rather as a practical discussion about options for next steps beyond the bachelor experience in the creative visual disciplines. There are several students I have in mind to hear this who definitely benefit from hearing what Mary had to share.

Networking

As the students return to the hotel to prepare for the evening’s Being Human event, the debut of The Electric Sorcerer Breaks Through!, a play inspired by the science-fiction work Robert Duncan Milne, I do my networking duty with Mary and we head over to the administrative offices to meet with an assistant dean, Cameron Wilson. I take it Cameron has assumed the internationalization duties formerly tendered by Mary. We exchange pleasantries and discuss the next steps in formalizing an institutional partnership, Mary’s pet project that led to this trip occurring in the first place. Unfortunately, the Dean, Anita Taylor, is out of town and would otherwise like to have met up.

Afterward, Mary drives me over to the site of the play. This is the only time I’ve ever stepped inside a car in Scotland, and it’s unsettling sitting in the “driver” side with no steering wheel. The performance venue is a library auditorium adjacent to an “indoor shopping center” — they really hate the term “mall” here! Mary’s next mission is to return home to collect a home-made feast, a buffet to be served at DCCS after the play. I am going to miss this buffet because I have scheduled a family reunion of sorts, a meeting with my cousin Louise Rankin, her husband Michael, and their daughters, Lauren and Lisa, who are set to meet me at the Apex at 7:30.

The Electric Sorcerer Breaks Through!

As the audience settles into the auditorium, I’m captivated because the play will evidently feature a Victorian magic lantern, which I am very excited to see in action. As the action unfolds, the conceit is to present dialogue as an old-fashioned radio show, a kind of non-comedic version of Prairie Home Companion. The performances are uneven, some actors are brilliant while others are less skillful, and the use of the lantern is disappointingly intermittent. I’m ashamed to admit I’m forcing myself not to nod off in the dark — remember, I’ve been up since 4 AM!

The magic lantern… is that a Clan Farquharson tartan underneath?

A family reunion — washed away!

I have to leave the play before the final scene to meet my cousins, and I arrived at Apex about 7:20. I sit in the lobby and check my phone: there is a message from Louise and disaster has struck! Three days of soaking heavy rains have washed out the road — not flooded, entirely washed out — from near Arbroath where they live. They are stuck at home. Meanwhile, messages begin to pile up in our emergency group chat: Mary, who lives in a village several miles away, has become trapped by more washed-out roads and cannot not reach her home to deliver the buffet. So everyone’s dinner plans have now eroded into bedlam.

Louise suggests a remote meeting so we can at least see each other and chat. We agree to meet at 9:30 so that I can scrounge up some dinner. The wind-driven rain is so punishing I have no interest at all in walking back into the city center for food, so I opt for the hotel restaurant, because here I am! This is actually an excellent choice: grilled Scottish salmon, baby potatoes and greens, washed down with a Thistle Cross hard apple cider. I can’t ask for a better meal, except that it could be shared with my cousins.

Zoom to the rescue

This night of misadventure is capped by a very pleasant Zoom meeting with the Rankins. Daughters Lauren and Lisa are clever young sculptors with a studio in Dundee named ShadowWish Designs. We talk about art practice and family stories for well over an hour. I pledge to return and meet them all for real, and to give my sister Paige their contacts so they can meet at some point. While this was certainly not as satisfying as the face to face family reunion we all expected, it was very meaningful to make contact with them.

This has been a long day filled with rain-induced, literal road-blocks, but it’s been delightful enough not to let a little rain spoil the fun. I reward myself at the Apex bar with a Laphroaig 10 year, which costs about half per dram what it does back in the US. Exhausted, I expect a nice long rest tonight.

Tomorrow: Abington College’s long-awaited — and hopefully rain-free — Being Human Festival debut!