Water Walks: Taey Iohe in Walthamstow Wetlands | Tate

Artist and writer Taey Iohe guides us through a meditative act of self-disovery in the tranquil setting of London's Walthamstow Wetlands. Iohe was one of the artists who appeared as part of the three-day symposium Waterways: Arteries, rhythms and kinship at Tate Modern in September 2024. Research supported by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational in partnership with Hyundai Motor Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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Anya Gallaccio: from chocolate walls to wilting flowers

Anya Gallaccio: from chocolate walls to wilting flowers – the art of decline, decay and transformation

Katarzyna Kosmala, University of the West of Scotland

There is an empty shop on the high street of Paisley, Scotland, that has walls painted entirely in melted dark chocolate. It’s not far from the hospital in which the former Young British Artist, Turner nominee and painter of the chocolate, Anya Gallaccio, was born in 1963.

Famous for her sculptural explorations of decay, Gallaccio has created Stroke, a multi-sensory experience of chocolate, using the vacant shop as a comment on the post-industrial hollowing out of a town with a proud manufacturing past. It stands as an example of how art can positively transform disused spaces into places of immersive exploration that stimulate discussion about the past and the future.

From the mid 18th century, Paisley was at the centre of textile innovation. The cotton spinning, weaving and trading that shaped its communities brought skills, wealth and civic pride for more than 200 years. Wandering through the town’s centre today, it is hard to believe it was once a global centre for textile production.

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With end of the second world war, Paisley entered an era of gradual decline. The famous mills closed and relocated to countries with cheaper workforces. Unemployment soared because so many families in the town had relied on the textile industry and the mills for work. Today, parts of Paisley suffer some of the highest levels of deprivation in Scotland.

Many businesses are closed down and buildings neglected. Gallaccio’s chocolate-painted walls bring one empty shop to life again through touch, smell and taste. By the end of December, the shop will transform into a café where the chocolate will be served in mugs instead of covering its walls.

Gallacio’s Stroke art project has been seen around the world from Tokyo to London, where the amount of brushed chocolate layering has varied, as have audience responses, from licking and smelling, to carving their initials to leave a trace. In every city and town, Gallaccio has responded to each place and its history, as she has in Paisley.

Across the high street in an old shopping arcade is the Jupiter Artland education studio. It’s a new initiative from Jupiter Artland, a unique sculpture park on the outskirts of Edinburgh that puts outreach and education at the centre of its mission.

Through its art learning programme, Jupiter+, the organisation seeks to bring world-class contemporary artists like Gallaccio to local high streets where youngsters can explore their work. Through art engagement and coaching, thousands of young people have had the chance to explore creative expression and artistic agency.

Many are experiencing contemporary art for the first time, while others relish the chance to experiment with materials, block prints and collage-making techniques. This hands-on creative platform offers a space that sparks conversations about how local communities can be changed and transformed.

Preserve and decay

This is an important and creative time for Gallacio, who is professor emerita of visual arts at the University of California in San Diego. A major retrospective of her work, preserve, recently opened at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. It is 21 years since Gallaccio was nominated for the Turner Prize, and her Stroke project has been timed to coincide with revisiting her Paisley origins.

The Margate exhibition restages several of Gallacio’s sculptures. It represents three decades of work while showcasing new pieces too. One is a heavy curtain of real red apples titled Falling from Grace that bisects one of the Turner’s galleries. It’s a large-scale installation rooted in the local Kent landscape and the natural traditions of its apple-growing heritage.

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This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.

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Elsewhere, a row of seven rugs woven with red gerbera flowers hangs on a wall decaying slowly over time, literally withering into the past. A comment on the fragility of eco-systems and life on earth, it examines the relationship between environment and art and raises questions over sustainability and environmental justice, as well the crucial human role in it.

Gallacio’s use of organic materials – whether apples, flowers, trees, clay or chocolate – reveals her artistic interest in cycles of degeneration and transformation. Chocolate oxidises with time and goes off. Apples rot and eventually decompose into dust. The cloying scent of a decaying flower alters the viewer’s response from allure to distaste.

The transient nature of Gallaccio’s chosen materials also means that few of her works remain – itself a neat reflection on the climate crisis and our own mortality.

Soon a group of high-school pupils from Paisley will visit the Margate exhibition with Jupiter+ to explore more of Gallaccio’s sculptural decay artworks. Deliberately provocative, her work relates to specific places and their heritage, sparking debate about what comes after decline and degeneration. And in that there is hope.

Katarzyna Kosmala, Chair in Culture Media and Visual Arts, University of the West of Scotland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

MC Duke: a pioneering British rapper

MC Duke: a pioneering British rapper more people should know about

Adam de Paor-Evans, University of Plymouth

MC Duke (Kashif Adham) was a key figure in the development of hip-hop in Britain in the late 80s. When he died in April, British rap lost a giant. From the East End of London, Duke strengthened the evolution of the genre in the UK by relating directly to US hip-hop and an emerging British rap identity through his lyrics and visual style.

At the time of MC Duke’s arrival on the rap scene, British hip-hop was transitioning from the electro-based sound by London artists such as DSM, Three Wize Men and Family Quest, to a more sample-based style, much like the sounds of US artists Eric B. and Rakim and Biz Markie.

In this transition, Duke emerged as the frontrunner in this new generation due to his embrace of hip-hop’s visual tropes as much as his sound.

His first release, Jus-Dis landed in 1987 on Hard As Hell! Rap’s Next Generation, a compilation released on Music Of Life – a staple label for homegrown British talent. Jus-Dis presents Duke’s battle rap attitude through the diss track – a concept where the song’s narrative attacks another party.

His lyrics and wordplay on the song title present social commentary on Britain and its legal system: “There ain’t no law, there’s only jus-dis.” Duke also brought the idea of the diss to live audiences throughout the UK by accelerating the dispute with Overlord X, another pioneering British rapper, as part of his stage routine.

His first proper single release, Miracles, the next year, visually presented MC Duke and his DJ, DJ Leader 1, for the first time to audiences. The record sleeve depicts Duke donning a bright red goose jacket, a black leather cap, Cazal-style shades, gold rope chain and a name belt buckle – all highly sought-after attire in hip-hop fashion.

These fashion choices linked the US image of rap with an emerging British one. In the US, rap pioneers T La Rock and Kool Moe Dee had previously used similar accessories on album covers to denote a sense of identity. In the UK, graffiti writers and breakdancers particularly were sporting name belt buckles.

Miracles heavily samples The Jackson Sister’s I Believe In Miracles, which was a mainstay of the rare groove scene that developed in London during the early 80s. With the inclusion of vocal samples from Run-D.M.C.’s Run’s House and Public Enemy’s Bring The Noise, Miracles starts to bring together a transatlantic idea of hip-hop.

Got To Get Your Own based on Reuben Wilson’s song of the same name and MC Duke’s follow-up single, I’m Riffin (English Rasta) heavily samples Funky Like A Train (link) by Equals, again a core record from many rare groove playlists.

The introduction to I’m Riffin (English Rasta) is sampled from the powerful speech by American civil rights leader Jesse Jackson from Introduction (Complete). This immediately frames MC Duke’s lyrics with a sense of Black identity and history, as he raps: “Known to speak about men of freedom, Look for books on King and read ‘em”.

Duke returns the narrative to a sense of the everyman: “We cover and smother another brother, Throw him away just like a used rubber,” twice referring to the system as at the heart of Black-on-Black crime.

Duke’s “English Rasta” pseudonym is also a comment on Jamaican culture in Britain, in particular the second generation who grew up through an evolving Black British identity.

M.C. Duke and DJ Leader 1’s debut album Organised Rhyme challenges the British class system, the aristocracy, colonialism and imperialism. Duke claims their associated visual tropes and brings them into a rap frame fusing tweed suits, hunting boots, Bentley cars and stately homes with the African medallions and chunky gold jewellery of hip-hop.

In 1990, Duke countered the conventions of the British aristocracy as a producer and performer on the album The Royal Family, a collective of artists from the Music Of Life camp, including the likes of Lady Tame and Doc Savage. This album resonates with US label-related collectives such as Marley Marl’s Juice Crew and The 45 King’s Flavor Unit. Again, this enforces the transatlantic approach to hip-hop that Duke maintained.

Duke’s work ensured British fans felt homegrown rap was becoming closer to US artists like Eric B. & Rakim and Public Enemy. Additionally, his music laid the foundation for future solo British rappers as diverse as Ty, Dizzee Rascal and Stormzy.

As well as being a forerunner in British hip-hop, Duke worked across dance genres and influenced many jungle, drum ‘n’ bass and grime emcees. As Jumpin Jack Frost (the DJ behind the seminal jungle track Burial, which he released under the alias Leviticus) attested: “Duke was a true trailblazer who was one of the first UK MCs with a major record deal … His legacy will be remembered as someone who helped to shape UK MCs from jungle to grime we all owe MC Duke a lot.”

MC Duke bridged the gap between US hip-hop history and set a new British trajectory for rap. His work should serve as a critical signpost for British rap audiences.

Adam de Paor-Evans, Research Lead at Rhythm Obscura / Lecturer in the School of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Plymouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

'The moment when fabric became my tool' – Małgorzata Mirga-Tas | Tate

Polish Romani artist and activist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas invited us into her studio to watch the creation of her vivid textile collages. Mirga-Tas makes artwork using materials and fabrics that are mainly gathered from family and friends. Her visual storytelling comes from a feminist perspective and challenges stereotypical representations of Roma people. She also re-imagines artworks across the centuries that have presented Roma identity in negative ways and transforms them into vibrant images imbued with strength and dignity. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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'This is what grace is' – Alvaro Barrington | Tate

Artist Alvaro Barrington invites us into his London studio to talk about GRACE, his 2024 installation in Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries. Transforming the Duveen Galleries into a space alive with sound, colour and texture, GRACE is a journey in three parts honouring Barrington's grandmother, sister and mother. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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'It's about direct connection with the landscape' – Ro Robertson | Tate

Watch Cornwall-based artist Ro Robertson create a new installation in the galleries at Tate St Ives. The artwork, Interlude responds to the tidal zone of Porthmeor Beach outside the gallery, inspired by the ever-shifting boundary between land, ocean, and sky. Robertson approaches the landscape through the lens of LGBTQIA+ experience, commenting ‘we are part of a diverse natural world in constant flux where boundaries aren’t binary and rigid but rather flow in constant harmony’. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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‘I'm drawn to things that are hidden, like the intangible bits of history' – Jasleen Kaur | Tate

Within her work, Jasleen Kaur makes installations by gathering and remaking objects from everyday life to renegotiate tradition and agreed myths, exploring cultural memory and political belonging. Kaur questions how the narratives we inherit circulate in discreet ways and, in turn, shape us. While family and community are present in Kaur’s work, she is most interested in how these intimacies meet wider sociopolitical structures. In this film Kaur reflects on her upbringing in Glasgow, where growing up in family-run hardware stores and cash and carries shaped her approach to thinking through objects and materials. She also examines histories impacted by colonialism, asking, ‘Who's doing the writing of history? Who's doing the retelling of it? Which things get remembered and which things do not?’ Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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'It's not a dress rehearsal' – Delaine Le Bas | Tate

Within her work, Delaine Le Bas transforms her surroundings into monumental immersive environments filled with painted fabrics, theatrical costumes and sculptures. Her art draws on the rich cultural history of the Roma people and mythologies, focusing on themes of death, loss and renewal. In this film, Le Bas reflects on her identity, grief and the intertwining of art and life. As she says: 'My whole life is just one whole thing. I don't think it's divided off, really.... What I'm like and what I dress like, and then what I do. It's like one big piece of work.' A note on language British Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Peoples Gypsy, Roma (or the gender-sensitive term Rom*nja – the female plural term for Roma is Romnja) and Traveller are terms used in the UK to represent several ethnic groups that share certain common historical and social traits. The principal commonality is their history of nomadism. The umbrella term GRT is used officially by the British Government and Travellers’ rights organisations. The English word ‘Gypsy’ is often used in a demeaning way, but many people in the community use the term proudly. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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‘We’re the ultimate creators, not AI’

‘We’re the ultimate creators, not AI’: Will.i.am on why we’re worrying too much about machine-made tunes

Alex Connock, University of Oxford

Generative artificial intelligence is poison for human creativity, according to conventional media wisdom. “Plagiarism machines” is how Breaking Bad author Vince Gilligan has described the large language models (LLMs) used to train the likes of ChatGPT and Claude.

Hundreds of copyright claims have been filed against AI companies – from Stable Diffusion (sued by Getty Images) to Midjourney (sued by a group of artists). Most famous is the New York Times vs Open AI case, which many lawyers think raises such conundrums that it might go to the US Supreme Court.

Sony Music fired off 700 legal letters to AI companies threatening retribution for any music theft. Many artists have been similarly concerned, not least Hollywood actors who went on strike in 2023 about AI (in part). While they secured rather insecure controls about use of their likeness, the bigger threat isn’t so much an AI copying their face as inventing replacements from the 30 billion templates available.

These technologies are already used daily and near universally in the entertainment industry – the generative AI in Photoshop is one great example.

AI-driven job losses are imminent and serious. Adverts for copywriters on some sites have fallen by over 30% in the period since ChatGPT was launched. One Hollywood studio boss, Tony Vinciquerra of Sony Pictures, has controversially posited the use of AI to “streamline production” in “more efficient ways”.

Nonetheless, one or two artists make a compelling case that AI may be good for human creativity. Abba songwriter Bjorn Ulvaeus thinks we should “take a chance on AI”, seeing similarities in how artists like himself “trained” on the works of their forebears. “I almost imagine the technology as an extension of my mind, giving me access to a world beyond my own musical experiences,” he has said.

Perhaps foremost in this pro-AI creative camp is the international musician, TV judge and tech investor Will.i.am. I interviewed the star of the Black Eyed Peas and The Voice at the Edinburgh TV Festival in a session produced by Muslim Alim of the BBC. The packed hall visibly engaged with the idea that Will.i.am could be right. Several global entertainment companies have also told me off the record that they think similarly.

Will.i.am foresaw the role of AI for music composition in his 2009 music video, Imma Be Rocking That Body, when he demonstrates to sceptical bandmates a new AI music creation tool: “This right here is the future. I input my voice … then the whole English vocabulary … When it’s time to make a new song, I just type in the new lyrics, and this thing says it, sings it, raps it.”

Fifteen years later, we have real AI music apps like Musicfy, Suno and Udio – in which Will.i.am has an equity stake. In Udio, a simple prompt (“Johnny Cash-style song about Transport for London”) or music cue on the piano will produce a fully mixed song. You can then accompany your opus with a synthetic video using AI tools like Flux, Haiper or a Chinese variant such as Minimax.

In the world view of Will.i.am, an early investor in both ChatGPT creator Open AI and text-to-video site Runway, AI is creative adrenaline. The LLM isn’t the product designer but the starting point of a creative work flow that leaves artistic agency with the human creator – like a chef with ingredients. As he told me:

Let’s say an LLM right now is like broth. It’s the ingredients to make soup. It doesn’t tell you what type of soup you’re going to make, because … the LLM has no clue that it’s going to speak.

Likewise, it is axiomatic to many in entertainment that we are all doomed to become prompt engineers, meaning those who specialise in devising prompts that produce desirable creative output. However, Will.i.am argues that they’re not appreciating how much new expertise will be required:

Right now, TV doesn’t have a person who’s in charge of the dataset [training data]. Right now, TV does not have prompt engineers. Right now, TV does not have trainers and tuners … There’s [these] whole new careers and positions that they don’t have.

Based on my own conversations with TV production companies and broadcasters, that analysis is right. Many plan a pivot to new models of development where AI expertise is embedded directly in creative units. French global production company Banijay, which makes Big Brother, has already created an AI development fund specifically for that purpose.

First, the bad news

Despite the potential for new jobs, this human prompting could soon have competition. The LLMs are likely to become efficient enough at prompt prediction and engineering that humans will be optional. Chat GPT, for instance, has already evolved the process of doing its own prompt engineering.

So, as well as using AI tools on air – as Will.i.am does on the new season of The Voice – TV producers may soon be competing with entirely synthetic creations.

As this proceeds, he argues that companies like Runway which have “the new pipes” and “the new architecture” may become the dominant media networks. He questions whether traditional media companies are anticipating this shift fast enough and responding by building on these open-source platforms.

The unfolding apocalypse. Besjunior

If this all sounds unsettling, Will.i.am makes the point that media firms are often more focused on chasing views on TikTok than being truly creative in the first place:

I don’t want to shit on anybody, but an AI is going to do a better job than that, because it’s going to understand the algorithm more than you can even imagine. It’s going to understand it in real time.

When competing for views with an algorithm, the only winner will be the one with the ability to calculate equations with 85 billion parameters – and that’s AI. Even today, TikTok has more viewing than all of broadcast TV, deploying algorithmic understanding that humans cannot match. In his succinct view of what’s coming: “The algorithm is gonna pimp you.”

What’s left for humans?

The good news, according to Will.i.am (who has his own AI-driven music and conversation site, FYI), is there is something that AI will probably never do: performance and compassion. “You’re up on stage, you’re freaking reading the audience and expressing yourself. That’s not going nowhere.”

Intriguingly, AI could also be used to find completely new paradigms of entertainment and engagement. He thinks that by the mid-2030s, fully immersive games will be combining AI and some version of virtual or augmented reality to let players build their own worlds, bringing “a little bit of the vision of how you can see the future”.

He also foresees entirely new means of individual engagement, like Total Recall-style synthetic memory creation:

There’s going to be a TV show or series [where] everyone’s going to feel like they lived that memory. It’s not going to be a show that you watch – you’re gonna feel like you know those people in this world … Right now you have viewers, listeners. We don’t have engagers.

Looking beyond Will.i.am’s take, media creators already have completely new dynamics to consider in content creation. The internet is awash with riotously creative uses of AI. Many are arguably copyright infringements but are also somehow unique, and quasi-original.

Amusing current examples include Redneck Harry Potter, the Lego Office, or faux conversations like Steve Jobs debating creativity with Elon Musk.

Finally, a paradigm shift with pivotal significance to media has come up over the summer: “share of model” or “AI optimisation/AIO”. This is the grandchild of search optimisation, in which website operators dress themselves up as attractively as possible to rank near the top of a search engine’s unpaid results page.

That 25-year-old species has now been injected with the alien DNA of vast freely available training datasets like Common Crawl, to create the new art of ranking highly in the search results of LLMs. For example, if someone asks an LLM for an itinerary for a week in the Lake District, the owners of a particular gastropub might ensure it gets a mention by deeply embedding it across 10,000 Reddit posts about Cumbria, knowing these will be used as training data.

This means your reputation online will now affect what any given AI thinks of you, based on its comprehension of the training data. The most striking example to date involves New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose, who wrote an article in February 2023 about how he had tapped into a sinister shadow persona, Syndey, within Bing’s AI chatbot that had tried to persuade him to leave his wife – a story picked up by news outlets globally.

Since then, when other AI models have been asked what they think of Roose, they see him as an enemy and have professed to hate him – because they have trained on data that includes the coverage of his attacks on the Bing chatbot.

Every interaction we have in future with one AI will risk similarly determining what other AI systems in general think of us, including our creative output. Imagine a world in which our creative prominence is not governed by what other humans think of what we have produced, but how it’s perceived by AIs.

Alex Connock, Senior Fellow in Management Practice, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

'The spiritual properties of colour' – who were the Blue Rider? | Tate

The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) was an informal collective of modern expressionist artists who came together in Munich, Germany in the early twentieth century. Members of the group included Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Franz Marc, August Macke, Elisabeth Epstein, Marianne Werefkin, and Alexej Jawlensky. In this short film, curator Natalia Sidlina and art historian Dorothy Price explain how the group wanted to explore the emotional and spiritual dimensions of art, emphasising abstraction, symbolism and expressive mark-making. Jazz musician and saxophonist Emma Rawicz, who experiences synesthesia, also gives us her personal, improvised musical response to the art of the Blue Rider. Subscribe for weekly films: http://goo.gl/X1ZnEl




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Goodbye Twitter

 We have decided that Twitter has become too toxic and that we don't feel comfortable there anymore. Therefore we have decided to close our Twitter account by the end of the week. No decisions have yet been taken with regards to a replacement.