Oh, hai Mark.
I’ve been working away on my commission for b-side Festival 2018, the triumphant and openly deceitful return of The Portland Office for Imaginary History this September. That’s the thing with artists, when you’re properly working you don’t have time to publicise yourself, but when you have time to publicise yourself that probably means you’re not working so much.
Been busy, anyway, with the commission and helping out with The Bank Job by Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn. I thoroughly recommend you check it out and support it as a great of example of a community arts project that a) really involves the community, and has made communities of its own and b) is not only addressing real and meaningful issues but also doing something about them. In this case raising awareness of our society and economy’s crippling reliance on debt, and actually getting our neighbours out of debt, not to mention paying local artists and makers the London living wage for their labour. I’ve also written something about the debts of various kinds that many artists find themselves in, for the new issue of Sluice magazine. Many of the places and communities I’ve worked with have become homes away from home for me- from Tokyo to the New Forest and Dorset– but this is the first time I’ve ever had the pleasure and the privilege of working on a participatory arts project in the community I actually live in.
I can’t really talk much yet about what’s coming up from September onwards (SO THIS IS A BIT OF A CRAP UPDATE ISN’T IT?), except to say that I’m really eager to share the new machine learning, performance and data exploration work that I’ll be researching with a great tech organisation in London 2018-2019. Pay some attention to that man behind the curtain, because this image is related.
I’ll also be returning to some semi-related practical magic and daft costumery for a live show in Sheffield at the end of September. Again, more details when I can share them. Here’s a cryptic preview:
Alistair Gentry 