Artothlon, Summer 2009

Half past ten, Saulius has arrived after giving blood this morning and Justin, Eero and Monica are dumpster diving downstairs. I go help them bring stuff up – hula hoops, a toy fire engine – a printer. Monica is beside herself with joy, she found an ornate old bathroom ceramic sink. She has a plan.

Justin’s taken cameras and phones so he and Ania can edit the footage from last night.

The mood has changed and everyone’s on form – even those who are usually pretty glum. I think interesting things could really start happening now. We’re in this together.

Anyone who’s reading this will have realised that what I’m writing here is highly selective and edited in the knowledge that it is public. I’ve taken to sending occasional emails to a small group, i’m intending to do this more as a means of documenting and not losing details. If you’d like to be added to this list, do email me – it’ll only be people I know.

Off to the flea market on my bike. Others are looking for something big.

more later. oh – still haven’t told the skirmantas story.

The broadband is dicky, much has happened and I haven’t been able to record it. But here’s yesterday’s sequence of events.

First thing, Tom bailed. Slipped away in the night with his whiffle hurling bats. Everyone very sad. Massage vouchers, a prize left over from last week’s show, were still hanging around so they decided to make it a girlie event – yet again I got a bit of a prize I hadn’t won. Poetic justice.

Skirmatas, the cameraman, came along – low point when he came into the massage room when each of us was lying face down under a towel. I asked him to leave.

Grim mood all day. The assignment is one hundred litas. At the sculpture park the day before – no, I haven’t even been able to talk about the sculpture park experience – Kornelya had given each team a hundred lita note. Except Justin’s team who had better things to do than visit a sculpture park, despite being put under a lot of pressure by Kornelia.

open bracket

More positively, we’ve asked for a day to do some workshops, a talk, make some work, at the Technology museum – a fantastic ex-energy station with all the plant still in situ. I’d gone the other day and found trays and trays of Lithuanian and Cyrillic type blocks alongside a magnificent printing press. Just imagine what you’d do with those. Great location, great stuff in there, it’d make fantastic footage. It took a long while for them to pick up on this but finally, they’ve bitten.

We’ve also asked for a day at the Observatory. There’s one eighty km away and apparently it’s fantastic.

close bracket

The grim mood continued all day – collaboration isn’t working for many but there is, underneath the grimmness, a sense that the only thing keeping our pulses beating is the delicate web of solidarity between us.

The screening of the show. This is where we have to watch it at the TV studio, then for the last ten minutes the cameras turn on us and Egmontas, the host. They film us responding to the audience votes and announce the prize and, officially, the next week’s assignment. It’s always horrible.

The show has been edited better this week, though inexplicably, they’re still showing hot air balloon footage and the Ania scene. It’s not like we haven’t given them masses of action.

Egmontas the host isn’t there, we don’t know why. Some technician has placed a number of bananas on each table. Of course, some people start putting these in their bags, so he puts more bananas out. This hasn’t happened before.

One of the reporters does the host thing and we all get up and leave, without a word. We leave the building and walk home. It feels sublime. It’s the first thing we’ve all been able to do together, in block solidarity.

Apparently they were intending that we vote one or some of us off with the bananas.

I mean, really.

pics and skirmantas story later.

Just spoken to Jim, my laser man back at home. Why on earth didn’t I call him before?

My lasers are almost certainly ruined, he says, thanks to using 9V batteries – they’re only able to tolerate 3V.

Another couple of important lessons learned. Always check, don’t assume.

Saulius and I are relatively happy with the work – though it’s a hard thing to document – the light is very fine.It looked absolutely beautiful at times; each time the light reflected off a mirror, it refracted very slightly so that by the fourth angle, it was very soft – and had divided itself into threads of light within the one main beam. Lovely.

Maybe we should have had a smoke machine there. I had wondered about it, but it seemed to me that that could, if we weren’t careful, be a bit showy and begin to detract from the very simple thing that we were trying to do – that is, to draw a line, using laser light technology, through two opposing buildings, connecting them using the line but driving the line through from one end of the location to the other.

What was really excellent about this project was that a good few people turned up to see what we did and they really interacted with the line. It was good to see the line build as we placed the mirrors, and to discover how the line worked and changed in response.

We didn’t get to take the line up to the sky which we’d wanted to do, but we’d always been clear that it was an experimental piece of work for us with no dress rehearsal.

Eero began to make a fire to generate some smoke – just as my lasers gave up (and now no longer function). We’d decided to rely on batteries and while the 9V ones we’d used over the weekend had been fine – Sony ones – the batteries which the crew brought for us gave up almost immediately and the lasers started to play up – I’d hardly used before I came here but they’d been as good as gold all weekend.

We all know that brand matters with batteries. But remember – it really DOES matter.

What’s interesting about this for me is that while, because we didn’t complete the work and get superb documentation, the TV show will see it as a failure. I don’t and neither does Saulius. We did most of what we wanted to do, people got involved and engaged with the work, we watched the line change and we changed the space – as a bonus, the people in the TV crew had never seen this small but atmospheric part of the city before.

I thought this morning of Catherine Yass’ High Wire project – her tight-rope walker only began to walk out – he never completed it as intended because it was too windy on the day.

But the work still stands proud.