Transform is a relatively new project that is incorporating art with history of the local area in association wit Leicestershire's Heritage. We were given a presentation at college by the two project leaders and artists Peter Walker and McKeown, the pair came to talk about 'Transform', share their work, ideas and give us a taster of what sort of work they'd be displaying in the festival and what the meaning was behind it.
Although the project does involve Snibston's history, the main thing that was mentioned is the new software they've been using named SlipStream that the pair have developed by themselves and the public can access for free on the internet. The unique, new and exciting part of the SlipStream software is that no piece of work will ever be the same, it will all be individual and will never be used or seen again, the work produced with it can't even be saved as a single file/project. This aspect of the software is completely deliberate and is meant to reflect the modern age and the world we live in, that everything is disposable and almost everything is readily available at our finger tips.
During the lecture we were given a demonstration of how to use the software and this gave us a real idea of how it worked and how it could be used. The software is very clever although it is still very much a work in progress and is being 'tweeked' or improved and added to all the time. They hope that once they are finished developing it that it can become a more widespread thing used by artists across the board. The pieces of work, as I've previously mentioned are one offs. Once you select the images you wish to use for the projection or slide show the software can take certain parts of the image and turn it into different shapes as well as rotating the image so that the different pieces then get layered on top of one another to create one big really fascinating piece that is constantly changing and developing, almost like the project as a whole is. One of the aspects of this project that I did really like was that, the artists have done this and designed it in such a way that, it's meant to be projected on to a huge surface making it even more obscure and giving it let another level. The only problems they've had so far with this is finding places that will allow them to project their work onto such surfaces especially in public places, one of the reasons they're having this difficulty is because they can't save their work and produce the exact same thing for them again.
The way that they've linked the project to Snibston, where the work will be displayed at the festival, is that all the images that are included in the slideshow were taken at Snibston and reflected the feel of the area perfectly.
Although we were very much aware that the software was a work in progress I think the work and the concept itself was very interesting. For me, I feel that I would use the software if I was able to save my work and look at it, show it to people more than once. I do however understand why this is a feature they have deliberately left out and the point that the artists/designers are trying to make and what statement they're making about the modern world and the times we live in, so I understand their reluctance.
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