It has been a very inspiring couple of days at Soho Create in London. It would be hard to sum up but I have to say that if I heard a reoccurring thing it was the inspiration of Punk and its DIY ethos. Apart from that – somewhat unpredictable – subject it really became a list of diverse insights and anecdotes from some very diverse people. There were also quite a few reference to a time before all sorts of digital influences – Google, Wacom, ProTools, Adobe and social media. It wasn’t really lamented – more celebrated and created some great analogies.
Here are some of my favourites moments:
– Harriet Vine of Tatty Divine talked about the joy of making a space where “we could make things and put things on the wall” – like art college. She was also mourning the loss of the days when “you could create an event and you wouldn’t have to get up and blog about it – you could just have a hangover”.
– Ron Arad had this great story that started with “12 years ago I invented the iPad for LG – when I was professor at the royal college”. It was called VU. He showed a dated but charming promotional film that proved exactly that. Shot in The Rogers House in Wimbledon it showed that modernism isn’t all black and white. Rogers being in many ways a deconstructor of modernism with his functional objects and daring bright colours. The iPad could of been very a different story.
– Richard wilson spoke about his oil tanks that were at the Saatchi Gallery when it was on Boundry Road. He described it as the beauty of a hazardous material. I saw that show when I was at art college and it was the most fantastic object experience. Ron Arad said how much he was moved by it and how it was also “the best thing my neighbourhood”.
– They were both described as creating “disruption and irreverence” in there work. Richard Wilson went on to say that creating art work is “about having an idea then it’s about tuning it and getting it right to be in the world”. That has been a very hard thing for me to describe over the years but I think that is the best version yet.
– Matthew Slotover from frieze talked about how 1989 was an incredible lawless time in fine art in London. It sounded like another punk.
– Legendary photographer Nadav Kander described falling for photography by discovering his grandfathers cameras in a cupboard.
– Games developer Shahid Ahmad made a fantastic analogy about the limitations of presumption and expectation in his industry: “Video game convention is like a pruned tree – it’s like a huge monolith that ascended into the sky 30 years ago but wasn’t allowed to grow branches”. He was introduced as “the man who moved jet set willie to the Commodore 64”. Not being a gamer I still found that rather charming.
– Dolby gave us an extraordinary audio demonstration of their Dolby Atmos system in their in house cinema. Developed to create “audio objects with positional information”.
I think one of the most poignant observations came from artist Yinka Shonibare MBE, who was describing the London he found when he arrived here during punk: “In London creativity wasn’t just in the studio – it was on the street”. Next time you Google an image think about that for a second… before you do it anyway.
Later on we saw Peter Saville in the Garden at St Barnabas. We talked about all the beautiful things he had made – in a pre-Google world. Unknown pleasures.
ideas/forms/functions 