#27: Lucky Day Overture
This week: Robert Wilson - artist of the digital age // SXSW London - what it needs to succeed // Immersive experiences for fruit flies // What to read, see and do this week in the R&D ecosystem
Sorry this week’s newsletter is late.
I went to see “theatre artist” Robert Wilson’s “Mary Said What She Said” , starring the great Isabelle Huppert at the Barbican last night, and, like every piece of work I’ve seen by him, it left me in a state of awe.
Wilson is like a golden thread for my own experience of art, and a connection with lots of people who read this newsletter. His work is too rarely shown in the UK, so this is a unique chance to talk about him.
READER SURVEY // Answers, pretty purlease
After last week’s issue, one of our brilliant readers Hilary O’Shaughnessy asked if I’d thought about staging meet-ups for the “Creative R&D” community that’s coming together around this weekly missive.
It definitely sent my braincells whirring. There’s lots more I’d love to do.
But the best thing to do first is to see what you all think. So if you get the chance, please take the survey I sent out on Tuesday 8th May. In your inbox somewhere!
I’d love to hear from you.
Now, on with this weeks bout of crucial R&Dism.
ART! // Robert Wilson, artist of the digital age
If I had to pick the best artist of the last 50 years, the one who’d done most to show what art can be in a world re-shaping through computing and communications technologies, it would be Robert Wilson.
He’s an artistic force who’s reshaped how we think about different art-forms from theatre to painting, opera to installations. And he’s a thread woven through my own experience of art.
Last night I was lucky enough to see a piece of theatre at the Barbican directed by him, Mary Said What She Said, starring legendary French actress Isabelle Huppert that reminded me of all the things I loved about him.
Robert Wilson makes theatre, opera productions, video art and installation art. He’s been doing it since the late 1960s, but became famous worldwide with his production of Philip Glass’ opera Einstein on the Beach in the mid 1970s. Inspired by avant-garde choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage, he’s reshaped each of the mediums he’s worked in through a relentless focus on fundamentals - on the power of light and sound to control our experience of time.
This video is a great starting point to understand his work.
Mary Said What She Said exists in the same aesthetic universe as the rest of his work - Isabelle Huppert, her body held largely still in an abstract canvas of light, tells the story of her life. It’s the story of the gruesome exploitation of Mary Queen of Scots - a woman made mythic symbol of the horror of Catholicism, of female sexuality and the terror in beauty.
Wilson’s skill and fascination is to make the way we encounter story both a bringing together of different mediums and media, and of helping us experience meaning not through the force of words or actions, but through their rhythm and texture. Words and phrases repeat over and over, delivered like drum beats or with the insistence of raindrops, the sounds of vowels mutating so we feel the words rather than hear them.
Those words disperse between those said live on stage and those held in voiceover - the gap between live and recorded breaking down in the formality of performance. Light pulses across the abstract backdrop, a pre-echo and a challenge to our current ideas of immersive experience. Huppert’s body moves in controlled ritual motions. Light and sound are utterly exposed as the medium for our own point of encounter with time.
The first Wilson piece I ever saw was an Artangel installation called H.G with Hans Peter Kuhn in the mid 1990s. Staged in an abandoned set of warehouses in London’s Clink Street before they were redeveloped as part of the gentrified South Bank we see today, it began in an empty room, a Victorian dinner party where all the guests had disappeared.
There was a moment in it that I can never forget - even if I can’t quite prove it’s real. A drop of water, maybe a drop of blood, dripping into a bucket in a dark room. I was just a teenager when I saw it, and it and the whole show changed my sense of artistic possibility.
I can’t find that in the Mike Figgis filmed documentary above. Maybe it didn’t quite happen like that. But it’s there inside my head. A moment of perfect encounter.
I think Wilson’s the best, most important artist of our last half-century because I feel his presence everywhere. It’s there in places like the work of Kane Pixels I wrote about a few weeks back where I can’t imagine Kane’s ever seen Bob’s work. If anyone’s explored the power and horror of liminal spaces Kane’s worked in and environment as subject, it’s Robert Wilson.
I’ve been lucky enough to meet Bob a few times. He came and spoke at the opening of my innovation lab, National Gallery X, and let us show some of his video portraits, one of those moments in life I’ll always be more than grateful for. Thanks Ali, thanks Bear, both out there reading this.
We don’t see enough of his work in the UK.
But when he’s here, just for a few days like now, he’s an artist everyone should run to, who questions and reveals what time and being means today, who smashes disciplines together and makes them into something radically new, and who does it perhaps more beautifully than anyone else.
Mary Said What She Said closes tonight. If you have any way to go: go.
ART! IDEAS! TECHNOLOGY! // SXSW comes to London
Back right at the beginning of this newsletter I did a couple of pieces about what I called “Creative R&D Infrastructure”. Covering the opening of Digital Catapult’s distributed media labs, and of UCL East were to me examples of “institutionalising Creative R&D” - and signs and symbols that the intersection of creativity and technology is one of THE defining features of the 2020s.
I’d love to write about this topic more often, but big new things like this don’t open every week…
EXCEPT WHEN THEY DO!
So it was super super super exciting to see the public announcement that SXSW is launching its London version in June 2025.
Many of you reading this will have known this was coming.
It’s not exactly been a secret, but getting the word properly out is exciting, and hearing the news that the excellent Randel Bryan, Deputy CEO of Aviva Studios/Factory International is going to run it all makes sense.
So it’s on its way, and a global event of the scale of SXSW in London should only be a good thing.
But Randel and the team are going to have to work through some complex issues to make it land.
This piece on the potential impact on the UK’s very delicate live music ecosystem is worth reading - and the scrutiny on the offshore corporate entity behind this venture is the kind of questioning an “invasive species” like SXSW will have to be responsive to.
But i’ll leave those wider implications to others.
Viewing SXSW London through a “Creative R&D” lens, here’s three things I think Randel and the team should be thinking about as they start to programme next year.
Integrating with what’s already here. SXSW developed of the Austin music scene, and broadened over time to integrate the rest of the creative and later technology sector. It lands in London as something perhaps broader than anyone can really get their arms around - and into a city which already does everything it does one way or other. Criticisms of SXSW Sydney were aimed squarely at this, that it didn’t cut through the noise of an already vibrant city. That will be much much harder to do in London, so really building partnerships that integrate and amplify has to be priority number 1.
The early positioning is very much about SXSW as a pan-European creative and technology summit, the same way SXSW Sydney is billed as pan-Asian. That feels immediately like a corporate markets take on the world that will be easier to say than deliver. European creative fragmentation, driven by language and a thousand years of tiny enmities, is the source of our greatest strengths and weaknesses, and the hard work done by Macron to make Paris a distinct tech centre might build walls that are hard to bridge. My gut is the European-ness might narrow over time to an Anglo-American market-driven, English-language speaking worldview. That might not be as powerful in principle, but it might be more impactful in practise.
The meeting of Creativity and Technology is London’s binding thread. It’s what’s driving our critical new cultural infrastructure from the Outernet to V&A East, to Here East and more and more. How do we really get the work that comes out of that to be the focus of SXSW London - SXSW itself is more a series of adjacencies, of putting things side by side, than real deep connectedness. In this smaller start-up stage, how do we put the genuinely experimental outcomes of Creativity and Technology together as the visible face of SXSW London? Beyond the celebrity names on panels, this will be what shapes the public understanding and public benefit of this happening here.
Massive good luck to Randel and co.
Last but not least. Whilst SXSW has stolen the media noise, we should note that another vital piece of Creative R&D infrastructure has opened this week - Coventry University’s Delia Derbyshire building. This is a visionary complex, built for immersive production and advanced digital creativity. I was lucky enough to see it in its earlier stages and it is AWESOME. An engine for big thinking and the real world skills which will shape new industries.
IDEAS! // What to watch, read and see in Creative R&D
Looking for the best in digital creativity this week? Check out what’s going on below:
I only just found out that the brilliant, and highly controversial UbuWeb has closed - but remains as at least semi-permanent public archive. Going since the mid 90s, it’s an incredible digital resource of avant-garde arts of pretty much every medium. Sometimes totally crappy in quality, it’s a testament to sheer love for the mediums it captured, and total disregard for the idea of IP.
Loved this impassioned take on the closing down of two excellent games studios in the Guardian’s excellent Pushing Buttons newsletter. The games industry’s brutality is part of its strength and resilience, but does little to help its case as a creator of cultural value.
The Saatchi Gallery have launched this brilliant looking Art for Change prize. Young artists get the chance to show how to make the world a better place, with judges from the M&C Saatchi agency and the art world. Winners get exhibited at the Gallery. BIG OPPORTUNITY.
Well, maybe I spoke too soon. Having got excited about Rabbit.AI, amongst the first of a generative AI powered new category of device, the reviews are in and apparently it … totally sucks. More worrying is this expose of how Rabbit is a dubiously managed pivot from a web 3 gaming company that left both investors and paying customers owed money and an explanation.
Nice long-form travel piece on TeamLab’s Planets show in Tokyo here
Finally, Peckham Digital, a brilliant Festival of Creative Computing last staged in 2023, is back for 2025, and you can pitch your project here.
TECHNOLOGY! // Immersive Experiences for Fruit Flies
Last up, and not for the first time, this week’s most mind-warping new technology comes from the pages of the brilliant Spectrum IEEE. If you don’t read it, you really should. Or leave it to me. Reader, I LOVE it.
So, a research team at Caltech have built a kind of mo-cap, immersive experience rig to help them study the flight mechanics of fruit flies. Understanding their wings, so delicate, so powerful, has obvious spillover benefits for the future of human flight, and for our understanding of the physical world.
Watch this video - there is so much going on here. The creation of a visual environment to let the fly fly in a real-seeming space. The way the tiny cameras capture space. The AI and machine learning transforming the data about its flight into models of how its wings work.
Scale this rig-up and I think you’ve got the next-gen of virtual production lab.
I’m also fascinated by the content they produced FOR the flies. We talked before about art made for insects when we talked about the Light Art Space Foundation’s Pollinator Pathway project back in Issue 9.
I desperately want to see this simulated reality for fruit flies. Getting inside the brains of our animal co-inhabitants of the world is one of the only ways we might persuade ourselves to stop killing them, it and us.
The title of this week’s newsletter is the opening piece of The Black Rider, a show by Robert Wilson with music by Tom Waits from a story by William Burroughs. That is a HELL of a combo, and one of the best things I’ve ever seen.
You can watch the original Berlin production here:
Or listen on Spotify here:
TTFN.