The film Alice Ladenburg and I made – Trees of Rotterdam – will be shown as part of performance presentation at the Modes of Production conference in Coimbra, Portugal, on Friday 28 June. More information about the conference here, and the film here.
Here’s the video of the talk I gave yesterday at Central St Martins as part of their Hybrid Futures series:
It was great to be able to present work from my PhD (which is now open access!) and my residency at the Palais de Tokyo. Many thanks to Betti Marenko for inviting me to talk, and posing insightful questions and comments, to Jacob Watmore for excellent technical support, Kaye Toland for fielding questions to ask, and everyone who watched, for your time.
I’ll be presenting some of my work at UAL on 9 December as part of the Hybrid Futures lecture series at Central St Martins, curated by Betti Marenko. It’s online (of course!) and open to all. It will be streamed on YouTube, and afterwards I’ll post it to this site.
Scripted Performances: Or, the Absurd in the Man and the Machine
‘Scripts’ in design and architecture are usually associated with computer-based design programming. However, this narrow usage belies a rich vein of concepts intrinsic to design and authorship.
This presentation poses the script as a useful critical and methodological tool within design, absorbing and reinterpreting ideas from behavioural psychology, computation, dance, immersive theatre, the Absurd, and the Oulipo. The talk is illustrated through a series of projects completed during Palmer’s residency at the Palais de Tokyo, PhD by Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, and independent work, spanning dance, film, installation and data manipulation.
With the recent turn to online education, I’ve reformatted the Parallel Worlds course I run at the Master Institute of Visual Cultures to be an open access podcast – so anyone can listen and take part. The course is about using practices from world-building to augment and enhance your existing creative practice.
There are a few weeks’ worth of daily activities, as well as interviews with strong voices from within the field (Sarah Lugthart, Amy Butt, and Abi Palmer). The daily activities take about 20 minutes, so (hopefully) you can fit them around whatever else you do.
I’ve also transcribed all of the episodes so that they’re accessible to people who find it easier to read, or use a translation tool to convert to a non-English language. All of the transcriptions are available on the course website at parallel.olliepalmer.com/podcast
One of the nicest things about the podcast is that listeners can (and do!) leave voice messages. Occasionally I take these messages and turn them into a bonus episode like this one:
My inspiration to make a podcast as a free course is drawn massively from Tim Clare’s excellent Death of 1000 Cuts podcast, which I can’t recommend enough. His Couch to 80k Writing Bootcamp course really helped get me out of a creative slump a couple of years ago, and directly led to my making this film. Thanks Tim!
I’m very excited to be giving a lecture as part of the Bartlett’s Constructing Realities lecture series next week. If you are in London, please do pop in on the 15th February. It will also be the first chance I’ve had to see the Bartlett’s shiny new campus.
Scripted performances: digital and absurd machines
‘Scripts’ in architecture are usually associated with computer-based design programming. However, this narrow usage belies a rich vein of concepts intrinsic to architecture and authorship. This lecture poses the script as a useful critical and methodological tool within architectural design, absorbing and reinterpreting ideas from behavioural psychology, computation, dance, immersive theatre, the Absurd, and the Oulipo. The lecture is illustrated through a series of projects completed during Palmer’s residency at the Palais de Tokyo and PhD by Design at the Bartlett spanning dance, film, installation, and data manipulation.
Biography
Ollie Palmer is an artist and designer based in the Netherlands. He holds an AHRC-funded PhD by design from the Bartlett and was artist in residence at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris from 2015-16. His work has been exhibited around the world, including at the V&A Museum, Opera Garnier de Paris, Seoul Museum of Art, and the Royal Institute of British Architects. He co-authored the winning proposal for the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2018, and sits on the project’s curatorial advisory committee. He formerly taught within the Bartlett’s Interactive Design Lab and at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. He currently teaches at TU Delft.
A film about propaganda and the production of fake news, created entirely using the techniques of the Internet Research Agency propaganda factory in St Petersberg.
Room 11, Bargehouse, OXO Tower Wharf – free entry
Wed 7 Jun 11:00-13:00 (ArchFilmFest Selection A, 120m total)
Thu 8 Jun 11:00-13:00 (ArchFilmFest Selection A, 120m total)
From the live performance at Opera Garnier de Paris on 18 June 2016, featuring choreography by Simon Valastro. Two dancers attempt to communicate via a new technology which converts their movements to words, using vector space translation.
Bargehouse | free entry
Room 11, Bargehouse, OXO Tower Wharf
Sun 11 Jun 11:00-11:46 (ArchFilmFest Competition Shortlisted)
Sun 11 Jun 13:40-14:26 (ArchFilmFest Competition Shortlisted)
Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) | ticket required
Sun 11 Jun 16:30-18:30 ("From Above" category, with introduction by Competition Director Anna Ulrikke Andersen) More information
Parisian friends! I will be presenting 24fps Psycho and the wider project that it is part of at the Palais de Tokyo’s Lundi du Pavillon on 18 April 2016.
24fps Psycho is a project that replaces every single frame of the film Psycho with a “similar” frame from historical archival footage. The frames are chosen by an algorithm which studies pixel colour values. The audience then construct their own narrative atop the film’s soundtrack.
This is part of a wider project looking at the technology of cinema. I will present some footage from the next stage of the project, whereby a film-wanderer makes its way through an archive, analysing films and continually making new connections between them.
Also at Lundi du Pavillon will be cellist Gaspar Claus and a screening of Olivier Dollinger‘s film Climate Control and the Summer of Love.
The Facebook-inclined can find more information and RSVP here.
I will be showing my film 86400 and performing 24fps Psycho at the Do Disturb Festival at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in a couple of weeks. This is very exciting, as both works have never been shown before.
86400
86400 is a real-time film made from Google Image searches for the time right now. It will be running throughout the festival.
24fps Psycho
24fps Psycho is an experimental performance remixing the film Psycho (1960) with footage from the French National Audiovisual Institute. It will be chaotic and confusing, but also highly enjoyable. I will be performing twice, once on the Saturday and once on the Sunday (9 + 10 April).
There are over 50 artists and performers participating this year, so it looks like a great way to spend a weekend – if I wasn’t performing, I would be in the crowd!
Tickets are avaialble through the Digitick website or at the Palais de Tokyo ticket office.
The projects I will be talking about are the Godot Machine and a new project in development, currently titled Spatial Cinema. Test videos from Spatial Cinema are here:
I was asked to give a lecture for UCL’s Lunch Hour Lecture series, during which I talked about the work of the Interactive Architecture Lab as well as my own artwork.
The lecture I gave is really a slightly modified version of my PhD upgrade presentation. During the talk, I briefly mention mental modelling and space neurons – which refers back to the incredible work of the eminent neuroscientist Professor John O’Keefe, with regards to the way that the human mind models the world. I was both surprised and humbled to see Professor O’Keefe in the audience. I hope I did not bore him, or over-simplify his ideas too much.
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