AdaM
ARTIST | SCULPTOR | FILMMAKER
I used to be a big fan of BLINK 182, and Tom's later bands, but later into my school years got into heavier music, and didn't think much of this 'soft punk'. When searching the YouTube for documentary type videos on creative people I came across this one about Tom Delonge.. and I'm really glad I clicked on it, there's a load of relevant things in it, that definitely relate to MAMA, the ideas later in the documentary, the mixing and merging of art disciplines in his business etc.. But there's something that he says about Liam Gallagher from Oasis, 'that's the most punk rock thing I've ever seen', he was shocked himself that he was seeing Liam say/do something so punk, it made him change his view on his music, opened up more doors.. looking back I have done the same with Blink 182, I have left that music behind, matured away from it... but this proves that theres still loads to learn from it.. This documentary definitely makes me respect it more atleast, hearing the story, the struggles of the art.
OK, I stayed up last night in the hopes of gathering some samples from recordings that me and Deano have done, drums, guitar, vocals etc.. I was in the house late, and the kids were asleep I knew I didn't have enough to pull from so I set out to look for some older stuff I'd recorded. Turns out I have two years worth of terrible recordings from my time working in Dominos.. I hope to find some time to pull some samples today, but last night I went in a deep dive into my old musical archives and found a few things that can definitely be recycled for MAMA and the Radical Toy Clan.
I'm getting really pissed of that I cant upload sound files to google sites now - I've made them into 'videos' and uploaded them back to drive to upload here..
anyway, 'New World Order' and 'Dead Mans Shoes' were recorded by a friend of mine who came round one day with some half decent recording equipment, this is the closest I've ever gotten to recording something 'properly', it was great to record, it felt creative, bouncing off each other, with him being the producer, giving ideas as we were recording, for some reason I thought the recording process was dull, just getting the recording, but we wrote new lyrics, changed words, and played with different ideas.
The music in these recordings are either from songs, such as the Mobb Deep track on New World Order, or something like Dead Mans shoes which is a remix of a Nirvana song from YouTube, the idea was that the producer was going to go back and make new beats for the tracks, and replace them, he never had the time to finish them, so this is as far as this went..
There's something about music creation that has always got me, I remember the feeling I was in a band in school, the last one I was in, we'd finally pulled together a decent band, and we sounded not too bad.. we were playing a song, and I was on bass guitar, purely because I owned one and no-one else in the area did, I wasn't really contributing.. when I lost my place in the song I just stood back and watched the other two playing guitar, drums and vocals, even though I wasn't playing in that moment, It felt really creative to have come together and created something so collaborative, I've been part of film crews ever since, but I still haven't quite felt this feeling, the closest I've got to it is when I did the collaboration in collab dialogues with the fine art bargain store and Hilario... I think maybe it was put together so quickly, it just had that similar feeling, but still the coming together of creative people and creating something absolutely brand new, that's cool, and it's what Le Corbusier talks about with Jazz musicians.. He talks about how they're such great musicians, and knowing theyre tools so well means they can come together and make something spontaneous. This is true, but we weren't great musicians, so the feeling of being incredible spontaneously creative isn't reserved for just the highly skilled.
With all of BELOW being said, maybe we made a mistake with the posters we made to advertise MAMA. Not a mistake as such but we didn't use our metadisciplinary to it's full potential, we fight narcissists with creativity, it's all we got, the paint brush is mightier than the sword and all that, and we're a development on from DADA, but when I made the posters I adopted the DADA stylistic approach with the misshaped letters and collage style aesthetic, it's become a sign of rebellion, so maybe it's needed, but maybe more thought could go into the next posters we do, were are artists, and such everything we do is art, right? including the posters we make just to get people involved.. How do we make that more creative next time? How do we show that we are a metadisciplinary clan starting the next creative uprising? We could make it part of the narrative, make it an 'in universe' poster as well as doing it's job in the real world. Could it use AI for people to scan and some form of our art pops up on the poster, music, moving image, digital sculpture? Could the posters be a kind of narrative? you know like one poster leads you to another poster in the same building or some shit, like it takes you on a journey of discovery, a loose narrative connecting all the posters, surely once someone completes that they'd wanna get in on it right? What if the posters were sculptures instead of flat paper? maybe I'm thinking more towards the future of our posters now, and maybe the more expensive stuff like physical sculptures, and the time it would make to create a narrative across multiple posters should be saved for event advertisement or something. I'm just saying that there's more than one way to make a poster, and that's what were here for right? to continue the conversation, started by the DADAists, continued through POMO and now to here with us to contribute our word into the continued conversation, ready for the next group of misfit students to say that we're talking through our arses.
I've always liked this 3D sculpted Wu-tang frame. It just makes it more interesting than a flat image.
What if we made toys, in their packaging, as posters?
I find this graph interesting for a few reasons. Firstly I like this notion of the meat grinder for what were doing, rather than putting a lot of art together like the interdisciplinary model, you know, what we see a lot of when people talk about they're mixed media practice, it feels forced and stale I think, placing things together. But Transdisciplinary speaks to me more, stick a loads of shit together, but find something new and cohesive at the end of it, one cohesive product that makes sense (even if it doesn't make sense in its context)
But secondly, it's in a graph format, putting shit into boxes, categorising, if we started saying we were transdisciplinary people would automatically associate us with other transdisciplinary artists, and our work would be based on that right?
Fuck that. Were doing something new here, not fully intentionally, but in the nature of taking from DADA, responding to it, against it and our AbsurdUty in respect to it, our discipline is new, untouched, were not transdisciplinary we are METAdisciplinary, beyond discipline.
Theatre absurd dude, I've done a bit of research and it's definitely interesting, feels very DADA, I suppose it was an evolution of that right? This continued conversation through time and art, back when this was kicking off there was still a lot of religion at the fore of everyday life, and questioning the meaning of existence was important then, it still is now, but in a more meta world, beyond that, we can question meaning in a different way you know? Different to these times we now live in a world where maybe the majority think its a bit wacky to believe in some all seeing God and creator of everything, but does that mean that there's no meaning to life? Even the Absurdist's felt life meaningful enough to feel the need to spread their idea that life has no meaning, is it meaningless to have meaning, or meaningful to have no meaning?
I dunno, getting stupid now. Maybe that's it, that's our response to this, "Don't be stupid".
We still don't know the meaning of life, but common sense tells us that it's meaningful enough to keep living, there's faith without religion, and meaning without meaning, just don't be stupid init.
And this is all relevant right, because by calling ourselves MAMA, it's in direct response to DADA, in this age, by just calling our movement that it instantly starts a feminism conversation, which is interesting because it was never our intention, but its there, it's absurd. And in response to DADA we have a kind of duty to the absurd, to the chaotic, and that's what creativity should be, chaotic and loud and free.
Art has gotten incredibly dull with the post modern era, yes the YBA's explored interesting idea's, questioning what is art like no-one before, it's become very conceptual, which is great by the way, I like meaning, I like to find things within art on the second, third, 8th viewing of a piece of sculpture, a painting, a film. It's been teaching us to think, but all the while, becoming numbing, there's no excitement like the absurdity of the modernist days, the days of the manifesto and art movements that have shaped our lives today.
We have an incredible range of tools and technology that are cheap, readily available and much more easily promoted to a larger audience quickly, I don't know of many artists or creatives utilizing this properly, there's a few collectives making some cool immersive shows and things, but there's nothing that packs a punch like DADA did.
Were living through a ridiculous time with climate change, countries burning, COVID locking us all inside for the best part of two years, and now we could literally be days away from a world war, these are not sit back and watch days, these are the absurd, and our response needs to be radical, it's our AbsurdUty.
With all these new and exciting ideas, I keep coming back to some of our earlier ideas, with Deano mentioning Ropey being a character in the band, because I drew a sketch of Ropey and SoUR SiMON, they're now cemented together in my mind. Who are these guys? what's their story?
Whell... SoUR SiMON has a rough story, but I've never actually created any content or art around him.. he was a procrastinator, and so we never got anything done.. I had to kill him off eventually. I wrote about him on my website.. https://adamsculptfactory.wixsite.com/creative/alter-ego-s
I'm wondering what Ropey's story is? how do their stories fit with one and other?
I wrote a short film about SoUR SiMON being my alter ego and how I killed him off, but google sites wont let me upload a PDF.
So I've uploaded it to a secret page on my site here : https://adamsculptfactory.wixsite.com/creative/sour-simon-script-secret-page
Any narrative ideas that may fit around this narrative? It's only now I'm realising after re-reading this script, I went on this whole art band journey a long time ago, I'll dig out some journals.. and it was with SoUR SiMON as the singer/rapper of a band. The band was called SoUR SiMON and the Psycho-men.
I've been thinking about 'the rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust and the spiders from mars', a concept album that had a loose narrative running throughout, I think this is relevant, Bowie used alter ego's for each of his projects, and with that a new backdrop for each album. It makes sense, a filmmaker wouldn't carry on making the same kind of film time after time right? the same characters, same environment... most wouldn't, and the only person who did it well, and is even debatable with the prequels, though I do love them, is George Lucas and Star Wars.. Think of all the masters, Kubrick, every film was a different genre, Tarrantino, though he has a 'style' each film is a new take on a different genre.. But musicians seem to stick to the thing they start with, then after 4 or 5 albums or a return after a hiatus, with a new sound no-one likes what theyre doing, I suppose it's because they're not expecting it.. if artists established it early on that they were changing slightly each album, it would be more widely accepted, right? I dunno, interesting thoughts. Like, we haven't even made one song, so this is all just possibly future talk, but worth mentioning.
Just finished writing the lyrics to 'extreme creation' and reading back over the lyrics, trying to find the 'flow' of the song etc, I was trying to imagine this 3D version of the song if you will, a combination of film, sculpture, painting, toys, music and narrative. Firstly we've got an instant distinction between what's digital and what's physical, digital is music and film, whereas physical is sculpture and toys, then you've got painting that could fit in both, but the real cross platform element is narrative. So it makes sense that in this world of mixed media, art band that the connection between the physical art and the digital will be the narrative. I suppose this is kind of obvious, but has a certain feel when written out like this..
And it got me thinking about Viktoria Modesta.. which is the first video attached. Holy shit when I first saw this on Channel 4 in 2014 just after meeting my disabled future wife, and just starting my Diploma in Creative Media production there were two huge factors that got me excited. The first was the super human idea that was adapted from the 2012 Olympic Games, brought into art, I thought that was pretty cool, and as much as the marketing campaign was a success in making the Paralympic games just as enjoyable as the able bodied Olympics that year, there was something about seeing it in art, in a narrative context that made it so much more memorable and fresh, even my wife felt like a super human after seeing it.
The second thing that got me about this Viktoria Modesta video is the braveness it had to do something new, completely incorporating a full narrative within the music video, not being afraid to stop the music and let the narrative play out for long periods, not being afraid to switch up the music, it was almost as if the music had been built around the narrative, or they were built together, rather than a music video being made for a song. It's a story that incorporates symbolism, propaganda, uprising, champions creativity, and it even has a toy in it that acts as such a powerful thing for that little girl. It includes elements of fashion, animation, toys, music, acting, story, symbols, dance.. This was new and exciting for me, I saw a future of music and art co-existing like never before, I couldn't wait to see her next videos/songs, and I was incredibly excited to see the work of the people who would be inspired by this... but this was about as far as this went. I haven't seen anything like this since, which is a real shame, I think this is fucking incredible.
This is definitely a way forward, thinking about these things, building a narrative along side lyrics, along side toys, art, sculpture, whatever, if nothing else it becomes an incredibly creative endeavour. But I think this has legs, excuse the pun.. I think we have a basis for something that could be pretty sick. Who are these characters we'll be playing? what do they wear? what's their story? what impact do toys have in their lives particularly? are toys outlawed or something? actually, here's a series from a bootleg toy artist, the OG 'The Sucklord' episode one is the third video attached, you probably wont get very far through it, its pretty horrific, but I enjoyed how gorilla it was knowing the bootleg toy community..
What's the narrative, what kind of world does our semi fictional band exist in? And within that, what toys exist, what are their place in it all, what are we pissed off about, and what do we want to change? what can we fix with creative thinking, and therefore with creative toys that are mentioned in lyrics, shown in the videos, and available to purchase or given away on the street or something... ?
This is extreme creation it's creating in 3D - that is not to say it's 'digital 3D artwork' but it's art that exists in the 3rd dimension, the complete and utter combination of art forms to create a 3D view of the ideas produced.
And for further delving into things around my latest ideas, it's worth mentioning the band MGMT who started their group as an ironic experiment, as students they had the idea to taking the piss by making the most popular music they could, it ended up being both popular and very unique. Just thought this would be worth mentioning.
Ok, I've been thinking about how we would merge our music ideas with toys etc.. It's a difficult thing. I've been thinking about our project, and the potential I always thought we had when we'd eventually come together to create something. And I've recorded a video in response to Deano's 'metangst' video, but had to delete it due to it taking up too much memory on my phone, I have the second part I recorded on my laptop, but like Deano mentioned in his video, things develop and suddenly, it's not relevant. The video was basically a continuation, answering some of Deano's concerns and all that, maybe that was always irrelevant. I've been thinking about both our practices so far on this MA, how weve both done very practical things, raw with a performance element at times, this was always a huge reason for me wanting for us to collaborate.
When we put that presentation together and that promo reel, it was just a bit of fun, but Deano was right in saying that he can see the potential we have since seeing that. Now, I'm not saying that this collab would be wasted, I believe in the power of toys, they're important to the future of our society etc.. I dunno though, we've been working on this for a few weeks now and we haven't really come up with anything close to a toy really.. And I don't know about you, but I feel maybe that the toy side has felt quite forced, from myself anyway, as in, pushing to try and come up with toy ideas etc, like that's what we've decided to do, and we've been working towards it very slowly..
With that being said, this promo reel was interesting, people had a good idea of what our project was about, but the reel was us pissing about with drums and rap, and arguably spoken word... "AHH, UHMMM, MMM, OK.."
We've been talking about VR, AR and the metaverse, its an interesting conversation, and definitely something to look into, maybe in the future though..
This collaboration was put together by Deano as he wanted to really get something out of a group collaboration that he hadn't got out of one before. I feel that maybe if we pushed towards this toy creating thing, we'd get there eventually and probably do something really good. But, I'm wondering, and also open to anything by the way, this is just me opening up my thoughts, totally down for carrying on with toy making... but, I'm wondering if that is where we really WANT to be heading? Maybe the philosophy around the toys and creativity is the key ingredients, rather than us making toys ourselves?
Thinking about this merger of art forms, I feel like we've both delved into this a lot in our own practices anyway, the Sculpt Factory was a mixture of sculpture, production design, costume, acting, writing, filmmaking and themes of mass production, consumerism, creativity and all sorts of other stuff, rolled into one loose narrative and exercise in world building. Deano's thought experiment with the laboratory was a live performance, production design, fine art painting, costume all mixed into a 'game' setting. Maybe there's something more interesting in this?
What if we took the idea of making music and mixed that with video and sculpture and painting. How would we do it differently to musicians making a music video? What about coming up with the visuals first, then writing music to that? What if we took the toy idea, give ourselves a visual look and theme. think slipknot and the masks etc... What if this band had a story? What if we dressed up as toys/action figures, the radical toy clan, take it literally and see what happens? We make the music but maybe we take it from a different perspective, rather than the music being the main part of the band, and then everything else, music videos merch etc coming secondary, what if it was all rolled up into one package, a fictional narrative of these toys that have become a band etc... the merch is more than just merch to sell, it has meaning, worn by the band members/characters etc.. maybe the merch is from a store/brand that the 'band' interacts with in the content we create? Doesn't have to be dressing up as toys, could be anything.. maybe this would eventually lead us into making toys.. action figures of the 'band' members, then we could put our ideals and philosophies into those toys so that theyre imaginative and creative, again, more than just 'toys' of the characters for no other reason than to sell them.
I dunno, I just think you're dead right about the potential we have as a collaboration, and in the past we've been very physical creators, raw and, it's like how Disney Star Wars has been incredibly disappointing other than one or two decent projects, we expect something that reflects the originals that we love, but has something new and exciting, so far it's either been an exact copy of the originals, or so far different that its almost in a different universe... This is kind of where I'm at when I look at us creating toys, thought it's important, and has a place, I'm underwhelmed with what we've done so far, when I think back to what I thought we could achieve together when the idea was first introduced!
I hope this makes sense, just an unfiltered ramble. Like I say, more than happy to carry on doing what were doing, aware we haven't got into the thick of it yet, just thought I'd put this out there since I have had these thoughts.
Yesterday we did a pitch to a small portion of the fine art MA group through a video call, we put a presentation together that day and I slapped a quick little 'ideas promo' video together. I love how something as simple as a presentation can help you to understand what it is your doing, I suppose it's the whole saying of, the best way to learn something is to teach it.. We weren't teaching last night, but telling people about your work, has a similar effect.
We mentioned the music part of our project, and how were going to be using it as inspiration for the toys etc that we'll make, the juxtaposition between using something like hip hop to influence the creation of toys for kids. This concept by it self had some good feedback, and it's strange how people take little bits, explain your idea back to you, and it makes much more sense, I kind of had this feeling last night.
But it's weird because I believe we now have a much better understanding of where were heading, and my mind is sparking new ideas, ideas that if implemented would take us away from what was presented back to us last night.
Anyway, I've been thinking about the merger of the music, the art, and the toys. if nothing else it would be an interesting experiment to merge music and toys, and I don't just mean to add a music button on a toy, or make a toy piano, or write lyrics about toys or whatever... like actually merging them to create something brand new. Now, I don't really know what I'm thinking or how to achieve this, but I think it would be an incredibly interesting project to work through, how could they be merged into one 'thing' one 'piece' of work unified?
(BELOW) Today me and my daughter, Luna were playing with plasticine, lego and whatever else had gotten mixed up in her toy bag. I found the games were really interesting, and much more free and creative than anything she plays when she uses her play sets or anything pre-made. This little plastic tray came from a plasticine set, so I repurposed it with a load of different materials, gathering the most creative materials we had on hand, this included lego, plasticine, pipe cleaners, pen lids and match sticks. I was thinking about what Cas Holman said in the Netflix documentary about how to teach creativity, and encourage it through play and design, she said that if she gave a kid a set of parts and asked them to make a car, they'd generally make a car, a pre-conceived idea, but if you switch the question around, giving it more freedom, give the kids the parts and ask them to make a new way to get to school, the imagination has space to breathe. I took this simple idea, and gave Luna the same challenge.. We did it together, talking through ideas, but letting her spark most of the ideas, this is what we came up with.. I think maybe there's something in random parts, lego is great, but limited on it's own, similarly with plasticine, it's a very free form material, but requires a bit more skill to master basic shapes, especially for younger kids without the hand strength to manipulate and make soft, but combined, these materials can create wonderful ideas, then when you add in materials like pipe cleaners, matchsticks and wheels, the possibilities, and inspiration through what the materials are capable of become closer to endless. There's creative restraint in only being able to use the materials you get with the set, but this is a constructed barrier, kids can easily take a random set of materials as inspiration and run off around there house to find more materials like toilet roll tubes and plastic bottle lids.
The Starting tray of assorted creative materials
Luna looking cautiously at the tray
the first idea.
A giant robot spider
a zip line all the way to school
a big cat you can ride
a bike that runs by blowing into a pipe
shoot yourself to school by cannon
My thinking about the Metaverse, beginning conversations around digital toys vs physical toys and whether there can be a middle ground.
I've had maybe an unhealthy need to make things 'cooler' my whole life, maybe it's because I was so uncool in the early years of school or something, I dunno. But I grew up in a cycling family, I stopped after I met my wife, Nia, I realised that I enjoyed filming the races more than racing by the end, spending time trying to work out how to make cycling look more interesting on camera.
When I joined a filmmaking group/company I thought about marketing and how we would show ourselves to the world, how could we make filmmaking more cool essentially, and what's cooler than a band, right? I had the idea of rebranding the whole company so that we looked more like a 6 member band rather than a film production company. The problem with this was that not everyone was totally convinced by my pitch, I had the idea of photoshoots, member profiles, and proper going for it with the marketing and even changing the way we produced and released films, releasing them in kind of short film albums... There was ideas there that would have been interesting to play with, but we ended up just doing one photoshoot.. And, probably less said about that the better.
But it's always been something I'd like to revisit, this project may be the perfect platform for this.. Being that we've talked last night about actually making some music, which will be hilarious and ridiculous, but probably just the right amount of.. This seems like a perfect place to mention this.
So Who are we? What are we doing? We've got this idea of making radical toys, this new vision were were taking 'creativity' and injecting it into the education of our kids.
Mike Ford referencing Le Corbusier in 'hip hop architecture' on YouTube said 'Le Corbusier noticed that Jazz artists can come together without a plan and create something that has never been heard before, because they have mastered the tools of their craft, which allowed them to come together in harmony in such a spontaneous way and create beautiful music, he wandered if architect's would ever master their tools that allowed people to come together and create architecture that had never been heard before.'
We're doing this, we're wandering how music and design and art and philosophy can come together in new spontaneous ways to create something that can have an effect on our youth so that they can be more creative and spontaneous in the way they come together and create in the future. So in this context, in the toys we want to create, are we creating tools for kids to enhance their imaginations and expand their creative and critical thinking?
So far we've been spontaneous enough to, through conversation decide that we want to create toys, and that has lead to us getting together with a mic and a drum kit and making music, this relates perfectly to Le Corbusier's ideas about Jazz and architecture, are we planning on using the music to collaborate in a new way, away from art and design, taking what we learn there about creating something as spontaneous and creative as 'hip-hop punk' or some shit, and injecting that knowledge into the toys/art/ or whatever else we decide to make.
I like this, not having a plan, it's completely putting into practice what I've been researching. Usually by this point I'd like to have a good idea of what it is the project will eventually be, but like the MA Thought Experiment, there's something amazing, and radical as hell about not knowing where we'll end up. .
As we started this project we talked about toys and what's available for kids in shops right now, and we talked about how we could make toys better really, but we talked about making satirical toys which turned into the Radical Toy factory, which I think became the Radical Toy Factory through Deano mixing what we'd talked about, maybe with his association with me and the Sculpt Factory, I'm not sure. But I think sometimes I have a tendency, even within this era of self creative discovery, I have the tendency to take things literally, and I think this might be a trait/flaw in my creative practice, I always make a self aware effort to look at the way I practice through a critical lens and this is one of those times when I've realised something, sat back and gone, "Oh, shit".. It's a kind of 'I'm not practicing what I preach' kind of feeling.
Anyway, this came from a meeting today with Deano where we talked about Cas Holman, who is someone who has shaped a lot of my creative understanding and energy towards researching 'creative thinking' recently, and has been the sole inspiration for my castle play set project. The thing is, even though that's a toy, and were making toys as part of this project, for some reason I've separated that project from this, I think it's this enjoyment I've discovered of collaboration and coming up with new ideas, maybe it's because of this literal taking of satirical toys, thinking more along the lines of the bootleg toy projects I did in my degree rather than something new. I think maybe the word radical has had an impact on the way I've been thinking during this project, taking 'radical' and 'satirical' and thinking, we need to make some kind of sarcastic remark to the powers that be.. I dunno, developing to some kind of Boris Johnson bootleg toy of him pissed at a party or some shit.. But we got talking about the ideas behind Cas Holman's work today, and talked about the impact toys and playgrounds have on kids shaping the future of our planet, Deano talked about implementing philosophy into toys, I mean it's fucking cool, and not just because its different or whatever, it has meaning and impact, a bojo toy might make a few people laugh at the tory party, but a toy that makes a child think for them selves, a toy that encourages a child to imagine and a toy that pushes a child to think creatively about how to over come issues, allowing the child to manipulate actual space in a meaningful way... it's radical as fuck.
I got me thinking about a few ted talks I've watched in the past..
https://youtu.be/UZCbNstq2Uk - this is about playgrounds and how shit they are in their current state, very much worth a watch in relation to all this.
This next video is connected in a more abstract way, it's a TED x talk from the 'Hip Hop Architect' - Mike Ford who has devised this way of looking at how black culture and Jazz inspired architect le Corbusier when designing block flats in Paris, and in return those designs inspired an American architect to build the Bronx block flats in New York, the birth place of Hip Hop, which Ford believes wouldn't have been created if the people who birthed Hip Hop weren't forced to live in such a situation. Mike Ford now runs workshops where he teaches architecture with the philosophy and teachings of Hip Hop, which I think is incredible.
It's got me thinking naturally about the Wu Tang Clan, a bunch of hip hop artists from New York who originally got together to share experience and resources, instead of just one rapper trying to get all the equipment together to record a track and release it etc trying to find all the funds to do that, they got together a big group, sharing recording equipment and sharing each others fan base building a following quickly for their music as a group, they then obviously went onto be one of the biggest hip hop groups in the world.
I think hip hop is an interesting thought to put on the table here. I'm not sure how much Deano and Alice are into Hip Hop, I grew up rebelling a bit and listening to metal, punk, grunge and anything else that was loud and raw, it wasn't until only about 4 or 5 years ago I got into hip hop, before that I considered it a joke, only ever hearing what was on the radio, and Eminem, who was generally listened to by the people I never got on with in school, so why would I give it the time? I discovered hip hop when I was working as a delivery driver at Dominos, after about 6 months I was trying to figure out a way to be creative, the job was taking up way to much time and I couldn't make films in the car, I was getting depressed seeing all my mates making films, and not just that but getting paid to do it, it sucked, they were in a position where they didn't have to earn a living yet, and so waited out a little longer than I did and it paid off for them. I tried writing in the car, at each delivery writing a bit of a scene I'd thought about on the way or whatever, but it was a pain, I needed an outlet that would be more improv based. I met my wife and her family for an Indian after work one night and when we left we heard music in the Parrot in Carmarthen as we walked past, we called in thinking "why not" and I discovered The Culture Vultures, a local hip hop group made up of rappers who were around my age. Bearing in mind hip hip generally takes a bit of adjusting to from the grunge I was accustomed to, which meant I had no idea what they were rapping about or anything, just had a general idea that it was about getting baked. It was great. I was hooked. The next night I wrote my first 'bars' and my next shift I practiced them over and over, it was absolutely terrible, but I carried on. Eventually I got to a stage where I was rapping from the top of my head, which is an incredibly creative act. I had no idea it would become the thing I spent my time doing for the next few years, but it was what it was, I had a need to be creative in a specific situation and nothing else fit, this thing came along that was hands free, quick, and could be done without the need to record everything I did, it was perfect for the situation I was in, and my first real hint that creativity was the most important factor to my practice, rather than specific things such as filmmaking/story telling or whatever..
'Creativity emerges when different regions talk to each other, in particular two networks, one of which is the default mode network, which is most active when day dreaming. When concentrating on a task you activate the executive control network, it evaluates the thing you're coming up with. The first network helps us make spontaneous new connections and the second one to judge which of those ideas is any good. In the brain of highly creative people these two networks are more connected. They talk to each other more.' -This is from the Netflix documentary 'the brain explained - creativity episode'.
Ken Robinson states that creativity is 'the PROCESS of having original ideas that have value'
In the same Netflix documentary as above they stated that 'A study of freestyle rappers brains whilst they were freestyling showed that their default mode network was turned right up - their day dreaming network, whereas their executive control network was turned down considerably - their logical side. They weren't just spitting out random words - they had to control it in some way, so they do use their executive control network, just a lot less.'
There's this idea about taking the ideas surrounding the hip hop architecture movement, taking a culture that is looked down upon by society, and giving those people the tools to do something amazing, these are kids who have grown up in the slums in Bronx, living and breathing hip hop, incredibly creative people, and if you take the teaching of the late Ken Robinson and believe him when he said "schools kill creativity", and understand the importance of creativity in kids, you've got to look at things like hip hop with a feeling of hope for the future of humanity, right?
What if the radical part of this project is designing toys and playground equipment that really impacts the lives of kids in really positive ways, tools to help kids grow and see things differently, taking inspiration from something as simple as rhyming words together in hip hop, and the empowerment that comes with it, what if we could take that feeling and put it into a toy.
The Sculpt factory project I did was/is a personal journey I underwent, discovering ideas and conquering my own artistic issues such as not being able to have a stable income that I would have in a 9-5 job, supporting my family, the idea was built around, well artists should be able to get that too! The factory setting made ironic sense for that project. Maybe The radical toy factory isn't right for this project, that's why I'm changing it to the Radical Toy Clan, taking inspiration from the creative clans around the world, pulling resources together to create something spectacular.
Going to the Moon was an incredibly creative and imaginative seed. It took a huge amount of innovation and TEAM WORK - collaboration, it definitely wasn't a one man show, yet schools still teach on an individual basis - calling it cheating - yet in the real world it's called collaboration. Lets teach kids how to collaborate and be creative together, as a clan.
I dunno, let's give a it a spin for a bit, see how we feel about it..
What if we made a shit-toker but they were fully animated.. an animated social media influencer. Stop motion or hand drawn traditional animation. the character does all the typical shit-tok trends, the dances, challenges, but the character is just animated?
Off the back of this, we can be as satirical as we want with the marketing etc.. sell toys and t shirts based on the character.
Who is this character? A clown? Someone tied up? why are they tied up? Is this character shit-toking from a room he's been locked up in? I dunno... What could we play with here?
I took a cheap army dude toy and modified it with some plasticine, into one of these clowns, just to see what happens. Nothing much yet..
Not sure if this clown idea could turn into something?
Are we making toys for kids or adults?
I'm thinking about who we have on our team.. and we have two animators, and another member who's up for anything new, and I think about marketing, because it's always interesting to look at commercial aspects mixed with our more artistic and contextual approach. We know toys sell better if they are based on a TV show or some kind of external media.. we have two animators in this group! We've talked about making a commercial for whatever toy we make, what if we made some kind of animated series, obviously very short and snappy, maybe based on shit-tok or something? Introduce these characters, some cool narrative.
I found a connection between Deano's tied up action man and a story I wrote about one of my alter ego's SoUR SiMON, who started off life as a character in a series of weird experimental shorts, in one of them he ended up tying people to trees with rope..
I took the idea of the clown, the mask, and drew these little clowns with removable clown masks, revealing sad and angry faces underneath..
I'm currently working on this project in the background of everything else I'm doing, thought it was relevant, so here it is..
After what I'd say was a successful collaboration as part of the collaborative dialogues module for our MA, I just really wanted to carry on, I find the whole process of collaboration in this kind of loose, random, stick everyone in a teams meeting and see what happens kind of thing really engaging.
It ties in perfectly with my personal research into creativity, different ways of idea generation and creation at the end of it that's just far different to anything that would have come form an individual project. The bringing of multiple minds together to 'truly' collaborate is a very special thing.. new ways of working, We met as a group for this project just yesterday, and through conversation we have found similar research and practice routes that have resulted in an interesting starting point for our project, and today were already merging into the format of collaboration by creating this collaborative blog site, which I think can work great as both a ways of documenting this project, and also for us to continuously share of thoughts and findings throughout this project.