In collaboration with Bounds Green School, Akiva School and Mapledown School
Cypher BILLBOARD, London; Artsdepot, London
1/2021 - 5/2021 and 09/2022 – 01/2023
From January 2021, an anemometer — a device that reads wind speed — was placed on top of the Cypher BILLBOARD poster site and split into eight discrete wind speed ‘sets’, giving a continuous, categorisable data stream of wind speed. Working together in a remote collaboration with Year 4 students from locally-based Bounds Green School, we developed a new billboard poster artwork and a corresponding audio segment that question how the wind can be captured, represented, and wildly interpreted.
Over two video recorded workshop briefs, we introduced students to ideas of wind turbines, green energy, the personification of wind in art and mythology and the transformation of data into sound.
Students were first invited to design a wind turbine of their own, which mixed functional design from contemporary wind turbines (such as the use of rotating blades) with imagined or representational ideas. Five of these initial sketches and collages were then visualised using 3D computer modelling and animation software. The billboard image is a collection of these turbines operating in an open landscape; a fantastical imagining of the harnessing of future winds.
Students were then asked to record sounds representing winds of varying strengths. These audio recordings were used to generate a sound piece dictated by real wind data collected from the local environment, for broadcast on North London community radio station Threads in April 2021.
Listen here
In a series of six workshops in 2022, students were asked to imagine and design their own wind turbines to power a speculative future city. A selection of these designs were 3D animated, accompanied by a soundtrack of sounds created by the students during the workshops.
Students also designed and decorated miniature turbines from laser-cut wood; these lit up LEDs to ‘power’ a cardboard city built for the exhibition.