A year ago – a white bear from the back of the mind was bear in residence at the Creative Lab at CCA. From here it investigated the crisis stricken free market, that was first put into theory in 1776, by the famous Glasvegian Adam Smith.

The bear returned from this free market with a whole lot of footage, that it believed it would process in only a few months time. Now – a year later, it’s “Diary of a white bear on the fre market” is finally online on it’s website

-  check out the diary on www.thewhitebear.info

Best wishes and many thanks  to CCA and the free market for your hospitality!

Posted by Ulla Hvejsel and the White Bear/creative lab

Is this the future of nostalgia?

Tuesday 3rd April.

Really, enjoyed the first day of my ‘Lab’, in a strange way the miserable weather aided and abetted that enjoyment, as I was able to concentrate, without the distraction of the weather or children, and plot out the coming weeks.
The focus of the lab is an investigation about how we, as citizens, inhabitants, and workers, engage with and contribute to the collective identity that is ‘Glasgow’ and how we redefine and prioritise the cityscape in ways that reflect and refract our own values and priorities.
To help work through this investigation/hypothesis throughout the duration of the Lab, I will be undertaking a series of short focussed interviews and field trips with a range of participants. The idea is to gather individual stories and memories and create a series of personal narratives and maps that will tell a story of the city.
If you would like to take part please do not hesitate to contact me on: 07594 170 598 / traxlercreativelab@gmail.com to make an appointment. The interviews should not take more than 30 minutes.

All interviews will take place at CCA, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, G2 3JD.

www.simonelandwehrtraxler.com

Wednesday 4th April.

Worked late last night mulling over the responses from the first tranche of interviews and some patterns/themes are emerging already.
I had an interesting conversation over morning coffee about true happiness Schopenhauer and how we choose to present ourselves ‘accentuating the negative’ as it were. After all that the weather and children were a terrific distraction so we all went swimming and to the park, back tomorrow morning first thing-honest! I have two interviews on Thursday.

Creative Lab CCA Glasgow 4th -27th January 2012

It’s now over a week since the closing event of my Creative Lab – ‘In The Mix’ on Thursday 26th January, in the Creative Lab space at CCA. The event was pretty much a baptism by fire as we only had three weeks to work together, but having an event tends to focus the mind somewhat, and it felt important to set a goal of some sort, and in a strange way it seemed like a good thing to do. I’m currently uploading some video footage to Vimeo and it’s a nice record of the event. http://vimeo.com/36142720

I met Martin O’Connor at a ‘Words per Minute’ event one Sunday afternoon at the Arches. Kate V. Robertson was there but I didn’t really know anyone else. I sat next to Martin and started chatting to him until he got up abruptly saying he was ‘on next’ , and gave a blistering rendition of his piece “Fame”. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjydoUsNwgA)

Douglas Morland is an artist who I worked briefly with on documentation for Sh[OUT], GOMA 2009. I knew he had been in various bands e.g. Mother & The Addicts, Older Lover and Big Ned and that he had done various art/music/performance type events.

Rebecca Green is an actress I got to know through my collaborative involvements with artist Alex Hetherington [‘Linda Fratianne’, “A Million Lies…”] and theatre director Sally Hobson. “Everything I Do Is A Love Letter To Life”, by Sally Hobson and Stillpoint Productions, during Arches Live 2009 was a foray into the world of theatre and acting. I might as well admit now that I am not particularly keen on acting, – in front of a camera is fine, I’ve no qualms about that but the thought of performing live in front of an audience is pretty much my idea of hell.. As far as I’m concerned it’s a very unnatural thing to do, if other people are happy to do it – fair enough, but it’s really not in my comfort zone.

I was hoping that the Creative Lab would give us the chance to get together and explore various collaborative relationships that would allow us to come up with something interesting, in a cross-artform type of way.

My Creative Lab began on Wednesday 4th January, the first official working day of the year. Kenny the technician had said I could have the use of some of their equipment for the month, which took the form of a drum kit, microphones, guitar amps, and a bass amp. People kept asking me if I was starting a band. Having a drum kit especially seemed to force the idea that there would be a musical performance. I had originally thought that during the Creative Lab I would work with the idea of playing around with existing music, remixing and working with sound and I had my records decks also set up. As things evolved it became more apparent that it would be good to use the band equipment more like a stage set, to play on the idea of a band’s performance, however the point I found that I was making was that this wasn’t a band and that the written and spoken components were of more interest than actually creating any songs.

Ironically, I was in a band in the late Eighties when I was at Edinburgh College of Art (The Vultures), at the time of the Shop Assistants, the Motorcycle Boy, and the Jesus and Mary Chain. We released a 12” single on the Narodnik label, did a Radio One Janice Long session and 17 gigs in total with bands such as the Pastels, the Thanes, Jesse Garon & the Desperadoes, the Motorcycle Boy and My Bloody Valentine. The mixed feelings I have as I look back on that time seemed to be something that came to the surface and needed to be explored, alongside the current talent show culture that channels a pipe dream culture into the heads of our children.

To get the ball rolling for the Creative Lab, Martin and I started working with two songs by PJ Harvey ‘Dress’ from her first LP and ‘Let England Shake’ segueing the two sets of lyrics together. We added the sound of Dougie’s Fender guitar, a bit ‘Paris Texas’ or Ennio Morricone-esque with a lot of reverb..

Martin and I both worked on texts that recalled our younger “going out’ days. I guess I was thinking about the hedonistic good times whereas Martin looked back with a slightly more jaundiced eye. From this he developed the “Night Oot” poem that starts “Change, Taxis, Chips, Pakora…” which we recited as a round with three voices at different stages until the third rendition where it’s repeated in unison. This was linked by some funky guitar from Dougie, into a piece by Rebecca that looks back at a child hood fascination with comedienne and TV Talent Show presenter Marti Caine. This is accompanied by the sound of me beating a drum and the odd cymbal crack as she tells ‘jokes’, highlighting her acknowledgement of severe stage fright and Caine’s untimely early death due to cancer. Stage fright comes up again in a short piece by Martin that runs through a list of celebrities who suffered from stage fright and this leads to more anecdotes about my own experience of stage fright and the unglamorous nature of being in a band. The piece ends, in a way, questioning why we do this to ourselves repeating “Id, ego, super ego”, and echoing the tyranny of the verse -chorus formations of songs.

The performance on Thursday 26th January went well, the red lights went on and footage of Marti Caine from a 1987 New Faces TV show was projected behind us. I managed to overcome my own misgivings about performing live to an audience and we hopefully managed to hide the fact this was only the second time we’d all been together.

The Creative Lab has been a wholly positive experience allowing me the space and time to collaborate with other creative practitioners, opening up new doors on many levels.

www.janienicoll.co.uk

www.martinoconnor.info/

www.douglasmorland.com/

In July 2011, the white bear went to Glasgow, Scotland to study the free market, (that was invented here in 1776), and it’s claim that cool impersonal money could overcome the problems with the bestial subjectivity within humans. While in Scotland, it filmed it’s experiences and is now making a kind of video diary about them. In this post in it’s diary you can see how the white bear ponders, by the famous Loch Ness, that the cool objective calculations that humanity have strived for for centuries, may actually be the very thing that makes the monster below the surface possible.

watch video: A few Hard facts s for a time that is money

Posted By Ulla Hvejsel and the white bear; artists in residence in CCA Creative Lab – July 2011

Last night Steve Hollingsworth and I staged what we termed a performance/sculpture using neon, sound and our own bodies. We called it ‘RUINS’.
We moved very slowly on our hands and knees amongst a scattering of thin neon tubing, with devices strapped to our chests enabling us to ‘interfere’ with the neon directly and therefor producing a series of sounds as proximity with the tubing waxed and waned… I have no idea how it seemed to the audience because crawling slowly amongst the neon and fiddling with the controls on my chest took all my energy and attention.
The performance began in darkness until a timer switch turned on the neon and Ben our CCA sound engineer (he done a great job by the way) manipulated the volume etc. Steve and I had decided to crawl slowly for half an hour whilst interacting with the neon tubing, but really there was a practical consideration too, because if we had accidentally knelt on and broken it we would have received a very nasty electric shock… After the half hour was up the neon automatically went off and the sound slowly faded.
An audience member described the performance as ‘erotic’. I suppose watching to 40 something male artists humping some neon infinitely slowly could be . . .

Snail Mail

Here and there amongst the smoking ruins of that great and degenerate civilisation of Mu a few survivors eke out a desperate kind of survival. Things are looking bad for the humans, until one fateful day, a race of star-travellers arrive for a look-see. As the snail-like entities ooze from the bowels of their softly wobbling ship and raise their twitching palps in hungry anticipation a lone human snuck in the back way and stole their greatest treasure from right under their noses (for of course snails are deaf as posts). The Pasilalinic-sympathetic Compass, as it came to be known, was a kind of telephone whereby the natural telepathic communication of mating land molluscs is harnessed by means of a ring of interconnected snails glued within a box containing a copper sulphate solution. Pressing upon the snails evokes a reaction, through a process of sympathetic communication or ‘animal magnetism’, from their partner snail be it anywhere in The Known Universe. This technological breakthrough led the human race to rise once more to greatness.

Snail Sex

The analogy of an invisible trail of metaphorical snail slime was so powerful that it led the race to adopt many of the habits of the diminutive land mollusc, including developing similarly bizarre mating rituals wherein the human phallus came to be ‘fired’ or ejected from the groin towards a receptive female, who is then ‘reeled in’. This meant that the penis had become a ‘chitinous’ outgrowth, which began to develop its own consciousness often at odds with its ‘host’. After a rash of fatalities people took to wearing suits of armour in their daily lives in order to repel the constant bombardment of calcareous darts. This uneasy symbiosis was only brought to an end when the vagina in its turn took to wandering in search of fulfilment.

[work in progress]

A Tremendous Delirium featuring Scarlett Johansson

In our naiveté we imagined that our journey was a linear one, you know, with a beginning a middle and a tidy denouement. That was before we sampled the tasty-looking fungus lining the banks of the White Carte Water. Or did we? Perhaps our encounter with the river naiads was simply a hallucination brought on by overexposure to the peculiarly fetid air of Glescoo? For it seemed that the journey and its destination had become interchangeable… In part this was due to the writers deplorable habit of going off at half cock with one or other risible narrative gambit or other, his constant prevarication was frankly a pain in the tits and The Outcast and I took to casting withering glances at the sky, which is where we supposed he resided the bastard. Anyway either we did, or did not ingest the aforementioned fungus. And the riverine naiads quite possibly did not arise from the middle of the polluted stream, beckoning us to step inside their lavishly appointed boudoir. The one that looked very much like Scarlett Johansson I found particularly fetching, and she obviously felt the same as she divested herself of her barely there Kate Moss for Topshop Livin Cool Lace Angel Sleeve Dress. Her ‘boudoir’ looked suspiciously like a vile hostelry we had perforce visited in one of Glescoo’s less salubrious streets, one Easy & Peasy’s. The usual rutting was taking place but the crowd of revellers miraculously parted before my hostess and there was a leopard-skin lined booth awaiting us. Scarlett demurely avoided sitting on one of the handily placed dildo’s jutting from each be-cushioned resting place. I was not so fortunate however, yet impaled as I was I attempted to converse politely with my famous and naked companion. She, for her part, shook her head and placed an exquisitely manicured scarlet-tipped finger against my lips and indicated that I listen to the surroundsound grunting and squelching of our erstwhile companions. In one corner of the bar I watched The Outcast as he was forced to partake in a vigorous cunnilingual conversation atween the silk-clad thighs of his Jenny Agutter-a-like (circa Logan’s Run) succubus. The drugged and pixie-lated eyes of the DJ met mine as she placed a sapphire-tipped finger onto another waxen cylinder and a strange unearthly howling began to issue forth from the . . .

Actually, lets pause at this point and go back . . . way back.

to be continued . . .

I am currently sitting in the creative lab space drawing and writing and playing with i phone apps for sound (sampletoy and loopy 2 primarily). I think I’m here to try to expand what it is I do into the realms of the multimedia, at least that’s what I claimed on my application… So far I’ve staged one event, last Friday 11/11/11, where me and my sometime collaborators Jamie McNeil and Una Ravensdaughter made an unholy (and very loud) racket inside beautiful Aye Aye books. We are called WIDOWZZZ and I think we must have made the diners choke on their vegan chocolate cake! People claimed to have enjoyed the experience but I know they were lying.
Other than that I’ve been cribbing furiously for a presentation/talk/performance I am giving tomorrow at the Glasgow Film Theatre (starts at 11 if you fancy it). Basically its an opportunity to bellow filth into cavernous Cinema 1! Yes!
Also I’ve been writing a thing called ‘The inland Castaways or Lord Jim and The Outcast of the Islands enter the Heart of Darkness’ which is a travelogue of sorts describing a friend and I’s recent trip from Glasgow to Paisley by rubber dinghy. We are called ‘The Sunday Conceptualists’ and that is the sort of thing that we do.. I’m going to post a section for your edification, enjoy! Jim x

THE INLAND CASTAWAYS

or

Lord Jim

and

The Outcast of the Islands

enter the

Heart of Darkness

The Atlantic! A vast sheet of water, whose superficial area covers twenty five millions of square miles, the length of which is nine thousand miles, with a mean breadth of two thousand seven hundred, – an ocean whose parallel winding shores embrace an immense circumference, watered by the largest rivers of the world, the St Lawrence, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Plata, The Orinoco, the Niger, the Senegal, the Elbe, the Loire, the Clydde, the White Carte and the Rhine, which carry waters from the most civilised, as well as from the most savage countries! Magnificent field of water, incessantly ploughed by vessels of every nation, sheltered by the flags of every nation, and which terminates in those two terrible points so dreaded by mariners, The Port of Glescoo on the Clydde, and the Benighted Burgh of Paislay, on the effluvial White Carte Water!

A Terrible Place

On the sudden death of my beloved father – Lord Wharrie Colquhoun, Thrice Noble – I found myself tasked with the onerous and sysiphian undertaking of sorting through the ejecta of a lifetime, consisting of a myriad curios, memento’s, postcards, philately, etchings (pornographic and otherwise), anatomically-correct dolls, mechanical Whippoorwill and so on. After weeks of effort I finally made it up to the attic to begin to deal with what I knew would be the very worst of my late fathers well-documented deviations from what are considered to be the norms. And so it proved to be, on the morning of September the Fifteenth I had already wrestled a number of trunks containing the remains of several ‘friends’ (both human and animal) into a series of shallow graves secreted on a distant part of our estates, when I came across a tightly-wrapped oil-skin packet. I was about to consign it to oblivion when my eye caught sight of an attached ticket bearing a hastily scrawled (in his own inimitable hand) note to – myself – the inscription read: “My dear boy, may I first offer my profuse apologies for involving you in my affairs, re the unfortunate ‘Crotchless Steam Boy’ debacle, and may I say that you handled your holiday at Her Majesty’s Pleasure with commendable stoicism (I had been buggered silly by my ‘cellmates’ every hour on the hour for six months) and that your forbearance will be duly rewarded (indeed it had been: I now owned half of *******shire). Now to business (my father was forever getting ‘down to business’), you hold in your hand an account of a trip, undertaken by myself and a dear friend who shall forever remain nameless, for reasons that will immediately become apparent, into the veritable Heart of Darkness! For at a time of my life where I could truly be described as desperate, I found myself in the environs of the benighted City of Glescoo. A terrible place (as you shall hear), and to be shunned by all right-thinking people, which of course, is how I found myself there in the first place! There is a secret lying at the heart of that terrible place, a secret so awful that I have been unable to speak of my experiences, and even to write them down was an act fraught with dreadful consequences! No my son, I did not die in my bed and was only placed there latterly by those whose names I dare not utter! Read on then, and I leave it up to you to decide whether the world is ready for a tale such as this . . .

The Burning Effigy

“We always knew it was wrong, what we did to the cats. But its not as if we killed them! They liked it!” This – the screaming headline identifying Glescoo’s daily scandal sheet The Burning Effigy – came past us on the barely discernable current, the blurred and photogravured eyes of the pasty-looking protagonists meeting and following ours. Looking up from our leaking dinghy we spied a group of lemurs shitting communally in the remains of a rusting Chinook helicopter. They looked at us with those depthless black orbs, and, as we rowed past one of them muttered “Fannies” in a flat guttural rasp, squirting a stream of liquid manure in emphasis. Luckily The Outcast received the bulk of the stinking ordure, not that he minded a jot as shit in all of its many manifestations held a special fascination for him. The sluggish White Carte Water seemed able to make up its own mind as to which way it was going as earlier that day we had been heading up stream, but now we were most definitely on our way back to its scrofulous mouth. Of course whatever way one was carried on this bloated stream one was destined (cursed?) to end up in the scabbed and lesion-dappled arms of benighted Glescoo!

God’s Cock Ring

The City of Glescoo is surrounded by an impenetrable wall of mountains known locally as God’s Cock Ring, indeed the inhabitants of this awful place are buggered, both by circumstance and by each other. As the Outcast and I made our way carefully along the shit-bespattered pavements of a bustling thoroughfare we watched in horror as various complicated couplings took place all around us! We later learned that it was fashionable in these parts to replicate the polymorphous social niceties of the perverse Bonobo apes of darkest Afrique, which charming specimens greet each other with a rutting penetration or slobber incontinently over the unmentionables. As we watched, an upstanding citizen knelt on all fours to receive a thoroughgoing anal-rimming from a portly dowager, and this but a passing helloo! The Outcast and I were careful not to meet the eye of passers by just in case we were mistaken for a casual aquaintance! (Still though, we looked forward to tipping the barmaid and the potboy enthusiastically…) But first, a short preamble describing the workings of this unsavoury state:
There is a Ministry of War, a Ministry of National Aesthetics and a Palace of Pleasure for the weekly group love-making of all law-abiding citizens. Because their ideal was an egalitarian social state, they suppressed all opposition so that there would be only one opinion. In Glescoo individual welfare is subservient to the welfare of the city. The state decree’s what is agreeable or useful, and everyone must accept this ruling as law. Individuals considered a threat to the National Ideal are sterilised. The State religion is the Religion of Natural Harmony, and in its honour the Ministry of National Aesthetics organises a yearly parade of young and beautiful artists. There is no money, because the State provides everything; however, nothing can be bought, sold or given away anyways. Artists must refrain from expressing personal emotions and must produce works, which reflect the communal ideal. We had spied in passing a square filled with the queer outpourings of this artistic elite, which seemed to consist entirely of cursorily-painted hollow plaster gourds and shoddy theatrical mis en scéne of indeterminate provenance. A group of artisans stood around moodily sipping from fluted golden goblets and counting each other’s patrons. We moved on quickly as we had been warned that potential patrons were routinely tarred and feathered, a form of flattery in those parts.

In July 2011, a white bear; a beast from the back of the mind, was in residence in CCA’s Creative Lab. In Glasgow, it wanted to study the history and the beastly aspects of the free market, a market tat was apparently invented here in 1776. At the moment the bear is editing a videodiary from this journey, and as it works it’s way through the it’s summer experiences in Glasgow, it will post it’s reflections here. This is the second post from it’s diary, and it is about misunderstandings and not being able to get your idea across the way you intendend it. A problem that the Glaswegian free market pioneer Adam Smith, must have known all too well.

Misunderstandings 1776-2011

by Ulla Hvejsel and The White Bear – artists in residence in the creative lab, July 2011

Emma Leach and Sian Robinson Davies are collaborating for this month’s Creative Lab. As part of our project we are collecting anecdotes – read on to find out more…

We want stories that highlight the unpredictable nature of protest. This could be protest in the sense of an organised march or, more broadly, defending a belief or voicing a disagreement. We are looking for anecdotes of confusion, subversion and surprise.

We are interested in stories that include an unexpected change to the meaning of the protest, where groups of protesters are marked out by their differences rather than their unity, where there has been a disruption to the usual protest formula, and more.

If you have an anecdote that might fit in our collection or any other questions about the project, please get in touch. Short, unpolished texts are welcomed.

To read examples please visit: conflictingthoughts.wordpress.com/category/protest-stories

Deadline for submissions: Tuesday 20 September 2011

Contact us at sianis@hotmail.com and hello@emmaleach.co.uk

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