Chord exhibition book

Measure have produced a book about the Chord project priced £8.

It will be avaliable to buy online soon from Amazon, but you can order a copy directly from us by emailing info@measure.org.uk.

Containing an interview with Shawcross and an essay exploring the themes behind Chord, it is beautifully illustrated with the artists drawings and installation photographs.

The history of the Subway is explored in an essay featuring exclusive heritage photographs, as is the regeneration history of Holborn over the last 100 years.

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58 Processions: Listening Through Holy Week

58 Processions: Listening Through Holy Week is an electronic publication documenting the research and practice in the field and studio of Duncan Whitley and James Wyness, from 2007-2008. It is the first significant release of edited field recordings from their work within the Holy Week processions of Seville during this period.

Available for download as a PDF, the publication features 10 sound recordings, and writing by Duncan Whitley, James Wyness and Katherine Hunt. The introduction is written by Simon Day, co-director of arts organisation Measure, who co-produced the multi-channel sound installation 58 Processions in the crypt of St. Pancras Parish church in August 2008.

Published by Labculture Ltd. 2010 ISBN: 978-9560187-0-0 in association with Measure

The PDF is viewable in Adobe Acrobat or the free Adobe Reader version 6 or above. The latest version of the free Adobe Reader is available here.

1. Download the PDF (right-click PC users or ctrl click MAC)

58 Processions: Listening Through Holy Week

2. Open the file in Adobe Reader.

3. The document will open in full-screen mode.

4. Connect the computer to your speakers or headphones. The first time you play sound from the PDF you will receive a prompt requesting your permission to play media from the document.

Click on the link below for the 58 Prosessions website.

Ben Rivers
Kate MacGarry Gallery

12 March - 2 May 2010

Private view Thursday 11 March 2010, 18.00 - 20.00

For his first exhibition at the Kate MacGarry Gallery, Ben Rivers is showing one of the shacks constructed for the Measure project On Overgrown Paths.

Inside, his film Origin of the Species (2008) offers a clandestine portrait of an elderly man living in a ramshackle cottage in the wilderness of the Scottish highlands. The man devises his own technologies for day-to-day subsistence while pondering the workings of the universe and the scope of human knowledge.

Although there seems a vast discrepancy between Big Bang theory and animal trapping, the voiceover forays into such grand universals as evolution and epistemology, bridging this gap through ruminations on the experience of nature. Rivers’ film is made using an old Bolex camera, which imparts a quality that cannot be digitally constructed. At times the blissed-out end of a reel is left apparent as errant bursts of yellow and orange light obliterate the image. Scratches similarly draw us back to the film’s surface and emphasise the mechanical nature of its coming into being.

Just as the man wonders at the destructive results of the too-quick evolution of the human brain, the near-obsolescence of film confirms this pace of change; and as his retreat from civilisation takes on the characteristics of an idyll, Rivers’ own shack reminds us of the awkward reality of this. Origin of the Species is unflinchingly beautiful, without irony or sentimentality.

As an artist working with film, though, Rivers is careful to put its nostalgic qualities to more testing use. His studies of the contingent lives of others are as much to do with investigative anthropology as they are utopian escapism.

Click here for a link to the gallery website.

Click here for the On Overgrown Paths website.

Puss and Mew Public House Snug

Chancery Lane 2010

Puss and Mew, is a heritage based arts project by Luis Carvajal and Annie Davey. It explores the social and vernacular history of London, particularly its entwined relationship with gin, through the recreation of cultural artefacts and events. Chancery Lane is situated between the once notorious parish of St Giles to the west, where one in four homes was a gin shop, and the site of Tom Langham’s distillery to the east, destroyed during the Gordon Riots. In Lincoln’s Inn fields itself, the Master of the Rolls, Sir Joseph Jekyll was hustled and trampled during a riot subsequent to one of the unpopular Gin Acts in which he was instrumental.

The result of specialised research and an adherence to traditional craft techniques, previous Puss and Mew projects include The Revival of an Eighteenth Century Gin Vending Machine, Clerkenwell (2004), and Southwark (2006). Although mostly situated in historic or unexpected venues the projects have also been exhibited within museums and galleries such as the V&A and arts organisations such as Artangel. Examples of Puss and Mew trade tokens are housed in the British Museum collection.

Later this year and for a limited time, a functioning early Victorian public house snug, a curious and short lived example of social architecture, will re-open in an undisclosed venue around Chancery Lane. It will be available for up to six guests at one time and will serve authentic “Old Tom” cordials, the progenitor to London Dry.

onemillionstories is an online project by creative writing student Karen Holst Bundgaard.

Onemillionstories now has been updated and has its own website. Click on the link below to read the stories.

Ten interconnecting stories are split into six parts that appear in random order each time the page is refreshed. Thus the reader plays an active part in creating a potential one million darkly comic narratives, subtly commenting on how the choices we make each day affect our lives.

A literary experiment following the legacy of authors such as Raymond Queneau, B.S. Johnson and Peter Adolphsen.