John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

using RFID as a sensor mechanism. I’m no techno-nerd and I’m not very good
at a lot of that kind of thing but it was just a way of exploring the idea more so
than wanting to use technology and I suppose that is what I think it is all about -
just finding the right tool for the job. In this case and with some other work I’ve
been doing technology, software, programming, whatever has been my tool and
it has allowed me to express those ideas – that I how I feel it should be used not
technology for technology’s sake. Which particularly in the case of a lot of
wearable technology that has shown up in the last couple of years it is really
about “Wow we have this technology – what can we put it in?” It is just an
attitude I don’t like. For me it is about the slow and the simple, the ordinary
and the everyday.
I currently work at Interface at the University of Ulster it’s a new research
centre. It has two parts Art and its Location which is the more fine art strand
and Art in Public which is broken into Art in Contested Spaces – we’re based in
Belfast so it’s not too hard to find a contested space – and Art and
Documentation. I’m a Research Assistant with Fabric Forward and the very
fancy name they’ve given us is Hybrid Textile Configurations, Customisation
and Construction – please don’t ask me what they mean. I’m just going to run
through a couple of the things we are working on at the minute – the more
programming based work like ‘Remember to Forget?’ has taken a bit of a back
seat for me at present because of other projects. These are all group projects –
we are running a series of master classes inviting high level professionals in
different fields to come and work with us and the equipment that we have
around themes. The first one of these was Contemporary Souvenirs and we had
Peter Ting who is Aspreys homewares designer and also designs for a number of
other people, Dierdre Nelson a textile artist based in Scotland, Clare Grennan
who is a jeweller and then the rest of us (Interface staff) are textile based. So
this is some of the work from the very first workshop exploring notions of Irish
souvenirs. They look like very ordinary things, probably but it was more about
process. The whole thing about Irish food came up and the fact that Irish people
when they live abroad always send home for their tea, their Barry’s tea, their
bacon and their potato bread. So on the right are just some crazy tea bags,
printed with all kinds of text and they were just some good John Hinde’s
photographs printed on tea bags. The top left is some ground up, local peat just
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