I am turning my tanker around and I don’t know where I will be heading exactly or even what my tanker might look like. It’s all very hard to fathom and I am sad and scared and excited and emboldened and of course so much more besides. I am expecting (when I least expect it)… Read more »
As a part of Cat Royale, we have engaged an Audience Advisory Panel who are coming along with us on this journey, as we try to work out and develop the complex nest of subjects that is the project. We have never done something exactly like this before, although we have employed many forms of… Read more »
Many of our works have high thresholds to entry: sometimes novel structures or difficult ideas; sometimes ways of using everyday devices just a little ‘off’ from what we mostly use them for. In all of this we need to know you are alright; that you can navigate; that you can get along with the rules and stay… Read more »
In 1992 we made Chemical Wedding, our second piece of work. David Hughes – a believer in Blast Theory from the get go and editor of Hybrid Magazine – gave us the chance to do a work-in-progress in Holborn with an invited test audience. But we couldn’t afford to make all of the films that… Read more »
Disobedient participants, or rather people who find their own way into our work, have become a strength of some of our work: a heart that is largely invisible to the outside, which we cherish greatly. In each work we assume that real disruption is likely and troubleshoot and ‘pre-mortem’ this in advance. However, I want… Read more »
We looked at quite a lot last week – still focusing on Cat Royale but also, more generally, what we enjoy or not creatively, and the platforms and spaces we may want to work in in the future. We will try imagining Cat Royale in some of those places and spaces over the next few… Read more »
The creative fortnight is something we three artists try to do at least every year. We clear the calendar of meetings and other projects getting into our heads and cut loose. We make ourselves unavailable so we can be totally available to each other. The idea is to reflect back and look forward, on… Read more »
We have been inviting you all to ask the artists and team here questions (absolutely anything!) relating to our practice, and have been sharing these in our monthly mailouts. Realising how hard it is to get our answers into a couple of sentences, we have decided to publish the full unadulterated versions here in our… Read more »
Tomorrow I am going for 10 days to the world’s second-largest and second-most-populous continent in the world, according to Wikipedia, I am going to Africa. I have never been there before and I am trying to work out in advance what it is that “Playable Cities” means to me, in relation to Lagos. It’s only… Read more »
Blast Theory will be exactly 25 on the 10th April this year. Here are the minutes from the first ever meeting we had: Wednesday April 10th 1991 8-11pm 284 Caledonian Road Matt Adams,Helen Hitchin, Niki Jewitt, Michelle Williams, Ju Row Farr, Will Kittow, Robin Tomens, Lorraine Hall Matt and Ju gave brief description of… Read more »
We run workshops and smaller projects quite a lot and I think they sometimes go unnoticed amongst Blast Theory’s bigger projects. So it’s really great to be running Apps for Art and Artists here in our studio in March – specially created, on our own terms, building out from our processes and projects such as… Read more »
Last night I met the team, a wonderful group of people on this independent Mesa, who have signed up to go on a journey into the unknown with Blast Theory with me at the helm. Everyone has a great wealth of experience and knowledge in many areas from advertising, to research, photography to journalism, semiotics… Read more »
OK, so this is going to be more than just a workshop, let me explain a little. This is an invitation by Mesa e Cadeira to make something, a project, something we’ve never made before, that we’ve always wanted to, with an invited group of people, on no money, in 5 days, which has social… Read more »
My One Demand may be our most ambitious project to date – I feel like I’ve said this before, but this is certainly pushing all of our boats way out. Work with the cast is well underway, we are sorting out the live link to the cinema, the codes for playing online, how to move… Read more »
A year ago Matt began editing the footage from Nagoya, of the trawler being moved onto the land, through the night and across the park – 5 days to edit, then straight back to Japan on the 5th of August, to install onto 40 tablets in Japanese and English, train invigilators, meet press, thank everyone… Read more »
I am reading The Gift (Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Society) by Marcel Mauss at the moment, ongoing research for a yet undefined project and just wanted to share a quote from the introduction section. It is written by E.E. Evans-Pritchard. “But he not only wrote about the social solidarity and collective sentiments. … Read more »
So we’ve been in Buffalo at University at Buffalo for about a week working with a fantastic and smart group of people in media studies, visual studies and theatre studies courtesy of the lovely Mark Shepard and Sarah Bay-Cheng. We also did a lecture and studio visits and broke down Ulrike And Eamon Compliant into… Read more »
Fixing Point is sold out at this years’ Brighton Festival already, which is amazing, and so I wanted to let you know a few things about the work before I go into lock down mode. I feel especially excited about our collaboration with Chris Clark the electronic musician on Fixing Point. He is a fantastic… Read more »