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 ideas concerned with formal experiments centered around the killing of three people at a mobile shop in Northern Ireland.
Clippings from The Guardian passed around. The Group discussed these around the following ideas:
– Exploring ideas of rapidity in a similar manner to Wilson’s ideas of slowness.
– Look routines prior to and subsequent to killing e.g. making a cup of tea
– Rituals of killing, of coverage, of potential political and religious responses, of the funeral, of the vicar’s sermon, of the burial, of IRA volley, of grief, of daily life
– Political issues of “justified” killing
– Press – killing of 3 people as trivial, levels of outrage, forms of reporting – ways in which information is distorted
– The act of killing
– Killing of young people
– Mythology of heaven – ways of dealing with pointless death
– Context of information – slides revealing a sentence word by word, Protestants and Catholics viewing information differently, attitude of the reporter covering the event, attitude of the newspaper providing information
It ends there.
We were always serious about it, even if we didn’t know and still don’t know what we are doing sometimes, or what to call it or ourselves. We had no idea where it would go, we had no idea there would be a future to it.
In 1993 we were in residence at the Arnolfini in Bristol for 3 months making Stampede, our third work. One weekend we ran a workshop with 30 people and made a piece of work – it was a bit unhinged, we didn’t know what workshops could be either, so we went at it full tilt. A sketchbook of amazing drawings got left behind – it belonged to Nick. He came for an audition where Matt and I made him run in a way that looks like you are trying to walk. He was amazing at this too. He performed in the work-in-progress and the rest flowed from there.
Coming up in the next few weeks are some videos from our older work to lead up to our birthday so keep a look out. In April we will launch a publication to celebrate 25 years.