This is the group of artists, film makers, architects, software developers, and activists you might never have heard of but that might be hitting headlines shortly. I came across them a short while ago in the context of reconstruction of the much-disputed chemical weapons attack in Syria. From all available images, from all available sources, they reconstruct scenes such as this in order to bring out the most plausible understanding of what actually happened, and just now they are contenders for the Turner Prize 2018.
As a side bonus (to me anyway – reflected glory and all that), they’re based at Goldsmiths university in south London which has spawned so much innovation. I was a psychology undergrad there in the late 1970s and for our fortnightly lab experiments, we were required to draw on the student population for our participants. To say they were atypical is probably an understatement. One of mine, recruited to a short term memory experiment, was wearing a bright yellow boiler suit with a string of children’s building bricks round his neck, and sat cross-legged on the table while I tried, with professional gravitas, to read him the list.
Cross posted from Strayfish Arts.
Update: they didn’t win but the work goes on. At present (February 2019) they’re appealing for footage of the Grenfell Tower fire that killed so many and for which culpability is a slippery thing to pin down.
The link to send images and videos is here.
Strayfish Arts 