Things have been hectic, hectic, hectic… what with the Flickernic, and college, and everything I’ve again arrived at the point where i have a months worth of half written blog posts cluttering my drafts folder…. most importantly though, the FMP piece for the exhibition at the New Art Gallery Walsall has taken tremendous shape, now being fully thought out and in the making.  and it’s called…

All My Dreams Came True! (nut now i have a bunch of other dreams)

I’m working in collaboration with another student and member of the Garret, Tom Smith, who was planning a working mutoscope showing a short film. As we’re working together we’ve been given a fantastic space, so the single mutoscope has now become a trio of various sized machines, next to a backlit projection of the horizon. Two of the the mutoscopes represent the follies and fetishes of our youth, whereas the smallest is powered by a music box movement showing a spinning ouroboros. This is our bit of blurb:

Vicky Roden and Tom Smith

“All my dreams came true! (but now I have a bunch of other dreams)”

The first collaboration between Vicky Roden and Tom Smith, “All my dreams came true! (but now i have a bunch of other dreams)” is an investigation of man’s eternal rush towards an untouchable horizon.

This installation combines disparate and obsolete technologies with childhood nostalgias, mythologies and desires. As the future predicted in our childhood rolls near, we neglect that which we already possess in favour of a mournful nostalgia of an unrealised promised land. This installation counters this in a temporal celebration of that which has been before, through exploration of the mechanical and the digital, the real and the illusory. In keeping with the disparate nature of the subject, this work combines both physical interaction and virtual space.

Our space is in front of you on the left side as you enter the space, and directly under the stairs so we have a lovely secluded alcove for the projection. As for the mutoscopes themselves, each has it’s own pet-name:

The Red Carbuncle: The first and largest machine, it’s free standing and will be showing the information film for the Artonator mk. 2, a.k.a. ‘Bianca’. This will be presented in glorious 3D!

PPP (Portable Picnic Player): A customised child’s kit, the PPP will play ‘The Menagerie of Ms Roden’ (dreadful working title), a forty frame animation of three childlike images drawn in oil pastels to resemble wax crayons: An ET doll my mum made for me as a child, which  is one of two childhood possessions i still own: A Jenny Haniver, one of the many faintly sinister myths that fascinated me from an early age, and a coffee monkey, which i see as the adult realisation of these two aspects of my childhood.

The Musoscope: A hybrid of my fascination with automata and Tom’s love of steampunk, added to our shared interest in folklore. The musoscope is powered by a music box movement, which turns a small reel which has a magnification lens in front of it. The film is of an ouroboros turning, symbolic of the eternal journey towards the untouchable.

more info on all of these as and when, and hopefully with more regularity. more mental prunes and spinach.