Top buzz......

by Janie Nicoll, 31 Jul 2008

For this blog, I feel like I sound like I’m constantly either reminiscing/ looking back, with the risk of sounding nostalgic or fretting and offloading various anxieties about something or other. The former probably goes with the territory of this type of residency, especially when working with a relatively elderly group, as for them there’s a lot to look back on, and they want to talk about it. The latter goes with the process of attempting to make art or the attempt at blogging.

Yesterday I went up onto the roof of Leishman Tower, one of the High Rises, to record some video footage. It’s an idea I’ve had for a while and developed from discussions with a few of the women in the group about items of washing getting blown off the washing lines up there.. Anyway I finally got it together to do the filming and was fairly pleased with the results. It’s a great location, and has got quite a surreal feel to it as there is a large grey parapet that goes all the way round and you can’t actually look down at the ground or at the view because of that. Also the light seems different, something to do with being so high up and with the clouds being a lot nearer. Last week I had a bit of what Alex refers to as a Vertigo moment when I was up a set of ladders with my video camera and realised I could easily get blown off, the ladder that is, not the roof thankfully. It would make a great location for a fashionshoot or an event; I keep thinking of a faux beach party or seventies cocktail party, maybe its Ballards “High Rise” creeping in again; either that or a music event like the Beatles on the top of the Apple building.

It can give you quite a buzz to make a new piece of work, a sense of elation, until the initial euphoria wears off and you realise that maybe there are a few things about it that need sorted or changed. At least I now have good footage to work with.. I also shot video footage in the stairwell, fifteen floors of it, which seems to me like the spine of the building but inevitably is a part seldom used by the majority of the residents, or only when necessary. I am interested in the communal spaces and how they are used or not as the case may be. There are two lifts one for even floors and one for odd floors, which seems well thought out and considerate, but these stop at the 12th and 13th floors respectively, so anyone living on the 14th floor needs to walk the remaining flight, not much fun if you are elderly and/or have things to carry. Bad forward planning on the part of the architects – I wonder what happened there?? Maybe the 14th floor was an afterthought, as well as access to the roof??

One of graphic designers for the Art Team showed me an Audio Visual room hidden behind the ‘Green Room’ in Callendar House where a lot of talks and lectures are given. It was like a secret chamber and I would never have guessed it was there. It holds an audio-visual set up that included multi-slide projectors and audiotapes that back project onto a grey screen. It would have been state of the art equipment about fifteen years ago, but is now pretty much made redundant by digital projectors and laptops. It was a bit like a portal into the technology of the recent past.

There I am looking backwards again!!
Also today we did an interview for The List magazine so hopefully that will be featured in the next edition.