Framing The Story. Kev Alexander, Dr Tacko, and The Magic Toyshop

Interesting week, eh? We went to Askam on thursday to record some footage with which to frame Jim's piece...here we are outside Kev Alexander's shed and at the end of his street. We recorded two sequences with Kev that we hope will show the world of the story, while he filled the shed with stories and petrol fumes.

Elsewhere, we've had the ok to use a recording by The Magic Toyshop, one of the best bands to come out of Furness in my time here. The song is an edited versh of King Of Space by Rob Kavanagh, from an acoustic session, and features the great Phil Birkett as singer.

Many thanks to Rob and to Jamie Bosanko for supplying a file. 

And on friday we were at the Laurel and Hardy Museum with Tony Lidington, for his marvellous lecture on Performative Science and quackery. We had a very good audience including lots of old friends, and raised a very decent bit of money for Furness Refugee Support.  

Thank you, one and all.
We'll be posting Tony's script, but for now here are his intro and then my notes hopefully explaining the thinking behind it in the context of Still Waters.

The talk will explore the ways that popular culture and science have fused and confused over the years: how the definitions of what is real, unreal, imaginary, fake or hallucinatory, are all woven together. Learn how pseudo-science and empirical knowledge bifurcate, blur and merge over time, to create a blended muddle of perception that we sometimes call truth, sometimes fakery, or sometimes a show.  (TL)

Welcome to the L and H museum for the inaugural and possibly last annual Artspace Lecture, entitled Illusion and Delusion, on performative science and quackery, with our good friend Dr Tacko. It is lovely to have him here.

Why are we doing this? Artspace exists to place locally based artists in community contexts, working with schools, in local buildings, with archives and collections.

A lot of the work we've done in the last few years has been about the way communal memory evolves, about the relationship between place and people, about vernacular forms and language, histories, and the ability of a place to tell it's own story through the people who live and work within it.

So far, as well as events like tonight's, there have been films and photographs, some records, books, a tent and an obby oss. Some of these, are available in the merch area. There will be another event later this year, screening some recent work made in Askam and in Whitby. And in december, the oss will cavort in the streets.

A lot of the work draws on an interest in the means of assembly and dissemination of histories and mythologies.. When people tell such stories they utilise folk processes, performance skills, and whatever scientific knowledge and technologies are around at the time..

These histories and the stories within them help us to understand the world in its beauty and cruelty; they can bind us, and inform us. Equally, they can be hijacked to dissuade us from any such attempt; to shut our eyes to beauty and to encourage cruelty, division and willfull ignorance.

After all, in hard times, we seek reassurance and direction. In the past we have looked for them in ritual and ceremony and in the notion of a higher authority; we have looked for other parallel planes of existence, to which our language and morality are somehow transferrable. More often today, we read the marsh lights in the swamp of social media for guidance and revelation.

When this happens, when we do this, are science and rationality enlisted in their own undermining? And if so, does this represent the failure of science, or the triumph of the imagination?

Are we withdrawing from rationality, or feeling our way to a new, poetic understanding of the world and our desires, or are we simply and unconsciously, thinking only the thoughts planted by the culture we have created?  (JH)