my biography prior to starting the MA course, as of May 2007

to throw into the pot as i begin to define my practice......what's important and what's not?

Harriet is a visual artist, educator and arts director based in South London. She specialises in creating, teaching and co-ordinating projects within the visual and interactive arts, experimenting predominately with live and media arts, using photography, film and animation. She loves collaborating fusing together her work with other arts practitioners be it creating illustrative or interactive visuals for sound art, music, movement, spoken word.

She has had a range of visual commissions including for large scale visual-music-theatre work, ‘Sedna Stories,’ composed by Kerry Andrew, and a collaboration with voice (capella group , juice), ensemble and electronica artist Paul J Abbott which premiered in York, in 2005 and then Cargo, London June 2006 . This work embodied the theatricality of inuit folk tales. In July 2006 she created a visual score (film) for silent improvisation for 'Hausmusik' (Claudia Molitor – Klangsieben and Sound Source series for spnm - Society for promotion of new music) In September 2006, she created a film played live to sound art performance 'Solar Noise Generation' (SNG- Ash Sargant -!PLOVA) screened as part of Wormhole Saloon at the Whitechapel Art Gallery London . Currently she is collaborating with visual artist Specialchild in generating stop frame animations for folk electronica band The Woodcraft Folk. In March 2007 she played live visuals for Gobsmack, an experimental vocals night at The Spitz, London.

Her work can be playful, bright visual pop exploring the bezerk and the kitsch, the plastic and the misplaced, or monochrome and macabre; she is flexible and open to new adventures.

Harriet is heavily involved in visual arts and design education, with a variety of experiences in directing, teaching and collaborating within local and international schools and communities. She is currently in charge of Visual Arts and Design at a Performing and Creative Arts school in South London where she has been in post since 2001, and SSAT Lead practitioner for Visual and Digital Arts, delivering a seminar on performance art at the SSAT National Arts conference at the Barbican in February 2006. She is also Subject Mentor representative on the Teacher Education Board of the National Society for Education in Art and Design,(NSEAD.) In 2004-5 she developed a collaborative teaching project in Shenzhen, China sponsored by the British Council exploring international perceptions of identity though the visual arts. She previously taught Visual Arts to 16-19 students and adults in the Community Arts programme at a sixth form college, and in a community arts initiative First Base, both based in Brighton from 1998-2001.

Harriet has a BA (Hons) Fine Art (Staffordshire University, 1997), PGCE Art and Design (UWIC, 1998) and a PG CERT in Educational Leadership and Innovation (Warwick University, 2006) and is starting MA Theatre: Visual language of Performance in September 2007 (Wimbledon College of Art)

what's technology all about? the galapagos man and trachtenburg slideshows...

ok, so in thinking about what this blogging malarkey can do for my practice (can it be process and as an outcome? how can i feed to it out and about, maybe recording an experiment from my mobile phone and why would i do this? what's to be gained from immediacy?) i need to think about blogging as an online technology and that meanders me onto where am i at with technology? what do i already use, how do i use it, why do i use it?? what does this online blogging technolgy offer me that i don't already have?

it struck me as interesting when douglas said the other day that the threads elevating the quirky objects in the wondrous yet highly spooky 'the galapagos man' performance MA shows 2007, were a form of technology. they actioned an object, gave it life. its too easy to forgot what technology actually means. these days we get so caught up in living in a culture of the latest state-of-the-art technolgical products that are fast-snazzy-compact-lifechanging, that has come to be what i associate the words high-tech with, and in then defining the opposite i suppose, when i have said low-tech in the context of my practice, i have actually meant, non-digital-but still-electrical-tech, (slide projectors, overhead projectors etc.) this is not therefore explaining everything that isn't categorised as high tech (and what fits into this category anyway? the latest simply-must-have quickly becomes yesterdays fish and chip wrapper, superceded by another soon to be relic), if considering the wiki definition; Technology is a broad concept that deals with a species usage and knowledge of tools and crafts and how it affects a species' ability to control and adapt to its environment. which is why galapagos man's threads are technology. this definition however becomes hugely problematic for me in how i have presented my practice in the past, but delightful in that by considering this wiki definition, i'm actually quids in on lots of other technological items , focusing on control and adapt that through using technology can futher my practice. hurrah! this should form part of my research as i develop my practice for the use that art and perfromance has made of technolgy, in a variety of forms. maybe its safer to say, traditional and non traditional technolgies...oh i sigh and move on...for now.......

if i am to consider my new (in)visible friend fitting into my practice, i now think i should consider my technolgical practice to date and how to bring it in on the action to futher my cause. starting with some of the highest-end-of technology-i-have-used. by this i think about the computer, which i have only really used for lots of photoshop, image ready, imovie, email, calendar, google, del.icio.us, flickr, youtube, myspace (far too much last year, am thinking of abandoning this virtual life i have too many absent friends) word and dare-i-own-up-to-it powerpoint (no sneaky fly-in clipart, promise) watching tv, (annoyingly it cuts out a lot.)

so how have i used technology to make art work? pukey powerpoint for one. in this powerpoint-gimmicky-crazed-naff society you may well ask why i have used it for artistic purposes. the problem with me (time wise)has been the very nature of who i am- both a passionate and hugely driven artist AND educator. i have been full time teaching visual arts and design, running a department for 9 years (6 year running the department) since my degree, and have struggled massively reigniting my practice in as much depth as i would have liked (i think my practice is fun and literal, and for this often quite superficial because its an add-on illustration to a performance, never really tried it the other way round since degree...YET.) over the last 2 years alongside the heavy schedule of teaching, both emotionally and physically, i haven't had time to really get to grips with proper vj software, film beyond imovie, stop frame animation beyond adobe image ready. but what i have had through teaching is enormous excitement in working in a performing and creative arts vocational school, learning and testing out ideas in school projects. it is the increasingly vocational relationship of where visual and performing arts collide that consumes me now.

so its been mainly powerpoint slide shows for my own practice of screen based photos in collaborative perfromance projects (and oh my god was this a nightmare at times, compatibility- can only exist on a computer not dvd friendly, time consuming, tricky to avoid the -gasp-desktop appearing to a frowning audience) alongside bits of animation and film.

in looking now to the non-digital-but still-electrical-tech, slide projectors, overhead projectors, i am thinking about how this technology to project images, when used, has a real presence, unlike much multi-media projector work. i am having thoughts about what i love about slide projectors, their clunky nostalgic prescence, and how this, in the bonkers world of the trachtenburg family slideshow players (and photo on this post) has given me so much- musically they are very haphazard and not very 'tuneful' but they have you in fits of laughter by the mad songs they create from car boot found slide collections - more in my inspirations later :) interestingly i used their technique with some old slides from the 60s for a gig at cargo, east london, but had to put them into powerpoint to run through the multi media projector set up...kinda misses the point, huh??