Young People in Focus

Author Stephanie Hawke

What do young people do in their free time? Do they engage with arts and culture? If the answer is yes, then how and why do they do this? If no, then what’s stopping them?

MPA are helping Curious Minds find out the answers to these and other questions as part of a miniature action research project.

The first two sessions took place at The Hollin’s Technology College, Accrington last week. The young people considered their level of engagement with arts and culture before choosing ‘interventions’ to make and reflect on. They chose to engage with digital media and theatre.

 

So  a few days later, Matt Gartside from Zumamedia joined the group in school to give them his digital photography top tips. What do you think of the results?

Next week we’re off to the Lowry Centre to see some musical theatre!

Weavers’ Triangle App – The Journey Part 2

Stuart Marshall from Treasure Trails takes us through the second part of his journey in creating the Weavers’ Triangle app….

The route of the trail came easily.  I wanted to take the participant on a journey through time and so the Weavers’ Triangle Visitor Centre was an ideal and easily located starting point. Sandygate Square forms a focal point of the area’s regeneration and has been the location of recent events and performances.  This was a logical end point to bring the story up-to-date and look into the future.  Between these two points the canal and Trafalgar Street offered opportunities to tell the story of the canal, mills and the people who worked in them.

Once I’d worked out the route and identified the key locations along it, I could then source the archive material to create image slideshows, videos and sound bites which would play when the user reached points of interest along the route.  The internet has put information at our fingertips but there really is no better way of spending an afternoon than exploring what our local libraries have to offer.  Burnley Library was a fantastic resource and an essential source of the many archive images I used within the app.

To create part of the audio soundtrack I recorded local dialect poet Mervyn Hadfield reciting some of his stories.  Five minutes of recording were followed by a most enjoyable couple of hours reminiscing about our respective childhoods growing up among the cobbled terraced streets of Burnley and Rochdale and our parents’ working lives in the cotton mills.  Common experiences separated by thirty years, but a world that has now largely disappeared.

A trip to the North West Sound Archive at Clitheroe Museum (where reel-to-reel tapes and C60 cassettes still exist!) filled the gaps with oral histories of mill workers and bargemen, which they were happy to exchange for my recordings of Mervyn’s memories.

It has been interesting to see how people have reacted differently to the various forms of media.  Contrasting how a location looks now, compared with archive images showing the same place in the past, always seems to delight the user.   My own favourite is a hole in the wall alongside the canal.  If you look through it in the real world a patch of derelict scrubland is revealed.   Looking through the hole using the app reveals something completely different, a journey back in time to what was there before and how it sounded.  You’ll have to find out for yourself what that was though!

Without wanting to sound too deep and analytical, the project does feel like a coming together of many strands of my life – my family’s connections to the cotton industry; the History degree I thought I’d never use directly; a career of over twenty years in software development; more recent experience as a trail writer; and reacquainting myself with a town I’d not really visited since my dad used to take me to the Turf in the days when Burnley actually had a good football team.   If this was a reality TV program I’d probably say that I’d been “on a personal journey”.

So the app is now out there, available on the iStore and Android markets.  A lifetime’s ambition has been accomplished.  Published, at last!

ABOUT TREASURE TRAILS

Treasure Trails devise Trails that inform, entertain and educate people in inspiring ways.  Our Trails capture the imagination, often using game thinking and game mechanics to engage users with their environment.  We now develop location-aware apps for smart phones which provide exciting opportunities to create media-rich trails, guides, stories – and of course puzzles, games and treasure hunts – using a mix of audio, video, text and images to immerse the visitor in their location.  Our company has produced outstanding tailor made Trails for major organisations such as the BBC, National Trust, the Woodland Trust, and many more.

Weaver’s Triangle App – The Journey Part 1

Stuart Marshall from Treasure Trails takes us through the first part of his personal journey….

It started with a Tweet.  I can’t remember exactly what I was tweeting about but it elicited an immediate response from @teamMPA.  “Intrigued!  I think we should talk”.  Within the week I was at Mid Pennine Arts’ offices in Burnley meeting with Business Director Rob Carder to explain all about our interactive trails and to discuss ways in which we might possibly work together.  It soon became apparent to both of us that there was an obvious synergy between MPA’s  ‘Art + People + Places’ formula and Treasure Trails’ aim of connecting people with the local environment, ‘The Fun Way to Explore’.

It was when Treasure Trails began to develop location-aware apps for smart phones that the real opportunities became more apparent.  Now the trails could not only be used to link works of art but themselves become a new medium for their interpretation – using audio, video and images, all triggered by GPS – to engage, inform and enhance the visitor experience in a way that could not easily be achieved with more traditional paper-based trails.

We decided that the                                                                                                            Weavers’ Triangle area in Burnley should be the subject of our first joint collaboration.  This area, once at the heart of Burnley’s textile industry, has been the focus of regeneration plans by Burnley Council for some time and MPA have been actively involved in this process.  One of their recent projects, Project Pride Burnley, had brought the area to life with a piece of promenade theatre within the old mills.  The outcomes from this project would be used as the basis for the app.

Soon a steady flow of information arrived electronically and through my letterbox.  A documentary of Project Pride, videos of Dark Satanics and a plethora of images.  Stories of Sandygate, a recent creative writing project that captured local peoples’ memories and stories of the area was also included.  I followed this up with research into the history of the area via the internet and visits to the site.  I always knew a History degree would come in useful one day!

Watch out next week for the second part of this fantastic account of Stuart’s journey to producing the Weavers Triangle app.

If you can’t wait for the second part of this instalment to view the app, you can download it now for FREE from Android or itunes .

The Gift that Keeps on Giving

MPA Creative Director Nick Hunt reflects on a five-year milestone for the Singing Ringing Tree…

Don’t time fly!  I hadn’t realised quite how swiftly, until the Christmas card from the Chief Exec of Burnley Council brought it to mind.

The official municipal card was exploiting a suitably seasonal photo of the Tree in its Siberian winter setting, with a pile of presents sketched in around the base.  This playful bit of graffiti might have been tailor-made to offend the impeccably minimalist design sensibilities of its creators, the inspired architect duo Tonkin Liu, but at MPA we are still inclined to be delighted whenever a Panopticon gets a bit of extra exposure.

Reflecting fondly on how often that happens with this particular, much-loved landmark, I suddenly realised that the fifth birthday of the Singing Ringing Tree had slipped past in December without us noticing.  Damn!  We should have been celebrating…

The Singing Ringing Tree was the third of the Panopticons series to be commissioned and built, in a very productive partnership with Burnley Borough Council.  It was unveiled in December 2006, with two coachloads of special guests ferried up to the site and bent nearly double to keep their feet in the face of the howling gales.  Back in the car park at Crown Point, the big executive coaches were rocking side to side as if about to capsize.  But this delicate little landmark survived its crazy launch day, and has not looked back since.

You can catch the wind-buffeted flavour of that day, and the story of the construction of the Tree as a ‘giant Meccano set’ , in Roger Appleton’s film of the project:

http://vimeo.com/13093620

The Panopticons project  was intended to encourage folk to use the landscape on their doorsteps, to discover spectacular new views of Pennine Lancashire, and to explore further the rugged splendours of our area.  More than this, it was designed to create positive images to project out into the wider world, and transform perceptions about our locale.

The Singing Ringing Tree has delivered on all of this, with knobs on.  Burnley Council and people promoting Pennine Lancashire both make fulsome use of this very photogenic icon in all their promotional stuff.  http://www.regeneratepl.co.uk/pennine-lancashire-location/about-the-region/.  Images of the Tree have whizzed around the world.  Millions of YouTube users have viewed viral videos of the Tree and its song.

And this momentum is not slowing down.  In 2011 we’ve had features of the Panopticons on two network TV shows – a lovely feature on Flog It! and another on Country Tracks.  The Tree has featured in audio and image in the Berlin fashion mag Sleek and its covermount CD.  And the new edition of our local OS map – guess what it has on the cover!

This is the gift that keeps on giving.  And what a gift it was.  By happy coincidence, that launch day in December 2006 was also the 80^th birthday of the Tree’s first benefactor, Sir Simon Towneley, who had identified the site, donated use of it, and worked tirelessly to help us locate the extra funds we needed.  He also recruited our second benefactor, his son Peregrine Towneley, whose immensely generous contribution made it possible for us to balance the books and to complete this dream of a project.

So happy 85^th birthday Sir Simon, thanks again Peregrine, and here’s to the next half decade.

http://www.midpenninearts.org.uk/panopticons

More information for planning your visit at:

http://www.visitlancashire.com/things-to-do/search/panopticons-p96590

Latest Commission in the Contemporary Heritage Series

Contemporary Heritage: A new way of seeing

by Claire Morgan

Mid Pennine Arts and Lancashire County Museum Service are delighted to announce the latest Contemporary Heritage commission has been awarded to international sculptor Claire Morgan.

No Match will have its official opening at a free public event on Saturday 18 February 2012 at Helmshore Mills Textile Museum, Rossendale, Lancashire.

Following on from a research residency at Helmshore Mills Textile Museum in October, Claire Morgan will create a six part, site specific, sculptural installation at the museum in January.

Inspired by the mill and her discoveries during the residency, what Claire has found most intriguing is the mill workers fond memories despite the daily hazards they faced. The installation will be suspended in the Devil Hole where man’s attempt to harness natures’ power was realised through intense heat, noise, pressure and sometimes even smoke, fire and blood.

“My idea for No Match came from my fascination with all the complex, repetitive, and really quite aggressive processes that occurred in the Devil Hole.  I wanted to make something that traced the passage of nature through that dark, industrial space, and for me that could mean anything from the cotton, to workers, to fire, or even blood.  The finished installation will hopefully acknowledge these things in an abstract but engaging way.” Claire Morgan

No Match is part of Contemporary Heritage: A new way of seeing, Mid Pennine Arts’ ambitious partnership programme of contemporary art commissions at some of Lancashire’s most colourful and intriguing historic venues.  The commissions, inspired by Lancashire’s heritage, animate each site and offer visitors a rare chance to experience major works of art by artists of national and international standing outside urban areas.

No Match launches at 1pm on Saturday 18 February 2012 at Helmshore Mills Textile Museum, Rossendale, Lancashire, BB4 4NP. FREE EVENT.

No Match is supported by Modern History which is a European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), funded marketing programme which promotes the industrial heritage of the North West in a contemporary and compelling way making it relevant to today’s visitor.