Forms of Circulation Paul Stewart & Sarah Perks

“They wandered in and out of lost worlds…”

Voiceover, Until the End of the World (1991, Wim Wenders)

Developed through workshops, Until The End Of The World is a series of films in relation to a gallery or museum's collection. Collections are a sleeping repository of pasts and presents that, once woken, influence meaning in the future through exhibitions. Whilst they sleep, can we conceive of them dreaming? After all, dreams are atemporal self-reflection spaces, experiencers of deep fantasy, exposers of desires, and portals to process the voices of around us. What if being awake was just to capture data for our dreams? What would the dreams of the a collection look like?

Until the End of the World #1 (MIMA / Middlesbrough Collection)

Developed through workshops, Until the End of the World is a new film commission by Sarah Perks and Paul Stewart for the Working Lives exhibition at MIMA, on show until Sun 29 September. This project invites publics to articulate the dreams of the collection and visualise them using machine learning, with a resulting AI-generated film off

Toon meer

Image © courtesy of artist

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Until the End of the World #2 (Cartwright Hall Art Collection)

Coming soon!

Archives and collections are significant in evidencing practice and activities, telling stories and narratives, and expressing a cultural history. Collections equally express the conditions of historical collecting processes, choices of inclusion and exclusion, and wider social and economic relations. Museums are beginning to take important steps to try to make their collections reflect the diversity and the voices of the people they represent and re-tell narratives. Many museums have legacies rooted in colonialism; their collections from wealthy donors who benefited from empires past.

The title of this project is borrowed from the Wim Wenders film of 1991 that is part road movie, part sci-fi. The latter half takes place in the Australian ‘outback’ with the scientist who has made dreams visible via headsets with emotional results.

Sarah’s research is in relational curatorial strategy, this continues her work on desire and empathy in curatorial practice, alongside interdisciplinary investigations of human and non-human hierarchies. Paul’s research is in educational aesthetics, knowledge exchange and democratic participation, this continues his work on collective assemblies and digital curation. Both have a long-standing history exploring participation, decoloniality and widening access. Filmmaking is also employed as a wider curatorial methodology, each film created from workshop material generated using AI. Our impact is around changing understanding of, activation of, and engagement with collections of all types, from art objects to natural environments. We also explore how AI contributes to decolonial strategies for the museum and heritage sector.

The workshops use a range of techniques including meditation, creative writing, observation exercises, sharing methods and karaoke, they are always bespoke to the group.

The label

The inaugural iteration Until the End of the World (MIMA / Middlesbrough Collection) is a new commission for the exhibition Working Lives at MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art) born from creative workshops there. It envisions the Middlesbrough Collection as a sleeping repository of the past and present. Perks and Stewart used the collection and displays as source material, engaging three groups to imagine the dreams of the collection through creative writing, meditation, observation exercises and karaoke. The resulting material was inputted into ChatGPT to generate as a script and then fed into an AI moving image platform, pictory.ai, which translated it into a sequence of moving images from existing databases and found footage. Accompanied by an electrotonic score using recordings of computational and modem processing sounds, offering an alternative vision of the Middlesbrough Collection.

The script

The script below is a collaboration between the artists, the workshop participants - students from the School of Arts & Creative Industries, MIMA Elders group and invited professionals from Tees Valley based cultural and environmental sectors - and artificial intelligence via ChatGPT and picture.ai

Credits

Until the End of the World (MIMA / Middlesbrough Collection) is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Impact Acceleration Account (IAA), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Sarah Perks and Paul Stewart are curators, artist filmmakers and academics within the School of Arts & Creative Industries at Teesside University.

With thanks to:

All our workshop participants including Bob, Doris, Irene, Marion, Sharon, Sue, Trish, Wendy, and Andrea, Callum, Cassie, Emily, Faith, Robom, Rose, Teddy, and Amy, Caroline, Karen, Katherine, Lauren, Mandy, Millie, Natalie, Oluwaseun, Omagehin, Rachel, Rebecca, Sally, Stephen.

Fellow workshop leaders: Wil Jackson, George Vasey, Danielle Ash

The MIMA team including: Elinor Morgan, Helen Welford, Claire Pounder, Sally Pearson, Kate Moses

Titles sequences designed by North Eastern Works

IAA support: Sally Blackburn-Daniels

School of Arts and Creative Industries and MIMA Research Unit

Teesside University

And our studio assistant Anouk Hoogendoorn anouk@formsofcirculation.com