Rehearsals for the Sensory Score. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
What colour is music? And what does music taste like? BittterSuite attempts to answer these questions by creating immersive classical music performances that utilise all the senses.
It started out when musician Stephanie Singer was passing through Brixton tube station on her way to work, and could hear classical music being piped out of the station’s PA system. When she asked a member of staff, she was told it was to keep the passengers calm.
Singer went away resolved to challenge people’s perceptions of classical music and to make them listen to it more actively.
Her idea was informed by Singer’s fascination for graphic notation and her research into syneasthesia – where two or more of the five senses usually experienced separately are involuntarily joined together. “But it is more about cross-modal perceptions and putting an emphasis on one of our senses at a time in a unified sensory experience,” she explains.
This month, BitterSuite is teaming up with emerging composer Tanya Auclair for a blindfolded and immersive concert at Rich Mix called The Sensory Score. Performers interpret the music and convey it to the audience by stimulating their senses.
There will be bespoke tastes by gourmet chef Adam Thomason, perfumes by Sarah McCartney and a tactile experience choreographed by BitterSuite.
“I felt like a child being cuddled,” says one audience member at BitterSuite’s performance of Debussy’s ‘String Quartet in G’.
For composer Auclair, the idea of letting Singer and the performers have the freedom to interpret her music however they liked “felt like a real gift”.
Blindfolding the audience is essential to the experience says Singer. “Everybody relies on their sight. That is real. But if you take it away it gives you more room to play.”
The blindfolds mean audience members are more likely to let their imaginations free, explains Auclair, as there no visual distractions. It makes them hypersensitive to the all other senses too, including touch, taste and smell.
The relationship between the 30 performers and 30 audience members is very intimate, with each person’s experience different. Singer says that as a performer you can “feel the person straight away and can tailor it accordingly”, building a sense of trust with them.
She recalls being told by one audience member that it was the first time he had been touched like that in seven years.
“He was very emotional,” she says.
The Sensory Score is at Rich Mix, 35–47 Bethnal Green Road, E1 6LA on 31 July richmix.org.uk
Shafi Ahmed, Virtual Surgeon. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
Do you ever feel overwhelmed by technology? If so, you are not alone. However, tablets and smartphones are only the start. With Virtual Reality on the rise, you will soon be immersed in it. Literally.
Without leaving your living room, you’ll be able to travel the world, feel what it is like to live in a refugee camp in Jordan or visit your new flat before it is built and decide on the interior design.
“Virtual Reality first came around 25 years ago, but people’s imaginations heavily outweighed the technology,” says Steve Dann, a digital media specialist who runs the East London Augmented Reality Meet Up Group.
Now technology is catching up with the imagination, and East Londoners are using Virtual Reality in new and diverse ways, from making virtual art galleries to treating brain injuries and training surgeons.
Storytelling
News journalists and documentary makers could soon be telling stories using Virtual Reality, giving those turned off by conventional news coverage a new way to engage.
Hoxton-based Edward Miller, Head of Visuals at Immersiv.ly, is one of the very first to have filmed an immersive news documentary using 360-degree video.
Hong Kong Unrest, about the city’s pro-democracy protests, was filmed using six Go-Pro cameras clustered in a 3D-printed rig around the size of a Rubik’s Cube.
Louis Jebb, CEO of Immersiv.ly, explains that Virtual Reality is “taking the mediation out of media – or reducing the mediation”.
“For a news piece for example, you feel as a viewer that you are the news editor. For an art gallery you feel like you are the art critic,” he says.
With Virtual Reality, spectators need not be passive or static. The format allows them to change viewpoint, and as they physically enter and move in the space with the help of motion trackers, they can interact, participate and comment.
“With that comes a lot of responsibility,” Jebb adds. “When you take someone into the virtual world they’re going from a place of reality into a place of Virtual Reality so you’ve always got to think about how you bring them back. It is a powerful tool.”
Patients’ recovery
Staring at four walls in hospital is nothing if not boring, but doing so whilst recovering from a brain injury is potentially harmful.
“We know that the environment of post-recovery is incredibly important in determining the extent of your recovery,” says Dr Paul Penn, a lecturer in psychology at the University of East London.
Research co-authored by Penn that was published in 2008 demonstrates the benefits of virtual environments in paediatric neuropsychological rehabilitation following traumatic brain injuries.
Penn explains that creating an enriched and stimulating environment in the real world of the hospital is difficult because of health and safety, cost and time implications. “So if we can’t take a person to a real enriched environment why not take an enriched virtual environment to them?” he asks.
Penn’s research finds that improving the quality of a patient’s environment in the recovery stage “will act as a catalyst for the plasticity that occurs in your brain to help you recover from that injury”.
Penn says that since the hardware is now financially accessible “it is crazy we are not using it in a more applied medical, psychological sense”.
For Penn, gaming can be the perfect way to provide auditory, visual and tactile stimulation, and offers the possibility to monitor patients simultaneously, as well as helping patients visualise their own progress.
Virtual Art gallery
Hackney-based American artist Gretchen Andrew, 28, is an early adopter of Google Glass, a form of hands-free wearable technology that she uses to record her work whilst
she paints.
For four months the artist worked with digital media firms on a Virtual Reality replica of the Los Angeles gallery that represents her, and where she had a show earlier this year.
As you put on a Virtual Reality headset it feels like stepping into the physical gallery, but as you approach each individual frame something happens that is specific to the medium of Virtual Reality.
One of the paintings morphs into the photograph that inspired its creation, another frame shows behind the scenes videos of the paintings being made with Andrew speaking to you, providing insight into her world.
“I want to try to create a conversation around how all of this is real,” Andrew says. “By thinking about it in that way it is easier to think about how we exist both physically and digitally. Our Facebook profiles, our lives on emails, all of that is important and real information about who we are.”
A Virtual Reality headset. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
Medical Realities
A year ago, surgeon Shafi Ahmed made history by removing a tumour from the liver and bowel of a patient at the London Royal Hospital whilst live streaming the operation to students using a pair Google Glasses.
“If you pre-record the operation that is okay and a good educational tool, but with live streaming you are watching exactly what is happening from my point of view,” Ahmed says.
As well as the live element, the software being used allows people to type in questions that can be answered in real time by their peers.
There are now three to four live surgeries carried out every month from general surgeries and orthopaedics, to cosmetic surgery and casualties.
Early in 2015, Ahmed co-founded Medical Realities, a group offering medical training products that specialise in Virtual and Augmented Reality.
He says that using Virtual Reality is better practice for students than working with a dead body. “With the interaction, you can create problems… blood loss, for example and if something goes wrong you have to deal with it. It is not just about doing a technical exercise.”
Ahmed estimates Medical Realities is one year away from being able to create an effective Virtual Reality simulation of an operating theatre.
Birth-day snapper Jenny Lewis. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
“Can you stop talking to strangers?” ask six-year-old Herb and eight-year-old Ruby, as their mum Jenny Lewis chats to women at playgroups and playgrounds, reassuring them about their pregnancies. “Don’t worry about it, you’re going to be fine,” she can be heard saying. What struck me when I met Lewis was her positive and contagious energy.
Giving birth is both one of life’s marvels as well as it’s most fundamental experience. Lewis captured this by photographing 150 Hackney women at home with their one-day-young babies within the course of the past five years.
There is something deeply emotive about the 40 portraits published under the title of One Day Young. Each picture is strong individually but it takes the series to realise the similarities between them all. Only then do you notice how Lewis has systematically managed to capture the domestic surroundings of one of the most intimate moments of a woman’s life with true honesty and real intensity.
All of the photographed women seem grounded with a similar inner strength, confidence and selflessness. There is a combination of tenderness and raw intimacy in the relationship photographed. But there is also a much less tangible relationship that filters through: the one the photographer had with her subjects.
In each of the portraits, you can detect the sincerity of a photographer who cares about the women she photographed who are essentially all her “next door neighbours”, living in the same borough and who, in her own words, she finds “fascinating and inspiring”.
The captions that pace the book hint on the depth of the open-hearted discussions Jenny might have had with some of those women, evoking life and death, anxieties and hopes for the future.
One Day Young is published by Hoxton Mini Press. ISBN: 9780957699885 RRP: £12.95
Meredith and Lina, taken from One Day Young. Photograph: Jenny LewisJen and Nora, taken from One Day Young. Photograph: Jenny Lewis
Busker’s paradise at No 14 Bacon Street. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
A couple of Sundays ago, I was on Bacon Street looking for the Vintage Emporium. Outside Des and Lorraine, a genuine East London junk shop, I asked a couple of men the way and was redirected next door. “Ask for Olli,” they said. “You’ll see he is really nice!”. It took me just a few seconds to realise I had stepped into the close-knit heart of East London’s Brick Lane community.
Pushing through the door of this intimate coffee shop, I instantly felt at home. The vintage furniture was harmoniously displayed and the smell of fresh lilies heightened a sense of delicacy as I was welcomed by numerous smiley faces.
On a small stage in the centre of the room was Jess Collins, who co-owns the place with her partner Olli Stanion. She was singing and playing fiddle with another musician, Alastair Caplin. Encircled in thick curtains evoking a baldachin, the look and location of the stage was a give away. “This place is a kingdom for musicians,” I thought to myself.
Bacon Street blues. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
Over a month ago the Vintage Emporium was renamed No 14 Bacon Street as Jess and Olli just managed to obtain a two-year lease extension from their new owner, the Truman Brewery.
Fiddle player Caplin is already part of the furniture, programming sessions of acoustic folk, jazz, swing and old time bluegrass music.
He explained: “The biggest change of the rebranding is the glass of wine appearing behind the bar so anyone can come with a bottle, pay the £3 corkage fee and listen to music.”
String ensemble at No 14 Bacon Street. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
All afternoon, musicians kept on entering a venue that was already packed. “They are all buskers from Columbia Road market and come here to play for fun and to enjoy the tea and cakes provided by Jess and Olli,” I was told later. “Between 15 to 20 musicians can turn up in one afternoon; this is the closest thing to community I have ever felt in London,” insisted Caplin.
Before I knew it daylight had long gone and people started dancing in the remaining free corners of the room, their faces illuminated by candlelights evoking paintings from the chiaroscuro period. Whilst I was taking pictures, I started daydreaming about how Caravaggio or Rembrandt would have depicted the scene, as a musician started playing harp, accompanying me as if by magic in my travels back in time.
If you don’t know the area, walking down Cable Street at night might feel like stepping into a no man’s land. You’ll soon realise though that behind the seemingly derelict factories lies a strong artistic community.
Cable Studios is an example. Situated in what used to be a sweet factory that was hit by a bomb during the Blitz, the building turned into a centre for small businesses and artists as early as the 1970s. Numerous squatters took over and the corridors of the factory were filled with the smell of fresh paint and turpentine.
Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
By the early 1990s, loud music replaced the smell of paint, as ravers turned the area into one of the most decadent parts of London. By 2000, musicians were setting up recording studios and rehearsal spaces in Cable Studios.
Like many before, Rena Beck and her partner Alastair Clark moved to Cable Studios to find cheap accommodation whilst trying to make a living from their art.
In 2007, a room in the courtyard of what used to be the factory’s canteen and then a prop making company became available. They rented it and opened the space twice a week for open mic and jam nights. Jamboree was born.
Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
With no heating in the main building, a local band started using Jamboree as an open rehearsal space. The musicians would busk at Limehouse station to attract audience members. Other musicians joined in and since then the dance floor is packed more often than not. Jamboree is now open seven nights a week.
Most likely a remnant of Beck and Clark’s time as squatters, there often is a bohemian feel to Jamboree. The music is eclectic, ranging from French musette to Americana, bluegrass or rock. Gypsy is at the heart of this world music venue, with many Klezmer bands and Eastern-European style nights.
Beck goes through a very particular selection process to choose artists from the 10– 30 emails she receives each day. She doesn’t listen to recordings but instead watches the artists perform on YouTube. “For me the quality of the musicians is one factor. Another one is the musicianship they have, their energy and charisma on stage. I always say they are a great band if they make the audience want to be a musician as well.”
Street life: Kaffa Coffee on Gillett Square. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
The original coffee drinkers hailed from the Ethiopian province of Kaffa.
According to legend, it was there in the ninth century that a goatherd experienced something of a Eureka moment when his goats started behaving excitedly after munching on some bright red berries.
On his wife’s suggestion he took the berries to a monastery, where they were renounced as the devil’s work and thrown into the fire. The rich aroma of the beans filled the monastery, and led the monks to investigate further.
Fortunately, it is not necessary to travel quite so far to sample authentic Ethiopian coffee. Kaffa Coffee is located in Dalston. It uses beans grown on a plantation in the Kaffa province and roasted on site in Gillett Square.
Full of beans: Kaffa Coffee roasts its own beans on site. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
The plantation and business are owned by Markos Yared, who founded Kaffa Coffee in 2004. The original Kaffa Coffee was a stall in Camden. Four years later, Yared moved into new premises.
His signature coffee isn’t cappuccino, latte nor macchiato but a black, strong, rich coffee served in a small espresso cup with an Ethiopian flag.
Strength in depth: Kaffa’s signature blend. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
Kaffa is very much a family-owned business, and Yared’s wife Haile serves homemade injera and wat, typical Ethiopian cuisine, every Thursday and Friday.
A few outdoor tables are available to sit and chat and staying outside this laid back and unpretentious coffee place makes you feel local to the square.
With the shop open till late, Yared also enjoys sharing his taste for Ethiopian jazz, reggae and blues, turning Kaffa and Gillett Square into a very lively and vibrant place to be.
Kaffa Coffee serves probably one of the best Ethiopian coffees in town. Its coffee is strong, and so is its fan base.
Iwan Baan, Torre David #2 2011. Image courtesy of the artist and Perry Rubenstein Gallery, Los Angeles
The Constructing Worlds exhibition at the Barbican challenges perceptions and understandings of the built modern world we live in today.
It brings together 18 photographers from the 1930s to the present day, each with a unique approach towards photographing architecture.
The chronological journey begins with Berenice Abbott’s documentation of New York and the construction of the iconic Rockefeller Center in 1932, a time of economic, political and social uncertainty.
Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, American photographer Walker Evans escapes from New York to capture rural America in a straightforward yet intimate way.
He looks at “the ones who have been the most severely affected, but is elevating the everyday and the vernacular”, explains Alona Pardo, co-curator of the exhibition.
Chongqing IV (Sunday Picnic), Chongqing Municipality, 2006. Photograph courtesy of Nadav Kander and Flowers Gallery
The photographs reflect global, international, social and political issues, says Pardo, as we move from the upper to the lower gallery. “Location and geography have changed, but you get the same issues being brought up about living conditions, urban density and rapid migration in Latin America, China and the Middle East.”
Ecological and environmental issues are also raised. Bas Princen’s image of ‘Cairo’s Garbage City’, shot in 2011, is a captivating panorama depicting residents stashing the Egyptian capital’s garbage in their own roof terrace.
Nadav Kander takes us to China depicting fisherman perching in front of a half-completed bridge on the banks of the Yangtze River. The atmospheric pale yellowy mist of pollution suggests the impact of rapid industrialisation on the community in an almost poetic way.
Designed by the Belgium architectural practice Office KGDVS, the overall scenography of the exhibition manages the balancing act of presenting the work of the 18 different photographers in a very consistent and convincing way.
The exhibition brings it home how much of our visual vocabulary originates from the past 80 years and how it has been refined by the construction of contemporary cityscapes.
It may help to step back from the global issues raised to gain a clearer perspective of the photography as a whole. At other times though, more confined spaces force us into engaging intimately with the issues, such as with Hiroshi Sugimoto’s poignant blurred photograph of the World Trade Center, or Hélène Binet’s more psychological and lyrical work of the Berlin Jewish Museum – two images that will compel the viewer to silence.
Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Age is at Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS until 11 January
Clinton Road, London 1997. Photograph: Thomas Struth
Jade Sempare, 31, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of 13
Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
Gardening tools
I have set up my own gardening project in Canning Town Caravanserai. I want to help people have a more simple life through gardening. I spoke to the participants about growing plants and challenging them about how it makes them feel, knowing that when you see something grow it builds your self esteem.
Photograph: Eléonore de Bonneval
John Waterhouse, 77, was diagnosed with blood cancer in January 2013
Photograph: Eléonore de Bonneval
A special photograph
I was born at the wrong time – 1937. I don’t remember seeing my father until I was eight years of age. It wasn’t a normal upbringing because my mother was in hospital. She had TB. She died at 32. I was nine. When my Dad came back he was like a stranger because I had not seen him at all really. I remember he came in, he gave us a little jar of sweets and went down the pub. I still remember that day. I didn’t know what sweets was in those days – everything was rationed.
Photograph: Eléonore de Bonneval
Viviane Fatimani, 29, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in December 2009
Photograph: Eléonore de Bonneval
A song written for me
My boyfriend wrote me a song when I was on my gap year. It is the best present I ever got. We went to see him play in a bar and he played this song to me. Everyone was like ‘Oh my goodness!’ I said: ‘It is a song about friendship – you don’t understand it, he understands me! I understand him too, this is a friendship song.’ But really, I was in denial about our relationship. I met with my boyfriend before I got diagnosed with MS. He is really supportive, very understanding.
Photograph: Eléonore de Bonneval
Everlasting Lives by Eléonore de Bonneval is at St Joseph’s Hospice, Mare Street, E8 4SA until 16 January.
No need to consider taking the Eurostar any longer to go to a bistro-type restaurant in Paris. There is one right up your street, though it took me a year to find it!
Located at the crossroads of bohemian Stokey and hipster Dalston, Oui Madame is owned by Jérôme Pigeon and Rosane Mazzer, the once married Franco-Brazilian couple who founded the Favela Chic restaurants in Paris and London.
On arrival, we found our bearings with a couple of Oui Madame Cocktails, made from gin, elderflower, lemon, grenadine and raspberries. To complement the creamy texture and frothy top (the result of the egg white) Pigeon sprayed them with absinthe using a vintage bulb spray bottle. They smelt a treat and had a really nice kick to them.
The steak tartare we had for starters was a cute-looking dish, displayed as four raw canapés on a plate. We indulged ourselves with the four corresponding eggs yolk, but were disappointed by the foie gras which looked and tasted more like a terrine.
Being meat lovers, we both had the steak cooked medium rare to perfection. It came with a gratin dauphinois, which for me was lack-lustre (I am a fierce critic of the dauphinois since no one could possibly beat my mum’s recipe!) though my dining partner had no qualms with it.
Other than food, art is what brought Pigeon and Mazzer to Hackney. The restaurant hosts live performances in basement space ‘La Culotte’ (‘The Knickers’) on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
It’s a chilled atmosphere in the restaurant before 9pm and fairly revelrous afterwards. With artists and performers invited to test their shows in front of an audience, I for one can’t wait to enjoy some of the fun and unique nights to come… oh que oui!
WickED ways: Anna Freeman Bentley with her paintings at Hackney WickED 2014. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
The first time I went to Hackney Wick was for a party in the autumn of 2009. It was late, it was dark and I was by myself. I felt anxious walking by the A12 among isolated warehouses to reach Fish Island. Back then the area was referred to as ‘the desolation on the edge of the East End’ for good reason.
But on reaching the party, I soon realised I had stepped into the life of a vibrant community of artists, who lived and worked in warehouses, and maximised their potential by creating, experimenting and collaborating with each other. Performances were raw and challenging.
This is a side of Hackney Wick many visitors at this month’s Hackney WickED festival might never have seen or heard about. The weather was glorious with uninterrupted sunshine and the vibe on the streets very relaxed. Parents showed up with their kids, people walked their well-behaved dogs while revellers tucked into offerings from innumerable street food vendors.
Of course, the festival is all about art, and visitors embraced this by visiting artists’ open studios. Heading for a beer at the Crate Brewery in The White Building, you might have come across Gretchen Andrew, wearing a light blue Google Glass. The contemporary painter was showcasing work she has been producing during her three months’ residency at Space Studios using Google Glass to “record the creative process and translate the physicality of it to my viewers”.
It was curious to see how many artists were influenced by their family trades. Jewellery maker Clarice Price Thomas’ father was a clockmaker. As a child, she looked on with wonder at clocks’ mechanisms and is now combining traditional clock making techniques and machinery in an innovative take on jewellery design.
Anna Freeman Bentley’s dad was a civil engineer. “I grew up looking at structures and building sites” she explains, which feeds into her paintings. She is currently looking at Hackney, how the area is changing and the impact of gentrification on the physical environment.
Over two days of exploring the festival, I was surprised to see that beyond official studios, few alternative work/live spaces opened their doors to the public. In almost a voyeuristic way, I missed stepping inside artists’ living rooms and bedrooms and being able to confront the honesty of their art within the intimate context of a home setting.
It meant that the festival lacked the thought-provoking, authentic experiences that I, for one, had come for. At the same time, people were willing to shell out £25 on the door of a warehouse to get into the Tuckshop Summer Carnival on Wallis Road.
As, privately, artists complained to me of having to leave their studios next year due to regeneration plans, I gained a sense of how sanitised the Wick could become.
