Social experiments (2017, 2018) [multi-component output with contextualising information]
- Submitting institution
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Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 3351
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Spode Factory (British Ceramics Biennial), Stoke-on-Trent, England & The Tetley, Leeds, England.
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first exhibition
- -
- Year of first exhibition
- 2017
- URL
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https://doi.org/10.17870/bathspa.c.5198330
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Rooted in history and place, Social Experiments brings together 2 projects, Material Environments: Bad Shit and Knowledge is Power: 6 Towns, to research the means and capacity for material and socio-political transformation through live scientific experimentation.
It asks:
1.How might the idea of libraries as empowering repositories of knowledge, be harnessed and communicated through a collective act of making, to create a catalyst for regenerative socio-political change?
2. How might scientific and engineering processes be manipulated and developed, in response to the industrial heritage and former social hierarchies of a site, to operate simultaneously as installation, laboratory and social critique?
3. Can audience participation in volatile and unpredictable acts of material transformation initiate new ways of thinking and offer fresh perspectives on societal systems?
Basing Knowledge is Power: 6 Towns 2017 on Stoke-On-Trent Libraries’ 6 Towns Collection of local history books Harrison worked collectively with the local community at the former Spode ceramics factory to make a complete set of replica clay books housed in 6 adapted library shelving units. The clay volumes were fired daily in accordance with library lending figures, to unpredictable effect - a ceramic production process destabilised through technological intervention, reflecting the potential for transformation through access to
knowledge.
Commissioned for Material Environments at The Tetley, Bad Shit 2018, spanned 2 office spaces of the former brewery, responding to the site’s industrial heritage and former social hierarchies. Through live experimentation with fermentation processes Harrison activated an erratic production of CO2 to inflate and deflate a giant red balloon, accompanied by an adapted Asteroids video as an evocation of the unpredictable alchemical circulation.
Social Experiments enabled Harrison to test the limits of ceramics practice and extend his interventionist approach to investigate the mutability of other materials through creative and destructive processes, to suggest potential for regenerative change.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
