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Describing themselves as a “support group for those too obsessed by technology,” The Curiosity Collective grew out of the nearby BT research labs, where founding members David Chatting and Cefn Hoile both work. maddog visited them at their house-cum-workshop on Christchurch Street where they immediately surround themselves with an intricate debris of half soldered circuit boards, laptops, arcane looking components and cups of tea. Cefn explains: “Dave and I were invited by BT to go to MIT, so we were planted in Boston where you see organisations like The Collision Collective, who were doing a day job as technology researchers at MIT and spending their weekends conjuring stuff to impress their mates. We were determined to inject some of that same spirit we saw in Boston back here. A lot of what Curiosity means to me is using the same skills that you’d use at work, but applying them for no profit or obvious purpose.” Oscar Wilde, who once famously said that “all art is quite useless”, would undoubtedly approve. The group may have emerged from an environment of hard technological research and computer coding, but its member base is now expanding to include people with all kinds of skills and backgrounds, undermining the stereotype of technology solely being associated with anti-social geeks. “I mean we have girls involved now it’s amazing, I mean they’re real.” Cefn jokes whilst pointing to Anne-Laure, who is attempting to film the chaos in the room for a documentary she is making on the project. Amidst the air of good humour I can’t resist asking: what’s your stance on health and safety? “Yes peoples’ health and safety is good,” David says with faux awkwardness. “At public shows, obviously, it’s much more important.” At this point Cefn, who is clambering around on the floor, bumps his head on the table, with typically perfect comic timing. The Curiosity Collective is far from some stuffy clique; instead it is a very tight social group who radiate fun. David is very clear on this point: “It’s quite important, I think, to keep things quite informal because if it becomes stressful and demanding as work, then what’s the point?” As if to demonstrate this Cefn, who reminds me of legendary 1980s tinker MacGyver, whips out a zoetrope he has made out of a cut up 35mm film canister. “I’m using an obsolete film technology to recreate an even more obsolete film technology,” he explains enthusiastically. It’s this playful, unserious approach to their material that makes the group so charming and accessible. “I think we lose a lot of that childhood tinkering,” says David. “This idea that everyone can get involved in creating art. I think its something that society encourages you to lose, so I guess it’s a counter to that.” The Collective currently meet fortnightly at McGintys, where they have been commissioned to create a funky interactive display in the pub’s window space – so watch this space (literally). The collective is always on the lookout for new members who feel they can bring something to the group, but David is particularly keen to bridge another gap and invite people with more traditional craft skills into the group. Visit the Curiosity Collective at www.curiositycollective.org and if you’re interested in getting involved drop them a line!
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Catch The Proverbs show Friday 26th to Sunday 28th June in The Electric House, Ipswich Words > Dean Bowman |
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The Collective have recently returned from a successful exhibition at Newcastle’s Makers Faire, the first such event to be held in the UK by the American Make magazine. According to Cefn, they had “been invited to go and fill a bunch of space with ridiculous constructions.” Newcastle was the group’s fifth public showing over a course of 4 years, but the first one to have such a coherent theme. Tom Juby explains that “the proverbs idea is a good way for people to ‘get it’. Often we’ll build something and people would ask ‘what’s the point?’ But with proverbs everyone kind of has their own mythology that goes with each piece, so they don’t question it as much.” Here are a few of their creations… 
Tom Juby: “Jon Sutton came up with an amusing idea to make a video installation based on the Proverb A Watched Pot Never Boils. Eventually this snowballed into a whole series of proverbs, the origins of this show. For some reason we took on the challenge of making a real, physical kettle boil when you look at it. But how do you make a kettle boil or stop boiling instantly? Also there was a safety issue with hot water. So we had to fake the steam. I found these little ultra-sonic misters that you can get in novelty shops that give a dry ice effect and built an elaborate pressure system that pushed the steam out of the kettle. Then we needed to make the noise. John Bowers, another member of the group who is a professor at Goldsmiths, is really into sound synthesis... So it ended up being a really over-engineered project.”
Tom Juby: “With Cefn’s grass is greener, he turned up at the pub one day with a piece of turf that he’d actually cut out from his garden that was 5 inches thick and still wet from rain. It had two knitting needles stuck in it holding a piece of green Perspex, so the grass on the other side of it would seem greener. But that’s silly because its obvious how it works. Then we realised that you can find a piece of Astroturf and, using a comb, you can spray just one side of the grass. So it’s a very simple idea.” When I asked Cefn what his modus operandi was for this he just told me it was “because I am lazy.”
Alex Healing: “We wanted to do a few proverbs with medicinal connotations like ‘time is a great healer’ ‘an apple a day…’ and ‘laughter is the best medicine’. So we were wondering how we could combine those things into some kind of character that people could interact with. My background is in robotics, so we started to think about what kind of sensors we could use so that when, for instance, you put an apple on the table how can you detect that. The thing we’re using now is a radio frequency tag. So each jar has a unique ID and that’s what the software detects, creating a reaction through lights, sound and movement. A motor turns the head changing the face through various states.. I didn’t want to involve a computer. I wanted to do it at the level of the circuit board, built from scratch.”
