Note: This project is no longer active.
Return to Ritherdon Overview
Before I describe what 'Eyes and Ears' and 'Return to Ritherdon' are,
I though it would be best to give you some extra context surrounding
it.
'Return to Ritherdon' was an arts-based two year residency, funded by Arts
Council England. Nicola Ellis devised the residency alongside Ritherdon &
Company Ltd. and Castlefied Gallery. Ritherdon is a manufacturer of metal
enclosures and based in Darwen, Lancashire, U.K., Castlefied is an art gallery
in Manchester, U.K. and Ellis is an artist. She is, also, based in
Manchester. Use the links below for more information on those listed above:
Note: The residency has finished and the information of this page is more for
archive purposes than anything else.
Eyes and Ears and 'Personal Flash in Real-Time' Artworks
Eyes and Ears is a dashboard program for monitoring the state of the 'Personal
Flash in Real-Time' series of artworks. The artworks were part of the 'No Gaps
in the Line' exhibition (2021), hosted in Castlefied Gallery. Each piece in the
series was responsible for detecting when a member of staff in Ritherdon
(factory) was welding and relaying that information to Castlefied (gallery) by
turning a set of lights on and off. If someone was welding, the lights would
turn on and vice-versa if no-one was welding.
How the dashboard looked when all the devices were off.
If you would like to know more about how I the 'Personal Flash in Real-Time'
artworks were made, or more about the exhibition itself, please the following
links:
I wrote Eyes and Ears in C# and is a UWP application so it only works on Window
10 or above. It's intended use was for it run on a Windows 10 tablet off to the
side -- allowing people to glance at it throughout the day to make sure it was
the whole system was working. I, also, gave it some text-to-speech tricks so
people in earshot could hear when a device powered up or down for the day -- or
an error occurred. If you would like to see the code and documentation for this
project, please use the links below,
Links Collection
Below is a list of all the links dotted throughout this page: