Laura's visuals from the Women's Network East London Talkaoke
Instant Visualisations are a regular enhancement to our events is an expert lightning visualiser who creates nearly instant images to capture the current ideas within the conversation. These are displayed on a screen during the event. This provides an often humorous visual representation of the discussion, and stimulates further collective thinking. We have found them to be very useful as a way of giving coherence to the conversation and as a form of feedback. People really feel as if they have been listened to. They also a provide a history of the flow and progression of the conversation. The images can be created through photo editing software or hand drawn.
We first used a live visualiser at our performance of “Who Wants to Be…?” at the Albany Theatre in 2007. The idea was developed with Zsolt Balogh, who has since gone on to make visuals and 3D video installations for a number of productions at The National Theatre, exhibitions at the V&A museum, the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, and most recently was the lead artist for the visuals at the Opening of Hull City of Culture 2017. He still is an active member of The People Speak and enjoys the added creative spontaneity required for our projects!
These days the bulk of our instant visuals are made by Rick. He has learnt from Zsolt to the point where his Wacom pen is even sharper!
Last year we began working with the incredibly visually witty Cat Faulkner who is an illustrator from the old pen and paper school. She has proved to us that you don’t always need the latest technology to respond visually to a conversation!
Some of Rick’s Visuals on Flickr
Some of Zsolt’s Visuals on Flickr
Laura's visuals from Destination Bradford Talkaoke
Rick's visuals from Talkaoke at Stratford Shopping Centre
Rick's visuals during Talkaoke: Monarch of the Glen at Scottish National Gallery
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The Slice is Right
The Slice is Right is a generative game show that has emerged from many years of practice in exploring the how collective imagination informs our structures of group decision making. It stems from a desire to escape the political theory textbooks and practically compare and experience different methods of decision making and their implications in a fun way. Like many of our other projects its roots were in working with children with learning differences. We formulated a project called “Rate Your Cake” which encouraged kids to work together and consider each others’ wishes when ordering a cake.
We wanted to combine this question of making something together when people have diverse and possibly incompatible needs with a way of experimenting with the protocols for making decisions which affect others. We were asked by Pat Kane, curator of Futurefest to come with something about the future of politics. The Slice is Right uses group Pizza making as a laboratory for testing different political set ups and inventing new ones!