Supporting life through art: The world of Fermynwoods Contemporary Art
James Steventon, Director of Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, explains the drive behind the organisation’s current online exhibition, what you’ll be able to explore and some of the other important work they carry out.
We are an arts organisation and educational charity. Our mission is that we support life through art.
We do this by commissioning artists to engage with audiences in public spaces across Northamptonshire and online.
We're currently project-funded, typically working to a two-year thematic cycle.
We've been around for 25 years so it's a proven model that works well.
Xylophobia
Our current programme is called Xylophobia, which takes its name from the fear of wooden objects, forests, or wooded areas, and is sometimes connected to other phobias. This is interesting for us because so much of our physical work takes place in the woods. In addition to exhibitions in public spaces, such as Barnwell Country Park last year and Brixworth Country Park this summer, we've launched an online exhibition.
Xylophobia: Online consists of a series of digitally-based works that respond to the increased needs and fears of outdoor spaces and activities in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, to connect people with each other and with nature while explorative and mindful of the environmental impact of creating artworks using digital technology. We try to work with a national and international remit of artists and when we work online, it's really easy to do that.
After putting a call out for artists, we had submissions from all over the world. We chose artists from as far afield as Los Angeles, but also from as nearby as Kettering, each selected by the quality of the proposal.
We're using a carbon calculator tool called The Networked Condition to help measure, plan and evaluate the carbon footprint of working online. That's not necessarily to make a judgement, it's more to be aware of the data - and knowing the footprint will help the artists shape their work.
I'll give you a couple of examples of work produced for the exhibition.
One piece will be a film-based work which will probably only be available during local daylight hours. The artist's view was: why should a server be available 24/7? Small considerations like that can dramatically reduce our footprint but also pose thought provoking questions about how we live. We're not suggesting we stop commissioning digital work, but it's interesting to explore how we can consider the environmental impact of what we do, how we can improve on that and how this challenge can lead to new and exciting work.
Two artists from LA have created a really quirky artwork - something they describe as a speculative Graphics Processing Unit that exists outside of computers. It's a lasercut, wooden pyramid and each panel on the pyramid is etched with code.
They've scraped code from various places - so the more code, the bigger the pyramid. All that code takes up space and uses power to execute.
The largest pyramid displays code scraped from ChatGPT, which lots of us have been using for different purposes, but this artwork questions what the subsequent cost is for the environment.
With this work executing code via heating up GPU chips becomes a visceral experience of burning wood with a hard limit on the powerful Machine Learning models involved. The kit can only run (be burned) once, suggesting how our use of powerful and expensive AI models should be carefully considered.
Our other work
We work in many different public spaces but we also have a regular podcast which we launched in 2020, partly as a way of reaching people during lockdown. Currently in the top 25% most shared podcasts worldwide, I like to think of it now as a virtual gallery space where we test the potential of this platform for sharing art. As well as audio content, there's a new Spotify function for podcasts that allows video. We currently use that to augment the audio content using wonderful contributions from artist Sapphire Goss.
We also work with two regular groups of children. One is called The CE Academy, who we've worked with for over 15 years, which is made up of children excluded from mainstream school and dual registered. There's also our Hospital Outreach programme, where we work with children who are too mentally or physically ill to go to school.
We say that we're led by artistic practice. Artists are always researching and developing their own work so rather than getting an artist to come in and do something vaguely creative, we ask them to do something related to what they're already working on. For example, Stuart Moore, an artist who works with us as an Education Co-ordinator with a real digital slant, is currently doing a part-time MA in Artificial Intelligence. So he brings that learning to workshops and he's incredibly good at making complex things accessible and fun.
NFTs
In the art world, NFTs are a phenomenon, but I think it's a ridiculous phenomenon! I liked their original intention as another means to pay artists but it's morphed into this seemingly pointless thing with a terrible carbon footprint because the Blockchain technology that underpins it is often resource-heavy.
So ahead of the online exhibition, Stuart and I wanted to address NFTs in a workshop with schools. How we work together is often I ask him to think about something, he comes back with a ridiculous (and brilliant) idea and then I get excited about it. I'll try to explain this one to you.
I asked Stuart whether he could do something that used the processing power of a school maths class to process and validate the NFT proof of work, rather than using an environmentally and energy expensive algorithm.
This is what he came back with.
Imagine a machine like the Enigma Machine with lots of cogs producing different numbers.
But instead of cogs, you have refracted light. So different combinations of numbers will produce different patterns of light. That's essentially what Stuart is creating for pupils to explore.
There are lots of outcomes for the pupils with that project. It will be an engaging introduction to the online exhibition. They will learn a little more about NFTs, perhaps questioning the sense in trying to own a digital entity through an environmentally damaging process.
They’ll also see the value in collective ownership and collaboration - but it's also an introduction to some pretty complex maths, explained in a simple way. I think it'll be really good.
The range of things we do really energises me. We don't often do the same thing twice. That can be a hard sell because we might get asked to repeat something - but by then we'll have moved on. You have to keep a bit of a lid on the chaos. Creativity without boundaries is just a mess, but if you're too restrictive it's not fun. If I'm energised and excited by something, I know others will be too.
Want to know more?
Explore Xylophobia: Online.