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A night at the Museum

Friday 28 June 6.30-9.30pm
Victoria and Albert Museum, Cromwell Rd, SW7

The Dalston Eastern Curve Garden will be ‘taking over’ a corner of the Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington this Friday evening. We are joining other organisations and individuals from the neighbourhood to share Dalston’s creative energy and vibe with West London, for the Museum’s ‘Friday Late – Dalston Takeover’

We will be taking up residence in the Museum’s formal ‘John Madjeski Garden and Courtyard’, with beanbags and seating from the Garden helping make V&A visitors welcome ‘Dalston style’.

Visitors will be able to enjoy all the lovely handmade objects created in design workshops at the Garden by children and adults from Hackney. Our ‘artworks’ will include crazy scarecrows made by children for the ‘Dalston Children’s Festival’ launch, breezeblock ‘gargoyles’ made in stone-carving workshops, giant paper pompom ‘flowers’ made in workshops led by Dalston resident Tina Butschbacher, and hand-painted recycled juice carton bird-feeders made by children from Holy Trinity School.

Since the essence of our installation is the artworks that have been inspired by the Garden and its surroundings, we will be offering a lantern making session to visitors, led by Dalston artist-maker Laura Halliwell, based on our ‘Festival of Light’ workshops. V&A visitors can take their inspiration from botanical designs and patterns from the Museum’s collections to create their own ‘jam-jar lanterns which will then be taken back to the Garden for evening events this summer.

Please come and join us for our night at the Museum!

Hortus for LIFT

Monday 17 – Saturday 22 June, 11am-6pm

An interactive audio installation, using algorithms from the financial market to process data from the horticultural environment into a sonic landscape depicting our place in the natural world.

Hortus proposes an artificial ecology. The visitor is invited to explore the garden where a sensor network measures the dynamics of wind and light harvested by plants during their photosynthetic process, and translating it into bird sounds. When there is human movement in the garden a financial algorithm (similar to the ones used in a speculation economic market) interprets the variation of the received data and transforms and remaps the natural garden soundscape to which plants seem most profitable in that split second.

But when the visitors decide to stop, to read or to reflect, the original sound design for the garden returns, reflecting only the readings of natural energy.

Simultaneously, a network of micro stories circulates in a loop on electronic paper botanic displays, comparing definitions of common terms in the economic, political, or natural worlds such as growth, beauty, regeneration or time.

Presented by LIFT in association with Artsadmin as part of Two Degrees festival.

Hortus is a HOUSE on FIRE co-production. HOUSE on FIRE is supported by the EU Culture Programme