Ed Compson

Ánemos: Turbines 2030

Ed Compson + Arieh Frosh in collaboration with Bounds Green School

Ánemos: Turbines 2030

8 March – 6 May 2021 | Domino Houses Billboard, Bounds Green Road, N22 8YB

From January 2021, an anemometer — a device that reads wind speed — was placed on top of the Cypher BILLBOARD poster site and split into eight discrete wind speed ‘sets’, giving a continuous, categorisable data stream of wind speed. This curious appendage is a research tool that has informed the development of ‘Ánemos: Turbines 2030’, a new body of work as part of the 2021 programme. Working together in a remote collaboration with Year 4 students from locally-based Bounds Green School, artists Arieh Frosh and Ed Compson have developed a new billboard poster artwork and a corresponding audio segment that question how the wind can be captured, represented, and wildly interpreted.

Arieh is a Haringey-based visual artist whose recent research interests look at how technology, myth-making and ecological thinking can produce fictions that question local contemporary conditions, and could form generative alternatives. Ed is an artist, facilitator and programmer whose work considers how care, craft and intimacy can exist within both virtual and natural systems and digital environments. Both of their practices directly inform this collaborative body of work.

Over two video recorded workshop briefs, Ed and Arieh introduced students to ideas of wind turbines, green energy, the personification of wind in art and mythology and the transformation of data into sound.

Students were first invited to design a wind turbine of their own, which mixed functional design from contemporary wind turbines (such as the use of rotating blades) with imagined or representational ideas. Five of these initial sketches and collages were then visualised using 3D computer modelling and animation software. The artists attempted to stay as close to the proposed designs as possible in the creation of the turbine shapes, whilst interpreting their materials and colours. The billboard image is a collection of these turbines operating in an open landscape; a fantastical imagining of the harnessing of future winds.

Students were then asked to record sounds representing winds of varying strengths. These audio recordings will be used to generate a sound piece dictated by real wind data collected from the local environment, for broadcast on North London community radio station Threads in April 2021.

https://www.cypherbillboard.com/edcompson-ariehfrosh