DIGITAL RESIDENCY | ELLIE TOWERS

ELLIE TOWERS

Ellie Towers’ practice interweaves autobiographical and fictional encounters into digital and physical psycho-geographies that warp the visual and social expectations of landscapes.

Reece Griffiths joins Ellie for the first three releases. Reece manipulates digital space to construct interactive and potentially community building landscapes.

RELEASE #1

AN OVERVIEW OF WORKS 2020 - 2021

Words by Reece Griffiths and Ellie Towers: To celebrate the first art release we have, using some content we have shared recently via Instagram, made a video work in a voice-over podcast style that provides an overview of our past works and our time working as a duo over the last few years. We thought this would be a solid baseline piece that would give our future content a more comprehensive context, and provide a better understanding of future uploads.

Here, we are providing an exclusive first view of our pamphlet developed to showcase our recent (19th Nov 21 – 3rd Dec 21) exhibition at Convenience Gallery as part of the In Cahoots programme, ‘Floor Plan’. We would love some feedback on the booklet as we still have some time to develop it, and hope our chatting gives you a better insight into the work itself!

After building the work in Blender to be translated into an IRL installation environment, we realized we had never actually combined the individually constructed elements into a more comprehensive visual version of what the space would look like in digital 3D, – we decided to pull this together to make a visual that we could gift to you guys to essentially use as digital posters.

RELEASE #2

FLOOR PLAN SOUNDTRACK

To accompany Release #2, Reese has written an article (first draft) here with the aim of questioning what the purpose of art practices are and what they can do in ways of supporting liberation, solidarity and emancipation. Also included in the release is a second draft with annotations by Ellie which can be read here

RELEASE #3

Words by Ellie: After completing the sculpting & painting of my CD case model, this month I have used the design as a way to begin expanding my own knowledge of Blender and other 3D softwares as an individual, away from working within a duo. Using a mix of digital sculpting, extrusion & photogrammetry to create the work in three dimensions, I eventually placed my design into a CD Case template & experimented with some lighting and simple animation techniques.

RELEASE #4

AS YOU PLEASE

RELEASE #5

Words by Ellie: Release 5 is an ‘Extra’ style video I’ve made especially for this upload in which I have fed pieces of the narrative of ‘New Bed Making Progress’, my latest work, to AI, in order to generate new visuals of the park that is imagined in my work for Convenience Gallery & commissioned for Birkhead Parks 175th Birthday. Continuing on a sense of the wider narrative present in the work that was on display, this additional footnote considers aftermath & incorporates new & increasingly popularised ways that visuals can be created from fiction.

RELEASE #6

Words by Ellie: This month I have been creating an audio work (alongside Joe Goff) to accompany my piece, New Bed Making Progress. As the installation was previously shown in an IRL exhibition held by Convenience Gallery in Birkenhead Park’s Visitors Center, the other works in the space – and the sounds from the park outside – created enough audible stimulation without a soundtrack. However, since the work has shifted to online only viewing, I wanted to create a piece of music that was built up from samples taken from the park, making this release the first complete version of this video piece. As well as this, I have produced an audio track visualizer, which is a unique audio/visual work made for the residency.

RELEASE #7

Words by Ellie: Expanding on a previous release where I used AI to attempt to use words to retroactively re-produce a scene I had previously created – this month takes actual images of my works and expands them using the same software, depicting any number of different routes I could have taken to create my works and actualizing alternate visuals.