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Theremin: an instrument that is not touched, but demands the body - exploring expanded physicality, ethereal gesture, and theatrical direction for empowering ensemble improvisation
No full textDr. Jessica Argo plays the Moog Theremini, a gesture-controlled synthesiser. This is a mutation of the monophonic theremin invented in 1920 (a by-product of Leon Theremin’s attempts to build a device to detect changes in air density, a poison gas alarm), an electronic instrument that the player does not touch; rather its antennas generate an electromagnetic field for the player to dance through.
The theremin was first popularised in concert halls by injured violinist Clara Rockmore (who turned to this instrument for its more inclusive affordances), recently techno-feminised by Dorit Chrysler in her site-specific surrealist film at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (she also devised an installation where the limbs of Alexander Calder’s mobiles performed her Moog Theremini), and again returned to concert halls by Carolina Eyck.
The theremin has a history of ethereal, magic (witchiness), femininity, balletic, corporeal gestures (the Moog Theremini instructions guide the player to move their hands as slightly as a butterfly’s wings!) which can be subverted by punk performers like Skin from Skunk Anansie, who at Glastonbury 2022 broke the rule of no touching, when she licked the antenna of a premium Moog Etherwave, before smashing it on the ground.
Dr Jessica Evelyn Argo, Programme Leader of BDes Sound for Moving Image at GSA, composes for ensembles and creates experimental film and sound art. Her research spans improvisation, cello/theremin, queer/femme voice and community world-building as artistic director of GIO Global, an online improvisation orchestra.
Dr. Jessica Argo is Programme Leader for BDes Sound for Moving Image at Glasgow School of Art, a composer for improvising ensembles and an experimental filmmaker/sound artist, drawn to music for community world-building - improvisation to bridge international distance and sustain intergenerational learning; improvising for queer affirmation; deep listening, emotional expression, mood regulation and liberation from patriarchal, ableist and economic oppression. Argo uses embodied synthesis (Moog Theremini, contact microphones, voice) to conjure alien sound, extended from her physical body or other acoustic bodies (cello). She has conducted neuroscience research, films in white cube galleries, dance clubs and hybrid room-and-ZOOM orchestra theatre performance
For UNESCO Week of Sound, audio visual documentation and reflective insights are shared from large ensemble compositions where heightened expressive physicality is encouraged from musicians for Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra and our international collaborators such as:
- the score and photomontage documentation for the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra Global XVII Hybrid Piece, called "When is a Mirror not a Mirror?" for a ROOM orchestra and a ZOOM orchestra https://youtu.be/3y-pPHwpQkc?si=JqKU1nfRAl4f-Hqc . It was sought to draw a dramatic attention to the uncanny distancing of digital bodies versus physical bodies (both the people and their sounds) - the work centred bold dancerly performances from ZOOM performers as if they were silent cinema stars!
- a suite of films from the year of GIOGlobal ZOOM recordings - these were premiered in the Centre for Contemporary Art Cinema, with a virtual watch party https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQw3tLmFowTT3xhgf_2dRaVVCUDPqqP9R&si=3TfZG5fjXCYqvDhh As well as our familiar faces, we featured returning guests, Alipio C Neto, Douglas R Ewart , Maggie Nicols, Rachel Weiss, Vinny Golia. Expansive original commissions were premiered from Instant Places (Ian Birse and Laura Kavanaugh), Melbourne's Rob Burke, Clare Hall, Michael Kellett, Paul Williamson, Chicago Association for Advancement of Creative Musicians Renee Baker, and Minori Seki with the Okayama creative community: works include Distributed Conduction, arresting animated graphic scores, blurring of the edges of the zoom boxes, bleeding the digital space into projected site specific installations, and dance.
- an article “Resonant Networks:Feminist Improvisation across Sites, Identities and Technologies” published in Improfil Journal: Theory and Practice of Improvised Music, from thering für gruppenimprovisation Musikalische Improvisation in Theorie und Praxis
The article was written, pondered and collated across multiple geographies – from India to Scotland and England – and from diverse experiences of migration, travel and belonging. A piece, titled Unbound, inspired by the River Yamuna was created by Surbhi Mittal and performed by Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra (GIO) and International Contemporary Ensemble at GlOfest XVI in November 2024, CCA Glasgow, and in Delhi with Synth Ensemble, February 2025. We outline the processes of collaboration which informed Surbhi’s creation of Unbound.
By sharing a detailed account of how this piece was created and performed (I played the theremin and extended vocal transformations), we offer practice-based insight into the intersecting fields of improvisation, gender studies and socio-technologies
What we mean when we talk about place – the Work of the Place Commission for Glasgow
No full textPlace is everywhere, places are all around us. Everywhere is some place. We live our lives in places. Place is a general construct, a concept that gives everywhere some meaning whether cultural, social, environmental or economic. These meanings establish qualities of place that are positive (ceremonial, beautiful, tranquil, lively) and negative (derelict, threatening, unloved). They provide a common terminology for something that is generally understood but imprecisely defined. When used to guide interventions in place, it is important to be precise and transparent to enable co-creation with citizens. In 2020, the City of Glasgow established an independent Place Commission under the direction of the City Urbanist with a mission to explore definitions, principles, narratives and actions for place in the city for its people.
Of Scotland’s four principal cities, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee are surrounded by landscape and sea. Only Glasgow is surrounded by itself. With a population of 650,000, and with a tight territorial boundary, Glasgow is the largest of Scotland’s cities by some margin. The metropolitan area has a population of over 1.8 million.
The Commission’s work reviewed the concept and complexities of place, discussed why these matter, and explored the growing body of evidence that place quality helps explain place value and place attachment and can deliver economic, social, environmental and health outcomes. The Commission undertook an examination of place in contemporary Glasgow, looking through the lenses of an international, metropolitan and everyday city. Based on its research and a programme of engagement the Commission drew conclusions including the concept of a place ecosystem and revealed valuable insights presented in a series of Place Stories.
The Commission’s report, PEOPLE make PLACES, was published in 2023. The evidence has been analysed and embraced by the city government now moving to service delivery organised around a directorate of place operating at the city-region, city and the community level. The paper examines the research and findings of the Commission and its contribution to place thinking and practice
Work Exhibited at TRANSFORMA(C)TIONS: MATTER DIALOGUES. Munich 2026
No full text3 x Collider brooches, Silicon, Aluminium, Enamel, Steel, 2026
The ‘Collider’ brooches reflects a moment of impact between heritage metalworking and modern Space Age synthetic materials and techniques.
A silicon disc, scientifically grown in a laboratory for the electronics industry, is bombarded with particles of vitreous enamel and fired to 900 degrees Celsius. Vitreous enamel was invented for use with metal, not man-made silicon, where the fired particles fuse and bond, or resist and spring away, leaving the starry marks of their passage and flight. (Bottomley)
Exhibition information / context:
Minerals, are not inert, but vital and articulate. Shaped over time by elemental forces, they embody transformation. This exhibition approaches matter not solely as geological phenomena, but as vibrant agents that can provoke, inspire, influence, transform and direct creative processes. Between light and dark, solid and liquid, stable and unstable, matter operates as a mediator, forms through which meaning, symbolic, and metaphysical metamorphoses unfold. They speak in rhythms of transformation, growth, shimmer, and resistance.
The exhibition unfolds across four cabinets on the museum’s ground floor. Each zone invites you to engage in a dialogue with matter focussing on light, form, growth, and energy, pairing mineral specimens from the collection with contemporary jewellery and metal work objects that respond, resonate, or interrupt. The show invites visitors into a multisensory dialogue between matter formations and their enacted contemporary artistic (re)interpretations.
Zone 1 ‘Energetics’
In this zone the vitality of matter is investigated through function and force. Crystals are essential to modern technologies from semiconductors to timekeeping. Quartz generates an electric charge under mechanical stress, making it a cornerstone of modern electronics. Silicon is the backbone of modern computing, its crystalline structure enabling the flow and control of electrons that power our digital world. In this zone, crystals are not passive components, but explored as active collaborators of which energetic potentials can be reinterpreted beyond utility. Artists' works create a dialogue of how crystals shape our technological realities while inviting new narratives of energy, resonance, and transformation.
(Booons & Zhang)
Artists in this Zone: Stephen Bottomley, Lin Cheung, Katharina Dettar, Adi Toch, Grace Wilson, Marina Ito, Lili Barglowska, Nicholas Yiannarakis, Syd Kendal
Review of The Tenementals' album - Glasgow: A history (Vol I of VI)
Full text linkA review of the album by Glasgow band 'The Tenementals' as an endeavour to write a leftist history of the city through song
Design Beyond the Human: Transdisciplinary Conversations About the Planet
No full textGlobal challenges like climate change and ecosystem degradation are proving that a singular disciplinary approach is inadequate to respond to issues where societal behaviours, individual choices, political decisions, economic, technological and scientific developments are so densely entangled - not least in design. But what happens when we turn things around and decentre “the human” to look at our relationship with the planet, its ecosystems and inhabitants beyond the capitalist human-nature binary worldview?
Design Beyond the Human is a collection of essays by international scholars, designers and engaged citizens traversing activism, anthropology, conservation, creative writing, design practice, design theory, economics, education, environmental humanities, ethics, history, indigenous knowledge, law, philosophy, poetry, politics, regenerative agriculture, science, sociology and technology. Divided into three sections - We Are Not Alone, Design Beyond the Human, and Mediating Human-Non-Human Relations Through Design - the text generates conversations capable of thinking about life on planet Earth, challenging the Anglo-European anthropocentric conceptualisation of design that dominates practice, education, and academic discourse. Distinct yet interlinked, the sections chart: the transdisciplinary cultural perspective that is required to comprehend our predicament, the critique of human-centred design and its interdependence with capitalism, and the nascent practices and projects that are attempting to reconcile humanity's possible relationship with the planet, its ecosystems and inhabitants.
The book offers the reader an opportunity to engage with expertise, knowledge, methodologies and lived experiences from across disciplines shaped by shared concerns and provides an opportunity to question if design in a more-than-human way might reimagine design's relationship to capitalism and contemporary lifestyles. Will our planetary future be merely an ecologically aware version of today, or, in going beyond the human, might we develop a transdisciplinary perspective capable of imagining an alternative vision of life on Earth
Artists’ Moving Image: Cinema as Archive
No full textSince its inception, artists have been fascinated by cinema, but the past thirty years has seen an intensification of direct engagements with dominant cinema, forming a compelling body of artists’ moving image. These engagements use strategies of sampling and imitation that range from the single elongated quotation that comprises Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) to the densely intertextual imitations of Rachel Maclean’s Over the Rainbow (2013). Divided into two parts, one focused on sampling and the other on imitation, this book critically maps this substantial and expanding body of work, identifying a series of common thematic and formal approaches to better understand artists’ ongoing dialogue with dominant forms of cinema.
This study sits in the field of visual culture studies and draws from art history, aesthetics and feminist, cultural, and postcolonial studies to construct an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that elucidates the intertextual strategies of writing back into and against old stories in the works discussed. By including work by younger artists such as Jesse Jones alongside that of more established artists such as Steve McQueen, this book reinvigorates the existing canon of artists’ moving image that takes cinema as a key source. What distinguishes it from other studies is its contention that the point of interest for the work examined is not cinema (and its history) per se, but what its evocation as cultural archive can illuminate about the legacies of the past in the present.
The principal insight of this research is that sampling uncovers suppressed or latent meanings hidden beneath the surface of the original, whereas imitation provides opportunity to include those aspects that were altogether excluded. The works discussed in this book use cinema to explore the limits of imagination within systems of visuality and representational conventions, and simultaneously advance propositional forms of redress that centre different forms of subjugated knowledge
Anselm Adornes’ Itinerary: Exploring and Representing Spaces of Spirituality through a Textuary Atlas of the Mediterranean World
No full textMostly famous for its perceptive descriptions of famous landmarks and cultural differences, Anselm Adornes’ account plays with flexible narratives of in-between spaces, evoking both spatial and chronological distance between a web of interconnected locations. In doing so – this chapter argues – Adornes’ account becomes a textual map, delivering a vividly personal interpretation of the world’s organisation striving to include and make sense of both a traditional system of classification, and of a novel understanding of measurable spaces prompted by recent nautical enterprises. Adornes’ double spatial understanding will be compared with more conventional contemporary views, such as that demonstrated by Dominican theologian Felix Fabri’s Evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae (1480s), and in the Mappa Mundi by Burgundian court historian Jean Mansel, in the latter’s Fleur des Histoires (1460s). This chapter also argues that the organisation of Adornes’ account suggests parallels with fifteenth-century written and illustrated texts for virtual pilgrimage - that is, instruments through which pious frustrated travellers could vicariously perform a symbolic pilgrimage to the Holy Land – and that the author might have included a visual aid to be consulted in parallel to the text
St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, Scotland: Engagement, Representation, and Conservation
No full textSt Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, Scotland, was designed by Isi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan for the architectural firm in 1953 (built 1961–1966, completed 1968) in the Modern Movement style, for the diocese of Glasgow; its closure in 1980 marked the beginning of an unstoppable process of ruination. This chapter suggests that a critical use of representation technologies – particularly digital media – and of sharing platforms, matched with current unstructured acts of engagement and appropriation of both the building and the landscape, point to a fragmentation of perceptions and a loss of unified identity. Rather than being a lamentable state of affairs, this in fact indicates a possible way forward for the seminary
"Les Périades"
No full text"Les Périades" is a pencil drawing on paper which continues my practice of making painstaking studio drawings to try to make sense of complex terrain - primarily of places that I have walked or climbed in, but also from images of places that I aspire to explore.
Les Périades is a sharp and heavily-pinnacled mountain ridge, stretching for over 1,500 metres in the Mont Blanc massif in Haute-Savoie, France.
This new drawing of the ridge was exhibited in the Reid Gallery in the exhibition "Mother Curator" between 10-31 January 2026 along with “Duration - 186 days, & 179 days”, – silverpoint & gesso on Board + oil on board respectively, and Map – Oil and gesso on board - all works that dealt with an aspect of an obsession with mountains, ice and the North
Chora
No full textChora is a collaborative enquiry between Sara Barker and Rosie Morris with sound commission by Sally Pilkington. It explores immersive installations and intimate objects as membranes of a ruined body, archiving and transmitting tacit, and complex knowledges of care.
The first iteration of Chora forms a new collaborative public installation for 36 Gallery, Newcastle (Feb–Mar 2026), serving simultaneously as an artistic output and convening live encounters through exhibition, focus groups and workshops. Using the analogy of skin as a semi-porous membrane, projecting, sheltering, shielding and enabling exchange, the artwork takes the form of a vibrant, semi-translucent fabric den, dyed with domestic kitchen waste. Placed inside are small-scale artworks, resembling votives, referring to pieces cut off, lodged, extracted, summoned or enshrined.
As collaborators we draw on feminist spatial theory (Kristeva, Irigaray, Grosz), ecofeminist material intra-action and polyphony (Barad, Wall Kimmerer, Bakhtin, Ozeki), and research into felt-knowledge and co-authorship (Springgay; Brand; Pallasmaa, Gale & Larkin). The installation investigates this as a porous, relational architecture (Ebling) —a container that behaves like a living or ruined body (Bachelard): a host, a skin, a shelter, a site of memory.
As a site to test ethical, accessible, consent-based methods of co-encounter and potential co-creation, we hosted 3 visits and 3 engagement workshops with invited groups, activating the site as a space for collective storytelling, and as a testing ground to inform future co-authorship and dialogues. Groups included interdisciplinary academics from (arts, social science, anthropology and archaeology) from GSA, Newcastle University, Northumbria University and Edinburgh University, Year 2 students from Hotspur Primary School, and Equal Arts, a charity for older people and people living with dementia.
These rich dialogues and exchanges inform our developing practice and methodological frameworks for sustainable, inclusive artistic practices and we hope to continue these relationships through future dialogue and iterations