Main article here: https://www.artconnect.com/projects/strings

This was a collaboration with Clemence Debaig. She created the hardware and choreography; I provided the UI and networking code to allow people connecting via a web browser to interact with the Arduino-based controllers she had created.

Performances will be continuing at intervals throughout the rest of the year.

Strings

http://brexfest.eu was created for April Fool's Day 2019, at a time when the horseshit and hysteria around Britain's exit from the EU was at a peak. The idea was to take the hundreds of neologisms created during the previous years- The Malthouse Compromise, Technological Solutions, Cake, Brexit In Name Only,  WTO Rules, Operation Yellowhammer, The Coup, The Star Chamber, The Pizza Club, The Three Amigos and so on- and present  them as bands playing at a music festival. The date of the festival was set (and reset) for the final end of Britain's membership, and was to take place  at the Mahatma Ghandi Industrial Estate.

In addition to the music, there were talks and other events modelled on the general zeitgeist at the time- street food, blockchain, Sting & Shaggy, synthetic cannabis, Jordan Peterson, and so on.

As the user scrolls down the page, the copy becomes more unhinged, and a highly uncomfortable sound starts being synthesised in the user's browser, using the Web Audio API. This builds and builds until the reach the end, at which point there's a special surprise for anyone who makes that far - although this recently stopped functioning properly on iOS, so be sure to visit on your computer.

Reception was largely split between people getting the joke, and others thinking it was an actual music festival, which is probably what you want for an April Fool's day project.

I also created a Twitter bot to follow British MPs and invite them to attend, which sadly didn't quite complete before it was caught by Twitter's spam filter. However the feed created by those the bot follows- https://twitter.com/brexfest/following - was, and still is, an utterly toxic thing to behold. 

We really should be given better from our political class. In the end the Conservative Party won a majority in the house of commons, which is now effectively being run by Vote Leave. So far they have failed to give us anything better, and I suspect the worst is yet to come.

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Ed Boucher

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