David Boultbee

David Boultbee is the creator of Bread Art Collective. using light, sound and simple technologies with a strong social focus to create works which gently ask you to stop for a moment and take in your surroundings in the hope that people will notice something new. 

Based in the North West of England, inspired by spaces, the public realm and the humour of creating the unexpected and seemingly impossible. He develops and delivers exciting and ambitious projects in collaborating with funders, partners and participants. 

Within Davids work, he engages multi-sensory experiences, often integrating visual and audible elements, that invite discovery and encourage audience interactively with both the work and each other. One of latest of david's installations which he shown us in todays workshop was an exciting, dynamic piece of work commissioned by Coca-Cola that celebrates how the nation spreads positivity and optimism on social media. the work is constructed from a series of cubes showing the top twenty positive words used on twitter. A direct connection to twitter using Arduino, which I will later go into more detail about allows a real time response and lights up the words based on the numbers of tweets being sent around containing them. The installation also included light-boxes displaying photographs, dozen of glass Coca-Cola bottles whilst exploring the patterns, textures, shadows and shapes created when lighting up these iconic designs. 

Even though I didn't find David Boultbee's work relevant to what I wanted to do, one thing that he did touch up on that really interested me was Arduino. Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy to use hardware and software. It is intended for artists, designers and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can effect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors and other actuators. 

In the afternoon workshop, we got to play around with Arudino kits and software. We used a website called codebender.cc which David uses himself and looked at codes which he had written and how we could manipulate these or use within our own work. After a stressful hour or so of trying to get my head around the software I successfully managed to light up the LEDs, get them to flash, flash randomly, and even do a morse code flasher. I am going to be taking one of these kits home with me for the easter holidays to experiment with and see if I can bring this into my own work.