Crowd Control: Migrations of Cool
Channel: Heather Barnett
Date: 2017-09-10

MIGRATIONS OF COOL 
Saturday 22 & Sunday 23 July 2017

Migrations of Cool is a live action street game about the movements of artists throughout the city. The pattern is well known: artists seeking low-cost work spaces find a foothold in old industrial areas and gradually, creative communities emerge. But the commodification of cool turns creative scenes into targets of regeneration and, with rising rents, the artists are often forced to up sticks and move on. Inspired by the social composition of Hackney Wick and informed by reports on the built environment, Jamie Harper devised Migrations of Cool, which mapped the local area as an emergent social and economic system, inviting participants to play the system and consider how its future could (or should) be shaped.
Film by Julie Dusuel

CROWD CONTROL
In July 2017, a team of researchers and practitioners came together to embark upon a month-long situated research residency based at Arebyte Gallery in Hackney Wick, East London. Connecting visual, digital and performance art practices with contemporary scientific research, law and urban design, the project - Crowd Control – explored the mechanisms of collective behaviour through observation, simulation and experimentation.
 
The project was commissioned by Arebyte as part of their 2017 Arts Council England funded programme on ‘systems of control’, inviting artist Heather Barnett to take a month long residency at the gallery. Extending the invitation, Heather was joined by Dr Andrew King, Dr Ines Fürtbauer, Dr Daniel Strömbom, Dimitra Georgopoulou, Laura Cappelatti and Amanda Fry (behavioural scientists at Swansea University with whom Heather is currently Leverhulme Artist in Residence) and by Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (law, spatial justice); Liu Yang (urban design); Josh Greenfield (swarm systems); Jamie Harper (theatre, game design); Julius Colwyn (art, design), Annarita Papeschi & Vincent Nowak (urban design, crowdsourcing), Melanie Phillips (interactive theatre) and Kira Wainstein (project assistant).

http://crowdcontrol.london/