For this project, I would approach a service for adults with intellectual disabilities that I know from my previous job and from which I recruited participants to an NIHR Invention for Innovation funded research project involving the virtual world platform, Second Life.

It would involve making work to be ‘projected’ onto buildings or spaces in Brighton; each piece incorporating an additional AR layer to be activated by the viewer via a smart device. I am imagining a tour led by me and the artist collaborators, with each of us speaking about our respective pieces at each stop. The physical work would be back at the collaborators’ base, 12 pieces in all, where it may be possible to give a talk, again as a collaborative effort. A tour carries with it risks and complexities that I would need to work out with the service, which has considerable experience and expertise with such activities.

The tour may be recorded and uploaded to YouTube on my and the collaborators’ channel if they have one.

There would also be a video tour made by putting all the works, along with their animations and soundtracks into a video suite. Any collaborators wishing to use audio that isn’t their own would be advised about copyright.

I would make a catalogue.

Invitees to a tour or a talk might include friends and family of service users, local service managers, senior councillors, the sitting MP, the press, local art groups, and my own friends, although numbers would have to be limited for health and safety reasons, given the narrowness of some of the streets, and the practical considerations of speaking to a group in the open. I am investigating microphones and amplifiers that would not need a source of power and found one that might be suitable. We would need several of these because, as the unit is wearable and the microphone very close to the user’s mouth, there would be cross infection risks if we were to swap among our various speakers.

Learning from the involvement of a service user advisory group for our funded research, a group that made comments on our proposed design and suggested insightful adjustments that could only have come from a user’s perspective, I would hope to recruit a similar group, separate from the artists, to help design the way the project would run and be managed. As a consequence, everything above is subject to change!

Ethics

I understand OCA now has an Ethics Committee which would scrutinise proposals of this kind. The service I had in mind also has ethical protocols and oversight and would, in fact, be the people who would manage the consent process in order to make a clear distinction between this and my role as proposer and manager of the project itself. Making this distinction is an essential part of valid consent because it avoids conflation of (most often) a desire to please a newcomer and genuine consent to the process. I am also planning to update myself on ethical issues by taking a FutureLearn course on the ethics of working with people [my thanks go to email buddy and recent OCA graduate, Catherine Levey, for this advice]

Legacy

Embedding AR into images capable of being recognised as unique by the Artivive software has uses beyond entertainment and part of this process would aim to give staff and service users the skills to make and embed informational AR that would assist people with literacy, visual, or hearing difficulties. This might include MAKATON sign language, or an audio track on a theatre poster, a hospital information leaflet, a set of directions someone uses a lot but needs help with, a bus timetable, packaging in shops, using Pelican crossings. <— And right there is a good reason for a service user advisory group which will come up with ideas that are actually relevant!

Much of this would depend on the penetration of smart devices into the intellectual disability community, which is not a given.

UPDATE September 2024

Note: I had originally written this in a more imperative tone (I will) but changed it to conditional when it became clear that something so ambitious was not required and was likely to be unworkable. In fact I had made contact with the service from which I’d hoped to recruit and received no reply. In other circumstances, I would have pursued this but the reality is that I could not have seen this through in the manner I would have wished.

Later, I approached a number of businesses in Steyning but found that the ones who already hosted local artwork had existing relationships with particular artists’ or preferred more traditional work than I could offer. Some didn’t respond. Again though, the lack of a mobile signal restricts what might be seen as the novelty value of my work, something different that would maybe help them engage with art in, for instance, the DIY store.

This remains a problem and it is much more significant than a missing layer of entertainment. When there is a power cut, this small town and surrounding villages lose all connectivity – no wifi, no signal, no ability to contact emergency services. As an artist with improving multi-media skills, I made a short public service video and sent it to our parish council, the district and county councils, and our MP. They all responded, the MP within days. The mast, which has no battery backup hence the loss of all connectivity, was due to be upgraded but there was no clear schedule for this and my attempts to gain clarification have been unsuccessful but, the MP having kept his seat and familiar with the situation, may now be open to a further inquiry. However, the signal remains so poor, it’s been hard to establish whether or not it has gone altogether during subsequent power outages and so it isn’t clear whether we now have battery backup or not.

Social Media

Twitter/X – @strayfisharts (other accounts, now closed, since 2009). Account closed following takeover by Elon Musk.

Threads @fishbits (since available)

Instagram – @fishbits (2011)

Facebook – Dr Suzanne Conboy-Hill (forever)

YouTube channel – Dr Suzanne Conboy-Hill (slightly less than forever)

Artsteps gallery – Dr SP Conboy-Hill. Includes Working Title Gallery (part of a curation task for 3.1), Strayfish Gallery (personal gallery for experimental purposes, aka building things and moving the furniture), and Best Little Virtual Gallery (curated collection for a peer critique group), Iterations – my gallery designed to show the stages of pieces of work and to prompt discussion about the effect of perceived status on work that has been subsumed by subsequent layers.

SCH 2024