Saturday 6 October 2018
The Time Machine
William Titley
14:00-18:00
Popular music can act as a first step to exploring and developing a sense of collective identity. Music somehow captures memories and wraps them in the cultural sound of your time, always there, in storage, and ready to come back in a flash, triggered by a few musical notes.
The Time Machine sculpture uses these audio triggers to capture and share collective memories of space and time. Constructed from an old jukebox, the sculpture holds a selection of community memories evoked by 50 songs on vinyl from 1979. Select a memory from the panel to hear the song that triggered that memory.
William Titley is an artist based in Pendle, East Lancashire, where he is a co-founder of In-Situ, a non-profit arts organisation with the aim of making art a part of everyday life, engaging with people, place and the environment.
Working at the University of Central Lancashire, he is a Senior Lecturer and MA Course Leader in Fine Art. He is a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University and has exhibited work across the UK, the USA, Pakistan, India, and Europe, including work in UK Museums Collections.
William’s process is ethnographic in focus, with an emphasis on his role as participant observer. The artist explores the relationship between two aesthetic ideals: one developed around spectatorship and the other around participation. As a researcher using audio-visual media, William is a participant, an artist and a member of the local community, and by adopting artistic research methods, and by making work in the place where he lives, his research analyses social artistic processes from the perspective of the artist, adding to debates around what social arts practice is, and what its limits are in its original social context and within the gallery and documentary systems of dissemination.
Image Credit: William Titley_'Time Machine' 2017 - Courtesy of the artist