An Afternoon with Technology Artist Charles Gershom, Glitch Festival, Llandudno

It’s 1:45pm on Friday 14^th October 2016. The seaside town of Llandudno in North Wales will be playing host to the Glitch Festival in just a few short hours and I’m walking in to Oriel MOSTYN to meet artist Charles Gershom who is exhibiting at the festival.

Stepping in to the gallery I’m greeted by a robot that looks like the product of a drunken night of passion between Henry Hoover and one of Red Dwarf’s Scutters. It looks at me suspiciously and then scurries off in the opposite direction. There is a hive of activity all around me as a blur of serious faces, skinny jeans and beards work to get the place ready for opening night.

There’s a smell of freshly ground coffee in the air and so I follow my nose to a staircase that ultimately leads to the caffi. I reach for my phone to message Charles and as I look up I see a bearded man with phone in hand looking down on me.

“Charles?” I ask.

“Yea. I was just about to message you.” Is the reply.

Charles Gershom is a large man in both character and stature. Tall with broad shoulders and an immaculately trimmed beard that frames a friendly and welcoming smile. As I approach he thrusts his hand forwards to shake mine.

I ask how he’s been and his words reflect what his eyes have already told me; this is a man that’s been ridiculously busy and slept very little. He didn’t say it, but my asking for an interview has cut his set-up time by a good four-hours and has most likely resulted in him having to pull an all-nighter. But despite the long hours and lack of sleep Charles is excited to show me what he’s been up to since we last met.

I remind Charles that our first meeting was in a Victorian bathing machine on Llandudno’s promenade at the 2015 LLAWN Arts Festival.

Charles laughs: “Yea, a bathing machine slash sound laboratory. I was working with Ed Wright on a compositional installation piece. The idea was to use the sounds of the off-shore windfarms to create an orchestra made of windmills. But when we got out there to make the recordings we found that rather than being big noisy things they are actually completely silent. You’d think that would be terrible for making sound art, but once we were out there we realised there was a lot more going on and the piece became more about the people, the boats and everything that was around the wind farms. It was a fun piece to make.”

But entering his space in the gallery I immediately notice that things were not as I had expected. I’m greeted with a flat screen TV with wires coming out the back and around the walls to a wooden box in the opposite corner. White tape form squares and rectangles on the floor and a couple of strange-looking paddles hang precariously on the wall. Beneath the TV, sat on the floor is another little box.

My confusion must’ve been obvious.

“Did you want to have a go?” Charles asks.

I of course said yes, not really knowing what I was agreeing to.

Charles picks up the box and removes an object that I can only describe as a pair of blacked out skiing goggles. Something I later discovered was a virtual reality headset.

He straps it to my head and I’m immediately back in the same room I was before, only this time the TV screen, wires and white tape have all vanished. The paddles strangely remain on the wall. I’m now in a VR simulation of the room I was just in.

“Look down,” Charles says.

I do, expecting to see the floor. But instead I’m now staring down into a river of molten rock and lava flowing all around me. The only thing between me and virtual death is the small plinth I’m stood on. Looking around I see other platforms and I precariously jump from one to another, forgetting that I’m actually in a small room in an art gallery. I hear Charles chuckle.

I then spend the next five-minutes exploring various virtual worlds that Charles has created, including coming face-to-face with a giant whale whilst standing on what feels like a ship wreck several hundred feet below the surface of the ocean.

On coming back to the physical world I’m speechless. This was my first time experiencing VR. And it is amazing. The phrase ‘fully immersive experience’ is used a lot in the art world, but this really is that.

We stand in silence for a moment. I’m genuinely affected. Awestruck even.

The silence is broken by the arrival of Charles’s well-earned pot of tea and I ask how he went from creating an orchestra of windmills to virtual reality.

Charles explains: “Basically, if it’s got any form of microprocessor in it then I’m usually doing something with it. So with the windmills I was using a lot of embedded electronics, things a little bit like arduinos to network all of the things together. Creating installations using a mixture of programming and electronics is what I do, generally. In this instance I thought the new VR systems would make an interesting art medium.

“The system I’ve got here allows you to move around and physically connect yourself to the virtual space. For me as an artist making work it means you can actually transform things. You’re not just looking at a pretty 3D picture two-inches from your face, you’re actually locked inside the environment.

“What I love about this is the most mundane thing can become something incredibly interesting in virtual reality. I’ve started experimenting with ways of making it possible to physically touch what you see in VR. So if you see a chair I wanted to be able to actually touch it and even sit on it. It’s like in the VR lava scene when you were jumping across the platforms, here in real world you were jumping between the taped sections on the floor. But if we taped up a chair and mapped it in to the VR world that chair could become, for example, a massive throne and you’d actually be able to sit on it. That link between the virtual and physical world is where things become really interesting for me.”

As fun as this all is, is it really art?

Charles said: “It depends on your definition of art. A lot of people expect it to be painting, drawing, sculpture, installation and that kind of thing but I’ve always been a firm believer that it’s about what you make it’s the process you take to make it. Art is about problem solving, it’s applying critical thinking to create something. So the end product is almost irrelevant.”

Despite that Charles is reluctant to call himself an artist. In fact, it was never a goal to become an artist.

“I always wanted to make art, but I never really wanted to become an artist,” he admits. “Even now I prefer not to confine myself to being called an artist and would rather be described as someone who makes art. I suppose at a push I would describe myself as a technologist slash artist depending on the context.”

And even those wide boundaries are too narrow for Charles. When he’s not working on his solo projects he runs an art studio with his partner called Happy Space Sloth, which is an illustration, video and artwork studio based in his hometown of Llanfairfechan.

Charles said: “Yea, my partner and I create comics and illustrations that we show at comic cons and game fairs. We even have a game out on the Google App Store to go along with one of our characters called Rabbit Bee Race.

“Oh and I’m also one half of a soundscape performance duo called Host/Operator. We’ve been going about six-years now and we specialise in producing endurance soundscapes. If people want to listen to that there’s 50 free albums on SoundCloud. And they’re all free.

“I’ve got some cool stuff coming out with Host/Operator next year. I can’t say too much about it, but if you imagine us as semi-egotistical sound artists being cloned over and over for thousands of years. Distilled down to our bare, broken copied husks and then told to make sound art. Well, we’re making a role-playing adventure game based on those characters. And there’s also going to be a comic and soundscape to go along with it too.”

 

If you want to find out more about Charles Gershom visit www.charlesgershom.com. You can also find him on social media including Facebook and twitter.

http://www.mostyn.org/cylch