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Atom Town : news and ideas from Gair Dunlop

I’m Gair Dunlop. I make art with cameras & words but more importantly with people and the places & ideas they have made, and which have made them. I’ve started this new website and blog because I want the work to be seen on many kinds of devices, and because I wanted to change my web address to www.atomtown.org from www.atomtown.org.uk

This is due to the dissolution of the ‘uk’ as a meaningful entity. Please adjust your address book and your sense of possibility.

Christmas film, Denmark

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December 2022

Festive Address to the Nations and Peoples. Featuring thoughts on education, art, and things we might do. Judith Williamson, one of the most thoughtful and clearsighted cultural theorists of our times, was famously still an undergraduate student when she published ‘Decoding Advertisements’ in 1978. Now you are probably expecting me to follow this sentence with another which decries the lack of intellectual fibre and initiative of students today. I am here to disappoint you. The intelligence and clarity of thinking of our best students is as high as ever. The very best students can teach their teachers a thing or two. I’m thinking here of recent DJCAD graduate Eilidh Guthrie, whose Honours dissertation has recently been published as “Art & Science Collaborations: Communicating Climate Change.” At a time when pessimism is easy, this very focussed exploration of how arts and sciences can communicate through ‘boundary objects’ gives some powerful food for thought, and I’ll be reading it alongside some Bruno Latour over the New Year. You’ll probably be expecting me to decry something, though. I’m Scottish, after all. Ok: once upon a time, modules were just assessment tools. Then they became key to resourcing courses. Then anything not in a module was not resourced. Modules separate everyone, then those separations become baked in. New Year resolution is to work towards co-operation and new alliances. Art I have made will be shown in the DJCAD Research Expo, Jan/Feb 2023 Art made a very long time ago with the esteemed Dan Norton (ABLAB) will be on display in ‘The Elastic Mind’ at the South Campus Gallery, Broward University, Florida, from February till August 2023. What will Florida make of “The Tomorrows Project” ? Coming up; the long gestation of a film work on oil to renewable transitions is entering its third trimester. Have a good time at Christmas and New Year… very best from Gair Dunlop

New Year, new tasks.

Lots to think about as we turn the planetary corner: see you soon, I hope.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/24/pandemic-earth-lockdowns-climate-crisis-environment

Teamwork

Community tree clearance after Storm Arven. Great to spend the morning working together.

He moves among us

Sculpture corridor, DJCAD. Where the sacred meets the profane and scratches its head.

Covenant: group exhibition

Delighted to participate in this group exhibition, alongside art students, artists, members and retired members of Moray’s armed forces. Awaiting documentation! The idea may be extended to an Army base near you.

Care and Recovery

Dear photography world: if you are interested in work happening Now, written from a Scottish and International context, please subscribe to ‘Notes: Letters to Photography’
There is incisive writing and the images are sensitively presented and printed.
The current issue on ‘Care’ is one of the best yet- work from Nina Bacos, @francismckee @picturemaking and more.