 Yn ddod, ond, dwi'n rhaid i gymryd. Rhaid i ddweud ychydig yn yr ysgrifenni James Kappa. Rydych chi'n gweithio'r rhagorau ac yn ddwy'r rhagorau yn ddweud y cybarau. Rwy'n rhaid i'n gweithio'r ysgrifennu. Rwy'n rhaid i dystod y tawr. Rwy'n rhaid i ddweud. Rhyw unrhyw James Kappa. Roedd. Rydych chi'n ddweud. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'n gweld. Yn amser, rydyn ni wedi gweld i'n gwybod ar y ddweud, a dyna'r ysgrifennu fwylltion mewn gwneud. Felly rydyn ni'n gwybod i'n dweud yw'r ysgrifennu yw'r ysgrifennu, a'r ysgrifennu ar y ddweud, ac rydyn ni'n gweithio'r ysgrifennu mewn gwirionedd, ac yn ystod o'r ffyrdd ymddiol yw'r ffyrdd am yw'r ymddangos, ydych chi'n ffordd o'r ffordd am y ffyrdd yw'r ffyrdd am ymddiol a'r ffyrdd yw'r ymddiol. Yn mynd ffyrdd yw'r ffyrdd, ac yw'r ffordd o'r ffyrdd yw'r ffyrdd oherwydd yw'r ffyrdd. felly o ddim yn 2009, ddim yn ystod o'r sgwrthau rwy'i dyfniadraidd. Yr sgwrthau felly oedd yn cael y rhaid yn gallu ar [? bryddoedd, ond my own in my last year of my BA at Chelsea Art School. The work consists of two jib-type structures that you would find in a tower crane and uses electric winches to mobilise itself basically in a rudimentary way it would drag itself over a very flat plane and in what I found in that and what I discovered I suppose it was like the Eureka work it was a sculpture that became quite graceful and mobile in its movement and it didn't stay in one place, it didn't stay in one shape and it was very transformative and anytime one would go to see it it would be in a different position or a different pose. Moving on from that I started at the same time researching into other modes of locomotion Locomotion has always been a very interesting thing for me because I grew up in a countryside and then went to art school in London but from what I learned in the country in a rural setting working with farmers and so on was that the ground is not always, rough terrain is quite a critical thing that they have to overcome and my fascination from a young age was watching this human expedition to try and overcome Mother Nature using engineering as a tool to try and tame things and get on with a daily life which was always very interesting and always changing and exciting from the perspective that they would never know what would happen in a day or what they would have to overcome. Through working with Ripper and producing this sculpture I started looking into different methods of locomotion and got very excited in insects and creatures that walk. Back in 2010 I built my first hydraulic sculpture I'd always wanted to work with hydraulics but it was something that I couldn't afford so it was always a dream and the dreams would manifest in these drawings and the drawings would in later years become realities with the prototypes and so this is the work I actually have here it's Mountaineer prototype, it's a 800 kilo prototype earth marker it's part of this division of work which all deals with locomotion within terrain and unlike Ripper the step I gave myself was to sort of get away from these walking machines that we see day to day in toys and robots and tests on YouTube and try and mobilise myself in extremely rough terrain and try and climb at the same time and see how difficult it would be to achieve climbing with purely an analogue control system so the controls for this mobile sculpture are basically eight four-way joysticks and it takes some experience to learn the actual way of walking and I can't say that I've achieved that, I'm still learning I think the reason that I went for something of an analogue nature in the control system was so that I could learn personally what it is like to walk with an anatomy such as the anatomy that it has what I found with these legs and I'll keep going back to this leg design is that the telescoping dipper is actually a really critical part of the leg and that's not something that any animal has within its anatomy so the anatomy is a mixture of an understanding of what a log lift crane is to a femur in an insect in a grasshopper's leg so it's kind of like a real mishmash of different ideas being thrown around moving away from the division which deals with earth marking and mountaineer which we can go and see after the talk I'm going to do a little demonstration of it but moving on to a different division in the work what I find is within divisions within my research allow me to if I get stuck somewhere, if I get stuck in earth marking or if I get stuck in something like offshore I can move over to a different division to sort of get my mind freed again and in that process I can also pollinate a lot of the stuff learnt in the I rate concentration of a single division so within the development of earth markers came teeth and the teeth graduated to a carving division where they became the jaws of a handheld sculpture called a nipper and this sculpture's got a capacity to fracture the plaster blocks that it sits on but that I suppose was essentially the beginning of the defacing of the idea of foundations or plimps or the architecture that we inhabit socially or physically I had this drawing for a very long time and I always start with a drawing and I had this drawing for a very long time and it's called Atlas and the sculpture itself is like multifaceted so the concrete block that the machine sits on also becomes a product of the machine's success in the completion of its installation so the sculpture itself is all of it rather than just the concrete block or the machine or vice versa so the machine consists of the upper car body of an excavator with an adjusted boom and obviously a set of tungsten carbide milling heads for concrete now because the excavator itself is quite a heavy thing and it's quite a feat to sort of do it I sort of downsized around the same time as making Mountaineer the work that we have here with the telescoping legs that can climb a number of other divisions so that I could prototype things and this is Atlas prototype it's a similar size to Mountaineer, the work we have here but it uses a bit more of a space of an installation to work in now the functionality of Atlas is that it basically is like the drawing it's bolted into the block via an armature which is cast into the cement and the milling head, the Atlas mill will then cut into the concrete very slowly it's a slow moving thing as it's all hydraulics and that's part of the choreography that I quite like about these sculptures these machines is that they're very slow and they're quite graceful and it will gracefully over at the period of a show which may be like a month to two months take its foundations out from underneath itself in the process of making these works I also developed a number of different cutting heads which also constitute as sculptures and these were all sort of handcrafted in my workshop where much of the machines, in fact all the machines are put together and these were then tested in different demonstrations and at different shows the legacy of what Atlas has become is now sort of like an interesting thing that I've been playing around with with drawings and again going back to drawings what will happen is that once the prototypes made and a number of demonstrations have been done and I've been able to test it I'll end up making a number of going back to the drawing board I suppose is the saying and coming up with a number of other works now these works are actually pyramid makers so they're like the opposite of Atlas taking its foundations out from underneath itself underpinning itself these are actually trying to create something that they can clamber up on top of so with all of the things that I kind of got together through learning about hydraulics I suppose by trial and error being shouted at by a hydraulic hose fitter I kind of managed to sort of get larger ideas sort of together and convince funding bodies to help me produce the largest to date which is Greenhorn and Greenhorn's quite an interesting work because it deals with the amalgamation of all of the understanding of fabrication hydraulic engineering and freedom as a sculptor to sort of like go into an area where it's slightly uncharted to sort of try and bring back something that's quite radical this image here is actually of the work sort of halfway through its fabrication in the studio the work now exists down in Chichester and you can see in this photo that it has pretty much all of the things that we've learnt about with the mobility of methods of walking propulsion in rough terrain the flippers allow it to ski along through the woods and leave very little trace of where it's been and in the process of doing this I'm trying to sort of create a forestry style installation but I think at this point the concept needs to catch up with me I need like a place in the world to go with it to sort of create a film or to create a reason for it but the point of making it it was just like a whole jumble of like all of these things I learnt and I wanted to sort of try and get them into one piece that could isolate all of that on its own in understanding on the other side of things with looking at different methods of propulsion there are like lots of changes through evolution and I sort of look at my practice as if it's known a weird way going through a similar sort of kind of evolution but from my perspective here it's sort of into the unknown so the sky's the limit, there's no real ceiling on it but in this explanation I suppose you can see where everything has come from in one way or another this image is actually explaining different methods of creature locomotion and it's quite interesting and I isolated quite early on the mudskipper because I found that this amphibious fish is quite an interesting creature it has an entertaining way of getting over very sort of muddy plains in shallow rivers like the Kerala River in India and it's able to breathe out of the water but its methods of locomotion are really just its front flippers which are also used for its propulsion in water this took me on to a dream in a way to sort of try and make a workboat for the time being a nine and a half tonne workboat that functions on the Thames in London into somewhat of an amphibious sculpture the boat is of the name of Dive Cove Free but will be changed to the name Mudskipper and I put these slides in, they're the newest ones in fact I took this photo before I came up here and this is its current state in a yard where I'm working on it and I suppose this is the project I've been aiming for in the last ten years of all of this research and all of this work the drawings again they sort of state dreams and they often reflect what's been learnt in the experimentation and the demonstration, the expedition of works and they sort of give me like a freedom like no other so the freedom that one can achieve in drawings is like poetry you may have had a bad day where many things have gone wrong but I can still sit down and make a drawing of something that fulfills my ambitions to look into the future of what my work can potentially do and where I can potentially go with it the journeys I can take and this takes me to the last couple of slides that I'll show and it's a work which really deals with a journey and after ten years of being fixated in three different divisions of research I sort of broke away very recently with the help of Verbie, 3D Verbie which is an artist residency in Switzerland who specifically asked me if I'd give them a proposal for a sculpture that could potentially work in a mountain range the project brief was about a big accident in 1818 where an engineer was called into the valley near the Verbie town to look at a glacier and at that point in history they didn't have a huge amount of information on glaciers and it was basically a sort of real stab in the dark for this engineer to try and resolve the issue of this ice dam about to break and in the end they cut a channel through the glacier to allow water to escape and this channel then fractured all of the ice and accidentally broke and washed out a couple of villages well through a couple of towns and created quite some disaster in 1818 so they said with this year being a sort of anniversary to it could I sort of make something that could facilitate the recording of what mother nature is like in the mountains and the ffarocious conditions it can be and the speeds that all of these things like avalanches happen in so I proposed a work that I call AeroCab and AeroCab is basically completely mech functioness it doesn't have any mechanisms it does have a very small hydraulic power pack for the brakes but apart from that it's functioness and we started making it this year and here it resides on the installation of the mountain that this was the last thing that I installed and I'm hoping in January to run tests and then in March to make the film the work I'm very happy with and I think the reason I'm happy with it is because I've broken away from this I feel like weight on my shoulders of all of this research and all of this stuff I'd stand by to find something that is now an adventure and with AeroCab and Mudskipper I feel like their works that will facilitate my journey in one way or another in life will also facilitate the journey of others who come to visit or collaborate like filmmakers and other artists within the journeys and the projects The last image I have is of the studio and it's a small studio in south east London near Peckham and I've been there since 2013 so a good couple of years now and I'm content and happy continuing making work but I feel that the works that I'm now coming into are the most exciting that I've made so far Thanks Thanks very much to James Do you want to do questions? We've got about ten minutes if anyone has a question they'd like to ask One at the back here Hello, fascinating work I guess my question is about where the agency of the machines lie Watching you manipulate Mountaineer across the metal yesterday and also seeing the work Atlas that's biting away at its own plinth requires a human agent to do that directing It's incredibly powerful machines but you need a human in there to operate them so I guess my question is since they're sculptures and they're mechanised where do you sit as the operator in that work Are you essential for the works? Yeah, this is a really interesting question and I think this question goes for a lot of things in society as well I think that there's more and more of a lack of understanding of the collaboration of human beings and machines or the mechanical things that inhabit the world with them that they collaborate with There's like an ongoing theory that AI is going to sort of slowly merger into these things and they're going to become autonomous and that will eventually become a terminator and will lose control of the things that we've built but from my perspective I think that's a little story into that and it's my collaborative effort with my sculptures with my mobile sculptures or machines is much like that of a musician but I'm getting to the point where my knowledge and understanding and know-how of operation and maybe my analysis of operation isn't as good as my sort of knowledge of fabrication and construction so I'm sort of very eager to work out a way that the operation can be passed down chain to someone who would specifically or a group of people who would specifically want to research into the operation or ergonomics and so on of those things but there are certain things that make sense to me like the roof of a cabin like on the boat or a greenhorn might be sort of like 10 centimetres higher than the average cabin of a truck or a boat so it's quite tall and I quite like the space above my head so I do sort of like anticipate me being the operator in some cases I've let works like TREDTO I've asked sort of telehandler operators in sculpture parks if they'd like a go and they just because I think they're used to the operation as something like a telehandler which is a good sort of 7 ton machine if you tip it over it's real it can be fatal and they don't like the feeling or even the knowledge that pulling a hydraulic lever slightly the wrong way could throw this whole thing over so factoring in the different kinds of responsibility the different kinds of operating styles it ends up being solely me who's operating them but it doesn't have to be but I suppose that then becomes the thing that we see today that is changing the operating cab of say an agricultural tractor is being replaced with well it's just being minused off replaced by a pelley case with some pretty clever software allowing it to go operator free and what that record or what that understanding of the human combatability the human decision making in the process of making art with machines you can go to Carrara Marble Mine where Iway Way gets a lot of his works made and one of the funny things with not the Talon Iway Way is they'll now addition stone in the days of sculpture if you wanted to make additions you would go for bronze but you can addition stone now because the robots can carve it in additions and that's quite an interesting phenomenon in art and then it's like the sensibility to what your machines create in art is it the hands of the operator is it the hands of the computer or are the artist's hands minused off because they're not allowed to use the carving machine or whatever so there's like loads of questions and I suppose it keeps it quite pure in a way that it feels like a full circuit of evolution to be able to operate the things that you make there are other interesting areas of operating the things you make in the sense that what's the legislation you know, like it's illegal for me to jump on to a telehandler and unload a truck as much as it's illegal for me to unload a truck with a hi-hat crane but if I have like a 16 hydraulic lever system in a sculpture like Greenhorn that warps through a forest of flippers then there's absolutely no legislation for it it's sort of like, you know, I can just jump in the cabin and drive it to my heart's content and there's like this amazing freedom to that you know, the things that you make you can then operate and it's like back in the days of the prototypeers of aviation in a funny way and that's very exciting the flying bathtub the film that we see on YouTube the most recent phenomenal film of aviation and how the laws of aviation are completely changing right now with drones and with permanent magnet motors you guys probably correct me on it the laws are completely changing you know, an aviation space frame had to be aerodynamic you look at most drones and the way that they're held together with cable ties and you're like, what's aerodynamic about that? it's really exciting it's sort of like you could build a chassis you could put these motors on it and you can make practically anything fine and that's, I'm getting very excited about that that may be something that I'll pursue in the future Sorry to interrupt, that's all we've got time for Once again, thank you very much to James Caffer Excellent, thank you