HHOS_v1: Publication Launch and Live Performance

Hummingbirds and Hamburgers Operating System version 1(HHOS_v1): Publication launch with participatory workshop and live performance.

What happens when we take conventions from a specific context and apply them to a completely different one? If we start with familiar starting points but make new rules where might we end up? And if there’s no fixed goal, what guides us?

HHOS is a digital publication, an interactive artwork, a set of graphic scores, a movement workshop, a methodology, a game, a thought exercise, a provocation! Version 1 takes form here as a digital pdf that is printable on an A4 printer. Visual and textual prompts adapted from screen-based devices are presented for physical interpretation and expression. The project invites you to slow down and take notice of the implicit instructions that guide your screen navigation and the tiny, repetitive actions that ensue. It prompts you to activate your habitual knowledge of digital interaction towards new outcomes ‘using your body and or other bodies’.

In this one-off event at CCA, Christine Ellison pays homage to Xerox, the copier company that funded radical research in the early 1970s at the Palo Alto Research Center, where computer pioneers applied the conventions of the office environment to produce many of the visual metaphors and graphical concepts that are still used to navigate screen-based devices today. A Xerox printer/copier machine will take centre stage in the clubroom to produce multiple hardcopy editions of the HHOS pdf within a live Happening with guest performers including members of Glasgow Improvisors Orchestra. You are invited to hear about the origins of the work, assemble your own copy of the publication and/or join in participatory activities led by the artist.

Artist Bio:

Christine Ellison is an Irish artist and educator based in Glasgow. Her work encompasses film, print, paper collage and text within a performative practice driven largely by a hunch that words and other symbolic systems become embodied within our collective actions -both explicitly and implicitly. Christine has exhibited, performed and collaborated extensively across the UK, Ireland and internationally. Since 2020 she has been developing graphic scores, films and performances under the umbrella title Hummingbirds and Hamburgers. This has evolved into a performance-based interdisciplinary exchange with collaborators across Art, Film, Community Practice, Dance, Music and Interaction/UX Design. Christine currently lectures in Fine Art at Edinburgh College of Art.