Plumpton Mornings – a 50/50 project for East Africa Famine Relief

John V Willshire on October 15, 2011

I’m delighted to be taking part in the 50/50 project, powered by the guys at Pipeline and Made by Many. It kicks off officially tomorrow for World Food Day, and is raising money for East Africa Famine Relief.

I need your help to help raise money.

I can come round your house and bother you till you help, or you can just read this post. It’s up to you. If we do it the easy way, you don’t need to make me a cup of tea and dig out some biscuits…
So, how does this work? Well, I’m creating a series of physical artworks from the ongoing digital ephemera that is Plumpton Mornings on Instagram…

Plumpton Mornings is a digital art project, exploring the relationship between physical and digital, certainty and uncertainty.

Every morning as I climb the stairs at Plumpton Railway Station, I load up a photography application on a mobile phone, and ‘shake to randomise’.

As I reach the same midpoint on the bridge, I take one picture, looking down the line towards Lewes, Eastbourne, Hastings and Ore, before jumping on the train to head north to London.

Any beauty in the picture depends not on the photographer, nor the people on the periphery of the picture; we are all just the dumb meat on the edges of technology.

What atheistic qualities are simply derived as a result of the randomised digital combinations, the processors of the phone and the instructions of the programs dealing with fluctuations in light and focus.

If there are human artists involved at all, they are unwitting ones; they are the programmers who set the code in motion, many miles and many oceans away.

Each morning’s photo is a mystery which will unfold only after the fact, much like the day itself.

I thought it would be interesting, and very Smithery, to create a project where the object wasn’t just to get people to donate money, but to give them something special in return; a tangible something.

A piece of art.

There are MANY plans for what these artworks may be, and in all likelihood, it will be a series of bigger and smaller pieces, at a range of different prices.

But in the meantime, I would ask of you just one thing…

If you think your, or your office/company/agency/international-confederation-of-superheroes MIGHT be interested in buying an artwork and donating to East Africa Famine Relief, then…