My Day with Wild Eye’s Ambiguous Machines

Aware that I was attending a Wild Eye event that was all about connections, I started my journey to the Ambiguous Machines launch event at Scarborough’s Italian gardens thinking about my own connections to the area and the sea. I wanted to look at things through my own “Wild Eye”, making the connections between art, nature and memories as I walked from the Italian gardens on the south side where pigeons graze from small piles of crushed grains and people feed the fat grey squirrels by hand. The squirrels here have round, almost human, features and even a reddish tinge in their greyness.

The paths along South Cliff have recently been refurbished. There’s a Star Map where the old Lido used to be and, embedded in the cliff, a children's playground I was tempted to have a go on. I could have chosen to walk down at sea level, where my son’s dog once ran off across the lido and jumped from the wall onto the rocks below, emerging entirely unscathed and totally exhilarated, like she belonged there. Instead I kept to the cliff, detouring past the Clock Cafe where people sitting outside with great white mugs of tea quietly browsed hardback library books, turning the pages with gloved hands.

I passed through the newly opened tunnel below the renovated cliff railway, then down Italian-style steps to the red roof on the Spa, past the checkerboard floor of the outdoor pavilion where Helena Bonham Carter cavorted at the end of a long forgotten TV play. An organist would play on summer afternoons to thin crowds arranged in a semicircle of deckchairs. Alone, on the higher level, I could see the pools at low tide where my wild eyes had spotted a starfish a few years back and attracted a crowd of 20-somethings who’d never seen one before.

Walking across Spa Bridge where Ambiguous Machines artist Shezad Dawood and author Daisy Hildyard had their picture taken for the “Invisible Dust” Wild Eye website, I was wondering which was the long gone theatre my Dad had taken us to see Tommy Cooper at. This was the time we stayed in a caravan outside town beside a meadow where the grass was bent over by armies of caterpillars. Tommy performed a routine on the piano that ended up with him covered with autumn leaves. Like our artists, he was linking art and nature.

I stopped off at an Italian cafe where many years earlier, in the pouring rain, my young family couldn’t go in as there was a “no buggies” sign in the window. The sign is still there. Today was the first time I had actually been inside. The coffee was strong and the company was good. Years ago, I was annoyed we couldn’t go in, but today it seemed like, even then, it was for the best. The place would have been way too small for our twin’s double buggy. As I entered Scarborough library for the launch event, I bumped into Shezad and discovered he has twins too.

The Shazad and Daisy hybrid

Shazad and Daisy work with connections and nature, indeed they admired each other’s work before being brought together to work on this project. Both have local connections -Yorkshire looms large in Daisy’s writing and Shazad studied in Leeds. They are working on a hybrid project about hybrids, so they too can become a hybrid. Shazad brings the ability to work in many forms - painting, sculpture, performance and film amongst others. Daisy brings the words. Her work connects the here-and-now to the past, present and future. She does the same thing with place, connecting the local to the global. From our point of view though, it is the connection between people, animals and society that stands out. Daisy says that if you have to give a room of people a 5 minute creative writing task, ask for an encounter with an animal. This gets the best stories and least level of pencil chewing.

As part of their research for Ambiguous Machines Daisy and Shazad worked with Scarborough sixth formers who surprised them with the subtleties of their ideas on hybridisation. None of your half-man half-haddock here, the ideas were much more subtle, even extending to mermaids defining their gender and societal roles in a changing aquatic world. All of this informed the version of Scarborough that was to emerge during the project, and the creatures that would inhabit it.

Hybrid Humans and the Octopus question

At the launch event, Daisy raised the idea that, maybe, we are already hybrid humans. Perhaps we are nothing more than a collection of microbes and bacteria and our evolution has been at least partly driven more by the needs of these microorganisms to thrive and collaborate. With her background in science, Daisy points out that this is quite a controversial way of thinking as it contradicts conventional theory.

Shazad has discussed the actual possibility of hybridisation with evolutionary geneticists. They say it is possible, right now, to splice human and octopus DNA. We don’t do it because it isn’t socially acceptable. We might like to try it because the Octopus is the closest thing we have to Alien intelligence. It has a distributed brain, a short lifecycle and lives in a place where humans cannot survive. Consider that cosmetic surgery for non-medical reasons was once deemed unacceptable, and you can see that one day someone might just try it. For now, Ambiguous Machines is here to satisfy our curiosity with imagined hybridised creatures.

Ambiguous Machines - The artwork

Firstly we have Daisy’s story 'The Aquarium' based in Scarborough. The starting point is the mysterious but grand aquarium that used to be where the south bay underground car park now stands (known as ‘Gala Land’ to some). This is also part of Shazad’s virtual reality vision. Recent events like the dead tides of shellfish, and even a new twist on Thor the walrus's 2022 visit, are included in the story. A potential future for Scarborough’s coast and people is mapped out. Without saying too much, non-native and hybrid species start to appear as the environment changes… This isn’t too far from the truth. 'The Aquarium' is short, online, thought provoking and all about Scarborough. The link is at the end of this blog - you should read it…

Shazad has imagined mysterious virtual reality versions of three creatures that we meet in 'The Aquarium'. They blur the lines between the organic and the digital, the real and the imagined and are based on real people - local scientists and conservationists - and one name many of you might know is Stuart Baines. Stuart is the Administrator of the Facebook page 'Scarborough Porpoise' which has 94,000 followers. This records sightings of porpoise in the Scarborough area, and increasingly dolphins and whales too. Stuart is portrayed, appropriately, as a post-human whale.

The others are Jane the Seaweed Being and Magnus the pistol shrimp. I will not say too much about Jane and Magnus… just go see for yourselves…

Ambiguous Machines - On the seafront

After the launch event, we went for a walk on the seafront. There are three points where you can scan a QR Code and see Shazad’s creatures interacting with the local environment.

The first point is underneath the grand hotel, near the Beachcomber cafe, at what3words smug.bricks.fancy.

The others are at laws.fallen.cling and spend.chips.blues which sounds like a 3 word summary of my 18th Birthday party night out in Scarborough. See how everything is connected...

With Ambiguous Machines, Daisy-Shezad has created another reason for people to stop and look at the sea. Once you scan the QR code, lost piers are brought back to life and the aquarium is rebuilt as hybrid creatures explore the imagined backgrounds and real coast. At one point, viewing Stuart the Whale, I wasn't sure if I was hearing the sea or the recording on my phone. If you look at it in the evening, you may even see the northern lights. As everything blends together you end up looking at what is actually in front of you with a wiser, wilder eye. This is how, at the second point, we spotted real dolphins leaping in the sea.

As I left the final point, I walked back towards South Bay where the exceptional 6 metre tide was battering the shoreline. Maybe we are going to get inundated sooner than we think?

Of course, we can't ignore the serious messages here. Changes to sea levels and water temperatures impact all of us. Today we see it in the price of fish and chips on the Scarborough seafront. Tomorrow - who knows? Shazad-Daisy shows us Scarborough as it might have been imagined in Disney’s Fantasia. A familiar place inhabited by animals with human characteristics (Ambiguous Machines?) and an uncertain future. Think of Mickey Mouse using magic he doesn’t understand and ultimately, can’t control as he is overwhelmed by rising water levels. It’s pretty close to the truth.

What is Wild Eye?

Wild Eye is a project that combines nature with art to create a series of events, artworks, and experiences engaging both local people and visitors with nature across the North Yorkshire coast. The YWT is working with Invisible Dust, a UK based Arts-Science-climate organisation and North Yorkshire Council.

Links

Daisy Hildyard Short story “The Aquarium” https://wildeye.org.uk/the-aquarium/

Invisible dust Ambiguous Machines site:

https://invisibledust.com/projects/wild-eye-ambiguous-machines-shezad-dawood-daisy-hildyard/

Wild Eye YWT site:

Wild Eye: Bringing nature & tourism together along Scarborough’s coast | Yorkshire Wildlife Trust

Wild Eye invisible dust site: https://invisibledust.com/projects/wild-eye/