john gillett presents							more options
		where seagulls swear on monday 10th march
		John Gillett left college fluent in Latin and Greek. Finding few jobs available for ancient Romans, he became an exhibition curator, a book designer and latterly a digital media artist. As the 2001/2 Navvygate artist in residence at ArtSway, having witnessed a young man on a train swearing at a flock of birds, he set himself the task of enabling the birds to answer back, by reanimating video images of bird flight to configure lettering in the sky. Studying Latin prose composition seemed the perfect preparation for performing the complex and largely pointless linguistic gymnastics which the task eventually required. For to achieve his goal he had to write the first code he had created since his attempts in the eighties to make a Psion Organiser write science fiction stories. He is a pragmatic Johnny ComeLately to computer coding, reading the manuals and conducting his own experiments to gain just enough understanding to get the job done. In his presentation, "Where Seagulls Swear", he will retrace his steps of last year in developing the bird piece, with edited lowlights of the wreckage of his residency, the various failures,near-misses and evolutionary cul-de-sacs, the albatrosses and dodos amongst the one hundred or so "Hot: This one! Absolute Final" files that he created on the way to the seagull work that was eventually shown. "The piece, called "Ah! This Life is so Everyday (After Patrick Caulfield)" uses the machine's ability to generate apparently random numbers to tip the balance of probability in favour of the unlikely, reflecting John Gillett's interest in our readiness to see what we like to call coincidence in common events. Being asked to make this presentation on his birthday, for instance, seems a coincidence, but only because coincidence is the subject under discussion..." John Gillett was ArtSway’s NavvyGate part-time artist-in-residence in the Digital Media suite at ArtSway between September 2001 and September 2002. John Gillett was trained by the Arts Council of Great Britain as an exhibition organiser, and has curated contemporary visual art shows for many years as Director of the Winchester Gallery, Southampton University.