Blue Devils and AI Monsters

A performance lecture by Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie at St Pancras Old Church

Join Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie at St Pancras Old Church for a performance lecture that excavates the infernal connections between tinderboxes and clay mines, fairytale devils and slum-land parasites, brickworks and data-mining, public sculpture and social housing. We trace a crooked passage from the buried voids of extraction to the silicon landscrapers of contemporary technology, where data centres and corporate towers rise as inversions of the mines beneath and behind them.

Come and meet us at St Pancras Old Church, site of ancient Christian worship under recycled Roman campanile tiles. Here Mary Wollstonecraft was laid to rest and Mary Godwin trysted with Shelley. Join us for an evening of geology, myth, Gilbert Bayes' mineral experiments with the fantastic and today's techno-futures, where the local and the subterranean collide.

Context

Melanie Jackson was asked by A Space For Us, People's Museum in Somerstown to reproduce one of Gilbert Bayes missing polychrome ceramic finials, originally made as part of the first body of sculpture commissioned for social housing in the U.K. This beautiful body of work is rich with medieval romance, fairytale and biblical narrative including a scene where demons are driven away for the tenants of Somerstown.

Following the talk @spaceforus has planned a night of food and music to fundraise for the museum and to celebrate the return of Bayes sculpture to the area 'High Art in Low Places'. An additional fee can be paid on the night if you would like to stay for the evening events.