Magnetic North Blog

Magnetic North is delighted to announce the artists who have been selected to take part in our next Space/Time retreat.  This edition of Space/Time is presented in partnership with Dance North Scotland and will take place at Findhorn, Moray.

Space/Time is a paid creative retreat for experienced artists from different disciplines that asks the question “How does an artist keep developing?”.  It aims to refresh participants through a stimulating examination of creativity. During the residency, we explore how creativity can be nourished and how artists can continue challenging themselves to develop.  The residency combines facilitated dialogue - built around a series of self-generated questions - with time for individual reflection and work as well as time to cook and eat together. It is led by Nicholas Bone and Alice McGrath.

The last six months of my artist attachment with Magnetic North have been hugely challenging, provoking and revealing from both a professional and personal perspective. My focus has been to observe the debates about rewilding and conservation in Scotland, from attending high profile discussions around issues of land management, to rewilding conferences and participating in highly divisive acts of conservation. 

Erewhon, New Zealand playwright Arthur Meek’s collaboration with Edinburgh’s own Magnetic North, will have its UK premiere at Summerhall from 1 August.  The new multi-media play brings together technologies separated by a century in a very contemporary investigation of our relationship with artificial intelligence and machines.  

Adapted from Victorian science fiction novel Erewhon by Samuel Butler, Erewhon premiered at Christchurch Arts Festival in 2017. This imaginative production shines new light on Samuel Butler’s satirical novel about Victorian society. Published in 1872, Butler's fictional account tells the story of a young colonial British explorer who discovers a remote community living in New Zealand’s Southern Alps. They’re the descendants of a technologically-advanced culture that had to destroy all their machinery after it became artificially intelligent and malicious. What first appears to be a utopia - where happiness is paramount, and machinery and inventions are forbidden - soon turns out to be a society filled with hypocrisies and blind-spots just as severe as any other.

Read the full Erewhon media release (PDF).