James Capper

Tim talks to James Capper, an artist and speculative engineer who makes boats that walk and robots that paint: machines that ask us what machines are really for. His latest work Monitor is an itinerant, walking workshop for Ukraine which emerged from a residency in Kiev and is currently on exhibit, in the form of prototypes and drawings, at the Royal Academy in London.

 

Podcast transcript

Tim Abrahams: There’s still so much to imagine. Hello, Superurbanists. James Capper thinks in machines. He’s a sculptor. And this is genuinely an accurate term, a speculative engineer, his project, Greenhorn is a charming land- art making, walking forestry machine. It lumbers in both meanings of the word. For Mudskipper, James took a 1980s commercial Thames work boat. And gave it the capacity to crawl on the foreshore, using a set of hydraulic jacks. He builds machines that make beautiful paintings. At the Royal Academy recently, I fell into the hypnotic possibilities of his latest project Monitor. A proposal, genuinely, to build an itinerant workshop that can walk on mechanical legs across the country of Ukraine . When the war is over. The RA is showing prototypes and drawings of this project. The work is a collaboration between James and designerThomas Pearce, an architect, Greg Storer. James will be mentioning them. James though is the prime mover. 

And when the opportunity came to visit him at his incredible workshop on an old World War II airfield outside Swindon where the science museum stores most of its collection, I had to go. Although James has only just moved there it’s pretty much impossible to imagine him anywhere else. Just on the drive from the gate, manned by Ghurkas, amidst a vast solar array, I saw the head of a wind turbine, 19th century canons wrapped in plastic. 

James Capper: Hi, I am James Capper and we are at my sculpture studio at the Science and Innovation Park in Wroughton. It’s run by the Science Museum. From what I’ve been told, It used to be uh, a World War II airfield run by women in the war effort. They were all the welders and the mechanics. and I suppose engineers, aircraft engineers, they were also pilots I’ve been told that they were fixing the, the Lancaster bombers that were peppered from the dogfights and just about flown back in and they would fix them, service, get them back to their service and then fly them back to their regional airfields.

Tim Abrahams: How many hangars are across the side?

James Capper: There’s 17. I’m told. I moved here in May. So I’m still learning a lot about it. It is phenomenal. but, um, that hangar over there, they say you can get three Lancaster bombers in, wingtip to wingtip and these they’re colossal planes.

See these concrete blocks? I was like, can I jackhammer them out? So that I can utilize the whole space. And they were like no, this is a listed building and they’re the buffer blocks for the fire engine. Because this is where they used to park all the fire engines.

Tim Abrahams: So these were for narrow 1940s built fire engines. Yeah. Yeah. And we’ve got one, two, three, four, five large doors and it’s a really nice building as well. 

James Capper: Yeah, apex angle iron trusses. Because I’m used to looking up into an asbestos roof 

Tim Abrahams: What did you say was in that building? 

James Capper: Again, I’ve been told that there are parts of the Cutty Sark in there. The Cutty Sark burnt down a couple of times. But the more recent time, they thoroughly rebuilt it. Timber for timber rib for rib. And the planks that they copied, have all been saved and they’re on stillages 

Tim Abrahams: How did you get this place? 

James Capper: I was introduced to Matt Moore, the site director, by Ben Russell, who’s the curator of mechanical engineering at the Science Museum in central London.

And Ben basically saved me because I was at a point where I had outgrown the studio in South Bermondsey. And potential development would make that brownfield site more of a place to put up flats and dwellings. So, I had to sort of figure out the next step.

And Ben mentioned this place and I for a long time had listened to stories of him coming here to look at the collection for exhibitions and he spoke very fondly of the site manager. But I never really joined the two together.

And then I was sat with my girlfriend, now wife, at her mother’s house down the road from here. And just, having a chat and her mother was like, “Oh, the science museum. That’s a 10 minute drive from here.” What is going on? 

Tim Abrahams: So it all starts to make sense. Now, take me around. What’s that three ton monster over there?

James Capper: It’s funny, when all these machine tools turned up Matt Moore came in to have a look to see how I was settling, site manager.

And he was like, “bloody hell, James, this looks like part of our collection.” Because these machines are quite old. Yeah. 

Tim Abrahams: So tell the listeners what we’re looking at. 

James Capper: I’m sorry about the rust that makes it look like it’s been out in the rain. That’s from the condensation that I’m trying to resolve. But yeah, so this is a Colchester 800 kilo lathe. That’s a half ton and that’s a two ton. And the Mitchell, the larger lathe the Mitchell that was part of a number of machines, including this Ward Capstan lathe,  this Russian surface grinder and this Italian mill and these rollers here were very kindly donated to me by two engineers Andrew and Bill Thompson, who have Thompson’s hydraulic presses and a very old company from Millwall down the road from my old studio. And they were donated gradually over a number of years. I remember one day them coming up and saying, “Do you want a mill? And I was, I was like, “yeah, actually, I’ve got something I really need to do some milling with.” And he’s “oh why don’t you come down and have a look at it?” And so I went down to the end of the road to have a look at it.

And it stood in this huge hangar, much larger than this place. And it looked very small, but when it turned up on this five tonne forklift, I was like, “Oh, bloody hell, how am I going to move that?” 

Yeah, so we’re currently standing around a load of my machine shop, which is basically from the 1960s.

And it’s, it’s 1960s, 1970s, and the welders are 1990s. So the stuff is pre- all of the robot craze that we’re in at the moment, which I’ve I endorse, I work with, but when I’m working on my own, I go back to lo-fi, if I’m working with a draftsman, then I’ll sit down and we’ll plan machine pathways with incremental forming like The Monitor in the RA at the moment or laser cutting, laser profiling steel plate for maximizing efficiency on repetitive profiling. But I see this as like a prototyping shop and prototyping shops these days have the distraction of a computer in front of them.

And I think an old school prototyping shop, if you woke up on the right side of bed, and you’ve got the right kind of thing in your mind of what you want to make, you can come out the other end of the day, in the evening, having made part of it, if not it. Whereas these days, you’ll sit down, open the laptop and within half an hour be on YouTube and distracted.

So I know here, if I walk in with a block, I should be coming out with something machined by the end of the day. 

Tim Abrahams: It’s funny, I’m not an engineer, I’ve not worked in this field, but what was, when I walked in, a massive array of stuff is now beginning to break down to me.And I’m beginning to be able to see the difference between the machines you make machines with, and the machines you make. 

James Capper: Which is a very confusing thing, because, Part of the inspiration are the machines that are making machines. It’s interesting because, like, we live in a time of artificial intelligence and robots and advanced programs on computers for analysis of things. And this is this for me. Steel stock on those racks over there, plate in the plate rack outside iron worker that can punch shear, notch does it hydraulically, it’s the analog method of what has now become a very data driven, very computer driven process.

And I think, the language of engineering, I say, is spoken in many different dialects internationally. And I’m not sure what dialect this one taps into, whether it’s like old school, hands on, agricultural or just that of someone who prototypes accepts that within failure, you probably end up with 10 other options of 10 processes or sculptures or mobile machines.

Tim Abrahams: What’s that? 

James Capper: This one is a sculpture. With the red funnel. That is a specular. 

Tim Abrahams: A specular?

James Capper: It’s a hydraulic painting tool. You put paint in the top here. I get a marine paint, and I actually mix it with Plaster of Paris so it’s a, it’s like a very thick slurry, it can’t be too thick because it has to go through the the valve there and that then drops down onto this broadcasting wheel, which is driven by a hydraulic motor, and it Yeah, broadcasts it everywhere.

Tim Abrahams: To the listener, we’ve just had a kind of a whip hand signal there from James to gesture at the velocity and speed and direction the paint goes in. That’s amazing. And these are other paint distributing machines as well? 

James Capper: These are probably the messiest machines that I’ve built for painting so far.

Because to use paint efficiently, which I would much prefer to do than inefficiently is is tricky with this kind of application whereas I found with this machine here, which looks a bit like a coffee table, and this one here, which looks like a kind of hydraulic CNC router

oh yeah, that’s the noise the wind makes through these gaps. 

That one over there on the tripod and this one here, I’ve realized the broadcasting rate is colossal, and they use a huge amount of paint, so the next experiments to do with these is just broadcasting plaster.

 I need to think of other materials basically where, and that takes me away from painting machines and that’s where these things started. And this one’s the most efficient. It has the side door that sometimes opens. You can see in there these are [00:10:00] These are made out of rubber, and that rubber is conveyor belt rubber from a concrete plant.

Tim Abrahams: The table we were just wiping down so we could sit on this table is actually a painting machine. It’s actually a machine. 

James Capper: Yeah. It’s for making rotary paintings. And they are a square piece of paper either 70 by 70 centimeters, 90 by 90 centimeters. Or on this one here, 150 by 150 centimetres. And so each square piece of paper has a hole cut in the centre of it. It’s taped down to this plywood surface. And then a sort of arm is applied to it. 

Tim Abrahams: That’s part of that.

James Capper: Yeah so where you’ve got the hole in the centre of the paper, that then attaches on to to, to the to the spindle, and that rotates it. 

What we’re looking at here is a kind of candy striped arm cannon, for want of a better term. 

I mean that, that has got years worth of paint on it.

Yeah, lots of people say that and I think if I was ever to exhibit the paintings again, I should probably have this somewhere in the gallery. 

But all of these machines are all hydraulic, so this is a hydraulic power pack, and this one here is one that I’ve made. And there’s a couple more over there. you know, I’ve, I’ve shelves of books, on the computational understanding of where a robot is in space, the different kinds of senses it needs, the different kind of understanding of terrains as well.

So there’s so much to go through before you can even get something to walk over a ploughed field and keep a level kind of hole or whatever. There’s, trip hazards are still a major thing, it’s still, there’s still a lot of stuff to be refined.

Tim Abrahams: What are your sculptures? 

Let me talk about two ends of the spectrum and then I’ll try and place the sculpture somewhere in the middle. The first is the prehistoric or the brachiosaurus of this situation.

If one is the high performance cheetah that runs so fast, it can trip over its own feet and barrel roll off the road, which is an impressive thing to see when you see the Boston Dynamics videos. Is is the, it’s something like the Meridian what is it me, what’s the name of, I’m terrible at pronouncing the name of these old equipment manufacturers.

It’s Ruston-Bucyrus or these huge walking drag lines.

Tim Abrahams: What’s a walking drag line? 

James Capper: Exactly. I occasionally get friends sending me videos on Instagram, going, I’ll bet you haven’t seen this, and it’s it’s like the flipper foot of a two and a half thousand ton mining machine, which is far too heavy to put on crawler tracks or tires, so it sits on its own slew ring, and it has either side of its upper superstructure, where the winches are a set of these big flippers and that walking drag line is used for strip mining or open cast mining and it looks a bit like a crane. It has a slew ring that it sits on on top of that is a a superstructure with a whole bunch of winches in it.

Which looks like a warehouse. It’s the size of this building the upper structure and then an A-frame, and then a boom or a jib that goes out the front and the winches basically control the bucket and the bucket swings out and then it lands in the dirt. And the reason it’s called a drag line is it drags the bucket back towards itself and it fills up with dirt.

And, these buckets often can fill up, as many as 10 cars or whatever, like a huge amount of dirt gets picked up by it. So yeah, so walking machines are colossal and cumbersome or small and high performance. And somewhere in the middle hydraulics gets forgotten about, although Boston Dynamics do use a lot of hydraulics in what they’re doing. The hydraulics are closer to pneumatics in speed. 

Tim Abrahams: Leaving them aside and focusing on your work, you’re locating yourself somewhere in between those, but that’s in a technological sense, isn’t it? You’re obviously, as an artist, doing something else again. 

James Capper: Yeah, I think it’s important, isn’t it, for us to try and contextualise the walking machine, because otherwise people are just like, This is just like someone who’s had a few pints down the pub and dreaming up this building that can walk along.

But, the walking machine has been with us for a very long time. It’s been, the robot walking machine, what Boston Dynamics now are today, has been something that started in the 1960s. The first walking drag lines were, similar age, 1940s, 1950s maybe. And so walking has been seen as a method of propulsion for some time.

And again, I get friends who send me photos or images on Instagram of a Menzi Muck spider excavator, a Swiss built excavator that sits on legs, but the legs have wheels at the end of it. So there’s, I think there’s walking machines out there that also cheat because they have wheels too, or they have some, something that sort of, yeah.

Tim Abrahams: so tell me about Monitor. How did Monitor come about?

James Capper: Yeah Monitor started really at University of Bath a long time ago 2015. I was invited to collaborate with Jens Rosner in mechanical engineering where we developed a module called Monitor, which was a little aluminium chassis with some servos that the chassis articulates in the middle, like a sight dumper.

And on four corners of those articulating parts are flippers with the servos they give feedback to a Raspberry Pi, or it’s like an Arduino. And that allows for us to develop programs. We developed four walking gaits. 

Tim Abrahams: And did you do that with students or was it just a research project?

James Capper: That was a module and that was done with students. On 

 

Tim Abrahams: On the B. Sc. programme? 

James Capper: On the B. Sc. programme. The last student, Declan: he really contributed quite a substantial amount to it. 

Tim Abrahams: It seems that the flame has been passed on. It’s a project which you’ve been plugging away at or has just stayed alive. It’s been there. 

James Capper: In 2018. Hannah Barry, who I worked with for many years, amazing art dealer. She’s supported and been a champion of my practice for many years since leaving art school. Was invited out to Ukraine by someone called Luba, who runs a program called IZOLYATSIA in Kyiv.

And so we went out to Kyiv. We met up with Luba and we met on her residency some amazing artists in an incredible piece of geography in Kyiv actually. In the shipyards of Kyiv. So these incredible cranes warehouses, hangars slips where they were pulling boats up and obviously the boats they were working on were all steel.

So welders everywhere. And it was a very exciting time for me to be be there. But yeah what we ended up talking about apart from being very excited about being in the epicenter of the shipyard with an art residency I ended up talking to a lot of the artists because Luba had asked me to have a think about a proposal I could make that may involve the the harbor front there, which her buildings back onto. And after speaking to a number of the artists realized that the reason and Luba made this quite clear as well, that the reason they were in Kyiv is because they had been displaced from the Donbass where she had the original residency program.

 We were there in 2018, but it had happened in quite recent times because the artists and the people on that residency or having studios within that facility told me their stories the displaced feeling was a very complex thing, very emotional thing to explain, but that feeling that they were doing everything that they could from very far away was difficult.

And it was in that process of having those conversations and asking them whether a satellite studio, something more mobile. Something that would get them back to those regional areas they are displaced from became a credible thing. From the shipyards of Kyiv this idea moved to these more regional areas from where these artists were displaced and their families from.

 What Alatsia has is this amazing group of artists. And I believe now, it’s even larger group of humanitarian people that are working in a multi faceted way within the cultural sector to cope with the Russian invasion, it’s war basically it’s horrific.

But back in 2018, there was a conversation going on about that feeling of being displaced and the effect of the propaganda in those regions that they had been displaced from. The Russians had colonized broadcasting media with this propaganda that told their parents and their friends that were still in those regions that they were the traitors. They’d gone to Kyiv because there was nowhere else for them to flee.

So there was also this emotional, disenfranchised, disassembled relationship between, in some cases, these artists parents and them and they just wanted to go back to almost prove that they weren’t the, what they were being told they were, and so this conversation went, developed more and more as I was there.

We, we, I walked, I came away from Kyiv realising that this thing had to be a collaborative thing. It had to be a facilitator. It couldn’t be a finger pointer. We’re surrounded by finger pointing art and media that likes to point at problems but not really come up with any solutions.

And as a sculptor and a speculative engineer, I’m constantly thinking of Big problems and how to come to solutions. And the work usually is a manifestation of a solution for something far in the [00:20:00] future. Like the mentality I had back then was really “it has to be a collaborative thing.”.

I have to find a solution in here somewhere. It would be amazing if I can introduce mobile sculpture. So the learnings of the walking gait of Monitor and Green horn, these two previous sculptures but also it to be a a vehicle of expedition, a mobile sculpture that would allow for the facilitation of

an artist to occupy it and to work from it within regional areas to be able to use it as a laboratory, a studio, a tool, which when getting back to London, talking to friends realized that this would require a piece of architecture. It would require something which was outside of my training as a sculptor. If I can say art school is training. I think 

Tim Abrahams: I’m looking around this room and thinking how much of this did you learn how to use at art school. 

 

James Capper: I think lots of us that went to art school, we were led by our noses or our hearts or what we feel we can get ahold of.

The situation I had was outside of my comfort zone. Greg Storer was the first person I phoned. He had been a friend through collecting and through conversations and the kind of similarities of our interests. He and Thomas Pearce, who is an industrial designer, run Unit Eight at the Bartlett. Which is this kind of module that I think it’s in year four or something like that of architecture training. Greg said, “Hey we should come to your studio because, (as you can see), it’s full of machines and sculptures and it’s very inspiring.” 

So they brought a group of students to the studio and it was really great. We had a great conversation. There was lots of interaction, lots of questions and lots of interest with the machines, as you could probably imagine. And I know that it was on Valentine’s Day and Greg wanted to get off on his date. And I was like, mate, just a really quick word. And yeah, we had this, we had this like 10 minute conversation about an idea for an architectural asset collaborate with a mobile sculpture.

So the chassis of a mobile sculpture to become the foundation of an architectural asset. And then and then Monitor started to develop. There were a number of 3D prints and it looked a little bit like a shipping container. It was an expedition style rectangular cube. Which had Thomas’s interest in incremental sheet forming, which is robotic forming. It had these these really interesting… 

Tim Abrahams: They are like moulded forms 

James Capper: Exactly I get on Instagram lots of people going, nice vacuum forming mate. Because it looks a little bit on an Instagram photo like a, like something that’s been vacuum formed. 

Tim Abrahams: There’s quite a lot more going on than that. 

James Capper: Yeah, , it’s the man from Space X that was designing part of the dragon rocket or the raptor, whatever. He’s now got his own incremental forming, engineering company, really exciting processes. He’s using, actually, two robot arms. We just use the one on the back of the piece of steel and one on the front.

The possibilities are phenomenal with this process, but yeah. Thomas had some research going on at Bartlett school of architecture. At the Here East site they have this incredible lab, this incredible robot lab. And so the project started developing into this field of incremental sheet forming.

And it was in 2000 and 19 Thomas Greg and I went out, back out to Kyiv where ideas started to become more solid. Whereas the first idea looked like a shipping container on orange canoes, a little bit like Greenhorn, the new work Was taking on much more of a form of a one of my mobile sculptures or drawings of mobile sculptures, a far more exciting form something that was morphic in the landscape; shows this expedition orange; has a a tower that goes up for a wind turbine to be attached to, or a crow’s nest type situation or broadcasting apparatus camera apparatus; candy cane colored, all the colors of industry; moving parts, like there’s the self raising cab that you get on scrap handling excavators demolition rigs; all these hydraulic parts painted yellow; architectural asset painted expedition orange, like the British Antarctic survey facility and the hulls all red oxide, red classic General Marine, a phenomenal tug company when it existed on the River Thames but it all came together in this 2019 visit.

And then we were shut off by the pandemic. And that’s where these painting machines came in when I was in the studio. And then we came out the other side of the pandemic, and I had a lot going on with Mud Skipper, a mobile sculpture that sat on the river that operated up and down the River Thames, the London River.

And we then started to develop the Monitor prototype, which you saw at the Academy, which is a one-to-one scaling of the interior and exterior walls which are all incrementally formed robots formed at Here East. Thomas Pearce, Theo Tan and one of the guys in the lab were working with the– were with the robots. And then I, back at the studio, was developing this trellis so inside that one-to-one is this incredible interior skeletal structure made out of 100 by 5 flat mild steel. It’s welded to a five five mil mild steel interior nesting assembly and it creates this extremely rigid strange formulaic of steel stud framing.

But if you could imagine steel sub stud framing. So it’s got this real strength to it, this real rigidity.

It also has within its rigidity, a little bit of flex, which I think is good. But that flex is helpful for the process of getting bashed or or the mobile sculptural side of the Monitor stuck in some position within the terrain it’s trying to navigate.

So yeah, I got very excited about this trellis, which you barely see. Then all of these incredible robo-form pieces of steel that were collected from the Bartlett, we assembled them, pot riveted them into the trellis. And in the future, whether we use rivets is another thing.

Tim Abrahams: What to you is the importance of the Royal Academy in that process? 

James Capper: Yeah, so it was really

Tim Abrahams: You alright? 

James Capper: Yeah, I’m just trying to, I’m trying to get everything. Cause this is where I don’t want to, 

Tim Abrahams: This clearly loads of people involved and it can be a little bit bewildering for the listener if there’s loads of names, which is one thing I’m cognizant of, but also, you clearly don’t want to forget people who’ve made a major contribution. It’s interesting, you’ve got this avant garde, utopian project, highly specialised, it’s in the realms of the unlikely, and yet you’re making it.

James Capper: Yeah. 

Tim Abrahams: And it’s a strange moment for not one, but three cultural organizations. Because you’ve got Hannah, you’ve got the Ukrainian dimension. 

James Capper: Yeah. 

Tim Abrahams: Then the Royal Academy rocks up in this all. So how do you use these cultural organizations to actually take steps forward in something that you clearly would like to achieve.

James Capper: It’s been very important at this stage to really get Monitor seen because Monitor has been going since 2018, but not seen to anyone. And it’s very difficult because as we were working on things with Monitor, as we were also meeting various people like Vicky, , the situation was unfolding in Ukraine, it wasn’t what it is today, talking from. November 2024. 

There were bad things, there was the escalation and there was a necessity to be able to convey the work. And. And the fact that we had been working on this work since 2018, without going too much into a political angle, because I didn’t want it to be this finger pointing thing. I wanted it to be this. unfolding, ability to be able to show this work that we’d all put a colossal amount of time and R& D into in its best possible way. So when Vicky came and found us she was like I have this architectural window, nothing was definitive. And we, and I had this little 3D print of Monitor the actual thing, and it was small enough to put in a little screw box tucked between two sponges. And Greg and Thomas were like take this away. And then at least, it wasn’t a waste of a trip, and we had our fingers crossed, but what happened after with her being able to work this into the, the curatorial team to agree and how to work this into the architectural window was phenomenal. And probably the best result we could have had was being able to show the work within a central London institution, and to sort of allow people to see the work and it was a great thing for Hannah and I too, because we’d been very patient with this whole process.

And these processes with these works. They take years, it’s not like a snappy kind of, and it’s not, that’s another thing we’re surrounded by, this kind of short termism, we were talking about it, people’s attention spans, if you’re making a film to document something.

Oh, it can’t be more than five minutes, mate, you’ll lose people’s attentions. And what do you get from that? 

Tim Abrahams: Interesting though, but what, as you were [00:30:00] showing me around machinery around before, you said one of the joys that you have is that you can come in and, you’ve got an idea and by the time you’ve left at the end of the day, you can have something made. Yeah. Whereas this sounds like a different order. 

James Capper: Yeah, it has the freedom, it has the free thinking, it has the kind of when a lot of people go, Oh why are you doing this? Does it have to have a reason? Do I have to have a reason to do anything? I’m an artist, I can do whatever I want. But, this Monitor does have a reason, it’s and it’s reason I think is unfolding gradually as time moves on, as this war unfolds as its requirements are set, as, So the next steps after the Royal Academy Exhibition, which closes in February. 

Tim Abrahams: Tickets are available.

James Capper: No, it’s free. It’s free. It’s free, yeah.

Tim Abrahams: Shouldn’t go without saying. 

James Capper: But yeah, no the next steps are To further look at roboforming, which Thomas is now doing from the Bauhaus in Germany, where he has a position as a professor and researcher. So he’s putting together Thomas Pearce is putting together, hopefully, a, fingers crossed, a robot lab over there, that he can continue this piece of research that he has going on with Monitor, along with a number of other fantastic pieces of research, including band saws on the end of six axis robots following natural grown lumber, and cutting down timber wastage and giving you like these very strange forms of, it got some fantastic ideas going on out of box thinker of a phenomenal out of box thinker.

So he’s putting that together out there. I’m going to build, here, a Monitor chassis prototype which, is what we’re calling it. It’s a complex name, but it will end up probably having a sculptural name, a quick name. But that’s its name on the drawings at the moment. 

Tim Abrahams: Monitor Chassis Prototype.

James Capper: Yeah, and that, that will be a combination of hydraulic power pack, hydraulic cylinders, articulating custom fabricated chassis with a feedback system programmable logic controller or an onboard computer with a number of gait modules gait settings that will allow me to study hydraulic walking gaits on a on a slightly smaller chassis than the actual Monitor chassis out there in the airfield.

Fingers crossed that 

Tim Abrahams: we were just driving past and you showed me something that looked like the kind of the husk of a husk of an incredibly advanced helicopter, but it wasn’t. 

James Capper: Yeah, it looks like a helicopter fuselage, but it’s actually an experimental wind turbine. Yeah.

Tim Abrahams: Who owns the thing?

James Capper: I’m sure it’s top secret, but no, there’s lots of people. 

Tim Abrahams: So if you were to have a robot walking around, it’s got some company, put it that way. 

James Capper: Yeah, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of things going on. There’s a lot of it around. Autonomous buses and Monitor, Monitor robots, surrounded by sheep and farmers on quad bikes. There’s normal things as well. But yeah so we’ll be testing the Monitor chassis here. Hopefully, this time next year, I’ll have lots of interesting studies and lots of things in place. And then a habitation study, that’s going to have to happen out in Kyiv. So we’re going to have to find a window and work that out with Luba at  Izolyatsia. So they’re the three big next steps. And then, between now, and 20 27, we hopefully build the Monitor. This is where this turns a very dystopian situation with the conflict into a very utopian idea from the perspective of a sculptor and a speculative engineer who wants to bring something in that facilitates the rebuilding of communities after this horrendous conflict.

But yeah, so it puts the dream-like state of where I can imagine things for things after conflict is putting the artists back into their communities where they can bring things back together, where they want to bring things back together. It’s less of a political thing, it’s more of a cultural thing.

It’s something that needs to be done delicately. It’s something that needs to be done in a way which comes from out of box thinking. It comes from specialisms. It comes from, whether you’re a broadcaster, if you’re a painter, whether you’re a sculptor or a musician, a poet, a general thinker, like a thinker and intellectual thinker, filmmaker, specialists and it helps the specialists.

And what it does is Monitor comes into these communities and it doesn’t have the appearance of a military vehicle or even like a Red Cross vehicle, an ambulance. It’s this strange lumbering character. It’s this mythical creature. It’s this thing that these artists or these people come out of and invite people into.

It’s this thing that tries to show transparency with the outside skin covered with what the inside contents are, it has this character and it takes on this sort of through biomimicry and its movement, this kind of walking gait of this reptile.

I’m hoping that it encourages people to come out of their houses rather than just whip their curtains closed. After these poor people have experienced these things. But, it’s utopian, it’s collaborative, It’s it’s a process, it’s megally multifaceted it’s megally adaptable, it looks at really what Greg said, it’s a Swiss army knife it’s this, it has this ability to morph into everyone’s necessities or needs within this kind of expedition environment.

Tim Abrahams: Just a little bit about your story. Where did you study:

James Capper: yeah, so I went to state school in a place called Maidstone in Kent. I went and did a BTech in fine art in a community college in Maidstone. And from there I went to Chelsea school of art to do a BA. And I, I, it was probably the most exciting three years that I’ve ever had in education at that point and then from there I went to the Royal College of Art and did sculpture. And again, that was great. But I realized in my last year there that I had to combine the things that I loved. And I had to try and make it all work. And I used to talk to tutors and visiting artists and go, How do you get this to work?

How do you get a studio to work? And no one has an answer for that. And especially for an artist who is making things with hydraulic cylinders and walking machines. They’re like, yeah, I don’t know mate. Good luck. But yeah, I very fortunately met in 2006 or 2007 2007 Hannah Barry in a squat through my friend 

Sean McDowell Bobby Dowler Christopher Green and Oliver Griffin. 

And they were all part of this collective in Peckham that was showing art in this old Georgian house in Lindhurst Way. And it was a combination of being extremely stubborn and true to my word and holding my integrity in its place as I could and collaborating with the most.

incredible people who agreed that I should continue with that integrity. So Hannah has been a supporter from the beginning and he’s also a supporter of Monitor. So yeah, that has, that was really, I guess that’s the journey. 

Tim Abrahams: The Monitor project was this itinerant laboratory of itinerant workshop and you moved your work from one condition that you’ve grown from in London and taking it to somewhere completely different. 

James Capper: And it’s interesting. I’ve, I was thinking when you were coming, when you’re driving over earlier, I was like, what do I say to Tim about this place?

Cause it’s not inviting you into the studio that I’ve been in for 11 years and I guess it’s easy to come in and go, Oh yeah, here’s a load of equipment. This is like a guy’s shed, but I just feel like it’d be nice when I get Monitor walking out there. You’ll see it, like, I think in a different state.

I think things have changed a lot. But what happens is, because I work here on my own, and previously I had students and I had people coming it was like a factory where everything had to work, everything had floor space, everything, everything costs money in London, especially if you have a warehouse, everything is money, floor space is critical.

Here is just a very different kind of, it’s not that I’m laid back, it’s that I’m I’m thinking of the next steps, as well as getting on with works, as the next steps are prevailing. And I think getting on with work, if that can be Monitor in the academy, it is. But yeah, there are things happening.

I wanted to show you those tree planting units outside. For my AI tree planting machine, we’re talking about a tree-planting machine. The thing weighs eight tons and walks like an ant. It’s not that you’ve got an AI tree. I’ve got two tree planting units off of a 35 ton excavator for reforestation out the front and lots of people see them and they go.

What sort of weapon is that then mate? Because there’s like cannons down there and I’m like, no, it’s not a weapon, it’s for forestry. Oh, does that cut a tree down? No. No, it doesn’t cut trees down. It’s not one of those. It plants trees and what machines in forestry can plant trees? They all cut them down, don’t they? And it’s that thing, it’s the confusion of what AI is, the confusion of what a robot is, a robot basically does very repetitive things over and over again. A robot is best optimized if it’s loading up a CNC mill. Or it’s spraying the same car body panels, the same doors, the same roofs, lots of people are like I’m going to get a robot to make that.

And it’s a one off thing and it’s [00:40:00] crazy, cause you can just say why don’t you just make it by hand? And that’s what this place is. I guess it’s this place where I can make one off things very efficiently with these tried and tested methods. They’re the tools of the trade are the lathes, the mills, the iron workers, the bandsaws, the MIG welder, the TIG welder, the sticks and the arc and whatever else, you know, like…  

Tim Abrahams: I don’t know if you’ve read the recently published article by Dean Kissick in Harper’s magazine about the state of the art world. But if you haven’t, you should really look out for it. It’s a bit of a complaint at finger pointing art and concludes with a plea to artists, which actually could go for all of us.. “You are free to dream anything to build different worlds, to whisper enticements in many years. , to try to destroy reality. These are prospects that artists have dreamed of for centuries. There is still so much to imagine”. Now I thought about that when I was driving back after my amazing visit to James’s studio. I’ve little to add to what James has said. 

I don’t want to pick apart this lovely idea of an artist working away in the industrial effluvium of centuries that the Science Museum has collected. But I do want to say that everything from the tree planting machine up front, that James is somehow gonna turn into a piece and the workshop, that whistled like a freight train, just charged my imagination. I will be back to see Monitor crawling around the airfield, an eight meter long inhabitable, mobile sculpture with four hydraulic legs, a pivoting frame and a reptilian walking motion. Thank you to Hannah Barry’s team, including Charlie Mills. Thank you to the Royal Academy team including Vicky Richardson, the Vicky who James mentions in the piece. And thank you to the Izolyatsia team in Kiev and James himself who showed remarkable patience with my inability to master my digital recorder: the one machine I am responsible for governing amongst his many. Superurbanists Berlin next.

 

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