'Saturday Night' has been made as part of 'Delinquents' - two related artworks for the new IDEA building.
(see also David Mackintosh - 'No Moving Parts')

Delinquents uses the building and localities' history alongside an understanding of 'delinquency' which draws on both the classical use of the term in relation to societal ills and the more liminal artistic use of the description in terms of wilful creative transgression of boundaries, site or 'official' usage of technology.

"Rather than some kind of delinquent aesthetic, we were in pursuit of a claim to romantic delinquency...things failing to perform their 'proper' role usurped, transformed in our delinquent hands into something all together more interesting."

Andrea Philips, TVOD and Boundary Stories, Hybrid magazine, Dec 1993

The initial impetus for the proposal came from the initial site visit and the details of the building's official and unofficial history within the ongoing flux of social change in Salford. Walking around the site it is possible to see the structural evidence of its original purpose as a brewery in its architecture and positioning within the city, alongside the more cosmetic and provisional alterations of its recent attempts at reinvention (refurbished offices, exposed wires, half-finished display units) all existing alongside the physically and metaphorically ragged edges of the building where flooding, fire or vandalism mark the progress of an unofficial, delinquent history. It is this that marks the starting point for both projects.

Saturday Night consists of a webcam focussed on an image on the second floor of the building. The image has been painted in an mdf alcove designed for clothes display. Jim Medway has painted the image which also exists via the webcam on this website. Medway's practice is largely based around his anthropomorphic drawings of cats as delinquent youths swigging hooch, racing each other in wheelie bins and being thrown out of shopping centres. The work combines the visual language of kids illustration with the documentary concerns of social realism and occupies a position somewhere between affection and pathos. At the point at which the number of 'hits' on the image reaches the number of Saturday nights since the building was built in 1878, Graham Parker will paint over the image in tar. The image and its treatment (including the context it is presented in for search engines) refers to both the high turnover of rogue web 'real estate' used for porn on the web and the practice of 19th century Salford warehouse owners of painting their doorways with tar to deter young lovers from using them on Saturday evenings (a practice detailed in Robert Roberts seminal account of late Victorian life in Salford - "The Classic Slum").

The use of electronic monitoring within the work is partially as mute witness, although 'Saturday Night' uses the monitoring of the hit rate and the physical consequence of tarring the imagery in the alcove when a certain level of virtual witnessing has been reached, to implicates the remote viewer. As with Mackintosh's 'Webcam Obscuras' the work takes an obvious act of delinquency and accords it a a significance within the lifetime of the building which it would not otherwise be granted. In doing so, the artists make a claim for the stake of the particular delinquent vision of artists within the future life of the physical building and its online presence.

Jim Medway is gaining increasing recognition and acclaim for his drawings of cats as 'scallies'. Examples of his work are held in the Arts Council collection and he was recently awarded the 1999 City Life Artist of the Year award. He is about to start a Year of the Artist residency at the Trafford Centre. Graham Parker won the award in 1994 as a member of Index and has received a number of commissions from such bodies as the Henry Moore Institute, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Tate Gallery, Liverpool. Along with Mackintosh, he produces collaborative artworks and curatorial initiatives under the name of Bono and Sting. They have just opened From Space, a project space quarter of a mile from the IDEA building. He is the Visual Arts Officer at Salford University.