Neil Winterburn Portfolio

Flunstellas

Flunstellas are flocks, clusters and constellations of ideas, emotions and memories that move through social spaces.

I make artworks to explore how Flunsetllas might appear. I have no idea what your ideas, memories or emotions might look like, so I'm always going to need to collaborate on this.
A lot of the time I get overwhelmed by the presence of other peoples thoughts and feelings, all these distortions in the space-time of the room emanating at me. Sometimes I get a sense of my thinking and feeling happening outside my body, moving around the room, communicating with other people's ideas, emotions and memories in ways I don’t understand. I used to think that was my super power, maybe it’s just anxiety. I think it’s double edged.

Multitudes of thoughts and feelings move within and between and all around us, reproducing in shop doorways, on the sofas we argue and make up on, the checkouts we queue at and the desks we work at. The fabric of places soak up things we try not to see. Emotions leak from our bodies, hanging mid-air or growing on the surface of things. The ways of thinking we feed with attention follow us around, showing us what we want to see, telling us what we want to hear and telling us off. Those we neglect grow wild, looking for safer habitats, attaching to other people, places and things instead of us. They arrive as ways snippets of being from other people, social media or TV shows from different times and places in my live, bringing needs of their own.

I try to stay in control, choosing which to hide or show, containing them or keeping them well away, but I can’t stop what I can’t feel. I keep a lot of my thinking trained, but I have this feeling that most pass between the layers of our skin, clothes, bones and walls.
I collected witness report forms.

Here's Flunstellas I sensed around Liverpool.

I created an exhibition at FACT with a group of teenagers, called Flunstellas and the future of education, featuring a large scale installation called Charlies Thought Constellation.

Video documentation of Charlies Thought Constellation

Blimpcam documentation of Charlies Thought Constellation

Here's the Flunstellas the young people from Weatherhead High created.

See the Flunstellas website for more.

Critical Kits and How We Use Them

Designing Teenage Emotions with a Life of Their Own - Chapter in the Springer book, Perspectives on HCI research with teenagers.

Designing Teenage Emotions with a Life of Their Own - article

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Awake it: Training field (WIP), 2026.

Awake It: Training Field is part of a new body of work about lads, 90s kit culture, defence and desire in the field called Awake It!

This is a work in progress AR sketch. To experience it, go to a place that lads could play football and click here to view in Chrome on an Android device. Tap on the BRING INTO MY SPACE button and place it on the ground in front of you.

This scene is an under 16's footy training session on a big green between a housing estate and a pub.

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Awake it: the Garages (WIP), 2025

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Flunstellas and the future of Education

More about Flunstellas models

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More about Flunstellas the starter set models

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Part Blind Communication Game

Part Blind Communication Game plays with what we do and don't share when we're talking to each other.





Rules
1) Each player stands either side of the plexiglass
2) Each player picks a colour of counters to use
3) Each player thinks of a secret - the aim of the game is to guess the other persons secret.
4) Player 1 picks up 3 counters & makes a drawing on each counter of something they asociate with their secret and uses magnets to place them on the plexiglass with the drawings facing themselves.
5) Player 2 points to one of the counters, player 1 turns the counter around to reveal the drawing.
6) Player 2 makes 3 drawings, player 1 points to 1 & player 2 reveals it.
7) Players repeat the process, chatting as they go.
8) Players can guess the other persons secret as many times as they like.
9) Keep going until either a player correctly guesses the others secret or you run out of counters.

The idea is to make the unsaids visible.

More about Chemo Cards

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3D AZ

More about Paaaarty

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More about Why Don't You?

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More about Bluescreen

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Flunstellas with Nerve, cd-rom, 2003.

Interactive tutorial

Digital space

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Twee-Prototype, cd-rom, 2001

Distribution

The cd-rom was sold at News From Nowhere, Jump Ship Rat & Probe Records.

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More about Projection Point

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Common Room (degree show), 1999

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Furniture Party

Move Something

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Move something is a social sculptural art experience.

To prepare, assemble a large collection of material objects in a large open space. A gallery, studio or project space work well.

The more diverse the range or materials the better. Try to get objects from as many different kinds of places, with as many different uses, scales, materials, textures, forms, affordances and cultural associations as you can.

Then gather two or more people.

To begin, take it in turns to move something.
Each turn you must move at least one thing, but you can move as many things as you like.

Speak as little as you can.

As your communication plays out through the materials, you can loosen the turn taking and begin to move things when you feel, in response and in relation to the other peoples movements.

As we became more absorbed bringing these objects to life, we started to pile, to build towers and other structures.

We noticed ourselves projecting all kinds of meaning onto these piles.

They became houses, towns, then figures, people, machines, animals and empires.

As we played, mostly without talking, I had a sense of what the others were trying to do. Was Hilary trying to break apart my little town? Was Lewis turning my godess figure into a monster? There were tensions.

Our dynamics, the pushing of our different intentions played out through the materials

Something worked. There was something in the space, the group of people, the twilight and that assemblage of materials that manifest some of the dynamics happening between us at different scales at that moment.

I got interested in the use of physical materials to mediate and social dynamics, tensions and intensions after a row me and my Dad had about a mess I made in his garage.

I'd been back at my mum and dads for the summer, between second and third year at university and my dad had very kindly let me use his tools in the garage over a few nights to make a sculpture. I left it in a mess and couldn't understand what his problem was at the time. I was so caught up in my idea of being an artist I couldn't appreciate I was in his garage. 30 years after his British Rail apprenticeship this was stretching him to the limit. It had been a perfect and tense summer, my dad was dealing with my Nannas dementia and I didn't know how to talk to him about it or help.

I'd been obsessing about intersubjectivity, making lots of quite conceptual pieces and writing very abstract artist statements about the different worlds we each live in. My way of trying to feel in control of the overwhelm of people I guess. Anyway, this argument and realising it was the garage and the materials in it that provided the contact and the spark for me and my Dad to have the argument we needed, pulled me back into the physical world and away from ideas and theory. For a while at least.

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St.Helens Vs The Lizards

‘St. Helen’s Vs The Lizards’ is an 1980’s / Lizard themed Escape Room, designed with teenagers and built in St. Helen’s Central Library.

The Escape Room was designed in collaboration with set designer Olivia Dumonceau, set builder Colin Gaskarth, Escape room experts Exit Strategy and Teletext Artist Dan Farrimond. It was commissioned as part of the St.Helen’s Cultural Hubs programme.

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Thought Blobs

Thought Blobs are a slime based off grid communication system for children in libraries.

Young people created a trail of slimy thoughts around St.Helens Central Library and investigated them using a Thought Detector device.

Here are some of the young people using the device to read the messaged stored in the thought blobs. Text descriptions of thoughts are written to slime covered RFID tags using a Raspberry Pi. They were then able to use a Ghostbusters style detector to read each other’s thoughts. The system was presented to the young people as a creative tool to be explore openly, allowing them to make their own connections between their thoughts and spaces.

Thought Blobs is part of the Re-Dock Cultral Hubs 2014 residency with St.Helens Libraries and St.Helens Arts Service. To make the detector I collaborated with IOT expert Adrian McEwen & OOBB inventors Oomlout.

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30 Years Of

In 2014 it was 30 years since the 1984 miners’ strike, which opposed the government’s policy of pit closures. Re-Dock and Internet of Things expert Adrian McEwen worked with women and men from the ex-mining community in St.Helens to create an interactive exhibition of enchanted objects, telling the story of the past 30 years.



Through a series of creative workshops we asked the men and women of the ex-mining community in St. Helens to share and curate a selection of objects to describe their experience of the past 30 Years. We used these objects as a focal point to discuss the strike, to evoke memories and to explore how things have changed over the years.

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The Loop

The Loop is an artwork and compture game, made with a group of teenagers, looking at the way stories spread about the Liverpool Loop Line Cycle Track, known as the Ralla.

We asked Young people from Rice Lane City Farm and Norris Green Detached Youth Project, “If the Loop Line were a computer game, how would it play" We worked with them to create and code a game in which you collect an arsenal of stories about the Ralla and shoot them out to other people. Positive and negative stories spread between NPCs, can you spread enough good stories about the Ralla to relaim it?

This project was comissioned by the Bluecoat.