Mark Wrigley: Bridging Technology and Creativity Through Photography and Innovation
Could you tell us about your journey from technologist to your creative work? What inspired this shift?
So, I kind of don’t see a division between the two as I see technology as being creative as well because there is always more than one way to do something. In technology there is a great deal of design, if you look at companies like Apple and the impact of design on their products. I was thinking about this the other day I worked in designing tech stuff and again there is always more than one way to do things. I think there are a lot of similarities between what people would classically call a creative process and a design process.
What drew you to photography, you said you ‘had always loved it and were the kid at school with a camera in class’, what prompted this?
I think there are a couple of things really. I have never been officially diagnosed but I am pretty sure I’m dyslexic, so in some respects photography becomes almost like a language. It’s a way of recording without words. When I was really quite small maybe 6 or 8, my father had a dark room, and it felt like magic. This was long ago, but to see a photo develop in a tray and the image appear from a blank piece of paper just got me. So, there are a lot of pictures of me when I was a kid with a camera in my hand and it has just been something I have always done. It is interesting now with iPhones and camera phones how normal it has become. I have a big archive of photographs and as you go further back in time there are fewer and fewer photos. It seems a natural language.
I found the 1201 Alarm - The Apollo Archive very impressive and inspiring. Alongside this I really enjoyed learning about the PiKon Telescope, what are some of your favourite works?
With the 1201 alarm project you have to go back to the late 1960s when just about the only technology that people had in their homes was a television, radio and maybe a radiogram if you were posh. I was really quite inspired by what was going on with the apollo program, I think the American’s ‘caught wind that the Russians were going to do something spectacular, so they actually pulled the Apollo 8 mission forwards. This was the first time that people had actually gone out of earth orbit and gone around the moon. You’ve got to think about it coming from this technology base in your home where you have a tv and a radio and that is it. So, I was trying to think of how I could record this and that’s what sparked that project.
It has been nice to return to it, on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing the Bradford National Museum of Science and Media shared what I had done. They did it in a nice way, they did a display that looked like the living room where I had recorded this stuff. In fact, I have just been to the Kennedy Space Centre last week that was quite the thing to see all this stuff. I think it’s more inspiring than the stuff that is going on now with Space X because when you look at these flimsy little things that were shot into space fifty odd years ago it really brings it home.
I’m planning on doing more with the 1201 alarm project. I recently went to see an exhibition in London, and somebody had done these really nice photo collages. I’m trying to look at how I could do it as something to hang on your wall as art, I also have things like old press cuttings as well as photos that could be incorporated.
How has your work been received by the community could you tell us more about the development of PiKon?
The Apollo thing got me completely enthusiastic about science and so I have always been interested in trying to impart that enthusiasm onto other people. It’s like education and I think education should be about encouraging people to discover for themselves. At the time, which is now 10 years ago, there were a couple of technologies which were around. One was the Raspberry Pi computer which was a little thing that you plug into the back of a TV and suddenly you have a computer, but it also had a camera. Another thing was 3D printing, which has been around for a long time but about 10 years ago it was just getting to the price where people could afford to have one at home.
We decided arbitrarily to combine the two and make a telescope and it was meant to be a talk. It was for festival of the mind and people were meant to go away and have a go themselves. We then got in the press, we were in The BBC, The Metro and The Mail Online. We were getting so many hits on the website that somebody suggested why don’t you crowdfund this and that’s how it came about.
So, we made a little package of stuff so you could have a go at making one yourself. That was 10 years ago, and it has just about come to an end after us shipping about 500 kits worldwide, which created such a community of people. We have encouraged people to do their own thing with it as well. There was this one guy who completely mechanised the whole thing so not only was he getting his images on the Raspberry Pi computer he was driving which way it was pointing with cogs and motors. That was exactly what it was meant to do! It has kind of gotten to the end of its life now because it is getting more and more expensive to source some of the components which doesn’t make it viable to sell the kit now.
PiKon
Could you share your creative process when working on a new project, is it different every time?
‘Chaos to Output’! I have lots of ideas and I need to make sure that some of them get done. I tend to capture ideas by using three things. There is an app called Brain Toss and if you have a thought you add it to Brain Toss and it send it to your inbox. When you’re getting your thoughts together all your ideas are right there. I also love using mind maps and suddenly you realise all of these random thoughts you’re having are all along the same theme. When I get a bit deeper I use Notion which is an app that you can store clips, photographs, basically anything.
I used to work in sales, and we had this thing called the sales funnel. At the top you had people who were interested, then people who had contacted you, then people who wanted a quote and so on. As you go down the funnel you get less and less people but more and more interest. I chose to apply that to my ideas, at the top are all my wacky ideas that might not work but they gradually become a project as they funnel down. It’s like ‘Chaos to Output.’
I do think we are all a bit sensitive to being ADHD, part of what makes humans so successful is that we are all a bit ADHD. We g off and look at things that interest us even if that might not cause an outcome.
What does creativity mean to you, how has your understanding of it changed over the years?
It’s interesting because in the seventies there was a big controversy about whether computer programming was creative. You get these two opposites: the hippie peace man, or the scientific analytical. Creative can be applied to any process where you come up with something new. When people think of creative they may think of a painter or a sculptor for example. There is a meditative thing about the process of making things, even down to Lego kits for example, it absorbs you which I love. Even when I was a kid I liked that process of making things. I suppose one way I would describe creativity is that meditative slow process which is perhaps the other side to how we live today.
If you could use only one camera for the rest of your life, which one would it be and why?
I’m going to disappoint everybody and say an iPhone. I started off using camera phones years ago when they were really rubbish and not as good as a camera; now they have gotten to the point where they are almost as good. The sheer convenience of having the thing in your pocket I would always go for. Having said that what I am doing now in my practice is going back to my photographic routes. I have joined a dark room, and I am going back to photographing for film.
NEW PROJECTS FOR MARK…
I’ve got a project lined up called Concrete At War, I really like brutalist buildings. Recently I went to the Island of Orkney and there are incredible war time fortifications from World War 2 and even World War 1. They are designed to do a job of course and now they are starting to crumble. In March I will be going round photographing these as part of the projects. Hopefully we will get them exhibited at the Orkney Science Festival in September.
As an update to this interview Mark has been offered an exhibition of the ‘Concrete at War’ project at the Modernist Society in Manchester, this will be in September 2025.
Having done 10 years of the PiKon telescope which really was the main income for me in terms of a side hustle I want to go back to photography. It is very similar to all the stuff I was doing when I was developing the Apollo project. I really want to get people interested in the photography aspect.
