It’s with some sadness but with a lot of gratitude, fond memories and good friends, that I’ve decided it’s time to move on from Ludic Rooms.
My association with Dom Breadmore goes back a lot further than LR – when he was just a keen whippersnapper, still at Coventry University on the same Communications course that I had studied, 15 years earlier. I was then the Video Officer at the beloved Depot Studios – a Council run media facility for the young people of Coventry. Dom drew my attention immediately with his boundless knowledge and enthusiasm for video production, his geekery, plus his larger than life presence. He quickly became a firm fixture in the Coventry arts community, collaborating with theatre companies and choreographers to make bold visual installations and films.
It was at Ludic Rooms, the company that Dom set up with Ashley James Brown, that we converged again, in 2013 at a point where I was on the lookout for new kinds of opportunities and took up the offer for a coffee at the LR studios, at Coventry Canal Warehouse. Everything about the experience was memorable and quintessential to the way Ludic Rooms was, and is; the great coffee in neverending supply, the cosy, cluttered, interesting space and the wide ranging conversation, that ended with us devising a new arts and tech project, that would iterate four times over the next decade.
Dom drew me into LR over time and over the next ten-ish years we’ve ended up creating a lot of wildly different projects that neither of us would have dreamt of, or made, without the other. It’s been a rich, sometimes hard, but joyous experience.
I plan to take some of the playful, DIY spirit of Ludic Rooms with me; creating arts projects in new kinds of contexts, as well as working on my own arts practice of making and experimenting. I’ll definitely keep in touch with LR and will continue to advocate for, and direct people to the work of this complete one-off of an organisation. You should too.
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