End of Year Show

This December’s Digbeth First Friday sees Black Hole Club’s traditional end-of-year show together with Vivid Projects participation in the National Lottery’s #ThanksToYou.

Everyone is welcome to join us to celebrate the work of 2018′s Black Hole Club cohort. Featuring performances, installations and digital works created during the year, the final show includes the launch of a publication celebrating the achievements of BHC members across the year.

Chat to the artists, meet the curators and find out how to apply to become part of the Black Hole Club in 2019.

Exhibiting artists:

Alex Billingham
Carol Breen
Daniel Hopkins
Edie Jo Murray
Emily Roderick
Emily Scarrott
Julie M Oneill
Libby Cufley
Michael Dring
newnewmoon
Sarah Walden & Ollie MacDonald-Brown
Sian Macfarlane
Tony McClure
Vicky Roden

#ThanksToYou

As part of the national #ThanksToYou campaign celebrating the contribution National Lottery players make to funding art in the UK, Vivid Projects is proud to offer participating players a very special early Christmas present – a hardback copy of VIVID’s 2007 publication, Zoo. Featuring extensive photographs and video images by world renowned artist Richard Billingham, Zoo can be claimed by the first 20 people to present a National Lottery ticket.

See full Terms and Conditions here http://www.vividprojects.org.uk/programme/black-hole-club-thankstoyou/

blackholeclub.com

Join us to celebrate the launch of blackholeclub.com and the cohorts first online exhibition. The artists use animated gifs, short form videos, tweets, 3D environments and more to explore how their practices exists in an online space.

The works will be available to view in the space and you can find out more about joining the Black Hole Club in 2019.

Featuring:

Carol Breen, Dinosaur Kilby, Edie Jo Murray, Emily Scarrott, Libby Cufley, newnewmoon, Pete Ashton, Thomas Tyrrell.

Another Dimension

An exhibition reflecting on ways in which optical illusions alter how we perceive the physical world.

Featuring:

Alex Billingham
Carol Breen
Dinosaur Kilby
Edie Jo Murray
Emily Roderick
Libby Cufley
Michael Dring
Pete Ashton
Sarah Walden
Vicky Roden

Exhibition opening times:
Friday 29th June – 18:00 – 20:00
Saturday 30th June – 13:30 – 17:00
Thursday 5th June – 12:00 – 17:00
Friday 6th June – 12:00 – 20:00

Forward

Join us for a final show from the 2017 Black Hole Club cohort, presenting works produced during their membership. Chat to the artists, meet the curators and discover more about the future programme.

Featuring work by:
David Poole
Alex Billingham
Sarah Walden
Sian Macfarlane
Vicky Roden
Kate Spence
Michael Lightborne
Vicky Roden
Patrick Goodall
Andy Howlett
Libby Cufley
Dan Auluk

Free event, refreshments available.

AccordingToTheInternet

As part of No Copyright Infringement Intended, Search Engine Artist Internet Imperialist Gretchen Andrew will be delivering a workshop on how search engines shape our understanding of culture.

Participants of this workshop will learn the basics of image search engine optimization (seo) and how the photography/ images they create can be better positioned online for discovery and cultural relevancy. This workshop will consider how the internet is imperially, intentionally, creatively, and maliciously, used a source of definition and consider what this means for intellectual property & image culture.

Entry to the workshop is £3.50 + booking fee and is limited to 20 places. Tickets can be booked here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/accordingtotheinternet-tickets-36684732021

Participants will need to bring their own computer/laptop.

Amazon is a company…and then also a river.
Cherokee is a car… and then a tribe of people.
Both are brands protected by copyright laws.

Conduct an image search (image.google.com) for “amazon” and you are pages down before you come across a reference to the world’s largest river. Instead you see logos and references to one of the world’s most “relevant” companies.

It isn’t that the internet is incorrect in returning these results, but that in doing so it tells us something essential about the way the internet creates definitions, and who is more likely to benefit: products over people, companies over communities.

In 1929 when Marguerite wrote “This is not a pipe” under his painting of a pipe he was playing with the relationship between an object and its representation. Today, search is how text becomes image, how sign becomes symbol, how words become flesh. It is how meaning and definition are established.

Image search in particular sits at the intersection of representation and meaning. When we enter text into the search bar and receive images as results it may appear that endless deferral of meaning, as described by poststructuralism, ends. However, a basic understanding of how image search operations exposes dependance on the same unreliable words. This obscures that the inherent problems of language have actually been exacerbated.

Now that the internet, through the lense of search engines and the optimization algorithms they operate with, is the arbiter of definition interesting things are happening. Whatever a pipe is or is not, Google determines it.

Gretchen Andrew (born in California, 1988) is a Search Engine Artist and Internet Imperialist whose HOW TO HOW TO HOW TO & #accordingToTheInternet projects look at the internet as a tenuous form of authority that can be used to understand, manipulate, and imperialize definitions. Her search-based practice is accompanied by a painting practice that is used as an image source for her related Internal Imperialism. She has completed projects or exhibitions with The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, The V&A Museum, Arebyte, The Photographer’s Gallery, The British Film Institute, The Lumen Prize for Digital Art, The British Arts Council, The White Building, Ace Hotel, The London Film School, and Whitcher Projects. She works in London with the artist Billy Childish.

Superseded

Join Black Hole Club and Vivid Projects for Superseded, an exhibition reflecting on outdated technologies built for the display and transmission of video signals, inspired by the recent cease in production of VHS players.

Superseded features a screening of Rosa Menkman’s 2012 live av performance Collapse of PAL, an audiovisual homage to the now deprecated PAL video signal. Alongside this will be works from Black Hole Club members Patrick Goodall, Rebecca Mahay, Sian Macfarlane, Michael Lightborne, David Checkley, Sarah Walden & Ollie MacDonald-Brown, Jaime Jackson, and Libby Cufley.

Exhibition open the following dates/times:

Fri 30th June 18:00 – 20:00
Sat 1st July 12:00 – 17:00
Wed 5th – Thurs 6th 12:00 – 17:00
Fri 7th – 12:00 – 20:00

Transmission

Join Black Hole Club and Vivid Projects for an evening of audio experimentations made in response to deprecation of FM radio transmission and shift away from analogue audio technology.

Featuring a live-streamed performance from Chicago-based artist and musician Jeff Kolar, alongside performances and installations from Black Hole Club Artists Alex Billingham, Coral Manton, Daniel Hopkins, David Checkley, John Bradburn, Michael Lightborne, Patrick Goodall, Pete Ashton, Rebecca Mahay, Sian Macfarlane, and Vicky Roden.

Opening times:
Friday 2nd June, 19:00 – 21:00
Saturday 3rd June, 12:00 – 16:00

Black Hole Club Launch

The Black Hole Club returns with a night of experimental new work in progress featuring performance, video, slides and assemblages. Focusing on the world around us, the works explore brutalism and taxonomies of the city ; ritual assemblage and incantations; states of mind; narratives of water and the body … and a golden glitter bath.

Featuring: Pete Ashton, Alex Billingham, David Checkley, Elizabeth Cuffley, Ferric Lux, Patrick Goodall, Barry Griffiths, Jaime Jackson, Sian Macfarlane, David Poole, Kate Spence and Sarah Walden.

Drop in for the first Black Hole Club event of the year, meet the artists and hear more about their plans for 2017.

Featuring:
Alex Billingham
Glistening Scum
A two-hour durational performance where the artist will take a bath in gold glitter. (Please note performance contains nudity).

Barry Griffiths
Periapt telumA, mixed media assemblage, 2017
An incantation – chaos cloak with emotive charms & symbols – combining to produce a physical threshold.

David Checkley
Black dog II, installation, clay and white light, 2017
Continuation of an expressive piece on depression, featuring a black dog and pure white light, symbolising the healing process and reconstitution. A shadow cast by the dog, though out of focus, is always there.

David Poole
The Conquest of Mars (Special Edition)
A comic short film that contrasts the epic and the pathetic. Blending slapstick physical
comedy and low-fi costume with Hollywood emulating special effects and an extra-terrestrial setting.

Elizabeth Cuffley
Tower/Gardens, 2017, Slide projection with audio sound track
A slide projection of images of two Brutalist projects: Robin Hood Gardens housing estate, designed by Alison & Peter Smithson and Erno Goldfinger’s Balfron tower in London. The accompanying audio is drawn from anecdotes from a period when the artist was a property guardian.

Jaime Jackson
Under the Blue, HD video loop video 2”, 2017
New video work exploring Imminent water resource scarcity and rising sea level challenges due to global environmental change.

John Bradburn / Ferric Lux
Proposed Battery For The Storage of Energy from The Floating Mountain Aita, 2017
Installation of Video, Wood, Animal Skull, crystal, Gold, Video

Kate Spence
Echo Chamber, video, 2017
New work in progress exploring the hidden history of Magdalene Asylums.

Patrick Goodall
Downfall, 70mm film, video, sound, live performance, 2016/17
‘A pole on a stand supports a reel of 70mm film ready to unfurl around the pole. The protagonist stands before it, like a condemned man awaiting the firing squad. He pulls the trailing film which releases a downfall, engulfing him.

Pete Ashton
A Portrait of Birmingham, video, 2016/17
Record of a walk photographed at five second intervals from a chest mounted camera.
The work uses machine learning to interrogate the visual identity of a post-industrial suburban city and builds on the psychogeographical work Cross City Walks developed in collaboration with Andy Howlett.

Sian Macfarlane
A Virus in the Memory bank/FalseMemory, slide projection, 2017
In a shrine to unreliable visual memory, doctored found images are presented as a incomplete 35mm slide show.

Sarah Walden
Bodies of Pleated Matter, video, 2015
A narrative on water and the human body, questioning how pleated and folding surfaces make sense, or non-sense.

Future Broth

“The future is here. It just isn’t evenly distributed yet”.

Black Hole Club present an evening of daring performance and installations including a live hashtag challenge, dystopian noodles, creepy surveillance and a film featuring St. Joseph, a group of Morris Dancers and a body builder covered in engine oil. Artists include: David Poole, Ryan Hughes, John Bradburn, Coral Manton, Sarah Walden, Jaime Jackson, Ollie Macdonald-Brown, Sarah Walden and Sian Macfarlane.
Part of Digbeth First Friday.

Constructing The Self: David Bowie

Constructing The Self is a one night event of new art works, music and audience participation, led by the Black Hole Club group of Midlands artists in celebration of the creative life of David Bowie. Put on your red shoes and dance the blues as we explore Bowie’s world. Starman, iconoclast, Blackstar: David Bowie remains the ultimate self constructed pop icon.

This event is raising funds for Cancer Research UK. Please give what you can on the night.

Artists include Kate Spence, John Bradburn, Jaime Jackson & David Checkley, David Poole, and Ollie MacDonald-Brown.