Category Archives: Events

Algorave at SXSW – 10th – 12th March 2019

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Algorave is heading to South By Southwest! From 10th – 12th we’ll be doing two showcases at the festival:

Dancing to Algorithms: How to Algorave

This session will discuss Algorave: a global movement focussed on creating dance music through the writing and editing of algorithms. At an Algorave, performers live code and project their screens for the audience to see the creative process unfolding. Since it emerged in the UK in 2012, Algoraves have taken place around the world, with large communities developing in North America, Japan, Europe and Latin America. To understand how the scene has expanded, we will bring together leading performers from the community to discuss the systems they use and the sounds that they make.
In a world where algorithmic processes are becoming so embedded in our daily lives and increasingly opaque, we hope to uncover why live coding is so exciting!

Please bring and laptop and some headphones.

This session takes place 15:30 – 17:30 on Sunday 10th March and will be led by me, Joanne, Shelly Knotts and Alexandra Cardenas

Lush Presents Algorave: Live Coding Party

Since emerging in the UK in 2012, Algorave has subsequently become a global movement with parties happening across the world. At an Algorave, performers live code and project their screens for the audience to see the creative process unfolding. It’s a truly audiovisual experience where sound and visuals merge together. This showcase will bring together an international host of leading performers from the Algorave scene. From minimal techno to bursts of noise all sounds and visuals will be generated through algorithms for your pleasure.

Part of Future Art and Culture produced by British Underground and supported by Arts Council England.

This showcase takes place 22:00 – 02:00 on Tuesday 12th March and features ALGOBABEZ, Alexandra Cardenas, Belisha Beacon, Byrke Lou, co34pt, Coral Manton, hellocatfood, Scorpion Mouse, Renick Bell.

Come and say hi!

Assembly Birmingham, 15th June

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Over the last few months I’ve been working with a-n to organise Assembly Birmingham, which will be taking place on 15th June at the newly reopened Eastside Projects.

The second a-n Assembly event for 2018 will take place at Eastside Projects in Birmingham, an artist-led gallery space established in 2008. Working in collaboration with artist and curator Antonio Roberts, Assembly Birmingham will address the increasing amount of development taking place across the city and the Midlands as a whole, exploring both the opportunities and the challenges this presents for the visual arts community in the region.

In 2017 Arts Council England invested £90 million in Birmingham-based National Portfolio Organisations, while the government’s multi-billion-pound investment in high-speed railway HS2, which is due to open in December 2026, will reshape the city’s landscape. Numerous artist-led galleries and commercial creative industries, including Eastside Projects, have established a presence in the Digbeth area of Birmingham in recent years, taking advantage of low rents, large spaces and close proximity to the city centre. While an ongoing redevelopment scheme for Digbeth and the wider city reflects the city’s ambition to grow and regenerate, what impact will these changes have for artist residents?

Through a mix of presentations, discussions, artist film and a specially commissioned soundwalk through Digbeth, Assembly Birmingham will explore these competing tensions, reflecting on the opportunities artists have already built for themselves, and consider what investment and change could mean in the future.

The event will feature artists and galleries from across the West Midlands discussing how +why they made the West Midlands their home and what they think of the challenges ahead. Get your tickets now!

Blender School, 12th – 29th May 2018

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On 12th, 26th and 29th May I’m going to be running a three-part workshops series focusing on how to use Blender.

Blender is a popular free and open source 3D modeling program used by professionals and amateurs for 2D/3D animation, making assets for games, video editing, motion graphics, compositing and more.

Blender school will be a three-part workshop series that will act as an introduction to the software and its features. In these workshops you will be introduced to basic concepts of animation and navigating 3D space, eventually progressing to more advanced concepts and techniques such as particle generators, sculpting and compositing.

In the workshops we will cover:

  • Compositing
  • Interpolation
  • Video Editing
  • Sculpting
  • Modifiers
  • Particles – emitters and hair
  • Navigating Blender’s interface
  • Manipulating and editing objects
  • Using keyframes for animation

Participants will need the following for the workshops:

  • Blender, which can be downloaded here: https://www.blender.org/
  • A laptop. Blender is capable of running on almost all computers. However, as a 3D modeling program it requires more resources than most programs and, preferably, a dedicated graphics card. More details of laptop specification can be found here https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/
  • A three button mouse. Many of the commands in blender require the use of left, right and middle mouse buttons.

Tickets are £20 per workshop. Tickets for the workshops can be purchased here:
12th May, 13:00 – 17:00 – https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/blender-school-1-tickets-45729838177
26th May, 13:00 – 17:00 – https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/blender-school-2-tickets-45730042789
29th May, 18:00 – 21:00 – https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/blender-school-3-tickets-45730155125

Granular: The Material Properties of Noise, 16th January – 3rd February

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From 16th January – 3rd February my 2016 piece Transformative Use will be on show at University of Greenwich as part of Granular: The Material Properties of Noise.

Granular noise is explored as a condition of material transfer in this exhibition. A central concern across the works on display is the material state change that occurs within the processes of mediation. Here, disintegration and/or reintegration of elements at a granular level is encountered as a mode of transference between states, whether physical or digital, and as a phase at which a thing starts or ceases to be.

Exhibiting artists include: Jim Hobbs, Benjamin McDonnell, Antonio Roberts, David Ryan, Audrey Samson and Rob Smith.

The exhibition features my work Transformative Use, which was originally commissioned by Hannah Pierce for the Common Property exhibition in 2016. It’s the first time it’s been exhibited since then. If you want to see some work-in-progress installation shots check out my all new arty Instagram account.

Alongside the exhibition is the Granular Colloquium, taking place on 27th January:

Utilising a range of formats from audio-visual performance to talks, this event is an experiential investigation of noise as a granular entity. State changes are a central theme. Processes of disintegration and/or reintegration of material elements at a granular level are explored, both as the mode of transference between states (whether physical or digital) and the means by which a thing starts or ceases to be.

I’ll be at that, talking a bit about glitch and its relation to copyright, as well as regular ol’ copyright. Tickets are £10.

If you didn’t get the chance to see Transformative Use in 2016 now is a great time to see a new and updated configuration of it.

Basquiat’s Brain, 12th – 28th January 2018

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From 12th – 28th January a series of animated portraits, developed in response to the Boom for Real Basquiat exhibition, will be on display at Barbican.

Barbican young creatives, along with artist and curator Antonio Roberts, present a collection of work in response to Basquiat: Boom for Real

Artist and curator Antonio Roberts worked with a group of Barbican young creatives over three months to create artwork in response to the exhibition Basquiat: Boom for Real currently showing in the Barbican Art Gallery.

Over the course of four sessions the group examined artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s explosive creativity and imagined the techniques and methods he might use if he was still creating art today.

The resulting animations combine more traditional methods of creation such as photography and collage, with more experimental practices such as glitch art, digital collages, animated gifs and projections. Each animated selfportrait reflects the identity of the artist who created it.

Artists:

  • Max Baraitser Smith
  • Isabella Barbaro
  • Alex Cole
  • Hector Dyer
  • Antonio Roberts

The animations will be projected near the exit of the curve exhibition space where people are often studying. It’s hard to miss as it has my big face on it.

Many thanks to the Barbican Creative Learning team for inviting me to do this 🙂

Copyright as Frame and Prison, 14th September

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Copyright as Frame as Prison, taking part as part of No Copyright Infringement Intended, will be a conversation around the disruptive power of technological innovation on ideas around copyright.

Featuring a panel including Nora Al-Badri, one of the artists behind The Other Nefertiti artwork, Lisa Beauchamp, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at Birmingham Museums Trust, and Francis Clarke, organiser of the Birmingham Open Rights Group. And me.

Using the works within the exhibition as a starting point, a panel featuring participating artists and experts in copyright will discuss how emerging technologies are shaping creative processes, how (perceptions of) copyright enable/inhibit those technologically-enabled creative processes, the appropriateness of appropriation and its effect on creative practices.

This event is free. Tickets can be reserved here and are limited to 30 places. Get yours before they all go!

Memes (for Luc Tuymans), 12th September

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As part of No Copyright Infringement Intended I will be leading a part presentation, part practical workshop, Memes (for Luc Tuymans), that will consider the history of the modern meme and how it sits contrary to outdated copyright laws which prevent using existing copyrighted imagery in new creative works.

Inspired by Christopher Meerdo’s 2016 project ♡°☆(ಠೆಒಠಿ)☆°♡ (for Luc Tuymans) participants are invited to create memes using Katrijn Van Giels photograph of Jean-Marie Dedecker as source material. The photograph itself was the subject of a plagiarism case against Antwerp-born painter Luc Tuymans, who used it as source material for his painting A Belgian Politician.

The results will be added to http://katrijnvangiel.tumblr.com/ with a credit to you, and exhibited at No Copyright Infringement Intended.

This workshop is free. Places can be reserved here. Participants will need to bring a computer with image editing software installed. We can advise on free alternatives should none be installed.

V&A Digital Design Weekend, 23rd -24th September

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On 23rd and 24th September I’ll be taking part in V&A’s Digital Design Weekend.

Back for the seventh year, the Digital Design Weekend brings together artists, designers, engineers, technologists and the public to celebrate and share contemporary digital art and design. Participants take over the Museum with pop-up installations, robotics, creative electronics, talks, workshops, family-friendly events and more.

The Digital Design Weekend explores human-machine interaction, making and collaborative work. The event coincides with the London Design Festival at the V&A.

I’ll be presenting Exposed and Unauthorised Copy, both of which were commissioned for the Short Circuit Project 2016 – 2017.

Short Circuit - Terminal 3

Short Circuit - Terminal 3

The programme also include rad folk such as Lawrence Lek, Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke, and much more!

Tickets are free. Get it now.

Green Man Festival, 17th – 20th September

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From 17th – 20th August I’ll be at Green Man Festival in Brecon Beacons to present new work, Mirrored, commissioned by the festival:

Antonio Roberts is a new-media artist and curator based in Birmingham. His practice focuses on the errors and glitches generated by digital technology. For Green Man 2017 he will create a new work inspired by seeing Battles at the festival last year. “Mirrored” (named after Battles’ first album) is a number of perspex cubes between 60 and 100cm square, each etched with his characteristic imagery depicting scenes from the festival. “Mirrored” is a development of recent work made for Short Circuit Project, Copenhagen. It builds on a recent interest in presenting his work off-screen and he will be working outdoors for the first time.

I’ll also be performing alongside awesome folk at the Alograve in Einstein’s Garden. Gonna be dope.

By the time the festival starts I will have been at the festival site for over a week so please send/give hugs and warm food plzkthxbai.

No Copyright Infringement Intended, 1st – 23rd September

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I’m happy to announce the second iteration of No Copyright Infringement Intended  will be taking place at Vivid Projects, Birmingham, from 1st – 23rd September.

Image: Still Not Sure if Art or Copyright Infringement by Emilie Gervais

No Copyright Infringement Intended is a group exhibition exploring the relationship between copyright and culture in the digital age, investigating how the concept of ownership and authorship is evolving and coming into conflict with outdated copyright and intellectual property laws.

Since the 1990s the internet has provided the opportunity for mass copying, redistribution and remixing of content – profoundly changing the way culture is produced and shared and sparking legal battles and debates that still rage on. Today, the increasing availability of technologies like 3D scanning and 3D printing have extended the ability to digitally copy and reproduce to the physical realm.

For many people now, mass sharing, copying and remixing seems like a natural form of self expression. Rather than embracing this change and using it to their advantage, rights holders and lawyers often resort to reinforcing outdated laws – penalising those who copy – and placing barriers on technology’s ability to share information and content freely.

Meanwhile, among artists there is widespread misunderstanding of copyright and how it affects their work. The phrase “No Copyright Infringement Intended” is often used as an attempt to avoid repercussions of copyright infringement. The phrase has no legal standing, but its widespread usage shows a lack of awareness of existing laws and the consequences of breaking them.

Featuring 10 national and international artists working across a range of creative practices, the exhibition highlights the ongoing tension between production and copyright, considers the new artistic, social and political possibilities created through this tension and suggests new ways forward for artists, rights holders and the wider creative community.

The exhibition features work by Nick Briz, Emilie Gervais, Nicolas Maigret, Christopher Meerdo, Jan Nikolai Nelles & Nora Al-Badri, Duncan Poulton, Fernando Sosa, Andrea Wallace & Ronan Deazley.

Like the first iteration of the exhibition, there will be a number of related events including: