Flatpack Film Festival turns 10 this year!! To help celebrate I’ll be providing a few gifs and animations for their birthday party on 23rd April, 21:00 at The Edge.
Help us blow out the candles on ten years of festivaling, as we celebrate the coming of age and reaching double figures with a traditional Digbeth bacchanal. Our friends electric from over the years will be joining us to make joyful noises and brain-melting visuals including DJ’s Grindi (Club Unlikely), Lisa (Capsule) and Harun (Fierce Festival) and projections from Antonio (Hellocatfood) and Sellotape Cinema.
There will be bubbles, balloons, birthday cake and some competitive party-hat making.
TROVE, whom I recently did an exhibition with, will be celebrating its third birthday on 12th October 2012 5-9pm. To celebrate this occasion they’ve invited past artists and collaborators to exhibit some work with them
Over the past three years TROVE have worked with 146 local, national and international artists that have created, exhibited and performed as part of TROVE’s programme.
TROVE have realised over 36 shows in the wonderful TROVE home, the Old Science Museum, and in offsite projects, with venues including Curzon Street Station, mac birmingham, Edible Eastside, DownStairs Gallery, FarGo, The Burlington Fine Art Club, Coexist and ARC.
TROVE is an independent art gallery who have worked with Fierce Festival, Hereford Photography Festival, Hedge Enquiry, Minnie Weisz Studio, Museum of Lost Heritage, Birmingham Architects Association, Birmingham City Council, Clarke Gallery, Birmingham City University and Crowd 6.
At Pop! Bang! Wallop! there will be presents, piñatas and pass the parcel! There will be artworks and cards from past TROVE artists! There will be a bouncy castle! And much much more!
Come and celebrate TROVE’s 3rd Birthday on 12th October 2012 5-9pm.
TROVE, Newhall Square, off 144 Newhall Street, Birmingham, B3 1RY
To celebrate the occasion, in addition to making/glitch a birthday card, I circuit bent a toy for them:
I received this toy as a present from the micro residency that I did in 2011 at Fargo Hack Play Space. Although it’s really small, this toy contains a lot of bits to bend and break! The toy originally played several nursery rhymes, contained a single-purpose light and had its own speaker and headphone port.
Using great science a lot of guesswork I added in a light-dependant resistor to control the speed of playback, repurposed the light switch to reset the device and made the light only turn on when noise is being made. Pressing and holding the play and skip button causes the speed of playback to double (or triple). I also replaced the sticker on the front with some of my own art. The below video probably explains it a lot better than words ever could:
(If pictures are worth 1000 words then the above video is worth 2095000 words)
Recently fizzPOP celebrated the two of its first birthday’s. On January 26th the mailing list was set up and on February 28th we had our first meeting. We count each one as our birthday, which, in theory, means more cake!
Leftovers from the last session. Photo by Nikki Pugh
I’m really quite proud of what myself and Nikki have achieved so far with fizzPOP. As I’ve stated in my manypresentations about hackerspaces and fizzPOP it was first set up to scratch an itch: I wanted to have a space outside of education to learn more about electronics and technology. Luckily Nikki had the same itch and we soon found ourselves working on the creating and running of fizzPOP.
I wont rattle on about the history of fizzPOP as we’re still creating it, and there’s little to gain from talking about the pitfalls we’ve had. The thing that I’m most proud of is that we can regularly get people from all over the west midlands (and occasionally reaching as far as Liverpool and London) in a room to do what they love most. I just wish we could do this more regularly, maybe even every day!
Photo by Nikki Pugh
What next for fizzPOP? I’m still recovering from fizzPOP workshop from the awesomeness that is Mitch Altman and Jimmie Rodgers, so have no brain space left to think about anything else! All I know is that I want to see more workshops like that and more people showing off their mad hacker skills.
After seeing my newly created twitter background, Jon (aka scribbleboy) asked me to do one for him. So I did. In fact, I did several versions
He asked for something red, so I took a few birthday pictures and did the equivalent of putting them through a shredder!
It seems recently that there’s been a bit of a backlash against databending. Reading some of the threads/comments over at 8bitcollective.com suggests that people are getting tired of people posting everything that they’ve processed through Audacity without much though to its artistic content. I tend to agree, so I thought I’d do something more with the output of the bends in order to make these ones. I took them through GIMP and edited them a bit, made them seamless for tiling and changed the colours slightly.