On 7th March I’ll be delivering a short workshop at BOM on using ImageMagick for image manipulation.
Join us for local food and drinks from Southside and get hands-on making with a bunch of like-minded folks interested in art and tech. This new monthly event aims to inspire emerging creatives and offer peer-to-peer tech support in a friendly, collaborative environment. Each workshop is different, featuring a different guest speaker and activities.
Permission Taken, which exhibited at Birmingham Open Media and University of Birmingham between October 2015 - May 2016, focused on copyright, remix culture and ideas around sharing, originality and ownership. In planning the exhibition I was fully aware that these concepts can be quite complex to comprehend and, worse still, incredibly boring, so I devised various ways communicate these ideas . I did so not in order to dumb it down but to give audiences as many entry points as possible. The exhibition featured images, texts, videos, sculptures, documentation of research and workshops. One such workshop was the Exquisite Corpse workshops.
On 7th March myself and Lucy Hutchinson will be presenting a small selection of our work for Evasive Manoeuvres at the BOM Live Research & Development Seminar.
During our Live R&D exhibition BOM presents it’s second ever ‘Fellows Seminar’. This event will see all 16 of our 2016 Fellows present and discuss their current research and development. This event is essential for students, designers, artists, technologists and scientists working in Birmingham, looking to learn and contribute to the local, artistic ecology.
During my 2016 Fellowship at Birmingham Open Media I will continue my collaboration with Lucy Hutchinson to further the work we have been producing in response to the growing surveillance culture. We will be devising creative interventions which aim to circumvent invasive surveillance technology.
These interventions will take a variety of approaches and will not be limited to purely hardware/software based response. In one such intervention we will be taking inspiration from the work of artists such as Adam Harvey and Zach Blas and develop a series of masks that can be worn to obscure faces from these cameras whilst making a political statement.
The Remix Party happened on 20th January to celebrate the closing of my exhibition, Permission Taken, at Birmingham Open Media.
Throughout the night remixes art artwork from the University of Birmingham were displayed in the main gallery space whilst Ryan Hughes took on DJ duties with soundscapes and the occasional R&B hit. It was really interesting to see how all the artists approached the archives and selected materials to work with.
To celebrate the closing of Permission Taken, on 20th January I’ll be having a closing Remix Party at Birmingham Open Media from 19:00 - 22:00
Artwork from over 20 national and international artists will be projected onto BOM’s walls, floors and ceilings in celebration of artists that appropriate, remix and rework. All this set against a backdrop of Copyleft/cut-up music from Ryan Hughes.
Artists include Dan Hett, Lorna Mills, Ashley James Brown, Shawné Michaelain Holloway, Michaël Borras, Benjamin Berg, Michael Lightborne, Morehshin Allahyari, Daniel Salisbury, Carla Gannis, Faith Holland, Nick Briz, Daniel Temkin, Adam Ferriss, Víctor Arce, Chema Padilla, Kate Spence, Jessica Evans, Emily Haasch
On Tuesday 8th December from 18:30 I’ll be taking part in Pecha Kucha Birmingham at Birmingham Open Media.
I’ll be delivering a short presentation, Ctrl + C, hat looks at the way that culture is created from copying and remixing. I’ll be presenting alongside awesome people including Linda Spurdle, Francis Clarke, Ian Francis, Daniel Alcorn (who recently interviewed me for the Small Talk podcast) and Ruth Harvey.
Tickets for the event have already sold out but there is a waiting list if you really wanna get in.
The Archive Remix print pieces are a continuation of the remix pictures that I have been making as part of my residency at the University of Birmingham’s Research and Cultural Collections. The content that I have been making for that has focused on what can be lost when restrictive copyright is enforced. In keeping more with the themes of this exhibition the Archive Remix print pieces focus on the effect of corporate branding on imagery.
On 26th November from 18:00 - 21:00 I’ll be holding the second event as part of my solo exhibition, Permission Taken, at Birmingham Open Media.
In this workshop I’ll introduce concepts behind the exhibition and my knowledge of copyright gained through undertaking a CopyrightX course.
This session encourages artists to think critically about how Copyleft concepts could be applied to their own practice.
Places are free but limited, to reserve places please get in contact.
The Copy Bombs are my way of contributing to the free culture movemnt by encouraging the public to share images, audio, text and video in an unhindered way.
The Copy Bombs are, at their heart, PirateBox installations.
PirateBox creates offline wireless networks designed for anonymous file sharing, chatting, message boarding, and media streaming. You can think of it as your very own portable offline Internet in a box!
On 19th November from 18:00 - 21:00 I’ll be holding the first of the events as part of the Permission Taken exhibition at Birmingham Open Media.
A workshop inspired by the Exquisite Corpse surrealist storytelling technique. Participants are invited to co-create an artwork re-mixing archive images and other materials to be exhibited at the University of Birmingham. Following this a discussion will be held questioning authorship and ownership of the collaboratively created artworks.
Permission Taken launched at Birmingham Open Media on 23rd October and it couldn’t have been better!
You may have noticed my internet presence has been somewhat quiet over the last few months. This can all be attributed to the many hours it took to prepare for this, my first solo exhibition. Prior to this I had done many performances, contributed videos, gifs and still images to group shows, and curated shows featuring the work of other artists. Being given the large gallery space of BOM was therefore quite a challenge and a new experience.
I’m happy to announce the launch of my first solo exhibition, Permission Taken, taking place at Birmingham Open Media from 23rd October 2015 to 23rd January 2016.
The exhibition features a number of digital, video, print and installation pieces developed as part of my residency at the University of Birmingham’s Research and Cultural Collections and Fellowship at Birmingham Open Media. The pieces explore ideas of ownership, copyright and free culture - issues which are pertinent as online communities become more prolific and harder to police.
Birmingham Open Media, the recently opened creative digital media space in Birmingham where I’ve also been a Fellow since 2014, recently launched an Indiegogo campaign to get one of its spaces renovated to allow more education and workshop events to happen. If you’d like to see more art and technology happen in Birmingham read on a give your money!
BOM (Birmingham Open Media) is a creative collaborative workspace for art, technology and science, less than one minute’s walk from Birmingham’s New Street Station.
From 16th March to 27th April I ran a four part Pure Data Patching Circle at Birmingham Open Media. It was originally intended to be an informal gathering of Pure Data and “creative coding” enthusiasts but quickly it turned into a course in using Pure Data. Here’s some of what I learnt from running it.
This was an almost exact replication of the beginner’s Pure Data workshops that I’ve done in the past at places such as GLI.TC/H 2012, Vivid Projects and Flip Festival. I first introduced some of the projects that I have done and then dove straight into things like installing the software on different platforms.
On Tuesday 14th April I gave a presentation about my work at Birmingham Open Media (BOM). You may not be aware, but in addition to all the things that I do I am also a Fellow at BOM. What this entails is that I will continue to develop a lot of my work whilst within the space and help to direct what will be happening in the space.
During April BOM had the Fellows Show, where most of the Fellows would showcase what they were doing. If you came in you would have seen Nikki Pugh Colony creatures, Pete Ashton’s recent experiments with compression artifacts, and Jo Gane daguerreotypes amongst other work.