On 17th March I’ll be delivering a presentation on the topic of Copyleft as part of my exhibition, Permission Taken, and the Arts and Science Festival at University of Birmingham.
Antonio Roberts introduces concepts behind the exhibition and knowledge of copyright gained through undertaking a CopyrightX course. This session encourages participants to think critically about how Copyleft concepts could be applied to their own practice or area.
If you missed the one that happened at Birmingham Open Media now’s your chance to take part! Places are free and can be booked here. There’s loads of other cool events happening during the Arts and Science Festival which you should check out!
On 15th March I’ll be running an Exquisite Corpse workshop as part of my exhibition, Permission Taken, and the Arts and Science Festival at University of Birmingham.
Antonio Roberts leads 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.
Following the workshop there’ll be a discussion questioning authorship and ownership of the collaboratively created artworks.
The “Brand” New Generation event took place on 2nd November at The Drum as part of Kalaboration. Aside from my Pecha-Kucha-style presentation on glitch art glitching (i.e. not working) it went really well! For the benefit of those who couldn’t make it and those who attended but couldn’t see the images, here’s a desktop recording or the presentation:
The discussion that followed was very interesting and covered topics such as being/not being an “emerging” artist, residing in Birmingham and finding validity in the art scene. Charlie Levine did a bit of live-tweeting:
On Thursday 21st January I’ll be doing a short bit about my involvement with the Changing Rooms exhibition that’s happening at Eastside Projects.
EXTRA SPECIAL PEOPLE SALON
Please join us between 6.30-8pm at Eastside Projects for an introduction to ‘Changing Room’ a project by the Visual Realisation Unit at EP. With an outline of the project concept by lead artist Michael Magruder and EP director Gavin Wade, individual presentations by those developing work and a workshop exploring the technology that makes it happen.
Brumcon 9 is coming up this Saturday and I’ve been asked to give a short talk about fizzPOP and hackerspaces.
BrumCon is a regular event organised by Brum2600 regulars, featuring a wide variety of talks, discussion, demos and most importantly, alcohol. Incorrectly but neatly dubbed a ‘blackhat thinktank’ by NTK, The Register - ‘We have your water supply, and printers’, BBC Midlands Today - ‘Spooky’, By you lot as the UK’s biggest underground Hacker con, By hotel staff as ‘scary’ but nice people and I’m scared I’d get my ass so electronically kicked. We welcome all kinds of phreaks, geeks and other technologically interested people from all sides of the fence (as long as hats, badges and warrants are left at the door). The entrance fee this year is 8 UK Pounds per delegate. Corporate packs are available that includes entrance, T-shirt and receipt contact us at brumcon9@brum2600.net to book.
On Thursday 11th June I gave a presentation about Open Source Software and its relationship to open source software. You can download my slides. There’s lots of information in the notes so be sure to check.
In general I covered the usual things including what programs there are availble to facilitate creativity. One thing I wanted to emphasise was the need for more collaboration between coders and artists/non-coders.
What makes many of the open source creative programs so powerful is their extensibility. In many of the programs have a scripting environment where plugins can be written, often in Python, that can do many things, such as batch processing, modifying an image in real time or just about anything that the programmer can imagine. A problem that we (the open source community) face is that not everyone is a coder. So, they may see the scripting environment as a drawback instead of a feature.
On Saturday 14th March I was at Kitchen Garden Cafe to take part in WXWM as a panel host. My 5-minute talk was a short introduction to hacking. I wanted to dispell some myths about hackers and hacking, show how fun it can be and also promote the Birmingham Hack Space at the same time. You can download the slides from my presentation for free (available under GNU FDL) and you can listen again to all of the presentations over at Rhubarb Radio
Prompted by the number of Brummies migrating over to Texas soon for SXSW, the lovely Shona McQuillain has organised something similar. In her words:
It may have come to some peeps attention that a number of Brummie bods will be whooshing over to Texas all transatlantic style for SXSW (South by South West) later next week, to mingle and schmooze with web wizards, net honchos and to do some other shizz, like having fun. Not wishing to be outdone by this, a furious flurry of Twitter activity this evening has registered interest in a counter-event to these southern States shennanigans: WXWM. That’ll be West by West Midlands, then.
Courtesy of