Created in Birmingham

I was chatting to Fay Goodman of Goodmedia the other night and she’s a nice person. Whether that counts for anything is up to you but I think niceness is an underrated thing these days.

Goodmedia, based in Yardly, are a TV/Film and music production company who’ve put out work about, amongst other things, John Entwistle and martial arts, the latter of which Fay turns out to be something of a master at. Lucky she’s a nice person then!

Art Auction 2007 is a three day celebration of contemporary art in Birmingham, raising funds for the region’s new, world class Leukaemia Centre at University Hospital Birmingham. The art can be viewed in the gallery from the 15th April, the Art Auction will take place on the 17th.

The auction takes place at St Paul’s Gallery in the Jewellery Quarter. Via Made Media who did the branding.

The X Press are looking to publish an anthology of new writing from the West Midlands’ African-Caribbean, Asian and Chinese communities in association with Birmingham Libraries.

The book will be edited by will be edited by Birmingham based author, playwright and former BBC Writer in Residence, Ava Ming (pictured) about whom there’s a pretty comprehensive biography at that link.

Full submission details are here and the deadline is May 31st.

via Birmingham Words

Beat 13 are a collective of artists and musicians based in Birmingham who’ve been doing stuff since around 1999. Founded by Matt Watkins and Lucy Mclauchlan the emphasis appears to be on Lucy’s work which you’ve probably seen about the place at some point or other.

While they were very active in 2006 the website has that verging-on-the-ghost feel to it so I’m not sure what’s going on with them right now. Hopefully lots of interesting things.

A quick update on the Co-working Spaces idea that Antonio Gould was pondering earlier in the month. He’s set up an informal meeting at The Kitchen in the Custard Factory next Thursday 5th April at 6pm for anyone who’s interested in setting up or joining this kind of working environment in Birmingham. More details on his blog.

PLOT put on a number of interesting talks and events at the the Light House in Wolverhampton related to the development of the creative industries. The problem with these, and the many other information dissemination sessions that go on in the region, is if you miss them then you miss them. The knowledge isn’t saved anywhere.

There are exceptions. the Lower Eastside Dialogues are filmed with DVDs are made available later and 4Talent based at Maverick are starting to act as “media partner” on a number of events, helping to bring the knowledge online. But on the whole the knowledge just goes to those who attended.

Which is why the PLOT Podcasts (or Plotcasts) are so interesting. The first one is a simple 40 minute recording of the Q&A that followed the showing of three local films with the writers and directors. Technically it’s nothing special but it’s quick and easy to produce and the talk is archived for anyone who might find it useful.

The Plotcasts don’t appear to have their own page yet but clicking here should subscribe you in iTunes. Alternatively you can simply download the mp3.

This summer Stripsearch, the project that seeks out and nurtures comic and graphic illustration talent in the West Midlands, is running a bunch of free professional illustration courses under the banner Com-Motion.

Budding cartoonists aged 13 to 19 can create their own comic or animation with professionals including John McCrea, Hunt Emerson and The Brothers McLeod.

More details can be gotten from Jemima Cattel at jemima [at] hi8us.co.uk or on 0121 753 7700.

Image by Michiru Morikawa, a recent StripSearch Finalist. More of her work can be found here.

Chris Keenan, trading as Prime Objective is a photographer who models himself after a WWII surveillance pigeon, taking photos and making short films around the world with a wide variety of tools, from polariods and lomography to super-8. In fact I’m not sure “photographer” is the right term for him - seems a bit restrictive.

His 9th Ward Scars print of buildings in post-Katrina New Orleans was recently on sale at New Art Birmingham and can be bought from his site, along with other stuff. He also has a blog buried in there though thankfully there’s a full RSS feed.

Photo above is “Nearly Yes, Daljit” © Chris Keenan. Hat tip to Tak.

The deadline for applications for the 4Talent Inspiration Sessions is coming up on April 2nd.

“Each event will have just 15 attendees, who will spend an entire day working with at least four top creatives - sharing ideas, discussing working practices, and learning from the best in the business.” The events take place in Birmingham on the following dates:

23rd April: Film
25th April: Animation
27th April: Advertising
30th April: Magazine production
2nd May: Design and Multimedia
4th May: Documentary

Application details here.

Lewes Herriot is an artist and musician based in Northfield who is looking to collaborate, specifically with a band or musician who wants “a free and reliable artist”.

His work can be found on his Flickr account though there’s a lot more hidden from public view. Email him at lewesherriot [at] hotmail.co.uk for access if you want to see it, or just generally.

He’s also in a band, (a) pars defect, who are categorised as “progressive / jazz / punk” on the MySpace page and which actually kinda fits. They’ve got a gig at the Actress and Bishop on April 23rd (one of the few non-Surface gigs taking place there).

Stuff that happened over the last fortnight:

• Eastside-based creative studio Substrakt relauched their website alongside a new blog which informs that they’re soon to be working on a new web presence for Jibbering Records.
• D’Log visits New Art Birmingham.
• The Birmingham Post previews The Event, the contemporary art, um, event, which starts on March 31st.
• The Custard Factory gets a “£6.4m boost” from Advantage West Midlands to develop Devonshire House on Digbeth High Street and Fazeley Studios in Floodgate Street.
• Wasted Youth is an exhibition run by Fused Magazine highlighting “some of the world’s best illustrators”. It launched on March 16th and runs until April 16th at Epic Skate Park, Moseley. via
• Andrew Dubber has listed the 20 things you MUST know about music online and will be addressing each point in depth over the next few weeks.

And lots more I’m sure, but that’ll do for tonight.

The Birmingham Post has a report on a new gallery show on Ladypool Road in Sparkbrook.

Baghdad Café is part of a project called Under a New Sky, which has brought together eight artists well-known on the international art circuit to propose a number of community-based projects, linked to the idea of regeneration, for Sparkbrook.

The Ladypool Road building acts as a kind of exhibition and information centre for the project. Participating artists include the American minimalist artist (and rock critic) Dan Graham, who is showing a video of a glass pavilion installed in the grounds of a museum in Portugal. Graham hopes to do something similar in Birmingham.

Others taking part are Reza Aramesh (Iran/UK), Paul Eachus (UK), Nooshin Farhid (Iran/UK), Runa Islam (Bangladesh/UK) and Goshka Macuga (Poland/UK). But perhaps the biggest name is Yona Friedman, the 83-year-old architect and theorist of flexible and sustainable urban forms who was born in Hungary and lives in France.

[more…]

There’s also more info in this press release and it runs at 394 Ladypool Road, Sparkbrook, Thur - Sat 12-6pm, until April 21st.

The problem with being a one-man blogging outfit is occasionally you’ll be unable to blog, in the current case due to a cold that is affecting my brain in a most annoying manner.

Please bear with me. Backlog to be cleared soon.

Nic Gaunt are currently producing a mixed media arts project based on the Rotunda in Birmingham that will culminate in a documentary and photographic exhibition. The title ‘21 Stories’ has been chosen to encapsulate the project which will tell the story of the Rotunda through peoples personal stories, memories and connections to this wonderful landmark.

The project will culminate in a documentary and photographic exhibition in 2008, which will coincide with the completion of the Rotunda regeneration programme - the largest change to the building since its construction in 1965.

The website for the project is currently under construction, but once launched, it will show short clips of the film so far, and samples of the photography. It will also have extracts from interviews, and people’s thoughts and memories of the building.

Although we already have a list of people to film, we are very interested to hear from anyone who may have a story to tell about the building or an opinion about it.

If you have any views, thoughts or stories concerning the Rotunda, or any of your memories of the building, it would be wonderful for you to contact me. The email address is stories@newrotunda.co.uk.

Nabbed from Film Birmingham

More details have been released about The Event, “a series of artist run activities in permanent and temporary spaces throughout central Birmingham” from March 31st to April 15th.

As the UK’s second largest city, it seemed important to highlight this increase and acceleration in activity, so in the summer of 2006 Birmingham Contemporary Art Forum (BCAF) was formed to organise a festival to celebrate and amplify this emerging culture. Discussions have recently been translated into the organisation of a set of projects under the umbrella name ‘The Event’.

Consisting of exhibitions and performances devised by ten of the brightest young visual art organisations in Birmingham, this sixteen-day celebration will focus on a myriad of event-based practices and exhibitions in such a way as to implicate the whole city into its logic.

The structure of the festival is too complicated (in a good way) to summarise here but the overriding theme seems to be Birmingham itself with many events taking place in the streets and pubs around the city. Go read the press release for details and check the sidebar links for specific projects.

Pascal Wyse interviews Brian Duffy of the Modified Toy Orchestra in the Guardian giving some insight into why he does what he does.

Duffy started modifying toys nearly 10 years ago while hunting for unusual sounds to sample. But nagging away were some heavier concerns. “What is music for? What meaning does music carry? What’s the role of the ego in it?” he says. “I realised most of the popular culture around me, particularly music, seemed to be obsessed with personal narrative, self-expression, self-catharsis, and social commentary. Surely there must be more to it; there must be more to be discussed than these songs that start with the word ‘I’. I never dreamed when I started modifying the toys that the answer I was looking for would be in them.”

Inspired by experimental composer John Cage’s book For the Birds, and by the work of Buckminster Fuller, Duffy dug deeper, attracted by Fuller’s ideas of refining objects to a level of perfection, and of “finding the surplus value inside the seemingly redundant” - which is quite a philosophical way of looking at a Speak & Spell machine. But Duffy goes on: “There is only one amount of stuff in the universe, which just exchanges itself between matter and energy. Along the way, it rearranges itself into us. I started to wonder why - why does it rearrange itself into us?”

More…

Warm Circuit page with YouTube videos.
MySpace page.

The Orchestra play the Barfly on May 24th and the Supersonic Festival on July 14th.

Photo by myself from Supersonic 06. Hat tip to Russ L.

The Surface Unsigned Festival is a rather massive live music competition running in Birmingham over the next few months.

The first heat starts on Monday with a series of 29 gigs at the Actress and Bishop running until the end of April. Each will have around six bands playing, making roughly 170 bands in this region. Two winners will be selected by the audience along with another two selected by the bands themselves.

These winners will then go through a second heat, a semi-final, and then a regional final where 12 bands play. The top four then go onto the national final “performing in front of a panel of Music Industry legends and A&R representatives” to win a top prize of £1,000.

Full details are here. The semi-final gigs take place at the Medicine Bar, the regional final at the Barfly with the national final occurring at an “Open Air Festival” in the Custard Factory lake.

The first round gigs are listed here. I guess the challenge is for anyone to go to all 29. It would certainly give a decent snapshot of the live music scene in the region. Hmm…

Stef Lewandowski of local creative agency 3form is atending the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin TX and is blogging what he sees.

A regular selection of photos from the Birmingham Flickr community.

by tanyalupton

by hartlandmartin

by Paul Regan

by ikkio_too

All copyright as applies.

To suggest photos for inclusion in this feature add them to this thread or leave a link in the comments.