Brum-based eccentric publishers The Eccentric City are giving away a whole pound every month to the person who can put it to the best use. What’s more, it’s totally free to enter and you could even see your idea in print. So get yer thinking caps on and you could be in the money! The deadline for this month’s proposals is 15th March.
The Big Picture are seeking artists/design teams to help with the following projects:
World Record Attempt (deadline for proposals 18th March)
Audiences Central wants to appoint an artist or artist/design team to break the world record for the largest photo mosaic in the world, as the culmination of our ‘Big Picture’ project.
The current record is 94,392 photographs covering an area of 562.85 m2 (6,058.46 ft2). Both numbers need to be surpassed in order to break the record.
MMS Upload Project (deadline for proposals 25th March)
Audiences Central wants to appoint an artist or artist/design team to produce an engaging online concept that will drive MMS photo uploads to the ‘Big Picture’ project.
The same artist/team may apply for both projects.
Digital Central are looking for 10 people from creative companies to take part in their pilot for a ‘serious game‘ which aims to teach business skills to creatives.
From the Digital Central post:
We’re running two workshop in the next month and we’d like to recruit a small number of individuals to help us test the game. Participants get their hands on a free Nintendo DS and Brain Training Game.
The workshops are on:
Wednesday 19th March (Central Birmingham)
Friday 4th April (central Birmingham)With a launch event over lunchtime on:
Friday 25th April (Coventry)
If you are interested in attending you simply need to be an individual working in a creative industries company.
See the flyer for more info. Note that places will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis and participants need to be able to attend all three of the events.
Martin Mullaney’s blog brings news of a Graffiti Art Festival, to be held in Kings Heath Park on the weekend of 15th-16th March from 12noon to 6pm each day.
From Martin’s blog:
The Festival is being jointly organised by Bishop Challoner School and In A City Arts, 21 York Road. The Festival is being funded from Community Chest Funds awarded by the Moseley and Kings Heath Ward Committee.
The Festival is part of a series of measures to move local teenagers from graffiti tagging, which upsets residents, to the legal form of graffiti art.
The tennis courts in Kings Heath Park will be filled with 75metres of 8foot high boards. The next door basketball court will have ramps for skateboarders and BMXers. There will also be food and music.
Professional graffiti artists will be on hand to show off their skills and advise younger teenage artists – young people who wish to participate will be able to come along through booking a place through the new ‘INACITY Arts’ Graffitti shop on York Road who will give them a time slot and will manage the Graffiti element of the day itself. Teenagers who are known to be taggers will not be allowed to use the paint facilites.
There will also be a marque in case of poor weather
If the event is a success, then funds will be made available for more during the Spring and Summer.
Martin also announces that there will be a full time managed legal graffiti zone behind Kings Heath Baptist Church on the High Street opening in mid-March.
In A City Arts MySpace page.
Via Podnosh.
I hate to get all serious on you in my first proper guest post, but local musician and blogger Christopher Woods has been on the telly to warn musicians and music fans to protect their hearing.
From the BBC article:
Christopher Woods, a musician from Birmingham who is training to be a sound engineer, has already, at the age of just 21, experienced damage to his hearing caused by playing and listening to loud music.
He said: “The damage is permanent. I have been told my hearing will never improve.
“Many people who have been working in the industry for a long time have a sustained level of hearing loss, and it is too late.”
Personally, I do believe that my hearing has been damaged from years of gig-going and clubbing. Does anyone think that promoters/bands should be making earplugs available at their gigs?
Hello, my name is Julia Gilbert, your Created in Birmingham guest blogger. You may also know me from such social media tools as Flickr, del.icio.us, Tumblr and Twitter.
While Pete is taking a well-deserved trip across the pond to attend SXSWi on behalf of us Brummies. I’ll be taking up the reins, so that nothing urgent gets missed.
I am not a professional ‘creative’ so have no work of my own to promote, although I am a big fan of creative activity, especially stuff happening locally. I have lived in Brum for 11 years now, so consider myself an honorary Brummie.
My own blog has suffered a severe lack of activity of late, but having attended the recent Brum Bloggers meetup, I feel a new surge of enthusiasm and hope to get it back on track soon! I also blog much more regularly on The Kitten Channel, and occasionally on BiNS (where I am the Typo Fairy, who comes and magically fixes Jon‘s typos before he hits Publish or sometimes after if he’s being impatient!).
Hopefully Pete will be able to forward any important emails to me, but if you have some urgent news and you want to make sure I get it, feel free to copy me in on julia.gilbert AT gmail.com.
Just hope I don’t break anything!
Taken at the sell-out Autechre gig on Monday:
You’ll note Melt Banana. For bringing Melt Banana to Birmingham again they deserve medals.
If you were at the Creative Republic launch / Created in Birmingham birthday party the other week you might well be in this. It also has my “speech”, which is handy as I had no idea what I was saying.
If you can’t see the video click here
There’s an exhibition at Baskerville House in Centenary Square running from 12 – 29 March showing “fine art, photography and contemporary craft by new, emerging and established British artists selected by arts professionals and business leaders” with the presumable intention of selling artworks to businesses and corporations. It’s run by Visual whose website isn’t running yet but there’s a PDF poster which has some info.
Pictured works (left to right) by: Frillip Moolog, Michelle Lord, Anne Guest, Vanley Burke, Jo Naden and Richard Foot
John Akomfrah, whose 1986 directorial debut was Handsworth Songs about the fallout from the riots in Birmingham, collected his OBE last week for services to film. From the press release sent in by Pogus Caesar (who owns the photo above):
A founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective (1982-98), the legendary Black British film group, Akomfrah work has proved immensely influential on the evolution of black filmmaking in Britain and the USA, opening the way for many young black and Asian film makers to enter the film and television industries.
In 1987, Akomfrah won the coveted Grierson Award with his first film, the independently produced Handsworth Songs. Hailed as one of the most influential documentaries ever made and it garnered a range of International Awards. Handsworth Songs was also one of the first documentaries to be successfully released in British cinemas.
John is also a multi-award winning director with over twenty international film awards for his wide range of feature films, factual, programmes, documentaries and shorts covering a variety of musical icons such as Louis Armstrong, Goldie, Stan Tracey, Lauryn Hill. His films have also looked at inspirational black figures such as Martin Luther King , Kwame Nkrumah and Malcolm X.
John Akomfrah recently finished serving a six year term on the Governing Board of the British Film Institute; he is currently on the of Boards of both Film London and the London International Film School. He is also a Visiting Professor of Film at the University Of Westminster.
John saw a full retrospective of his work with the Black Audio Film Collective open at Foundation for Creative Technologies in Liverpool in February 2007. Designed by acclaimed architect and designer David Adjaye – architect of the new Nobel Prize Centre in Oslo – the Retrospective encompassed all the feature films and documentaries made by the collective screened in a specially designed gallery setting. The show received rave reviews in The Guardian and Frieze Magazine.
