Created in Birmingham

The Edge, “Birmingham’s first dedicated live and time-based arts venue”, wants to put the joy back into making art:

Saturday Sesh is not networking, it’s not a series of seminars, it’s just a place for artists to meet, to share ideas and resources and to make things happen.

All of which is highly laudable, so more power to their collective elbow. Anyone interested should feel free to drop in from 3pm on Saturday 3 May and every Saturday after for drinks, nibbles and a chat. Admission is free.

The Edge can be found at 79-81 Cheapside, Digbeth, Birmingham B12 0QH, or roughly where the green arrow is on this map.

The International Dance Festival Birmingham started today and continues until Sunday 25 May at venues all over the city. Pete mentioned this back in January and pointed out how truly international the line-up is, with performers from Taiwan, Australia, South Africa, Cuba and Russia, as well as “rising star” Rosie Kay from Birmingham.

The full line-up for this week (and indeed the other weeks) can be seen on their events page.

Pulling out highlights would be a fool’s errand but for those looking to sample the impressive wares without parting with their hard-earned, there are a few free events to catch:

• Performances in shop windows around the city centre are taking place daily from midday all this week - head for Oasis, the Puma Store, Bathstore and Chamberlain Square. More details here.
• In Victoria Square on Friday night, 9pm and on Saturday at 4pm and 9pm you can see Watch This Space which I have very high hopes for indeed.

Lastly, the festival has a blog, although I see this hasn’t been updated in the past week. I’m hoping they use it to collect together all the photos, videos and reviews that will be spun out by visitors to the events, similar to the Collective Memories that Pete did here (and that I’ll be continuing to do).

Photo by Brian Slater.

The line-up for this year’s Fierce! Festival, the international performing arts festival, has been announced and can be seen on the events page of their newly updated website. You may recall that a significant number of acts were chosen via a public vote and these have now been programmed into the wider festival too.

The opening party will be held at The Vaults on 16 May and promises burlesque cabaret from Miss High Leg Kick and Fierce’s favourite DJ Joe Egg. Entry is free but you’ll need to RSVP as capacity is limited.

In the lead up to the festival there are a few events being held on Wednesdays at 2pm at BIAD:

• On 30 April Breathe will be creating “sensory performative experiences in interactive environmments” with The Other Way Works “daring and remarkable theatre that draws the audience into the very heart of the experience.
• On Wednesday 7 May at the same time and place it’s the turn of Harminder Singh Judge and Hancock & Kelly Live.
• Finally, on 14 May it’s the conceptual artist Yara El-Shirbini and trans-disciplinary artist Jiva Parthipan who will take the stage.

I’ll go into the specifics of this year’s festival a little nearer the time but the main programme runs from 21 to 31 May, with a bewildering array of shows and events in that time.

Computer games and individual bands are outside the traditional remit of CiB but this is a bit too cool to not warrant a mention. According to their bio on the SXSW website, local band Deluka have somehow managed to get their song ‘Sleep Is Impossible’ featured on the next installment of the Grand Theft Auto series.

For those that don’t spend their days complaining about their parents and/or hiding in their bedrooms, the Grand Theft Auto franchise has sold 70 million units to date - making it as popular as Tetris but much more controverisal. GTA 4 is due out imminently and likely to be one of the biggest-selling computer games released this year.

So congrats to Deluka. You can check out their obligatory MySpace page and you can also go see them at The Barfly on 29 April supporting another rather decent local band, Envy & Other Sins. I understand the gig will be reviewed and photographed by the guys at Birmingham Live! too.

Thanks to Antonio for the heads up.

• 7 Inch Cinema’s next event is on Sunday 27 April from 7 to 11pm at the Hare & Hounds in Kings Heath. Entry is yours for £4. I’m going to try and drag some friends along to this.

• Birmingham Printmakers look interesting and they run courses on silk screen printing, photo etching and the like. They also do free workshops for kids and are based in Digbeth.

• Rhubarb Rhubarb, the photography training and development agency, have announced the date’s of this year’s Rhubarb Festival. It’ll run from 31 July to 3 August and will be at Aston Business School.

• Bobbie Gardner went long to see Soweto Kinch talking at the Creative Networks this evening -something I wish I could’ve gone along to. She’s written up her refections of the evening on her blog.

• Dice Productions have launched a new blog, just a couple of months after their last one. It’s called Um Ok Yeah and the post about a Tescos ecosystem made me laugh.

Sunday 27 April is the closing day of the Behind Closed Doors exhibition being held at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts.

Over the past two years the organisers of this show have visited in excess of one hundred private art collections within the Birmingham postal district. Now, almost 40 paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints have been brought together to reveal the range and variety of treasures that exist outside the realm of public galleries.

So you can marvel at works by Turner and Picasso, as well as more contemporary artists like Hockney, Rego and Parker, that are usually squirrelled away out of public view.

You never know when the next chance to see these will come around so if you’ve got a spare hour or two this weekend then why not pop down? Admission’s free, if you need any more excuse.

You’ll have to excuse some slightly hectic posting this week and next while I get my head round 300ish new RSS feeds and an inbox stuffed with interesting (and hopefully not yet out of date) emails.

I’ll also introduce myself properly later but for now, here’s a round-up:

• “aCtiVe arts is a steering group, made up of committed residents and local professionals, dedicated to providing quality arts experiences and opportunities for the Castle Vale community of North-East Birmingham”. They have a blog and you are advised to see what they’re doing.

• The next Drop Beats Not Bombs runs from Friday 2 to Monday 5 May (the bank holiday) and tickets are available. That’s at The Rainbow (and the warehouse and arches) in Digbeth. There should be more info on their website but it was having bandwidth issues last I checked.

• The people at the People shop in Kings Heath are having a party with drinks and canapés at their store on Saturday 26th April from 10am until 5:30pm. It’s in aid of Macmillan, there’s a raffle for a luxury goodie bag and visitors can have their photo taken by Emily Quinton. Get all the info here.  **UPDATE** It was a big success with £430 raised on the day.  More events will follow.

• Simon has started a blog called Birmingham Central. He says he’s “been inspired by the recent blogging epidemic sweeping Birmingham and the value of a good blog to share news and information”.

• Speaking of bloggers, the next Birmingham Bloggers meet-up will be on Tuesday 29 April at Rooty Frooty in the Custard Factory. Nick Booth has more info but I refer you also to the Facebook event and the Upcoming page.

Animation Forum West Midlands are running an after-work (6.30pm to 8.30pm) event at The Rainbow in Digbeth on Monday 28 April 2008. It’s called Shorts on Walls and in their own words:

Whether or not you actually make short films, Shorts on Walls is a great chance for animators to meet and network after work with other freelancers, animation companies and professionals over a mid-week beverage.

It’s free to attend but please let them know if you’ll be going down. There are contact details and more info on the Animation Forum West Midlands website.

Incidentally, props to AFWM for showing how this web promotion lark should be done - the news page of their site has an RSS feed and features a map of the venue. There’s also a Facebook group (with a list of participating animators/studios) to join as well as a newly-minted YouTube group.

On May 1st Pete Ashton, being myself, will stop running Created in Birmingham. It’ll be run by Chris Unitt.

First the admin stuff.

If you’re not already doing so, please start sending email to createdinbirmingham [at] gmail.com so that they go directly to Chris.

I’ll still be around as a kind of “blogger emeritus” making sure the handover is smooth. I might even post occasionally but not too much.

Now for the why.

If you’ve been following the blog for a while you’ll have noticed a slowdown in posting recently compared to the heady days of last year. The blunt truth is I’m not as interested in running this blog as I was. The blog worked as a document of someone who knew nothing about how the arts and culture as they explored that world and figured it out. After a year I’m not on that journey anymore. That’s not to say I’ve figured it all out - that would be impossible - but I’m thinking about other things. In short, I’m not the right person to run this site anymore.

But the process of blogging here has been tremendous. I owe this site a lot as it’s given me access to people and ideas I wouldn’t have had otherwise. If I’ve become anything of worth this last year it’s thanks to having a platform on Created in Birmingham to do so. So it makes sense to make that platform available to others.

In discussions with co-founder Stef Lewandowski and Helga Henry of Creative Republic (who source the £500 per month funding for this blog) we came up with a number of ideas for how to take CiB forward most of which were kinda complex and needed some serious planning. Meanwhile the blog was in danger of getting less relevant as I posted less and less. So a decision was made. We’d get someone to take over full time for 6 months. After than we’ll figure out where it goes next.

Chris is, I think, relatively new on the Birmingham arts scene. He’s comfortable with the blogging medium and has started exploring the arts world with his own blog and blogging work for Fierce and New Generation Arts. In other words he’s very similar to how I was last January. He’ll be more focussed on digging out relatively obscure pockets of activity in the city and pushing them on the blog as well as continuing to link to all the relevant online activity - the sort of things I should have been doing but haven’t lately.

More importantly, he’ll be running the blog the way he thinks it should be run. One of the nice things about running CiB is I’ve been making it up as I go along, trying new angles and ways of reporting on the city within a loose remit. While I’d imagine he’ll use what I’ve been doing as an initial template he’s free to tear it all up and start again if he sees fit. The blog format is flexible like that and it’s his to make his own, just as I did.

And then, after 6 months or so, we’ll see where we are. Maybe Chris will be ready to hand over to someone else. Maybe he’ll have set up a team of people with him as editor. Maybe he’ll have done something completely different. All that matters is it’ll be a weblog that links up Birmingham’s artistic and creative communities and inspires others to do the same.

As for myself, this frees me up to take what I’ve learned this last year or so into new places, hopefully exciting and relevant ones. You can, if you want, follow my progress at peteashton.com.

And, needless to say, thanks to you all for providing the reason and subject matter for this blog to have worked as well as it has. I am eternally grateful.

And so, once we’ve removed all the references to me on the site and replaced them with him, take it away Chris!

• Lots of filmnights going on
  7 Inch Cinema round up the local activity.
  (tags: cinema film 7inch)
• Experiments with retail
  Andrew Dubber introduces Liquid Crunch, his new online music shop where you can “return” the mp3 if you don’t like it for a full refund.
  (tags: dubber liquidcrunch music internet mp3)

News to me here is that the Moselely Folk Festival is a three day event this year, starting at 3pm on the Friday. Other than that it looks to be the usual mix of old school folkie classics, nu-folk (or whatever) and quirky stuff. Nice!

Here’s the lineup and tickets are on sale with a weekend pass at £55.

via RussL

• 27 Thoughts On Blogging For The Artist
  Useful. I’d agree with all of this.
  (tags: blogging tips artist via:jonbounds)
• 383news - » Broadstreet.co.uk Launches
  John383 talks us through the new Broad Street website which has a lot of really cool features on it that you wouldn’t normally expect for a Business Improvement District site.
  (tags: 383 internet website design)
• Jazz and hip-hop star Soweto Kinch joins Creative Networks
  “Birmingham’s multi award-winning jazz and hip-hop musician, Soweto Kinch, will join this month’s Creative Networks event, to explore the resurgence of live music and its positive impact on local communities.”
  (tags: events sowetokinch music networking live community)

On Saturday semi-serious (i think) art group Digital Is Dangerous will be hosting a debate on digital technology’s role in the creative process. Conformed speakers include Robin Giorno, Jonathan Green, Keir Williams and artist and researcher for Wolverhampton uni Robert Grose (cant find a website sorry).

Event starts at 3pm and goes on till 5pm with D.I.D providing “a wonderful selection of edible digital nipples” and this all goes down at Jibbering Records in Mosley. I’ll be the one in with the long hair and mouth full of nipples.

Here’s the “outline design” for the new BIAD campus in Eastside, as revealed on Simon Howes’ Eastside blog.

Millennium Point is in the foreground and the red blob is Curzon St Station. Simon also has a top down map which pleasingly shows how much open space they’re planning to leave, which is nice as I like the amount of green currently there.

A number of you have been contacting me over this appearing on Google:

In short, nothing to worry about, it’s all in hand, just waiting for Google to process the site before removing the warning.

In long, we were running WordPress 2.2 which was vulnerable to hacking and someone hacked it. Nothing major, just a bit of link spam. We’ve upgraded to the more secure WordPress 2.5 and cleared away all the spam so all it right with the world.

• Brum Guide - it’s wiki’d
  Jon Bounds has started at wiki for Birmingham with some rather neat mapping involved. Like Wikipedia only different. And about Brum. Get adding stuff.
  (tags: wiki internet birmingham jonbounds)
• Catherine Bray’s Weblog
  Another journalist with a blog, this time from the 4Talent stable. She’s finding her feet so go say hi. (And do scroll down to the excellent Torchwood review!)
  (tags: blogging catbray 4talent)
• Zuki - Proof
  A blog by the artist Edward Bond. I don’t like to give value judgments in these links but this is a really fantastic blog. Read it now.
  (tags: via:bins blogs art)
• Youmeo - “The ultimate UK social network”
  Interesting looking service out of Coventry that aparently has 500,000 users
  (tags: youmeo internet)

Last Wednesday I went to the imaginatively titled Local shorts Film Club, which I previously talked about here. I was pleasantly surprised to find a large turnout (a quick head count of around 80) maybe its because of by passion for social media and indoctrination into the cult of blogging that made me presume that a poor web presence, and equally poor advertising automatically means low attendance.

The night is ran by Nigel and Sabine of It’s About Time Productions and chatting to them before hand I was interested to find out that updates, the forthcoming programme, submission requests and basically all the functionality of a blog is actually carried out by a mailing list, of which over three hundred people are signed up too. They explained this lo-fi attitude is partly intentional as not to appear to exclusive. Unfortunately this attitude also means that the LSFC is one of the best kept secrets of the film community in Birmingham. Speaking to a local video artist we both remarked how frustrating it was that this event was happening 200 yards away from where we were doing our degree with other student film makers, yet we never heard about it.

The event itself was very informal and friendly with the quality of the films varying widely. Standing out from the pack was the short film written and directed by Lewis Arnold called <i>Long Standing</i>. An engaging, warm, and very funny but ultimately melancholy study of old age and a mans emotional redemption through human contact. Lewis seems to be very talented capable of producing slickly finished pieces on almost no budget that are both humorous and visually interesting. I can’t help but see big things for him.

As for the night, the relaxed setting, friendly atmosphere and question and answer session after each film are much to the organisers credit, although the community itself does seem kind of small. The event has recently secured funding from Screen West Midlands so will using the money to develop a wider film making audience and the next night is scheduled for late July.

to get on the mailing list e-mail your address, theirs can be found here.

7inch Cinema have a new website! And it’s very bloggy by the looks of things with RSS and everything. Worth checking out the other sections too as they’ve crammed it full of some really good writings.

• Opportunities for media firms at Channel 4’s digital hub - Birmingham Post
  “The race is on for West Midland businesses to cash in on a new Channel 4 digital hub in Birmingham, after it was revealed the broadcaster will soon launch similar centres across the country.”
  (tags: channel4 screenwm birminghampost media digital)
• Birmingham: maligned and misunderstood
  Catherine O’Flynn reflects on the Art of Ideas talks of last week.
  (tags: birmingham artofideas catherineoflynn)
• Wonderleague Shoppe
  New online store for Bunny Bissoux
  (tags: bunnybissoux shop internet)
• BMAGiC
  is “Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery’s online database. It gives you information about the objects in our collection. Every month we add more images of objects for you to look at.”
  (tags: bmag bmagic art gallery online)
• Handsworth Self Portraits
  Taken in the summer 1979.
  (tags: photography handsworth)
• Master classes
  A 2006 article by Melvin Bragg on the launch of Birmingham’s National Academy of Writing.
  (tags: writing literature melvinbragg bcu education)
• Eight Eyed Sea Bass: Dolby Digital
  “EESB are currently the only visual and sound facility in the Midlands region to be awarded this license by Dolby, direct from America.”
  (tags: eesb dolby audiovisual film visual sound)
• Woom
  Autumn Dunc bigs up the gallery in Hockley as a potential gig space. Hmm…
  (tags: woom gallery gigs)

The next Pub Conversations conversation, where an artist and a guest of their choice discuss stuff in a pub, takes place on April 29th in the Lamp Tavern on Barford St. Melanie Carvalho and Ross Birrell are the speakers and there are usually questions from the audience. Free but spaces are limited so email selfservice [at] hotmail.co.uk to book. And while the recording will be podcasted the Lamp is a lovely little pub.