Created in Birmingham

Black Tonic is a new, unusual theatre experience from The Other Way Works, a Birmingham based theatre company formed in 2001. The production is an interactive performance staged in the bedrooms and corridors of the Radisson Hotel Birmingham.

You are invited to unravel an original detective story, where even love can be bought for the price of a cocktail. Check-in at the Hotel reception two by two and journey along the corridors and into the bedrooms to piece together the clues and uncover what makes the hotel tick.

Thursday 2nd – Sunday 5th April 2009
Thursday 9th – Sunday 12th April 2009 (Easter Weekend)
2pm*, 3pm*, 7pm, 8pm & 9pm. *Saturdays only.

Very limited audience (4 places per hour). Booking in pairs recommended.

£15 / £10 Suitable for 18+ Trailer

This is one for all you Google Street View fanatics out there (you know who you are). Photographer and filmmaker Matt Murtagh has painstakingly pasted together the journey from Moseley to St Phillips Cathedral to create a stunning example with what can be done with free online tools, a huge amount of patience and a bit of love for Birmingham.

About a year ago Karen Strunks came up with the crazy idea of getting out of bed and stepping out at 4am to photograph desolate streets and a sleeping city. A year on, the idea has grown into a fully fledged international event called 4am Project. The idea is spreading like wildfire, and it seems people all over the world are getting in on the bleary-eyed party. On Thursday the Guardian profiled the project in their Travel section, featuring 4am photographs taken around the globe.

Abandoned summerhouse, Bjärnum, Sweden by Steve Anderson

New York subway, USA by hy136

On Saturday 4th April 2009 photographers of all kinds will be dragging themselves out of bed and taking a picture of their world at 4am.

It can be of anything at all. A self portrait, the room you’re in, the view from your window. Perhaps you want to venture out a bit further, maybe you’ll be travelling, or at work – maybe you’re a night owl…

Whatever you’re doing, it’d be great if you could get involved and play a part in building up a big picture of the world at 4am.

Get out there, take your photo and either email it to them or upload to Flickr and tag with the word 4amproject.

VIVID are giving you the chance to do something different with your weekend are are hosting a series of Saturday screenings of independent video work.George Barber / Beyond Language &  introduction by George Barber
Saturday 28th March 2pm £3/2

A pioneer of British video art, George Barber was a founding member of ZG Magazine and a leading figure in the Scratch Video phenomenon of the 1980s. Moving away from Scratch in the early ’90s, Barber created many lo-tech video pieces and was influential in defining the then emergent ‘slacker’ aesthetic. Narrative is at the centre of much of his work, whether deconstructing it as in Scratch, or creating humorous and absurd situations to find existential meaning in the margins of modern life.

Gazwrx: The Films of Jeff Keen & ntroduction by Will Fowler, Curator (BFI)
Saturday 4th April 2pm £3/2

Jeff Keen‘s unique and imaginative filmmaking has outlived the various scenes in which it thrived - the Sixties counter-culture, punk and beyond. Making work of immediate power and raw intensity on a range of film stocks, this World War II veteran, self-taught artist and pioneer of radical British independent filmmaking continues to defy categorisation.

The twelve short films in this programme, made between 1960 and 1993, reveal the astonishingly tireless talent of a filmmaker not afraid to grapple with sex and war, or to experiment with visceral soundtracks and brutal animation techniques. Truly inspired and inspiring, this programme is a testament to the irrepressible force that is Jeff Keen.

Victorian Wolverhampton is a new blog started by Joanne Penn at Wolverhampton Art Gallery. It coincides with the redisplays of Wolverhampton’s collection of Victorian art and objects at both the city’s gallery, and out of town museum, Bantock House. I interviewed first time blogger Joanne Penn to find out how she is getting on.

Can you tell us a little bit about Victorian Wolverhampton?
Victorian Wolverhampton celebrates the opening of The Victorian Galleries here at Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Bantock House. Everyone here is really excited about the displays finaly opening after so much hard work that has gone into the project, and I thought that to engage the community with the displays, we would need a website which can give them a behind-the-scenes look at what is going on. It’s not all just from me! There is a community panel who are researching stories and information.

What was your first reaction to being given the task of setting up a blog?
I was terrified but really excited all at the same time. I have never done anything like this before, I don’t even have a Facebook or Myspace! I also don’t get on too well with computers, but I love researching and learning especially about local things. I’m not from Wolverhampton either so it has been quite a lot of work as I didn’t know very much about the city at all. I didn’t really know where to start, I had to have a crash course in blogging!

What difficulties have you faced when creating the blog and fitting it around the existing website?
I’ve had to be really careful with what images I have chosen to go on the blog, the images from the collections all have to be credited. Also, all of the information has been subjected to some scrupulous examining by the staff working on the displays, which is a bit daunting. Other difficulties have been technical, as this is my first encounter with blogging, I am really learning as I go along however, I do think that I have picked it up really well, the blog is only 4 weeks old!

What have you found most surprising or exciting?
I think the most exciting thing was when after working on it for about 2 weeks, it was then published! I was so happy when I looked at the statistics and found that people had actually been looking at this blog that I have worked really hard on. I knew that blogs are the way forward and that they really do reach a wide variety of people, but it’s great to know that people are actually looking for it or stumbling across it and learning something new. It hasn’t had any comments yet, but I am looking forward to feedback from the community about it. What has been surprising is how easy it is once I knew what I was doing, sometimes I have made mistakes, but I’m learning from them and getting quicker at posting items and working on the pages.

What advice can you give for people wanting to start their own blog?
I would say think very carefully about what you want people to get out of your blog. It’s great that it is a space for you to share things that interest you but why are you sharing it? Also, you have to think about the tone of your blog. They tend to be more chatty than websites, and snappy to so that you engage people and make them want to read more. When I first started working on the blog, I think I took too much of an formal tone, I’ve tried to relax this now and be more myself which is very important but then you don’t want to alienate people either- so it’s about trying to get that balance.

Creative Republic invites you to join them at 6.30pm on 30th March to hear direct from those who went to Texas as part of the city’s SXSW Music delegation.

Now in its 23rd year, SXSW Music has grown from a tiny music festival in Texas to an essential event on the music industry calendar. It’s four hyperactive days of making connections for musicians, recording companies and every other business touching on music, from concert bookers to copyright lawyers, publishers to social media types. Creative Republic thought this would be an ideal opportunity to find out what the Birmingham team’s experiences were and what they’ve learned.

As the dust settles on the old way of doing things for the music industry, has SXSW shone some light on a new model?

They have lined up Kerry Thomas and Dave O’Coy from Fused and Lisa Meyer and Jenny Moore from Capsule, amongst others who are ready to be quizzed. Leading the quizzing will be Andrew Dubber and John Mostyn.

So you might want to ask them a question or two as well. Timings for the event are:

• 6.30pm Arrival; cash bar available
• 7-8pm Panel discussion and questions
• 8-9pm Networking and event close.

There is no charge for attending but they do ask for you to sign the Creative Republic Charter, and to RSVP. A map and directions for the venue can be found at www.creativerepublic.org.uk.

Phillip Pullman’s Dark Materials has been adapted by Nicholas Wright, from three novels into two full-length plays and is being directed by Rachel Kavanaugh at the REP. The productions are from Birmingham Repertory Theatre Company in association with West Yorkshire Playhouse.

Image by Catherine Ashmore

Philip Pullman’s magical story unfolds in a world where young girl Lyra lives in an Oxford very like our own, but strangely different with other people’s souls brought to life as animal companions, known as daemons.

The trilogy has been on my reading ‘to-do’  list for ages now and this has promted me to do so, but I do wish I had read them before finding out about tonight’s ‘Spotlight Special with Philip Pullman’. Catherine Ashmore’s beautiful production images just got uploaded to the REP website, and are definately worth a look.

Made Media is a digital media agency based in the Jewellery Quarter, and very proud to be so:

‘Apart from being the most criminally underrated city in the UK, it’s just two hours from London and about the same to Manchester so there’s no excuse not to visit.’

Their extensive portfolio reads like a who’s who of creative and cultural Birmingham, they have created clean, functional and stylish websites for: The Drum, Fused Magazine, Hello Digital, The REP, New Generation Arts, Fierce Festival, Maverick and Town Hall.

They are currently looking for people to help them in a usability study into some websites by spending an hour clicking around some websites, and there’s a £75 gift voucher in it for participants which that relates to the study. So if you are an average web user, not a techy, and have got an hour spare in central Birmingham between 1pm and 9pm next Monday (30 March) get in touch with Jake Grimley on 0844 581 1374 and leave a message.

2.5 Hours of Oxygen is a temporary art event taking place in 7 phone boxes in Birmingham city centre tomorrow (Thursday 19 March) 11.30am-2.00pm.

The event brings together 7 artists working in diverse practices including pinhole photography and guerilla knitting. The phone boxes will be transformed into startling and intriguing art works which explore what the red telephone box means, now that communication is ubiquitous. The seven phone boxes are sited centrally on Victoria Square,  Temple Row and Eden Street.

2.5 Hours of Oxygen e-flier

A team of computing students from the University of Wolverhampton and University of Birmingham have picked up the BAFTA ‘Ones to Watch’ award at the GAME British Academy Video Games Awards.

The team, named DarkMatter Designs designed Boro-Toro, a platform puzzle game which uses an innovative control system using Wii technology.

Since leaving University two members of the team now work for RockStar North, the British games company behind the hugely successful Grand Theft Auto games.

Guardian writer and professional grumpy man Charlie Brooker wrote a hilarious and unfortunately accurate article on the British Games industry this week.

…despite being about 10,000 times more successful than the British film and TV industries combined, the British videogames industry continually balances a pathological inferiority complex with a wounded sense of pride. Quite why it still wants validation from these older, fading forms of media is a mystery. It’s like a powerful young warrior disgruntled at being ignored by an elderly and irrelevant dying king.

One day a year, Digbeth is painted green and becomes a huge celebration of St. Patrick, with a parade only matched by Dublin and New York. Some swifty Flickr users have uploaded their photographs of the festivities showing the eclectic mix of revellers. This work from two Flickr users especially capture the atmosphere:

Birmingham St. Patrick’s Day 2009 by Tim Ellis

Birmingham St. Patrick’s Day 2009 by Tim Ellis

By Very Quiet

By Very Quiet

Last weekend was one the most exciting and eventful of the year, but unfortunately I have come down with a nasty bug which meant I missed it all. I had plans to don my reporters hat and head off to see internationally revered film maker Mike Figgis speaking at the Boilerhouse (Thursday) Flatpack Festival (Friday / Saturday / Sunday) and The Haunting (Friday night). It seems I am not the only one Nicky from Digbeth is Good has also missed out on all the fun due to the mystery bug.

Floodgate Kino by sharl

Thank goodness for Flatpack’s guest blogger Eleanor McKeown. London based Eleanor works for quarterly cinema magazine Electric Sheep and popped up from the capital to experience the weird wonderment of Flatpack Festival, and to stay in the historic back to backs. Her very specific knowlege base and the fact she is an out of towner makes for interesting reading, though photos to illustrate the words would have been nice.

Last month an unlikely collection of street artists gathered in Shenley, Birmingham, joined by senior citizens and BBC2’s ‘The Culture Show’ presenter, Lauren Laverne, to create a giant mural. The mural will be a permanent “thank you” to Lottery players, who in just one year alone, invested over £235million to help fund Good Causes projects across the Midlands.

The artists are all members of the Arts 50 Alive Network. This Lottery-funded project works across the most deprived areas of the Midlands to integrate young and old through art. Working together allows the groups to find common ground and helps break down negative social stereotypes that can otherwise cause animosity and fear between the age groups.

Birmingham City Council’s Big City Plan is looking for imaginative photographs and films showing how you think Birmingham should develop over the next twenty years.

In the spirit of this user generated content age it doesn’t matter if you use your mobile phone or the latest camera technology. Entries will only be accepted from amateur photographers/filmmakers though, which does make you wonder how amateurs would have access to the latest camera technology?

Perhaps you feel Birmingham would benefit from greener areas or maybe you have an idea about how public transport could improve. Your vision could be for the whole city, or your local area.

Competition Categories

Competition Rules

The closing date for this competition is 20 April 2009.