Studio Kinglux was established in 2002 by Tony Hill after graduating from Central Saint Martins.

Initially providing graphic design and illustration to youth based lifestyle brands including Urban Outfitters and Coca-Cola, the company has grown to encompass knowledge, commentary and forecast services relating to consumer tastes and trends.

Previous clients include Channel 4, MTV, The Future Laboratory, Weber Shandwick, 02, Viewpoint magazine, Inspire magazine and Monotonik records

The photo above was taken at the now defunct Omega Sektor and is from Studio Kinglux’s first book ‘One Thousand Words Per Second‘ (link is to a pdf). The book also features pics from Supersonic, a silent rave in the Tescos on New Street and a Barry Gibb lookalike from Birmingham.

Their other books – Cosplay, Smile. You’re Nightclubbing and Gameface (also featuring the above photo) – can be seen on Issuu. They have a FB page too.

Specialz Ltd is Keith Owen and Dave Smith and they describe their company as a ‘Production Design and Manufacturing House’. That is to say that they make lights like these for Radiohead’s 2008 world tour:

They’ve worked on sets for the likes of Franz Ferdinand, Pink, Girls Aloud, Kylie Minogue and U2. They also refurbished the Black Sabbath Cross from 1981:

Acquired as a piece of Black Sabbath memorabilia by Music Superstore PMT The Black Sabbath Cross found it’s way in the Specialz Workshop for a refit. The Birmingham branch of PMT Music store plan to hang the piece, dating from 1981 tour, in the shop. However, with most of fittings missing and the fact they’d have to sell twice as many instruments to pay the electricity bill if it was rebuilt with the original light sources.

Keith Owen, Specialz Technical Director, sourced some obsolete spinnings and repopulated the piece with 60 1.5w LED clusters which only draw a total of 300w max. He then used a prismatic lens to amplify the light output.

Impressive stuff. They do art installations and all sorts too. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be much they can’t do and the reports I’ve found on them elsewhere are glowing – there’s a PDF here which effusively explains their role in the Radiohead stage set.

I’ve often wondered why museums and galleries aren’t using their web presence in more innovative and useful ways.  I worked within a gallery for a number of years, and this gave me the unsurprising insight that many factors contributed to this: underpaid overworked staff, simply no capacity (in terms of time) to explore new avenues, gallery staff restricted to working within strictly defined roles with little room for experimentation, and those who do maintain the web side of things being under supported and in need of upskilling.  Plus above all, there are many challenges facing gallery collections (from conservation to valuation to interpretation and beyond) that the additional pressure of creating new ways of accessing that information sits at the bottom of anyone’s agenda, particularly when it could just end up as a copyright/intellectual property/Digital Rights Management nightmare.

Finally, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery have been brave enough to tackle these issues head on with the decision to publicly release their world-class Pre-Raphaelite collection, the largest in Europe, becoming the focal point for this work.  With assistance from JISC, BMAG appointed Birmingham-based digital agency TAK! after a five way pitch to design and develop a website application to achieve their goal.  And the resulting site is a beautiful, delicate and sensitive piece of design.  Visitors will be able to access high quality content which will enable schools, universities, and the general public to have a greater understanding of the collection in their own time, and in their own space – which in turn could encourage new visitors and raise the profile of the museum.

“TAK! have helped us create the largest online Pre-Raphaelite collection in the world” concludes Linda Suprdle, Project Manager at BMAG. “It’s a fantastic resource and provides an unparalleled level of access and quality to the works on display. Anyone with an interest in art should visit the site and discover the importance of the Pre-Raphaelites.”

I hope that this project will encourage other museums and galleries to consider making their collections accessible online.  They have the opportunity to create such valuable learning resources which could cross so many diversity and access barriers, and it seems a shame that the majority of artworks only ever see the light of day if and when a curator deems them relevant enough. Using online technology, all collections could eventually be available to view regardless of current exhibition theme!

If and when that does happen, I will be interested to see how the role of ‘the curator’ responds to that change.  The Pre-Raphaelite collection site already encourages users to create their own personal collections, so how far a leap would it be for people to share those collections and reasons for their choices with other users?  Imagine an itunes playlist or an amazon reading list – but for art, complete with personal interpretations, anecdotal thoughts, factual evidence and academic input.  THAT would be something I could become obsessive about!