Created in Birmingham

I’m not really one for reprinting press releases that are sent to me but I’ll make an exception. Here follows a message from Pete.

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I’m running a couple of courses which I hope will become regular monthly things.

The first is Matt and Pete’s Photo School (see poster)

Here we’re combining an academic approach to photography with the the practical peer learning of a Flickrmeet. As well as hobbyists we’re also looking to help those who can use photography better in their businesses or as a personal development course.

Through a combination of group teaching, personal goal setting, one-to-one mentoring and peer learning, Matt and Pete can help you become a better photographer, whether it’s for photos of your family or as a valuable business tool.

The first class in on Sunday Feb 6th at The Victoria from 12-5pm. The usual cost is £60 per head but we’re doing an introductory offer of £25 for February.

The second is Social Media Group Therapy (see PDF poster).

This is run with the Moseley Exchange and is aimed at the self-employed and small businesses who are having issues with their online activity. “Group therapy” isn’t just a joke. I think people’s problems, once unpicked, can be best be answered by those facing the same situations.

Social Media Group Therapy avoids the snake oil and magic beans of fly-by-night “experts” with a structured environment of peer learning led by someone who understands the pros and cons of the online world.

This course is on Tuesday March 6th at the Moseley Exchange from 6-8pm and costs £25 per person (£20 for Exchange members).

Pete‘s made a video about the next Stitches and Hos.

Creative Times are doing a series of events around the country, with the first being a panel discussion at Fazeley Studios on Wednesday November 30 from 6.30-8pm. It’s titled ‘The Beauty of Digital: New technologies, old aesthetics and where the two meet‘.

Tickets are FREE and available here.

Here’s the info:

A panel of four, chaired by Creative Times editor Chris Sharratt, will share their own experience of the creative interplay between old and new, followed by an audience Q&A and a chance to chat in the bar afterwards.

The panel for the night is:

Pete Ashton, Blogger, photographer, ‘webmonkey’ and trainer (peteashton.com/)
Chris Unitt, Head of Social Media, Made Media Ltd (mademedia.co.uk)
The Brothers McLeod, BAFTA-nominated animators (brothersmcleod.co.uk/)

The event is supported by Hello Culture.

Pete’s making a few appearances this month, and I’m speaking at a bunch of things too. Say hi if you come along.

So I went to the previously-mentioned Birmingham Creative City launch at lunchtime.

I’d still struggle to explain exactly what it is, so here’s some blurb from the council’s press release:

The Creative City initiative will play a significant role by:

• Creating a fund to build on existing public sector funding of the arts through loans, grants, match-funding and investments. The allocation of funds will be based on the potential for job creation and economic growth.
• Outlining the vision for a new ‘museum quarter’, including a new museum of photography and the development of a new contemporary art gallery.
• Exploring ways to unlock private sector and philanthropic support for culture, linking cultural development to wider economic growth.

So this was really the launch of an idea. In the way that Manchester has Media City and London has Tech City, Birmingham (if it wants it) could claim the title of Creative City.

Thing is, the designations of those other two seem to have been built on much stronger foundations (a strong BBC presence and an already burgeoning tech scene, respectively). All we seem to have at the moment is ideas, visions (like this one for a Museum Quarter), pledges and plans with comparatively little substance. Maybe’s it’s just early days, but if the intention of this event was to make people excited about the possibilities on offer then I don’t think it worked.

Maybe the more substantial conversations are all taking place behind closed doors this afternoon – but then I got the sense from others that therein lies the problem. Chatting to people afterwards actually left me kinda depressed by it all.

Personally, I’m not sure what to make of it and I’m pretty busy, so here’s the audio from the speeches that were made. Please have a listen (they’re all quite short) and I’d love to hear what you make of this in the comments below.

In typical Peter O’Hanra-Hanrahan style, I managed to miss the bit where James Yarker from Stan’s Cafe thanked Cllr Timothy Huxtable for name-checking his theatre company but asked him how he squared that with the council cutting their funding by 100%. The response is in the final audio clip above (although it does make for uncomfortable listening).

On the subject

It would be hugely remiss of me not to point out this rather angry post by Pete Ashton, many of the sentiments of which I would endorse.

A couple more links

• This from James at Stan’s Cafe should be read
• As should this from Stef Lewandowski, should be read too, with some interesting comments
• Philip Parkin is upbeat but says he “struggled to find the substance”
• BOP Consulting point out this launch is all “particularly interesting as it is one of the first LEPs to announce its ambitions for the creative industries’
• Pete’s done a round-up of some of the discussion
• Pete also pointed to the discussion on the Re-Stirred forum

Four days of training to learn how to talk to people (or audiences/clients/peers/customers if you want to see them that way) about your art – in real life and online.

I rate Helga and Pete on those subjects and think there’s a real need for some people to get their heads around this stuff and see that it’s not as scary or difficult as they might think. That, and I’m still shaking my head at the berk who told me “Oh, I don’t do business cards” when I asked if he had any contact details.

More info (including booking) on the Fierce Earth website.

If want to read about the purpose of/thinking behind the course then Pete’s written about that here.

Pete Ashton, occasionally of this blog, launched his first exhibition this evening at the Central Library. I couldn’t get there and was a bit gutted about this. However, there are photos up already courtesy of Fiona Cullinan and I’ve got until 17 June to get down and have a peek, so all is not yet lost.

The exhibition, sponsored by The Royal Society For Arts West Midlands and Pure Planet Recycling Ltd is called Looking though Birmingham. Here’s some of the blurb from the EC Arts website:

Pete Ashton has created a series of slow animations consisting of sequential photographs shot through the artists own customised lens.  The lens is made from a vintage camera which forms a process called “Through The Viewfinder”. The slow animations will be displayed on salvaged CRT monitors that have been converted into peep-show machines.

A frequent subject of Pete’s work is “unnoticed Birmingham”, the patterns and shapes that emerge as the city succumbs to and builds on the entropy of progress. For this show he invites you to view Birmingham’s pedestrian flow filtered through a nostalgic, intimate perspective of inner Birmingham.  A second event will take place in June to view ‘outer’ Birmingham.

It’s the Biting Back event on Monday. An event about:

how arts sector professionals and individual artists can learn from examples of successful partnerships in austere cultural landscapes

I’m sure there are still some tickets available if you’re still thinking about coming.

The website’s been a hive of activity over the past couple of weeks, with links to similarly themed events happening around the country. Sandra Hall from Friction Arts has written about what she’s hoping to get out of it and Helga Henry’s written about why the event is important.

There’s also been some strong words from Pete in advance of the event.

I went to see Stan’s Cafe’s The Cleansing of Constance Brown at AE Harris on Saturday. It was superb and I’d thoroughly recommend grabbing some tickets before it closes on Saturday. Unless it’s already sold out. By rights it should’ve done that long ago.

It’s probably better to go with no expectations/preconceptions of about what you’re about to see but, in case you’d rather take someone else’s word for how it good it is:

• Terry Grimley in the Birmingham Post (5 stars)
• Exeunt Magazine (5 stars)
• Lyn Gardner in the Guardian (4 stars)
• Pete Ashton (with video trailer, but if you’re going I’d recommend not watching it)
• Lots of people on Twitter

Book tickets here.

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*Alternative titles for this blog post:

• Knees up Constance Brown (didn’t make sense)
• Constance-ly good reviews (just rubbish)

A quick message from the folks at We Are Birmingham;

Four months after Pete asked Birmingham’s creative communities for help, the We Are Birmingham shop is very nearly ready to open. We start trading on Saturday morning at 10am but before then we want to have a little drinks reception to thank everyone for their help and support and to announce stage two of this project.

Please come to the shop on Dale End at 6.30 on Friday evening. There’ll be a very short speech in our gallery after which we’ll give you a tour of the spaces above the shop. It’ll all be over by 7.30.

• Blogging the retail game « I Am Pete Ashton
  “So starting in a fortnight I’m going to start my journey, exploring the indie retail landscape of Birmingham from a We Are Birmingham perspective” Pete’s good at blogging. This’ll be interesting
• Digbeth is Good » Hither and Thither’s tour of Digbeth art spaces
  A nice run of interviews with The Lombard Method, Behind Closed Doors, [insertspace], Eastside Projects, Grand Union and An Endless Supply. There’s another one with AAS if you head for the YouTube channel
• BBC iPlayer – The Daily Politics: Conference Special
  A clip of Rosie Kay Dance Company on The Daily Politics. Worth watching for Andrew Neil’s ‘So what’s all this about?’ afterwards
• University of Birmingham – Barber Institute memories sought
  “The Barber Institute of Fine Arts is officially 80 years old in December 2012 and alumni memories of its early days are being sought”
• Popular Music History – So What? – Discussing the political economy of popular music history
  Rob Horrocks’s “PhD research scrapbook”. He’s the manager of Einstellung too. Re-posting this link because I broke it last time
• Less:Seen:Spaces: Welcome
  The online portfolio of Birmingham based photographer Harry Starling
• Queen’s Square arts commission
  “The aim of the commission is to animate unit 26 (Community Artspace) for 2-4 weeks in February / March (including invigilation)”

Following the one-off live event back in January before part of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre was demolished, Soul City Arts in association with mac and The REP presents Mohammed Ali’s Writing On The Wall – The Documentary.

Taking place 3 September, 4-7pm at the mac, the event will screen the documentary, plus live performances and a Q&A session with Writing On The Wall artists: Mohammed Ali, Zena Edwards, Amir Sulaiman, Dreadlock Alien and Jonzi-D.

Pete Ashton will also be on hand, chairing a panel discussion on the topic of ‘Creative collaboration – the way forward for cross-cultural arts and public engagement in B’ham?’

Take a peek at the documentary trailer, which we posted up a few weeks ago.

Tickets can be booked at www.macarts.co.uk, and are £5 / £3 concessions. This also gives you entry to a bonus event the following day: In Conversation with Amir Sulaiman & Performance, at The Hubb.

A reminder that tomorrow (Wednesday) from 6.30-7.30pm Pete Ashton will be talking at the Ikon as part of their These are a few of my favourite things series:

A number of well-known individuals undertake a series of talks inspired by Desert Island Discs. Asked to select their eight favourite works of art, speakers will reveal their personal inspirations, illustrated by a slide show.

Places are free but should be reserved by calling Ikon on 0121 248 0708

He’s been described as a photographer, blogger and DIY culture enthusiast, which just about covers most bases. Should be good.

There was a bit of Dave Harte’s Birmingham’s Creative Industries – the ‘business case’ post that really caught my eye – something that I hadn’t noticed/thought about before.

First the set-up:

I think this position [that creative industries need handouts] comes from the confusion of thinking that the subsidised Arts sector has much to do with the Creative Industries sector. There’s overlap of course but in Birmingham the two most significant contributors to Creative Industries value have been Architecture (32% of GVA in 2004) and Software (35% of GVA in 2004). Music and Performing Arts are low-value sectors in economic terms (1.1% of GVA in 2004).

And, keeping in mind that 1.1%, here’s the bit that hadn’t occurred before:

Writing in 2006, Calvin Taylor noted that it was:

“significant that the arts lobby mostly uses the creative industry tag. Very few other sector bodies, representing other components of what are taken to be the creative industries, use the tag in their sectors promotion work.”

I pointed this out to Pete Ashton who happened to be sat a couple of desks away at the time and he’s run with it on his own blog:

it’s no surprise to me that the “subsidised Arts sector” are the major cheerleaders for the Creative Industries in the West Midlands given they operate on a financial knife-edge and will grab at every opportunity to raise funds from wherever possible. Meanwhile those who make their income from international deals and multi-million dollar sales don’t feel the need to lobby the local chamber of commerce

Although I wouldn’t go along with that entirely – the arts sector is often chastised for not having a particularly strong/coherent lobbying voice around these parts (that’s partly what Creative Republic was set up to solve) and the games industry have been doing some quite high-profile and temporarily successful lobbying recently, especially around tax breaks. However, I agree with the general thrust and would pick out this bit too:

The other fantastically vague label that everyone’s keen to attach to them at the moment is “digital”

Which ties in with a bugbear of mine – that in some conversations the words ‘creative’ and ‘digital’ seem to have become oddly interchangeable, when they’re really not. It’s just there’s perceived to be funding available for ‘digital stuff’ (often quite useless ‘digital stuff’ at that) so that’s what dominates the phrasing of the conversation.

Oh, and I’ve just seen that D’log has chipped in with some analysis of Dave Harte’s stats. Cor, it’s like the good old days of blogging with comments, discussion and all sorts going on (it’s the same voices speaking up too).

Anyway, this is all a bit heavy and texty. In the next post there will be pictures.

Pete Ashton, who occasionally still pops up around these parts and is looking into bringing the CiB Shop back, has announced a couple of notable things.

First up, he’s resurrecting the social media surgeries that he used to run out of Rootys a couple of years ago. £20 will buy you half an hour to pick his brains, which should give you plenty of time to learn a shedload about how the Internet works and how it can work for you (especially, but not only, if you’re on the artsy/creative side of things). There’s some more info about these surgeries here.

To book a session with him, click this link and follow the instructions. Dates are:

• 13 July – MAC cafe
• 14 July – Fazeley Studios
• 15 July – Urban Coffee Co

He’s also doing one of the ‘These are a few of my favourite things’ talks at the Ikon on 11 August.

So that’s it then – the final pitch was in Liverpool yesterday and we’ll have to wait until July (can’t find an exact date) to find out who, out of Birmingham, Derry/Londonderry, Norwich and Sheffield, will have the title of City of Culture 2013 bestowed upon them.

A neat addition yesterday was the chance to send messages of support via CoveritLive that were then relayed to the judges via a screen. You can see those messages here. Apparently the judging panel were impressed by the level of support (I was less impressed by people spamming their stuff on there, but then I’m an idealist like that).

So, just a few more weeks until we find out whether Birmingham’s won a prestigious title or narrowly lost out in an arbitrary box-ticking exercise. Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, Pete Ashton is selling prints of his image above that was used in the campaign. A bargain at £25.