AUTOICON was a dynamic internet work that simulated both the physical presence and elements of the creative personality of the artist Donald Rodney, one of the most significant and essential artists of his generation. After initiating the project, Rodney died from sickle-cell anaemia in March 1998.
Re-Imaging – AUTOICON is a research project exploring the digital embodiment of the artist Donald Rodney, and the challenges of re-authoring a digital legacy.
For 9 Evenings, Ian Sergeant and digital developer Antonio Roberts lead a salon to explore the development of ‘doublethink’, a beta website which has been produced through a series of workshops with participants of Wolverhampton Sickle Cell Care and Social Activity and Oscar Sandwell. The salon includes a rare screening of ‘Three Songs on Pain, Light and Time’ (Trevor Mathieson & Eddie George / Black Audio Film Collective, 25m, 1995).
AUTOICON is produced by Ian Sergeant and delivered in partnership with Vivid Projects. The project is funded through Arts Council England.
Presented in association with Black History Month
This event is presented as part of 9 Evenings: Redux, a season of new collaborative commissions in which artists will critique, re-work and react to the seminal 1966 series 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering.
Admission is free
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Programme change: please note that the Dance Prototypes lab by Gabriel Shalom is no longer running.
Art Macabre, London’s purveyors of ‘death drawing’, inject a lethal dose of theatricality, curiosity and playfulness into the art of drawing from life. Drawing upon concepts, questions and ideas shared earlier in the day, Art Macabre invite you to explore deathly themes through a hands-on, creative event. RIP life drawing!
Create your own ‘memento mori’ designs with 21st century twists, sketch skeleton figures, nude flesh and bone. Live models will pose in theatrical tableaux, exploring personifications of death from around the globe to inspire your drawings. With drawing challenges and collaborative sketching games and a musical soundtrack to add to the atmosphere. Grab a drink from the bar, put pen to paper, and enjoy a fun, playful evening exploring the relationship between art, dying, and how death can be represented in colour and form.
Art Macabre Death Drawing salons began in London in 2010, as a way to explore themes of death, dying, life and the nude body through drawing. Starting as part of a DIY feminist arts festival, Art Macabre has engaged thousands of people in drawing. From Latitude and Wilderness festivals, to outdoor cemetery sketching, pathology museums and old operating theatres, to the British Museum and V&A.
“Imaginative, intimate and inspirational, Art Macabre is everything you could want from a life drawing class – or any night out, for that matter.” -Katie Antoniou, journalist for Time Out
This event is presented as part of This Mortal Coil, an exhibition and events season at Vivid Projects exploring representations of death and the macabre.
Material is surface and object, an idea or information. We seek it in aspirational spaces; commercial & corporate zones in which our dreams are played back to us as advertisements and marketing campaigns, fashion, trends and current affairs. We purchase the new which in turn becomes the redundant. As citizens, we exist in a state of passive immersion with commerce and goods. The transactions we make in indoor shopping centres are continuous, forming a cycle of consumption and waste.
Outside the security of environmentally controlled luxury goods concessions, there exists an alternative version of our desires. What we wish for, but cannot afford, spills out to the local market as counterfeit goods, embossed with logos.
The shopping mall discards what it does not need. Empty bags, packaging & fast food wrappers are offered back to the city as spent gifts that layer the streets with debris, as we drift they follow, to a certain rhythm. They linger, tumbling along our paths back through the patterns of streets’, conversing scratchily with the pavement; ‘short life expectancy, degradation, persistence’ and other similar musings are whispered in the wind.
In Material World our engagement with surface, space, and commercial architecture is explored through new video & sound works made in public/private areas of shopping centres and the outer city centre. Footage has been captured on mobile phones offering a wider set of opportunities to document environments ‘unseen’ and without disruption. Using this technology we are able to utilise the high street ‘user/ consumer’ aesthetic which allows us to beam and project personal reflections in the commercial space. The work depicts what exists, it seeks to chart our immersion in the spaces we use as consumers. The ‘terial, a material, a material, a material world.
By cutting and conflating sound, text and image, Repeator focuses the practices of Cathy Wade and Laurence Price as collaborative working processes in which works are layered, revised, regurgitated and replayed. Repeator is an ongoing project through which works are generated from research, exchange, conversations & collaboration with others. Previous projects include #FoxNewsDisco for Werk and WE LIKE with Keith Dodds for BE Festival.
Comments Off on X-Ray Audio – live record pressing
Join Stephen Coates, author of the X-Ray Audio project, composer and music producer, as he tells the story of the X-Ray records and bootleggers in an evening that includes a live demonstration of recording onto X-Ray plates using vintage analogue record-cutting lathes and groove-based recording techniques.
Stephen is joined by special guestsThe Leisure Society and vintage recording specialist Aleks Kolkowski, who will cut a new x-ray record from The Leisure Society’s live performance.
This event is presented as part of This Mortal Coil, an exhibition and events season at Vivid Projects exploring representations of death and the macabre.
STEALTH presents recent work by UK and international artists critiquing surveillance culture and the invasive and pervasive technologies that shape our daily interactions. Utilising a variety of media including installations, video, social media and software, the exhibition explores how technology affects and disrupts our perceptions of privacy.
STEALTH launches Thursday 25 June and continues to Saturday 11 July 2015. Special opening hours on Saturday 27 June, 12 – 2pm & Digbeth First Friday 3 July, 12.30-8pm including Curator’s talk at 5.30pm.
Admission is free.
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EXHIBITION PROGRAMME:
Henry Driver (UK) Drone (2014)
Drone demonstrates the uncanny ability of simulations to mimic reality. Created using imagery from USA Army Youtube uploads, simulated representations from popular video games and imagery created by the artist, Drone asks the viewer to define the difference between simulation and reality and the issues that arise when the two are so closely entwined.
James Bridle (UK) Drone Shadows (2012 – ongoing)
Drone Shadows are a series of installations, comprised of the outline of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or drone. Each 1:1 representation conveys both the physical reality, and the apparent invisibility, of drone aircraft. Described by Bridle as “the avatars of the political process”, drones are around us on a daily basis: visible and invisible.
Bridle is a UK based artist, writer, and publisher. His writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in Wired, Domus, Cabinet, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, the Observer and others, in print and online. His artworks have been commissioned and exhibited worldwide and on the internet.
Joseph Delappe (US) Me and My Predator – Personal Drone System (2014)
Delappe’s work is a 1/72nd scale plastic model of a Predator Drone suspended on a carbon fibre rod and connected to a custom made aluminum c-clamp/head band which can be attached to the head. The Personal Drone System is designed for insecurity and comfort – to simulate using analogue technologies what it might be like to live under droned skies.
Delappe also directs the iraqimemorial.org project, an ongoing web based exhibition and open call for proposed memorials to the many thousand of civilian casualties from the war in Iraq.
Ryan Hughes (UK) We’ve Been Re-Distributed (2011)
We’ve Been Re-Distributed is a work which adopts the blurred presentation, content gathering and distribution techniques and tendencies common to broadcast media. Hughes reflects these tendencies and extends them through other means of communication and presentation. The work uses randomly found, selected and edited video presented via VHS projection, various forms of print based material and mass communication via email.
Manu Luksch (AT/UK) FACELESS (2007)
Luksch focuses on the effects of emerging technologies on daily life, social relations, urban space, and political structures – specifically, possible futures of infrastructures, the thresholds and constraints of public space, and the traces of data that accumulate in digital networked societies. Her 2007 film, FACELESS was produced under the rules of the ‘Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers’. The manifesto states, amongst other things, that additional cameras are not permitted at filming locations, as the omnipresent existing video surveillance (CCTV) is already in operation.
The UK Data Protection Act and EU directives give individuals the right to access personal data held in computer filing systems. This includes images captured by CCTV recording systems. For a nominal fee (£10), an individual can obtain a copy of this data: financial or medical records, or video recordings. Other legislation states that the privacy of third parties must be protected. In CCTV recordings, this is done by erasing the faces of other people in the images – hence the ‘faceless’ world.
Sang Mun (US) ZXX (2012)
Sang Mun built the ZXX font as a disruptive typeface which would resist decryption. It is named after the Library Congress’s labeling code ZXX, which archivists employ when they find a book that contains “no linguistic content.”
“The project started with a genuine question: How can we conceal our fundamental thoughts from artificial intelligences and those who deploy them?” “I decided to create a typeface that would be unreadable by text scanning software (whether used by a government agency or a lone hacker)—misdirecting information or sometimes not giving any at all. It can be applied to huge amounts of data, or to personal correspondence.”
Mun built six different styles (Sans, Bold, Camo, False, Noise, and Xed), each of which is “designed to thwart machine intelligences in a different way.”
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STEALTHis presented as part of RADICAL NETWORKS, a programme of aesthetic disruption and questioning of the moving image, ethics and digital legacies.
RADICAL NETWORKS takes a subcultural perspective, seeking out and introducing practices and tendencies from emerging communities of artists, makers and collectives.
We are delighted to present the first collaboration between Darren Joyce, George Saxon and Justin Wiggan.
Drawing on their recent groundbreaking projects with the health sector, the artists present new research exploring empathy, nostalgia and recall through audio, performance and film. Their individual contributions will clash, coexist and repel each other.
Justin Wiggan will explore the portrayal of nostalgia drawing from the empathy tests used to tell humans from androids in Philip K Dick’s cult novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the cultural phenomenon of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) – the pleasurable tingling sensation in the head, scalp, back, or peripheral regions of the body in response to visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or cognitive stimuli; and Harsh Noise Wall – in which artists produce unchanging, monolithic “walls” of static noise.
George Saxon presents BREATHING TEST: Dying Melody, a new work focused on breathing (inhalations and exhalations), and the limitations caused by childhood respiratory illness and auto-immune weakness. Through live performance, archived video recordings, visual and audio soundscapes, Saxon will explore illness and its manifestations, highlighting the liminal gap between memory, recall and nostalgia.
D Joyce, using binaural recordings (holographic 3D sound), will explore schizoaffective disorder – a brain disorder in which sufferers experience two vastly different worlds within one consciousness. Schizoaffective disorder is to experience both the world that non-sufferers perceive, but also a complex world riddled with auditory hallucinations and mood swings. Joyceinvites the audience to listen to holographic sound in realtime through the medium of headphones and experience what it’s like to live in an audible parallel reality.
Programme of events:
Friday 02 October | 6-8pm
Joyce, Saxon and Wiggan present a live event for Digbeth First Friday
Saturday 03 October | 3-4pm
Join the artists as they discuss their collaboration and wider practices.
This event is presented as part of 9 Evenings: Redux, a season of new collaborative commissions in which artists will critique, re-work and react to the seminal 1966 series 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering.
Polly Hudson, Katye Coe, Charlie Morrissey and Florence Peake have worked together, in different configurations, over the past two decades, and share underpinning approaches that focus on the viscerality of the body.
In the spirit of 9 Evenings, Polly Hudson leads the Vis-er-al salon, bringing the artists together as a group with musician Daren Pickles for the first time to explore live and screen works in the immediate, visceral environment. The salon artists take Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and the ensuing Judson Dance Theatre as a particular point of reference.
Presented through a sequence of salons, Vis-er-al includes classes, a lab, discussions, live performance, installation, single and multi channel screen works that share the viscerality of the body in space and on screen.
Programme of events:
Thu 8th Oct | 10 – 11.30am at DanceXchange, Thorp Street Skinner Releasing Technique class with Polly Hudson
Skinner Releasing Technique is a pioneering approach to dance, movement and creative process that has evolved from the simple principle that when we are releasing physical tension, we can move with greater freedom, power and articulation.
Polly Hudson is Co-course Director for Dance at Coventry University. She is a certified teacher of Skinner Releasing Technique which forms the underpinning of her practice alongside Contact Improvisation.
Presented in association with Birmingham Dance Network. All are welcome. Admission £5
Yvonne Rainer founded the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the genesis of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Rainer performed Carriage Discreteness as part of the original 9 Evenings series and it is the only one of her choreographed pieces to incorporate technology into its very structure.
The screening is introduced by Polly Hudson and Yasmeen Baig-Clifford.
Friday 9th October | 10am – 5pm at DanceXchange, Thorp Street Performance Laboratory: Florence Peake
Applications are open to work with internationally acclaimed dance artistFlorence Peake in a one day laboratory and (re)making of her piece Remake.
The laboratory will take place on Friday 09th October, 10am – 5pm, at DanceXchange and the final work will be performed on Saturday 10th October, 10am – 5pm at Vivid Projects. You must be available on both days. Participants are also advised to take Polly Hudson’s Skinner Releasing Technique class on Thursday 08 October, 10 – 11.30am at DanceXchange in preparation.
To apply, please submit your CV together with a statement of interest, and if possible, a link of you dancing to: hudsonpolly@hotmail.com.The closing date for applications is 28th August and successful applicants will be notified by 04th September.
This is a free CPD event, and is supported by Vivid Projects, Birmingham Dance Network and Dancexchange.
Friday 9th October | 5.30 – 7.30pm at Vivid Projects Katye Coe and Charlie Morrissey – ‘This Thing That We Do’ Polly Hudson- ‘Making Lemonade’ & ‘Vis-er-al’
Saturday 10th October | 2.30-5pm at Vivid Projects Florence Peake – ‘Remake’ Polly Hudson- ‘Making Lemonade’ & ‘Vis-er-al’
Saturday 10th October | 5pm at Vivid Projects In-conversation: Polly Hudson and Florence Peake
Vis-er-al is convened by Polly Hudson and produced by Vivid Projects. Additional support from Birmingham Dance Network and Dancexchange.
This event is presented as part of 9 Evenings: Redux, a season of new collaborative commissions in which artists will critique, re-work and react to the seminal 1966 series 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering.
Yvonne Rainer founded the Judson Dance Theater in 1962, the genesis of a movement that proved to be a vital force in modern dance in the following decades. Rainer performed Carriage Discreteness as part of the original 9 Evenings series and it is the only one of her choreographed pieces to incorporate technology into its very structure.
Rainer transmitted instructions to the performers, who wore FM pickups on their wrists, telling them to carry objects from one part of the floor to another. Props included slats, slabs, cubes, planks, sheets of different materials like Masonite, wood, and styrofoam beams. Rainer also had preprogrammed events which were set in motion when her piece began. They included a super ball dropped from the ceiling, a garbage can releasing pieces of foam rubber over the area, a lighted lucite rod travelling high over the performance area, and films projected onto screens that were cued to fall at the performance’s end.
Source: 9 evenings brochure, E.A.T., New York, 1966
This screening is presented as part of 9 Evenings: Redux, a season of new collaborative commissions in which artists will critique, re-work and react to the seminal 1966 series 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering.
Robert Rauschenberg was among the founding members of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a non-profit organization established to promote collaborations between artists and engineers within in industrial environment.
Open Score is a movement piece that was performed as part of the original 9 Evenings series. Robert Rauschenberg derived the content of his performance from the characteristics of the performance venue.
The tennis racquet suggested both the idea of the readymade (at other times tennis was played at the venue) and that of a dance improvised in accordance with specific rules. Each time a racquet hit a ball, the venue lighting dimmed, which conferred on the player’s actions a function bound up with a complex technological system. In the second part of the piece, a crowd assembled on stage in complete darkness, filmed by infrared cameras.
Open Score is presented as part of 9 Evenings: Redux, a season of new collaborative commissions in which artists will critique, re-work and react to the seminal 1966 series 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering.
Join singer-songwriter Bumi Thomas and Professor Hugh Montgomery, Director of the Institute for Human Health and Performance at University College London, for a live music experiment and discussion exploring the connection between the emotional, the medical and the musical.
Vivid Projects, in partnership with Body of Songs, is inviting curious audience members to drop in on Saturday 26 September, between 2-5pm, to listen and observe as musicians interpret organs of the body through live, improvised music. The audience will be able to request an organ to be explored, learn more about its medical, emotional and metaphorical significance, and then ‘hear’ them as interpreted by local musicians.
Body of Songs is an ongoing project in which challenges music artists to write music inspired by organs of the body. Vivid Projects is delighted to be working in partnership with Body of Songs to bring a one-off lab to Birmingham as part of 9 Evenings: Redux, a season of new collaborative commissions in which artists will critique, re-work and react to the seminal 1966 series 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering.
Are you a musician interested in taking part?
The workshop will take place at Vivid Projects on Saturday 26 September 2015, 2-5pm and we are looking for amazing musicians who thrive on a challenge to take part! If you are interested in participating please e-mail Beth Clayton at beth@castironradio.co.uk.
For more information on the wider Body of Songs projects, please visit www.bodyofsongs.com.