With the launch of FRAME_birmingham I’m happy to announce that three of my pieces from Some of My Favourite songs will be exhibited and for sale between 17th Nov 2012 – 17th Feb 2013 at venues around Birmingham.
On Friday 30th November I’ll be taking part in the Midlands Experimental Moving Image Collective’s first salon, entitled Warpaint. It’ll be held at Althorpe Street Studios & Gallery in Leamington Spa [map] from 7pm.
MEMIC Film Salon 1: Warpaint is the launch event of MEMIC (Midlands Experimental Moving Image Collective). Come along for a screening of a program of artists’ film and video accompanied by an exhibition of moving image installation works. Including work by artists from around the Midlands (many of whom will be in attendance), as well as work by a number of international artists.
I’ll be demoing glitch camera/Open Camera that was developed as part of my residency at Databit.me in October. It’s a simple script, running on Raspberry Pi, that glitches images from a webcam automatically:
To design the poster image for The People VS The Machine I revisited an old technique that wrote about in 2009. The technique used the Extrude extension in Inkscape, combined with the Color > Randomize extension to create what could be described as a stained-glass effect for text.
I wanted to do the same and create an extrusion between each letter of the title text. This, however, presented a few challenges. In versions of Inkscape up to 0.49 the extrude extension would only work on two selected objects. Even if you highlighted more than two objects the extension would only choose two of them to apply the extrusion to (I’m still not sure how it decides which two to choose). I could do this manually with each pair of letters, but this would take a long time and could easily get confusing!
Pairing
I took my concerns to the Inkscape bug tracker. I explaind what I expected to see when I ran the extension on two or more objects:
Two objects – one extrusion
If you select two objects it should create one extrusion. Simple enough!
Four objects – six extrusions
If you select four objects it creates six extrusions. A bit more complicated…
Six objects – fifteen extrusions
If you select six objects it creates fifteen extrusions. Now it gets more complicated!
As you can imagine doing all of that by hand would take some time and would be hard to keep track of. In fact, for all of the letters I would have to run the Extrude extension 220 times!
I argued my case to the developers of Inkscape on their bug tracker. After a bit of discussion around the intended purpose of the extension it has now been updated to work on all selected objects. The updated extension should be in Inkscape 0.49. Thanks to ~suv and to Alvin Penner for updating the extension!
Love it or hate it, Comic Sans is one of the most popular fonts in the world.
Vincent Connare designed the font for Microsoft in 1995. He described it is best being used for “new computer users and families with children”. Despite this it has constantly been misused and can be seen everywhere from school letters, e-mails from government officials and even in documents about the discovery of the Higgs Boson.
Since it was unleashed on the world there have been multiple calls by designers for the font to be abolished completely, most famously by the Ban Comic Sans website.
Comic Sans Must Die is a project that satisfies every designer’s dream: to see Comic Sans die a slow and painful death. Every day the individual glyphs of Comic Sans will have their demise displayed for all to see.
Comic Sans Must Die is a project conceived by me with code contributions from Richard Clifford.
GLI.TC/H is back for 2112 in Chicago and needs your halp! Spendyspendyspendy!
I’m not personally involved in the organisation of the festival this year, but I’ll be physically present in Chicago for the duration of the festival! More on that later
Education has always played a role in GLI.TC/H: from organized workshops, to performers informally sharing their hacked and homebrewed gear with attendees, to theory sessions over pizza.
As learning, sharing and growing have become central thematic nodes, the GLI.TC/H events are organized into “threads.” So, this year, we’re launching a new model. It’s framework is built upon participatory ‘threads’ (or classes) with different focuses, complimented by panels/presentations throughout the day and installations and performative share fests in the evenings.
Threads were chosen through an open call for ideas earlier this year and are provide pathways for folks to dig deeper into the many realms of glitches. You can hop over to the working groups to join in on the conversations and help shape GLI.TC/H 2112.
Let’s make this gathering happen together again!
Executing GLI.TC/H takes considerable resources. [The GLI.TC/H bots are] reaching out to you (and your networks) in an effort to help amplify these efforts and make GLI.TC/H 2112 a reality.
Your donation will be use for the decimation of festival data, workshop materials, and resources for this year’s threads. Of course, the biggest incentive we can offer is you supporting GLI.TC/H 2112 in growing and developing the glitch art community.
From 6pm on Friday 16th November selected pieces of my work will be exhibited at a soon-to-be-announced venue in Birmingham as part of FRAME_birmingham.
FRAME_birmingham is an Arts Council funded, mac birmingham supported project by Elly Clarke/Clarke Gallery that sees unique and very small edition artworks by 42 local & international artists installed into a variety of businesses across the city as a means of bringing art to new audiences, new audiences to art and new contexts in which art can be shown. It is also about provoking and stimulating conversations about and around the artworks, by a variety of people in a variety of different places.
Launching at 6pm on 16th November 2012, frames will remain in place for three months, with work changing only when sold. projectframe.net will act as the mirror to show what is on display in the city. All work is also for sale, up to a maximum price of £750. Thanks to the partnership with mac Birmingham, all work will also be available to purchase via the Own Art scheme.
Yorks Bakery Cafe on Newhall Street in the city centre will act as the central hub during the three-month exhibition. Here you can find out more about the project or purchase tickets for tours led by Birmingham artists, curators and business owners as well as by members of the FRAME_birmingham team. And get your hands on some very tasty soups, snacks, stews and sweet things. And even drink some coffee.
I’ll announce on my website which pieces will be exhibited, where they’ll be located and how much they’ll cost once the project is publicly launched on 16th November. In the meantime there’s a launch party taking place at The Old Joint Stock on 16th November at 5:30pm.
Thank you to everyone that attended the Pure Data Play workshop on 2nd November as part of Flip Festival. In the space of two hours the participants went from knowing nothing about Pure Data to manipulating 3D objects on screen, playing videos and webcam streams and controlling their videos using user-defined keyboard shortcuts. Some images of the patches:
To those of us who know more about programming and using Pure Data these patches may seem simple, but hopefully from this tutorial the participants have gained an insight into what is possible using Pure Data.
What I like most about Pure Data is that it is very extensible. It can accept data from a wide range of sources – including Arduino boards, game controllers (including Wii remotes and Kinect controllers), microphones, lists of data and even raw binary data – manipulate it and give audio or visual feedback. Best of all it does it in a way that is very logical. Some people may prefer to write lines of data, but with Pure Data (and other dataflow languages) you can visually see how data flows and is manipulated.
If you’re interested in attending or booking me for a Pure Data tutorial get in touch!
Thanks to everyone that came to The People VS The Machine on Saturday 3rd November. It was a really great way to end Flip Festival for another year. Over three hours all five artists created some brilliant computer generated and live illustration art. Here’s a video, featuring music from Silhouettes who also played on the night:
The “Brand” New Generation event took place on 2nd November at The Drum as part of Kalaboration. Aside from my Pecha-Kucha-style presentation on glitch art glitching (i.e. not working) it went really well! For the benefit of those who couldn’t make it and those who attended but couldn’t see the images, here’s a desktop recording or the presentation:
The discussion that followed was very interesting and covered topics such as being/not being an “emerging” artist, residing in Birmingham and finding validity in the art scene. Charlie Levine did a bit of live-tweeting:
who are the establishment in brum? @hellocatfood says ‘the Internet and whoever would take a chance on us’ @the_drum
To reiterate some of the points in those tweets, I think the idea of being an “emerging” artist is rather stupid. Whilst I recognise that building confidence in your practice takes time and effort, from what am I emerging and what am I hoping to happen once I emerge from it? Do I lose the emerging artist tag once I’ve had a clearly defined number of exhibitions or successful funding bids? Or is it the case that I need to get my work into the well-known galleries and be represented by a gallery in order to no longer be an “emerging” artist? This confusion on the term isn’t just shared by me.
Although I’m predominantly a digital artist I don’t reject the idea of working within white-walled galleries, nor do I attempt to avoid associations with the fine art “scene”. As the above tweets suggest, I’m more than happy to work with anyone that is as excited about digital art as I am, be they independent galleries and artists/curators or commercial organisations and well-known galleries. To me, the support of friends, family and curious strangers is just as important to me as support from institutions, galleries and funding providers.
On that note, here’s some pictures from the event by Kalaboration:
Thanks to Ian Sergeant/Kalaboration for asking me to take part and Elly Clarke for chairing the discussion.
