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This week Papergirl Birmingham takes place on bikes across Birmingham:

Papergirl is a global project that aims to open the art world into the urban streets of everyday life. It is an intervention seeking to surprise people and to heartily upturn the notable predictability of day to day life

Art is collected, exhibited, and then distributed on mass to an unsuspecting public, via an atmospheric array of honkingly exuberant and ravishingly roadworthy Berliners Brummies on bicycles.

Papergirl Birmingham made its first appearance on a stall at Birmingham Zine Festival in July 2011, and has since teamed up with EC-Arts/48 Sheet. There will be some rather awesome artwork being carted around Birmingham, amongst which will be some prints from my never before seen video I Am Sitting in a Room.

The opening night is on Tuesday 24th April at The Mailbox, with the main distribution day taking place on Saturday 28th April from 12:30pm, also starting at The Mailbox. If you’ve got a bike go to it!

Well done to Kate Grundy for putting this together!

In June 2012 I’ll be co-curating an exhibition about toys at/with TROVE and Daniel Salisbury. More info, including how to get involved, is below:

TROVE is an independent art space in Birmingham, UK, which run a monthly changing programme of contemporary art exhibitions/events.

In June 2012 TROVE are hosting an exhibition about toys. This project leads on from the discovery that the Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham, where TROVE is based, used to produce more ‘toys’ than jewellery, guns or pens; all things it is now more famously known for producing. When researching what toys were produced in this area of Birmingham it was discovered that the term ‘toys’ was used to describe items such as buttons, cuff-links and belt buckles.

Calling all hackers and Circuit-benders

With the misinterpretation of the word ‘toys’ TROVE are looking for actual toys, as is the current understanding of the word, that have been altered, hacked, modified or electronically changed, rather than ‘toys’ meaning belt buckles, buttons etc.

Sound like something for you? Email me with your hacked creations (antonio@hellocatfood.com) and include:

• your CV and a short personal statement
• a short description of the work/toys
• links to online footage of the toy is available
• max 6 photographs of the toy/s you are proposing

The deadline for submissions is 6th May 2012

Notes for application:

• please make sure you can deliver and collect your toys from TROVE (map); 11th/12th June for drop off and 24th June for collection.
• If the toys require power, only applications where toys are battery powered will be accepted

This exhibition is also looking for films about toys to show. More info on that is here.

Happy hacking!

I was asked at the last minute to provide some visuals for 2xAA’s set at Curious Sounds/8 Bit Lounge as part of Fierce Festival on Saturday 7th April.

Here’s a short video from his performance

And another

calmdownkidder has loads more videos on theirFor this set I loaded up the feedback loop Pure Data patch and another one that I’m working on for BiLE, All graphics from multiple patches are rendered in the same window which brought up some interesting errors. Below are a few stills

And a close-up of the visuals in action

Lots of chiptune goodness happens regularly at 8 Bit Lounge in Birmingham.

BYOB Birmingham happened on Friday 16th March and it was a great success! For those who like statistics, in the end the event had 18 artists (plus videos from VIVID’s archives), 22 beamers, and nearly 200 people attend.

My thanks for making the night awesome go to:

• Flatpack Festival, which has been going for six years, for putting on a great festival and allowing BYOB to be part of it
• VIVID, whose amazing gallery space was perfectly suited for this event. There were worries about there being too many cables and causing a power outage due to too many beamers, but the excellent VIVID staff were on hand to make sure it all went swimmingly
• Bobby Bird from Modulate and Gary Judge (aka Arcade) for providing awesome music throughout the night. Many times I received comments about how well the music matched the event. Also, Cylob FTW!
• Shelly Knotts, for being helping me on the day, taking photos, keeping me sane, and for buying me lunch ;-)
• Rafaël Rozendaal, for coming up with the BYOB idea and allowing anyone to do as they wish with it
• The people of Birmingham and West Midlands, for coming out in your hundreds to support the event
• And last, but not least, my thanks go to all of the artists that traveled from all over the country to be part of BYOB Birmingham!

Be sure to check out the artwork from all of the exhibiting artists: Alan Brooker, Ewa Mos, Daisy Hogan, Antonio Roberts, Chris Plant, Modulate, James Warrier, Sarah Rose Allen, Paul Harrison, Kate Spence, Elizabeth Howell, Soraya Fatha, Leon Trimble, Michael Lightborne, Matt Murtagh, Pete Ashton, AAS

If any of my readers took any gifs, photos or videos (even phone quality is great) upload them to Flickr/Youtube/Vimeo and tag them “BYOB Birmingham” or send them to byobbirmingham@gmail.com and, with your permission, they’ll be used in a video documenting the event.

In the meantime here’s some photos from the event

Keep an eye on byobbirmingham.tumblr.com for more future events

Recently I’ve been making a few video loops for Dreambait Recordings to use in their shows. The videos, made using video samples and Pure Data, focus on feedback loops. For BYOB Birmingham on Friday 16th March I decided to showcase these video feedback creations. Some photos of it in action:

The Pure Data patch used to make these visuals, inspired by this patch is pretty simple: Put an object on screen, take a snapshot of the screen and then apply that snapshot as a texture to another object. You can download it below

As a texture for the cube I used the Skin Cells video again. You could replace this with any video, image or webcam feed. The [pix_contrast] object is there purely to provide an over-saturated look (try bringing Saturation to a negative number). For BYOB I automated the controls by using random number generators (feeding [random] into [metro]). Here’s a render of what the audience saw:

All that is needed now is some cool audio to go with it! Thanks to all those that came to BYOB to see this and other awesome artworks!