The former comes courtesy of Claudia Losi’s Balena Project as presented by Ikon Gallery (and previously alluded to).  A 25ft cashmere whale will be deposited by the escalators in The Mailbox from 24 Sept to 26 Oct.  This is what it looks like:

Hmm, so it doesn’t look like a fearsome, city-levelling villain, more like me flopped on my sofa feeling sorry for myself.

Meanwhile, flyers for Hello Digital (a mere 6 weeks away and still no-one knows quite what it is) will apparently be distributed around the Bullring tomorrow by a giant robot.  Brilliant!

I’ll write something about Hello Digital when I know what’s going on but details have been trickling out:

• It’ll be happening predominently at Millennium Point and will be free to attend
• SCAMP will kick things off on the first night with an “electro-acoustic and live visual performance”
• An international digital conference called ‘Hello World’ will take place on 23-24 October
• There’ll be an interactive ‘Field of Light‘ from the Plus Expo people, controllable via a microsite (this sounds dead cool)
• Capsule’s ‘Home of Metal‘ project will launch at Wolverhampton Art Gallery on Saturday 25 Oct
• Baskerville: The Animated Movie will get it’s premiere
• Killriculum seems to involve getting kids to watch scary short films while lying in coffins
• Digital Storytelling is “a touching vision of the world we live in”. Hmm, sounds very worthy
• The Light House in Wolverhampton, in association with 4Talent, will be screening “contemporary and classic film from the Film4 back catalogue”

So far the Hello Digital blog and Twitter are up and running and the main site is due to go live any minute now.  Meanwhile here’s the flyer:

From 12 – 30 August, Ikon is running a tailor shop in the old Salvation Army charity shop, 3 New Street, Erdington.  Led by creative facilitator Jess Worley and local members of the Erdington Arts Forum, the shop will be making small fabric whales designed by pupils from Erdington Hall Primary School

It’s to tie in with Claudia Losi’s Balenaproject – the installation of a lifesize cashmere whale at the Ikon gallery in September (obviously…).  Rather than something that big, the tailor shop will produce 85 of the smaller whales.

If you can sew, have at least eight days to commit and would like to get involved with the project then give Claire (Ikon’s Education Curator) a call on 0121 248 0708.

More info on the Ikon Gallery news page.

While we’re on the subject of the Ikon, the gallery is still opening til 8pm on Wednesdays until 10 September and the guests for the remaining ‘These are a few of my favourite things‘ are:

• 6 August – David Prentice, one of Ikon’s founder artists
• 13 August – Glenn Howells, architect
• 20 August – juneau/projects/, artists Ben Sadler and Philip Duckworth
• 27 August – David Lodge, writer
• 3 September – Kelly Large, artist
• 10 September – Jonnie Turpie, Director of Digital Media, Maverick Television

Places for those are free but need to be reserved by calling Ikon on 0121 248 0708.