Pete’s photos from Ben Waddington’s Written in Concrete tour as part of the Still Walking festival last weekend. Onna map.

Preclusion

No Venue : No Permission : No Money

A genuinely guerilla experience, Preclusion is a totally unsupported spontaneous art exhibition.

A space has become available for a limited time and the secretive El Perro Radicale has chosen to take advantage of this opportunity to unveil a collection of locally and nationally produced art.

El Perro Radicale hopes that nothing precludes your attendance.

More confirmed artists including street art, street dance, guerilla poets and the following:

• Jane Baker Photography
• Lucy Grange Photography
• Ryan Hughes Mixed Media Installation
• Matthew Hunt Mixed Media Art
• Lewys Jones  Painting
• Lucy Sparrow Felt Art and Street Art
• Luke Thompson Painting
• Martin Pickard Photography
• Lizz Lunney Illustration
•  Wesley Wezism Painting
•  Pete Grange Photography
•  Ben Waddington Drawing

Preclusion will be at the derelict Whitmarley factory on Ivy Road, Stirchley (B30 2NX for the sat nav fiends out there) which is currently playing host to The Birmingham Social Centre.

There’ll be a grand opening on Friday 29th July at 6:30pm and the exhibition will be up until Sunday 7 August.

Ta to Birmingham Loves Photographers for flagging this one up. I like. I’m going to try to get along on Friday.

The first of what might become a regular thing, Knowing Me, Knowing You was fun last week. As part of Capsule’s longest birthday party… ever, we got together and invited a bunch of interesting people along to introduce themselves and say (for the sake of getting a conversation going) what they might do if they were to get their hands on VIVID for a little while.

The kind participants were:

• Dan Davies
• Ben Waddington
• Fin & Ken from a new (currently nameless) housing co-op
• Sara from Needles and Hooks
• Mark Murphy from Surely?
• Stuart and Ben from First Fold Records (who’ve blogged about it)
• Sarah from Heat and Light
• James Yarker from Stan’s Cafe (well, I read out his submission)
• One of Eagle and Feather from Kipple
• Ben Javens

All ably compered by Jon Bounds with half-time entertainment provided by Charlie Pinder‘s cake orchestra.

Truth be told, we weren’t sure what people would come back with or what sort of direction the evening might take. As it turned out, ideas included:

• Social spaces
• Turning the place into a massive ball pool/packing it floor to ceiling with jelly
• Setting up a swapshop
• Using it as a place for realising unfinished ideas
• Creating an edgeless, white room and projecting images through hung pieces of perspex
• Kipple Live
• Artist talks

And some other things that escape me just at the moment. To be honest, the suggestions themselves weren’t the most crucial part of the evening. The point was really to get people out, meeting each other and sharing thoughts and ideas. As far as that goes I think the evening was a success.

Capsule have written up the event here with lots of lovely photos. Thanks to them, to everyone who took part and to those who came along to watch.

For the next CiB Project we’ve been asked to take part in Capsule‘s 10th birthday celebrations. We’re getting together a bunch of Birmingham creative types, putting them on a stage for 3 minutes and asking them ‘What would you do if you were given the run of a space like Vivid?’

Featured folks will include:

ATTA Girl, Scott Johnson aka Film Ficciones, Stephen Earl Rogers, James Yarker of Stans Cafe, local historian Ben Waddington, illustrator extraordinaire Ben Javens to name but a few

That list is from Capsule’s website.

There are 20 places left for spectators, so if you want to come along then please admin@capsule.org.uk. If it goes well it might be the first of many such events.

There’ll be full reporting back after the event, so if you can’t make it down then don’t worry.

The programme includes a fair amount of local talent (I’m no expert in this area but I recognise the names of David Osbaldestin, Smile, Ben Waddington and the Baskerville Project) with some international flavour added by Henrik Birkvig from the Danish School of Media & Journalism and John D Berry from Microsoft Typography in Seattle.

It’s £25 for most folks, £15 concessions. Here’s the full programme and you can register here.

Speaking of Smile, they went to visit Airside recently and written it all up on their blog. Well worth a read. This quote from Jamie Wieck stood out:

“We’re now a design company competing with advertising companies that have design and digital design subsidiaries. They know how to talk… some call it strategy, others might call it hot air, but either way we have to learn a bit of that now in order to compete.”

The first one she did was the Richard Trengrouse Tour of historical Digbeth.

Next up was Ben Waddington’s Digbeth Type and Architecture Tour, the videos have been embedded into a Google map and are viewable one after the other here.