This Thursday take an after-hours cultural excursion on the Art Bus. Visiting seven Birmingham galleries for this edition, (The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Eastside Projects, Ikon Gallery, mac birmingham, The Parkside Gallery (BCU), RBSA Gallery and the Waterhall Gallery at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery) all will be open from 5pm until 9pm. The free bus will be transporting visitors throughout the night.

More information can be found here.

• mac
• Barber Institute of Fine Arts
• Ikon
• RBSA Gallery
• Eastside Projects

Hop aboard the bus as it travels around the city, all while enjoying a mince pie and glass of wine at selected galleries.

Some of the galleries taking part in Art Bus were featured in our brief CiB exhibitions round-up last week, including the launch of Trade Show at Eastside Projects, and Tim Johnson, David Tremlett, Amikan Toren and Dean Kelland exhibitions at Ikon Gallery.

Visit the galleries’ websites (linked above) to find out more information about current exhibitions for each of the venues.

The Art Bus will run from 5 – 9pm and a schedule of the bus times can be found here.

D’log has flagged up:

• A Series of Conversations organised by the Birmingham Photography and Archive Research Group; and
• Some events and lectures accompanying the Barber Institute’s Cityscapes exhibition. The ‘adult events’ listed on that page are either couched in heavily euphemistic terms or not actually smutty at all. I suspect the latter.

Also, We Are Eastside bring news of:

• A writing talk from Dr Paul McDonald, presented by Hooky Street Press and presumably the first in a series. This one’s about how classic theories of humour can be made relevant to writers; and
• There is no Script for This – a chance for “students, recent graduates and emerging practitioners a chance to quiz people at different stages of their careers as they talk about highs, lows and pivotal moments during their first years out of art school”

There are also loads of things happening as part of the Love Architecture Festival and it wouldn’t be outrageous to assume that the walking tours have some sort of talky aspect to them. Sticking strictly to the theme of this post, there’s a talk from LEGO’s Senior Design Manager this evening.

I’ve been sent a copy of the user’s manual for Eastside Projects. It’s the fifth one they’ve produced and it’s quite a lovely thing – part guide to the gallery, part document of their work and part choose-your-own-adventure book.

My favourite bit is an explanation of what they call ‘dog-whistling’:

As a contribution to the exhibition ‘This is the Gallery and the Gallery is Many Things’ (September to November 2008), Kelly Large instigated a perverse social ritual in the gallery. Each morning, following the opening of the building, the alarm was left to sound until a passerby or neighbour entered the building to complain. This process forced our immediate neighbours – a taxi repair workshop and a limousine hire company – to enter the gallery, where they were prompted to look around.

are a Design and Fabrication Workshop based in Birmingham, UK.

Recent projects have included the design and fit out of a canal boat for Ikon Gallery, the Design & Fabrication of a modular wall system for Eastside Projects, the fabrication of a giant kite for Heather & Ivan Morison .

And here’s a very lovely film about that kite, called Little Shining Man.

Little Shining Man from Queen & Crawford on Vimeo.

I’d seen the Google Art Project and I knew they’d started mapping inside shopping centres, airports and comic shops but I didn’t know they were doing anything in the UK. Fancy that.