Vivid Projects autumn programme opens with a new collaboration with Birmingham Friends of The Earth as we celebrate the rich creative and collaborative history of Digbeth with some very special screenings. Coinciding with the opening of the British Art Show 10 in Coventry, our doors are open as part of the BAS10 Weekender from Friday 2-Saturday 3 October.
Across the BRIG Cafe and Vivid Projects spaces, connections between Vivid Projects, its organisational antecedents, and Birmingham Friends of the Earth reveal the remarkable history of The Warehouse on Allison Street, a space that has been a home to environmental activism and a cultural hub since the 1970s.
Our screening programme brings together films exploring ecological themes.
Test Drive was filmed in Digbeth, right outside The Warehouse on Allison Street. Made by Neil Forrest and supported by a VIVID bursary, it was first shown as part of Spin, an exhibition of members’ work at Birmingham’s Arcadian Centre in 1996.
Wildlife in Cities is a 1983 film made by Birmingham Environmental Education Project (BEEP) workers and sponsored by Birmingham Friends of The Earth. The film championed the idea that
All welcome, free to attend 🙂
Join us at our Vivid Projects space and the BRIG Cafe to take a look at excerpts from our Birmingham Media Archive collection, see behind the scenes of our digitisation process, and view creative responses, including early previews of work by BMAP Professional Placement holders Charlotte Bailey and Jayne Murray.
Staff and artists will be available to answer your questions about the project and share more about the topics that will be explored in the forthcoming exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, which opens on 18 April.
Noise Scraper is a collaboration between Hannah Sawtell and Oscar Cass-Darweish that explores their shared interests in the creative uses of open source browser-based tools. Taking place across Vivid Projects and BRIG Cafe through a series of performances for December Digbeth First Friday. As a playful engagement with digital images, their surfaces and intersections. This project reconfigures Hannah Sawtell’s Useful Tools app to produce sound from the surface of inputted images, to enable dynamic relationships between image and sound through audience-activated installation and performance.
Noise Scraper is a collaboration between Hannah Sawtell and Oscar Cass-Darweish that explores their shared interests in the creative uses of open source browser-based tools. Taking place across Vivid Projects and BRIG Cafe through a series of performances for December Digbeth First Friday.
As a playful engagement with digital images, their surfaces and intersections. This project reconfigures Hannah Sawtell’s Useful Tools app to produce sound from the surface of inputted images, to enable dynamic relationships between image and sound through audience-activated installation and performance.
Join us for a relaxed conversation in the BRIG Cafe this Digbeth First Friday. Vivid Lab resident artist Oscar Cass-Darweish and Antonio Roberts will be discussing their practices and creative responses to surveillance. Observe Protocol, Oscar’s current work hosted on site at Vivid Projects will then be available to view. The work represents the invisible interactions that persistently take place between our digital devices in real time within The Warehouse building at Allison St. Once you enter the space your devices will be interacting with and changing the output of the artwork.
The talk is free to attend and runs from 4:30 – 6:00pm there is no booking required.
Following the talk both Vivid Projects and The BRIG Cafe will be open from 6:00-8:00pm.
Oscar Cass-Darweish is an artist, creative coder and web developer with an interest in the struggle for autonomy in our daily interactions with hardware, software and code.
Antonio Roberts is an artist, musician, coder and performer who works with technology in innovative ways, exploring authorship, gaming, digital and reproduction.
Observe Protocol is a work in development by Oscar Cass-Darweish hosted onsite at Vivid Projects.
The work visualises interactions between digital devices in real-time within the building at Allison St.
Each coloured node visible on-screen represents a nearby digital device, ordered by the time of its first detected activity. Variations in colour and appearance reflect how recently it has been active and how strong its signal currently is. Calls and responses are made multiple times a second as local routers, phones and laptops look for new available networks.
Once you are present in the space you will be able to interact with the work via your devices and see these invisible data interactions in real time.
Join experimental sound collective ‘ways towards something’ as they sound Vivid Projects out of Minerva Works and celebrate the practices held onsite since 2013 with their final ever event in the space.
For Sound Out the collective are joined by Radio Stall, who will be recording and broadcasting the work that manifests live onsite. This is a durational performance and you are welcome to drop in and respond to listening prompts developed by the group at any point.
‘ways towards something’ are a collaborative group led by Emily Warner, Sam Owen and Laura Fox, who have been convening on a monthly basis from Jan to July 2024 with support from Vivid Lab.
They produce experimental sound that harnesses the spirit and aesthetic of DIY, with a focus on providing a safe and open environment encouraging women, trans, non-binary and gender-expansive people to engage with new sound-making processes. They work with open-source software and low-cost tools and instruments to research what manifests when creative momentum is given time and space to evolve through noise and sound-making.
Join us for a rolling screening of Dr XYZ, a trans+ healthcare training film produced by XYZ Projects (CIC) as part of the NHS Untold Stories Initiative, with funding from the British Film Institute (BFI) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
The film takes the form of a satirical healthcare service announcement of the 1960s and 70s, intended to act as a training film for the current NHS England staff, equipping them to give trans and non-binary patients the level of gender-affirming care they need and deserve.
The film follows first hand accounts from the trans/non-binary community through, as they describe it, “the labyrinth of accessing gender affirming healthcare in the uk”, re-enacting these experiences to “guide us through effective and affirming healthcare practices in communication, social transitioning, bridging prescriptions and shared-care agreements”.
XYZ Projects is a newly established trans+ film collective based in Birmingham, concerned with community healthcare archiving and collaborative filmmaking. El Jones (they/them) independent filmmaker/community archive facilitator, and Dr. Raviv Piccus (he/they) NHS doctor/researcher are co-directors of the collective.
Join us for ‘A Boy is a Gun’, an exhibition of new works from Vivid Lab resident Antonio Roberts, as he reimagines stereotypical roles within video games.
Following on from Roberts’ 2021 work Heavyweight Champ, which critiqued the stereotypical portrayal of Black men in early video games, ‘A Boy is a Gun’ focuses on developing an experimental narrative fiction game featuring Antonio’s version of the character Skate Hunter, from Streets of Rage.
Visitors will be able to play a beta version of the game in a web browser, catch a series of video works expanding the narrative and listen to a recording of the artist in conversation with curator Dr Ian Sergeant.
Join us for a screening of two timely films exploring the legacy, aesthetic strategies and histories of the 1980s UK Black Film Workshops.
South, Morgan Quaintance, 2020, 28 minutes
Taking two anti-racist and anti-authoritarian liberation movements in South London and Chicago’s South Side as a point of departure, South presents an expressionistic investigation of the power of individual and collective voice. Interlinked with Morgan Quaintance’s own biography (time spent living in both London and Chicago), the film also considers questions of mortality and the will to transcend a world typified by concrete relations.
Your Ecstatic Self, Rehana Zaman, 2019, 32 minutes
A conversation unfolds in a car with Sajid, the artist’s brother. As the journey progresses Sajid discusses his engagement with the philosophy and practice of Tantra, having spent the majority of his 44 years as a strict Sunni Pakistani Muslim. Placing the idiosyncrasies of western fetishism towards eastern philosophical traditions alongside cultural orthodoxies and ancestral knowledge, Your Ecstatic Self takes up multifaceted expressions of desire, intimacy and sexual agency.
Works will be screening continuously from 6-8pm, drop in any time.