Calling all performers!!! Scratch Platform - Sunday, August 31st 2014 - Four Bars, Cardiff - From 7pm

Scratch Platform is a brand new event in Cardiff and the showing of work on Sunday August 31st is the first of what will be a regular event happening every other month. The idea is to give Live Artists, Sound Artists, Cabaret Performers, Poets and other artists who perform an opportunity to show their work (whether it is ‘finished’, ‘polished', in development or otherwise) to an interested and supportive audience. The showing will start at 7pm and the venue will be open until pub closing time!

Any work that is designed to be performed to an audience needs at some point to be performed!

It will be free to take part in and free to watch. There are no ‘rules’ as such other than that any piece shouldn’t last longer than ten minutes - in order to give everyone a fair chance. There will be no competitive element and we want to encourage a very open, pressure free and supportive environment.

It’s a lovely intimate venue and we are able to provide some technical assistance- we have a PA, lighting rig and access to a projector and screen. Will will also be filming the event to offer the performers a copy of the documentation (this will be free, basically bring a memory stick or external drive and we will copy the footage to it).

At the end of each event we will have a performance from an invited artist. On August 31st this will be Foxy and Husk

We hope to draw artists and an audience from the artist communities in Cardiff and further afield. There will be an opportunity for the performers to display business cards, CV’s and other information that they might wish to share. We will also offer feedback forms that members of the audience can fill in.

If you would like to show your work then please can you send me your technical requirements (will you need music playback for example or a microphone(s)?) and give me a very brief breakdown of what your 10 minute piece will be.

bring your friends!
any questions? 

Rowan Talbot

rowan@fizzievents.com

       

Lights Out on August 4th

“The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime” Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, August 1914

National Library of Wales Cymru 1914 archive

Everyone in the UK is invited to take part in LIGHTS OUT by turning off their lights from 10pm to 11pm on 4 August, leaving on a single light or candle to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War .

Millions of people are expected to participate and hundreds of local authorities, iconic buildings, national organisations including the BBC and the Royal British Legion, parish councils and places of worship have already pledged their support. Iconic landmarks such Blackpool Illuminations, the Houses of Parliament, Eden Project, Imperial War Museums and Tower Bridge will turn off their lights; the Royal British Legion has launched a campaign for at least one million candles to be lit across the UK and theatre productions including those of the National Theatre’s War Horse, both nationally and internationally, will invite their audiences to take part in LIGHTS OUT after their curtain calls.

 Leading international artists have been commissioned by 14-18 NOW to create special public artworks, for one night only in the form of a light source.

Bedwyr Williams’ work Traw will be a large-scale video and sound installation  at the site of the North Wales Memorial Arch, Bangor. The memorial takes centre stage in front of images projected onto the enormous facing wall of Bangor University’s new Pontio Arts and Innovation Centre.

Taking photographs found in the Cymru 1914 archive, Williams has created a sequence of images of local soldiers and civilians   affected by WW1. Excluding all uniform and references to rank, the close up faces reveal something of the individual’s personality and personal sacrifice in a war where death was measured in millions.

Bedwyr Williams is one of Wales’ leading visual artists. In 2013 he represented Wales at the Venice Biennale.

Commenting on the project Bedwyr Williams said: “As a young art student I walked past the memorial arch in Bangor many times and I have to admit that I never gave it a huge amount of thought. Working on this project I’ll never be able to walk past this place again without thinking of the lives lost fighting in the First World War.”

Audio Arts sound art magazine, aural archive of artists’ voices and sound art

Audio Arts: Volume 5 No 3 & 4 audio cassette Live to Air comprises a compilation of artists' soundworks, includes contributions from: Bruce McLean, Harvey Mangolds

As I tidy and throw away redundant materials from the Slide Library here at Cardiff Metropolitan University prior to a move to another campus it really helps when I know that what is going into the bin is not therefore lost to history. the old audio arts cassette has been binned but every volume from that magazine of sounds and sound art is available still! On the Tate website here.
Explore and listen to this innovative audio cassette-magazine featuring exclusive contributions from more than 900 individual artists including Joseph Beuys, Ian Breakwell, Tracey Emin and Andy Warhol. Audio Arts was  established by Bill Furlong in 1972 and includes soundworks, interviews and  coverage of exhibitions. You will find all 24 volumes from Audio Arts published between 1973 and 2006
including  the Audio Arts supplements which focus on particular themes and individuals, from the state of British art in the late 1970s to a feature on Damien Hirst in 2003.
Read more here

CC Search (Copyright free images)

from CC Search 

keyword =business meeting

I am often asked to recommend a website to go to for Copyright free images. The Electronic Library at Cardiff Met offers many links to image databases  that we recommend, some (marked with a black or a green copyright symbol)  like Bridgeman Education and Visual Arts Data Service offer copyright free images for educational use.

 I can also recommend a single page to which you can navigate on the internet which will allow you to search a whole selection of different image databases ...not just images of art and design... made available under a  Creative Commons licence.

Creative Common licences all offer, as minimum, permission to copy so long as the image is marked clearly with details of who first created it (attribution). To learn more about Creative Commons licences (which are voluntarily  applied by creators to their works and can apply to text, images , music and all copyrighted materials) you should go here.
To search for all those Creative Commons licensed images  go here. Enter a keyword and select a source to search from the range offered ( various interesting websites ) results will bring back Creative Commons licenced images, moving images and sound.

Pathe News on Youtube

Pathe News Inc.

In 1895 Charles Pathé began his quest to document the historical events of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. By 1914, Pathé produced the first weekly newsreel.
British Pathé, the U.K. newsreel archive company, has uploaded its entire 100-year collection of 85,000 historic films in high resolution to YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/user/britishpathe

The collection, which spans 1896 to 1976, comprises some 3,500 hours of historical footage of major events, notable figures, fashion, travel, sports and culture. It includes extensive film from both World War I and World War II.
The Home page displays a choice of popular uploads, days that shook the world, disasters, inventions, animals, daredevils, celebrities and  compilations.  'Weirdest newsreels' includes a newsreel about a progressive school , a tall man marrying a short lady and  an obese three year old . In contrast you can also find footage from the Battle of the Somme , the SAS storming the Iranian Embassy in London and a documentary on the assassination of the American President John F Kennedy claiming the CIA killed him.

Behind the Scenes of the Museum: Artists in Collections

Installation for Woverhampton Art Gallery 2012    Photo credit D8

10am – 4.30pm, Wednesday 14 May, 2014
National Museum Wales
Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre, Cathays Park, Cardiff, CF10 3NP

If you are interested in the ways artists have interacted with Museum collections then this is the event for you.

The event will include:

·         James Putnam, curator and writer, discussing shifts in the way that artists are working with museum collections and their role in activating engagement.

·         Andrew Renton, Head of Applied Art at the National Museum of Wales, in conversation with artist Sarah Younan about their collaboration and what artists can bring to the interpretation of collections.

·         Jon Monaghan, artist and animator, leading a workshop on 3d printing as a tool for creating user-generated content.

·         Artist Helen Snell, talking about collaboration and what it's like to work in the 'institution' of a museum.

·         Emma Price, independent art consultant, offering practical advice on developing projects that utilise museum collections.

This event is free to attend but places are limited so booking is essential

Book now at eventbrite > 

For more information contact Alicia Miller, Axisweb Associate in Wales: alicia@axisweb.org

Illustrating Heart of Darkness

                                                                Alison Bryant, UK


The  25 longlisted entries for this year’s Book Illustration Competition run by The House of Illustration have been published as a Gallery on their website here 
They illustrate Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. 
The winner and five runners up will be announced in September. The winner will be asked to provide a total of 9 illustrations for the final Folio Society book, as well as a binding design, and must agree to complete the commission within the given deadline


There is a  a gallery of past winners of the Book Illustration Competition here