ARTS NEWS
Artist Mark McGowan has begun a week long performance piece entitled “Dead Soldier” where he’s lying on the ground on the corner of New St and Needless Alley (clever…) dressed in uniform for 10 hours a day to “raise questions about the horrific nature of conflict”. Or at least he was. Possibly because of inevitable outrage from The Sun, or maybe just because of “safety” reasons, the police have asked him not to continue, according to the BBC. Naturally he’s rather annoyed about this. “What am I supposed to paint, pictures about nice things? Well, things right now are not very nice.” There’s a long interview with him here, a catalogue of his recent stunts and a retrospective of his work is on display in the International Project Space at the Bournville Centre for Visual Arts from November 16th to December 16th.
Congratulations to Stuart Whipps who has won first prize in the Observer Hodge Photographic Awards for his documentary photographs of the deserted MG Rover plant in Longbridge. He receives £5,000, a camera kit from Olympus and an assignment from The Observer. You can the series on his site, one of which a reproduced below, and an exhibit of the winning photographers’ work is at the Guardian/Observer’s Newsroom on Faringdon Road, London, until 19th January. (via Ten4)
(© Stuart Whipps)
Brilliantly Birmingham, running from November 16th to December 23rd, is an international festival of contemporary jewellery with exhibitions, workshops and fairs taking place in venues across Birmingham and the West Midlands, with an emphasis, naturally, on the Jewellery Quarter itself.
MUSIC
Podcasts come and go, the initial enthusiasm weakened by the inevitable drudge of producing the darn things on a regular basis, but Birmingham based music promoters ColdRice have gotten off to a good start with weekly half hour shows containing the kind fo eclectic mix you’d expect from the people who once brought Guitar Fucker to the Birmingham stage. Drag this link into iTunes or whathaveyou and enjoy.
TECH NEWS
Apparently there’s going to be a square mile of WiFi in Birmingham city centre next spring, offering access to council services and run in conjunction with BT and Digital Birmingham. According to the press release (PDF) “the portal will give… free access to information on health, transport, events and schools. People will also be able to buy vouchers or subscribe to services such as BT Openzone.” Interestingly the signal will be transmitted via existing lamp posts and will stretch from Brindley Place to Millennium Point. I’m not sure this is quite the “groudbreaking innovation” they claim but it’s a notable development. It’ll be interesting to see exactly what they charge for normal internet access and whether there’ll be any content filters in place.
I’ll be waiting to see if this wifi scheme does what it says on the tin. Both the City and Islington have what they call a mile of free access. But I haven’t been able to gain access within those miles. So while the scheme may get set up, being able to make use of it is another issue.
On the other hand Tower Hamlets seem to have things sorted with their free access at the
Chrisp Street Idea Store, where I have spent some hours online. Ditto Durham’s Clayport Library. Both of these latter schemes provide proxy addresses for user access. I think this would be feasible within central Birmingham, as we could just toodle into the Library to collect the info at one end or Millennium Point at the other.
That said, I welcome anything better than the ridiculous Starbucks T-Mobile Hotspot thing.
So his performance was going to be 70 hours of pretending to be asleep in the street whilst wearing an old out of date soldier 95 camo pattern uniform and a red beret. And he gets £4000 for that. So thats, er, £57 pounds an hour.
Nice ‘work’ if you can get it.
Does he pay income tax on that?
My dear boy, art is priceless!
Fuck me, that McGowan is hilarious. Just read the last paragraph of the interview. Excellent work all round. Thanks for the info, Pete. I hope he carries on his piece in Brum later in the week.
Art from these guys IS priceless :)
http://www.spacehijackers.co.uk/html/welcome.html
Yes I saw this about the Wi-Fi. Just one message to Brum, what took us so long, eh? On a related note “The Gadget Show”, which is funnily enough filmed in Birmingham, is launching a free Wi-Fi campaign, which was launched on Monday on air.
Hmmmmm ……..
Lee: Actually it seems Birmingham is the first city to get this as a trial before it’s rolled out across the country so we’re ahead of the game here.
I’m not sure about the “free WiFi” thing. There’s no such thing as free in this world so I reckon it’ll be sponsored to the hilt and/or restricted in some way. The latter is a concern of mine because this site is routinely blocked by businesses and council servers for some reason (probably all the swearing…) and I wouldn’t be surprised if internet access that is open to anyone had some kind of nannyware on it. “Child views porn via council subsidised net access” and all that.
I don’t think it’s actually free, BT have a habit of charging for these things, and what’s the point of a “mile of wiffy” if it costs so much?
Just to clarify, the BT / Digital Birmingham WiFi project will give free access to Council services but everything else will cost money. Presumably this was a factor in getting access to all those lampposts.
The Gadget Show campaign is separate and I don’t know much about it (since they only have a couple of paragraphs on the site…) but I reckon it’s fundamentally flawed, attention grabbing nonsense.