The Archaeology of Silence
Part of Moseley Festival Art Trail
Moseley, Birmingham
17 July 2011, 2 – 4 pm
AAS Performance Ritual: Excavating The Ark of Silence. More info here.
Hierogamy Disruptor Ritual
Moseley, Birmingham
23 April 2011
AAS ritual to disrupt the rising of the lizard and turn it away from destruction. More info here
Watch Video
The Happy Hypocrite — Say What You See
Co-hosted by An Endless Supply and Maria Fusco
Eastside Projects, 86 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham, B9 4AR
31 March 2011, 6.30–10pm
AAS perform their spoken word piece “…and trees”
aasgroup.net
eastsideprojects.org
anendlesssupply.co.uk
Changing Room Ritual
Second Life
6 November 2010
I’m going to be part of another iteration of Changing Room – a project by Michael Takeo Magruder. It’s part of Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music and The Two Thousand + Ten symposium.
I’ll be working with Antonio Roberts and Rachel Darke to create a space for a ritual alongside the a.a.s version in Walsall.
The Cage
AAS Reidency
New Art Gallery Walsall, West Midlands
11 October 2010 – 16 January 2011
The a.a.s residency at The New Art Gallery Walsall has started, follow their news feed and The Other Place Portal for more information
48 Sheet
Harry Blackett. Robin Kirkham. Lucy McLauchlan. Ian Richards. Elizabeth Rowe
Digbeth, Birmingham
2 – 14 September 2010
The billboards have been speaking to me again. Their messages leaping out of the paper and infecting my brain with subliminal commands, you feel empty, you need me, this will fill that hole, desire, obey, consume…
But sometimes forces of resistance manage to break through these portals instead. Taking the form and twisting it, questioning the nature of these message boards to the subconscious.
Ian Richards
The dream state can be accessed to show us the potential of images in the media, that they can have moments of ecstasy, strange violent joy, if we only take the time to read them actively instead of passively.
(This particular intrusion of one reality into another was so powerful my camera couldn’t capture it, so I borrowed evidence from DiG)
Elizabeth Rowe
The debris can be reformed, grow into new shapes, remind us of the creative possibilities we saw when we were young, before they convinced us that fun had to be bought.
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Lucy McLauchlan
Or we can simply distill the adverts and logos into pure icons, sigils that refuse translation, while firing off endless associations.
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Harry Blackett and Robin Kirkham
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EC Arts: 48 Sheet
Ian Richards
Elizabeth Rowe
Lucy McLauchlan
Harry Blackett and Robin Kirkham
Dead Fingers Talk
Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs
IMT Unit2/210, Cambridge Heath Road,
London, E2 9NQ
28 May – 18 July 2010
Plastique Fantastique Yage-Cat-Demon Shrine, detail, David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan
Something wordless called me to this exhibition, the dry hissing of ghost tapes echoing sibilantly around the streets. As I entered the space, a portal reached out to me, bending space with cones of acceleration and deceleration. Plastique Fantastique’s three-dimensional diagram was charged with a subliminal feline Scientology spell. It pricked my skin with a strange energy, and my brain was infected with the parasite-thought of Burroughs’ reality-changing playbacks of tapes.
His other experiments with cut-up audio techniques include combining street sounds with news reports, morse-code with adverts, his own speech spliced and looped until new meanings break through, as if from the future or outer space. 23 artists and groups were invited to create work in response to these re-edits of the world, and although there were plenty of ghosts in the walls and ceilings, there were also more visual and physical ‘recordings’.
In the centre of the main room were two buckets filled with a dark liquid that suggested oil or the blood of a giant black centipede. This piece by Alex Baker & Kit Poulson was activated when a droning buzz made the floorboards vibrate, and the liquid shivered in kaleidoscopic patterns, hypnotic eye pools drawing you into their conversation.
First Thought Best Thought, Aki Onda
In the gallery setting, old tape recorders became sculptural objects, particularly the orange painted machine used to play Simon Reuben White’s found recordings of a man sending audio letters to his mother. These could have been fictional, but it was still easy to get involved in his problems through the polite intimacy of his updates.
There were also visual collages, such as Riccardo Iacono’s jumpy images scratched onto film, or the ever changing montage of images by o.blaat that reminded me of Ozymandias’ headquarters in The Watchmen, where he divines the currents of history through a giant insect-eye of screens.
This exhibition is named after a Burroughs novel that was itself a ‘cut up’ of his previous work, and the pieces resonate with each other to create a virus in the visitor’s head, that in turn leaks out to merge with the stuttering sounds of the outside world.
Originally published on Interface
Changing Room
Eastside Projects, Birmingham & Second Life
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Transitional%20Space/140/133/51
7 January 2010, 6.30-7.00pm
I’ve been collaborating on a project in the virtual Eastside Projects in Second Life that Michael Takeo Magruder has been developing with them. Myself, Antonio Roberts and some students from BIADs MA Digital Arts in Performance have been using the space and the virtual objects left there to explore the possibilities for this kind of exhibition.
During my slot I’ve taken phrases that suggest control, persuasion and compliance from Liam Gillick’s plays (that are being performed for his exhibition in the RL space), and scripted them into objects for avatars to sit in.
I’m interested in whether we can use this rather structured environment to produce new relations, so feel free interact with any other avatars you see, perhaps responding to the space, the phrases, or the context.
As part of the Eastside Projects Associate Members Salon, I’ll be doing a RL version of this as people arrive between 6.30 and 7pm, it would be great if you could make it to the space in SL during this time so that there is a link between the two sites, or go to the Salon if you are a member of ESP. This will be followed by a discussion ‘Are artists the lapdogs of the bourgeoisie?’.
This link takes you to the door of the main virtual Eastside Projects, assuming you have Second Life set up on your computer, and you need to walk along the wall to get to the ‘twin’ space where we’ve been doing things.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Transitional%20Space/140/133/51
(You’ll need to sign up to SL and download if you haven’t already)
My SL name: Ana Vemo
EP:VV
Changing Room
23 November 2009 – 23 January 2010Changing Room is an evolving mixed-reality installation that considers the inherent mutability and reusability of artefacts, concepts and situations in the Digital Age. Lead artist Michael Takeo Magruder will collaborate with Extra Special People artists Ana Benlloch, Iona Makiola, Antonio Roberts, Lee Scott, Zhao Wei and Selma Wong to develop a new collaborative space.
Blending the shared virtual environment of Second Life with the shared physical environment of Eastside Projects, the artwork will facilitate the realisation, curation and documentation of seven distinct – yet interrelated – art projects arising from a common pool of virtual and physical resources.
Experience the artwork’s physical component at Eastside Projects alongside Liam Gillick’s Two Short Plays, a new solo exhibition (27 November 2009 to 23 January 2010) and the virtual environment in Second Life
(http://slurl.com/secondlife/Transitional%20Space/140/133/51). For further information please visit: www.takeo.org.Changing Room is an experimental prototype for EP:VV (Eastside Projects: Virtualised and Visualised) – a new space for imagining ideas about Art. EP:VV will develop online, multi-user virtual worlds that afford new models for participation and representation of the gallery’s artworks and initiatives. For more information about EP:VV and its ongoing development, visit: www.eastsideprojects.org or email: epvv@bcu.ac.uk.
Ever felt there’s something missing in your life?
AAS – The Family
Digbeth, Birmingham
4-8 November 2009
The Event is upon us and we’ll be spending the next 5 days changing our name every 6 hours, wearing hand decorated dungarees, playing thought-stopping games, eating brightly coloured food, asking questions, strengthening our Dantien, collective dreaming, strumming red, yellow, green and blue ukuleles, finding portals, calling rainbows, going to the top, chanting punk meditation, making friends, sleeping in pods, giving out flowers, love-bombing, and having all the fun we can cram into the day.
Want to join us?
All You Can Eat
Sunflower Lounge, Birmingham
15 October 2009, from 8pm
Come along to the Gallery of Owls‘ Zine Event. As well as performances from Pseudo Nippon, Fallen Timbers, and the genius Richard Peel, Stuart and I will make a rare and exciting Milgram appearance, DJing cold head games, and hot perverted beats. We’ve also put in zine-style reprints of a.a.s. maga-zine and comics from 2003-2009
