Apparently we have been hoodwinked…
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Led by umbrella-wielding tour guides (pointing devices rather than rainsavers) last night saw the launch of the Flatpack Installation Trail. Dedicated trailmakers began at Urban Outfitters for Chris + Keir’s ‘tribute to the 19th century Canadian Vaudevillian Rob Ring’.
David Osbaldestin and John Wigley of BIAD were both on brolly duty and led the ramble (and discussion) across all five installation hotspots (map). A gothic love story, cross-looping noir narratives and Hitchcock sms intertitling took us through to Digbeth’s favourite bright yellow building, COW Vintage where Phil Barber’s untitled, multi-monitored, screensaver death piece concluded the tour.
Pete Ashton was on hand with his Flip and comprehensive footage is on his Vimeo page. I relived the tour this afternoon in the cold light of day, hoping to take some more photos. (Note: monitors in windows in daylight makes for difficult subject matter.) All will be uploaded to the Flickr shortly. In the meantime you’d be advised to do the rounds and see with your own eyes. The installation trail runs until March 15.
Below is a flyer for next week’s launch of the shop-window installation trail, at Urban Outfitters [map] from 5.30pm on Thursday 5th March. A little tour will wend its way around the shop locations on the night, ending at COW Vintage in DIgbeth around 8pm. We’re really excited about what the artists have come up with; read Tessa Burwood’s splendid BBC writeup for more of an idea of the trail.
(Flyer by Jaskinder Kaur, Birmingham City University.) Oh and for those of you who can’t make it near a nice pile of brochures, here’s a handy PDF we uploaded.
So what else is new? It’s getting to that time when people ask ‘how’s everything going?’ with a slightly worrying/worried smile. It’s actually going really well. (I’m going to get this printed on a tshirt.) On Tuesday we had about 60 volunteers congregate at Friction Arts, all up for it – as always the point when the festival feels like it’s happening. Even more exciting for me was going through the techy schedule with our video fellas and concluding that it is all just about doable (though no doubt this feeling will pass!).
But the best thing has been how damn excited everyone else is. When you’re pretty much at the end of your tether with list-making and problem-solving fatigue and wondering why you bothered, along comes a palpable audience buzz to buoy you up and keep you going. Extra pressure, but a good kind of pressure.
One of the first physical signs of Flatpack this year will be a series of interventions in shop-windows around the city. It’s an idea we pinched from our friends at Aurora in Norwich, and seems tailor-made for Birmingham; what with it being ’shopping capital of Europe’. A string of shops from the city-centre down into Digbeth have agreed to give over their windows to students and alumni from Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, who’ll be making work loosely inspired by the festival and early cinema. Ideas include a tribute to legendary Canadian vaudevillian Rob Ring, an SMS reworking of Psycho, and a romantic encounter in a graveyard. One group of students have put some of their proposal sketches in a blog.
Black Country-based art student Kevin Timmins has been sending us an intriguing stream of photos for over a year now, showing work in progress on a series of pre-cinema devices including a motorised phenakistoscope (top) and a slightly chunkier pedal-powered version (bottom). Hopefully both will take a bow at Flatpack in March. And if you’re an animator who fancies the discipline of a looping 12-frame film on a circular disc, get in touch and we’ll give you the spec.
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