• Music
• Video
• Art

The Fierce Festival is Birmingham’s festival of the performing arts (essentially) and was started in 1997 by Mark Ball. Since then it has had an immense impact on Birmingham’s culture and has gained a reputation for edgy, underground and sometimes tongue in cheek presentation of the finest in contemporary art. The company Fierce Earth has grown and moved on from the festival alone. The festival is currently reinventing itself and experimenting with new directions under the artistic directorship of Laura McDermott and Harun Morrison who took over in 2009. One of the main things I’d say they bring to the mix is a totally open mind and no agenda. They are not from the Midlands and as such are gazing on the landscape like explorers, learning as they go, taking their time to learn the ways of the people. Having had two ‘interrobang’ events away from Birmingham (one in Warwick Arts Centre and one in Wednesbury at The Old Post Office and the Town Hall), i think the best thing is to expect the unexpected, which has always been the way of Fierce.

I have been a fan of the festival since before I considered myself an artist and along with Vivid, Fierce had a lot to do with me getting involved in the arts. I volunteered as early as 2004 to help out with the festival and was employed by Mark Ball on a few occasions. I also met some good friends whilst being involved. People like Rich Bate and Anne-Marie Pope, who were involved in the organisation of the festival. Meeting ‘the pope’ was also the beginnings of my involvement in the Project X Presents series of events.

So when the opportunity came up to apply for the Platinum artist development program i gave it some thought, submitted and Harun and Laura chose me, I’m very pleased to say. The aims of the program:

Platinum is an exciting opportunity for artists to develop their work with Fierce Festival.

Platinum provides a space to network & make connections with key internationally acclaimed artists to focus & develop your own work in a supportive environment.

Fierce has a reputation for celebrating risk and for encouraging the expression of a myriad of voices, perspectives and artforms.

Fierce is particularly interested in its curatorial agenda being led by the artists it engages with. Forthcoming Fierce festivals will involve 8 – 12 artists who develop their projects over a ten-month period. This emphasis on process is very much at the heart of the thinking around Platinum. We are less interested in finished products than the development of long-term strategies to sustain your career as an artist. Platinum artists are very much a part of the activities and enquiries of the festival itself.

So even if i don’t come up with something at the end i have achieved something. Seems I can’t lose. I do feel obliged, however (if only to myself) to create new work from this and have decided to come back to where I started creatively as a youth, and have been creating some music, with the aim of performing a fully live Audio Visual set of my own creation from beginning to end, using found footage, my photography and animation, field recordings, and live performance.

The program started last April and through Laura and Harun’s zen-like guidance I have been developing my ideas, and communicated them to the other artists on the program. Mentoring of the group discussions has been by performance artist Kira O’Reilly, who is extremely inspiring and perfect for facilitating the group. For instance on the first day we met, she instigated, not an icebreaking waffle fest of artists spouting about themselves (I know I do) but a silent walk around the surrounding streets where each member took turns to lead. We learnt as much about each other in that hour than if we’d talked for three.

Each artist has a budget for the program, two-thirds of which can be spent on kit. The remaining portion to be spent on exploring, e.g. courses, travelling to festivals, and mentors of the artists choice. I decided i would like to talk to AV legends Coldcut (why keep it mortal?), mentioned this to Laura and she got someone from Ninjatune to contact me a couple of weeks later! I’m about to arrange a meeting with Matt Black, so I’ll report back when I have done.

I have pretty much got to where i want to be in terms of technology and am up to speed with the latest methods of music production. From there I have been working my VJ work into a seamless AV show where every sound has a visual counterpart. Next up is the performance side of what I want to achieve in a live show. Loops (both video and audio) will form the basis of that and as such I have purchased an Ableton Live (grid-based music sequencing software) controller – the AKAI APC40 with some of my equipment budget supplied to me as part of the scheme. The rest went on a fish eye lens to help with my fulldome filming (more on that, later).

I want to invoke more of a live feel than that, even and will be using the element of spoken word, looping my voice through the use of Ableton Live, Autotune and two live effects boxes, the Korg Kaoss Pads 1 and 3:

Also I am working on fusing a common melodica with the workings of  a wii remote to give me some acoustic sounds but with an extra dimension of wireless  control over the output.

And the icing on the cake, a Stylophone which my good lady bought me for xmas; when put through the right effects, it sounds phat as phuck.

I will be performing my new AV set at the Fierce Festival which is held 22nd – 27th March 2011. for more info go to www.wearefierce.org.

ArtPrize

Last year Chromatouch had the honour of being contacted by Rickey Ainsworth at Grand Rapids Michigan Roger B. Chaffee Planetarium and asked to show the fulldome film Written on the Body in Michigan’s ArtPrize festival.

From Wikipedia:

ArtPrize is an international art competition held in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The first exhibition took place between September 23 and October 10, 2009, and the 2010 exhibition was open from September 22 until October 10. ArtPrize is unusual both for the large size of the top prize ($250,000, combined with other prizes cummulatively amounting to half a million dollars), as well as for the method of judging entries. There is no juror. The artists negotiate a venue with local exhibitors, and the works are voted on by the public using modern networking technology.

Rickey, being a follower of the Birmingham Thinktank Planetarium‘s highly entertaining Facebook page got in touch with Mario DiMaggio there, saying

I’ve long been a fan of what I’ve seen of Trimble & Wetton’s “Written on the Body,” shown not too long ago at your institution. Do you think they’d be willing to re-exhibit their work at another planetarium?

Well of course we agreed, the only problem was that the original footage had been lost due to hard drive corruption, so the fulldome, six channel, Digistar 3 format had to be reverse engineered into the original single frame Dome Masters ready to be re-rendered into the Digistar 4 format for the system they hired in especially for the festival. Thanks to Mario very kindly upgrading his software and passing it on to his team of highly trained assistants, it was possible to do this, and the thing was copied to a hard drive and ready to send…

Hard drive all packed up and ready to go...

It took a while to get through customs but arrived just in time for the festival and it was shown alongside two other fulldome films by Scott Hessel and also Paul Grimmer that Mario suggested would fit the bill.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the chance to get out to the festival but it sounded amazing, with the whole city turning into a gallery for two weeks! In Paul’s words:

During the three weeks of ArtPrize, our venue at the Grand Rapids Public Museum attracted over 241,000 visitors, more than we typically get over the course of an entire year. Likewise, we set records in the planetarium with over 65,000 visitors (which would be a just-below-average annual attendance for us), all there to see three video installations, including yours, projected by truly state-of-the-art planetarium technology. We couldn’t have done it without your participation. Thank you for all the effort you put into to creating (and restitching) Written on the Body, and for giving us the opportunity to share your work in such a unique way.

One of the highlights for me–aside from the art itself–was the ArtCation program, which gave roughly 2,000 area students the chance to experience your work and think about the intersection of art and technology in new ways.

So all in all a highly successful venture, international exposure along with a chance to hopefully show my next fulldome film this year and visit the festival…

First up is the Rea Garden’s resident artist Hannah Hull talking about her work and a memorial she will be holding at the end of November.

And yesterday we had (Captain) Ed Wakefield in to talk about his new maritime novella, Blood & Rorschach and also Cheryl Jones explaining it’s inclusion in the Digbeth based Arts Festival – THE EVENT – which launches tomorrow.