Items of interest found around the Internets

• Tindal Street in The Bookseller - Scan of an article in the publishing industry trade magazine last week featuring photography by CF tenant Richard Battye.
• Plus+ Design Expo is looking for volunteers - Folk wanted to help with setup, running and breakdown of the event from November 3rd - 9th. Details at the bottom of the page.
• Capsule went to London - along with numerous other Birmingham arty types for the opening of The Joyful Bewilderment in Brick Lane.
• Job vacancy at Punch Records - They’re looking for a Project / Office Administrator, 3 days a week
• Gigbeth 2008 set to bring welcome boost to Birmingham’s economy - Press release from Big Cat for next month’s big shindig.
• Digbeth is Good reports on the Shambala Art Exhibition - I intend to check this out later in the week. It runs until Friday.

Birmingham-based artist Nikki Pugh recently spent some time in Japan and visited the Koganecho Bazaare in Yokohama district, a 12 week event run “as a means towards reconstructing a sense of place in a small river-side area that had previously had a national reputation for being a hotbed of illegality.”

Her report on her findings is well worth a read as she draws parallels between the work being done there with the development of Digbeth, specifically how art and artists are used in the transitional period, and notes differences in the approaches taken here and there.

I suppose the comparisons inevitably start with the two geographies: Koganecho and Digbeth are comparable in size and both located just outside of the main focus of the city centre (although I find this concept is less applicable to cities in Japan and I imagine Yokohama is on a much bigger scale). Is it worth also mentioning here that both Yokohama and Birmingham are/were/might be second cities? Not sure…

Where Koganecho has seen the decline of its, um, ‘entertainment’ industry (the area is cited as having hosted some 250 brothels in its heyday), Digbeth is home to many empty factory units caught between industrial decline and the promise of better property prices ahead in the wake of the area’s transformation into the Cultural Quarter.

Both are, to their own extents, suffering from a decline in their economies and the loss of the communities that thrived off these. What generally remains are people without the links to, and vested interests in, the infrastructures and interactions going on within the area. Given the population density of urban Japan, that’s a lot of people that don’t really care that much. Imagine if you could mould just even a tiny fraction of that attention!

There are exceptions of course, and, not surprisingly, artists and entrepreneurs started to move in and take advantage of the available space. It’s my feeling that in Digbeth’s case, this has come down more on the side of the entrepreneurs and large institutions (the Custard Factory empire, colleges, universities and media companies) and artists have found either the rents or leasing terms to be difficult to work with. (Again, a mediated perception…)

My major concern about the regeneration of Digbeth/Eastside is that it always seems to be so incredibly top-down: funders specify what they want in return for their money and the appropriate components are parachuted into place. I’ve already highlighted that my perceptions of Koganecho Bazaar are highly mediated, but I came away from it with the overriding feeling that it was very much bottom-up in its approach. It felt like it was providing spaces for people to get on with their thing, rather than shaping and controlling what that thing might be.

That’s just an excerpt from the introduction. Go read the whole piece.

The website for 7 Inch Cinema’s Flatpack Film Festival has gone live and they’re looking for submissions of short films up to 15 minutes long. Here’s the submission form - the deadline is December 5th. If you want to chat they’re in Unit 118 of Scott House.

This is something I’m involved with which I think should be of interest to some of the charities based int the Custard Factory. As part of Blog Action Day a number of bloggers will be holding a Free Social Media Surgery in Digbeth on Wednesday 15th.

As our part in Blog Action Day 2008 the Birmingham Bloggers group with the support of BVSC is offering free advice to voluntary and community groups in Birmingham. It doesn’t matter what size you are, you could be a huge charity or a one person campaigning machine, you are welcome to some fiendly, hopefully jargon free one-to-one to help.

We’ll show you round the social web, talk to you about you want to achieve and give all the help and advice you could want. You can go away and think about what you’ve learnt or we could even help you set up some useful tools at this surgery.

Tools like blogs, podcasts, video and social networks can give a real boost to campaigning organisations, so this team of experts is offering you approachable one to one help and support. No boring speeches, just a group of people with the knowledge, ideas and a passion to help you make best use of the internet for your organisation.

If you could register your interest here that’d be great or just feel free to drop in on the 15th from 5.30 - 7.30pm. More background can be found on the blogs of the organisers Jon Bounds and Nick Booth along with a roundup of those planning to attend.

Hope to see you there!

Items of interest found around the Internets

• Search for the stars - It looks like part of the Creative City Awards this year will be a “Birmingham’s Got Talent” competition. “Undiscovered singers, groups, comedians, magicians, acrobats, dancers and other acts can sign up for the Birmingham City Council-backed Search for a Star contest” with auditions taking place at Custard Factory later this month. I am unable to comment for fear of making a scene.
• Athletico Tortured Artists FC - A football team made up of local artists. I believe they’re welcoming new members. Entertaining blog too.

The deadline for entries for those wishing to exhibit, speak or run workshops at the Plus+ Design Expo is this Friday 17th. Full details here.

So far confirmed for the event (which, I’m informed, is definitely taking place at Fazeley Studios) are the following:

Airside
Jonathan Barnbrook
Steve Bell
Designers Republic
Studio Output
Jeff Willis
Another Limited Rebellion
Clusta
Feed
Fluid
Hurtwood Press
IE
Inkymole
Julia Lila
Periscope
Pixel-Lab
Raidy Printing Group
Karoline Rerrie
Sterographic
Type
We Make Art
4Talent
Fused
Illuminate Lighting Ltd
Baskerville Project
Birmingham City University
Coventry School of Art & Design
Wolverhampton University

Personally the name Steve Bell jumps out at me like a big scary beardy man, which is what he looks like but he’s lovely really.

Hello World is Birmingham’s international digital media conference, held at Millennium Point from October 23-24 as part of the Hello Digital festival. Join the conversation, be inspired and hear from industry leaders including Channel 4, Pixar Animation and photo-sharing phenomenon Flickr. Admission to all sessions is free.

A lot of these events will be of interest to Custard Factory tenants, including those who don’t think they’re part of the digital media world, so have a look through and book your places as while they’re all free demand could well be high for a some. Here’s a handy list of links which I snarfed from Created in Birmingham (thanks Chris!)

Thursday 23 Oct:

• 9.30am - Gaming Gets Serious
• 11.15am - Doing Business in a Digital World
• 2pm - Digital Content Creation and Distribution

Friday 24 Oct:

• 10am - 4iP Regional Launch
• 11.45am - Digital Debate: Do or Die? Coping With Convergence in the Digital Age
• 1pm - “Talent 2 Market”- Developing the Skills of the Creative and Media Sector
• 2.30pm - In Conversation with Heather Champ, Director of Community at Flickr
• 3.45pm - In Conversation with Michal Makarewicz, Pixar Animation Studios

Baskerville: The Animated Movie is a celebration of Birmingham’s most famous font and the man who created it.

The work of Baskerville is synonymous to innovation, ambition, creativity and enterprise. John Baskerville is a local figure, who lived and worked out of Birmingham, inspiring the birth of the Lunar Society and contributing through financial and intellectual investment to the Industrial revolution. Baskerville the Animated Movie acknowledges the achievements of the past and aims to inspire the generations of the future.

Baskerville is a leading transitional/neo-classical serif typeface widely used in publishing and print today. Typography is an integral component in the education of a graphic communicator. Type forms the building blocks of visual language, carrying complex messages through carefully chosen and arranged letterforms. In Birmingham during the 18th century, John Baskerville advanced global printing technology and typographic design, represented through the design of his neo-classical (transitional) typeface Baskerville.

For the closing scenes they’re looking for “exciting and captivating images of Baskerville” in the wild and are welcoming contributions. Here’s an identification guide and you can either add your photos to the Flickr pool or email high-res images to info@baskervilleproject.com.

I know there are plenty of font nerds in this building so get to it!

You’ll have noticed the banner outside the corner shop unit on Gibb Terrace - The Ticket Sellers are moving in there in the next 4-6 weeks. Presumably they’ll be able to sell tickets for all events occuring at the Custard Factory which is great as an improbably number of organisations and promoters put on things here and, logically, reception tend to get a lot of inquiries for tickets despite them not being equipped to deal. This should fill an essential gap.

Here’s their current listings for Custard Factory events.

Items of interest found around the Internets

• Flatpack Festival dates confirmed - for 11th - 15th March 2009. I believe some of the events will be taking place around the Custard Factory along with the usual cinematic venues in Birmingham. Keep and eye on the 7 Inch blog for news.
• Gigbeth 2008 MySpace Marathon - Bounder and Catnip from Birmingham: It’s Not Shit check out the MySpace pages for every band playing Gigbeth and write a quick and dirty review. For the second year running.
• Substrakt and Walkit - Nice news of two CF tenants working together. Substrakt are developing Walkit’s new website, due for a beta launch in November.
• Film Dash - A 48 hour film competition run by Chris Unitt that starts in the Custard Factory Theatre on October 17th. Teams will be given a theme and then have 2 days to script, film, edit and deliver their masterpiece. Register now!