Category archive for: Of Interest

Midge posted on Twitter that “Custard Factory/Rootys local boy Steve is doing a quick jaunt across Mexico” and is looking for sponsorship to raise £3200 for Macmillan Cancer Support in the process.

On his fund raising page he says “In March 2009 I will be cycling cross country from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, covering 700 miles through dense jungle, into the cloud forests of the Sierra Madre and up to the highest point of the ride at 3000m.”

Steve used to work at Urban Village and, as Midge said, is a Rootys regular so if you fancy chipping in something…

Here’s a curious competition being run as part of the Plus+ Design Expo at Fazeley Studios from 5th - 8th November.

Type Tart Cards invites you to “design a tart card either for a typeface or a letter of the alphabet” using the prostitute cards found in London phone boxes as inspiration.

Maybe Sabon would invite you to caress its counters, or Palatino would advertise its ‘Mega Serifs’. Bodoni boasts some magnificent finials, Baskerville’s swash can really inflict some pain, and Century Schoolbook would undoubtedly keep you in after class. Perhaps you see something seductive in the curves of the ‘S’ or the ‘A’ exhibits dominatrix tendancies. However you see the alphabet there is a type-tart in every letter.

Submissions should be on A6 card and sent to Type Events by October 30th with all entries being displayed at Plus the following week. Full details here.

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.

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!

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