Crit Club for Black Hole Club

A review of my art journey to this date, presented to my peers.

October 2018

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Black Hole Club is an artist development programme run by Vivid Projects in Birmingham. As part of the programme members are invited to present their work, or an aspect of their work, to their peers for discussion, similar to an art school crit, though more presentation-based.

Mine was on 9 October 2018 when I found myself in something of a quagmire artistically, having used the programme to experiment and see where I might go next but not coming up with any useful answers. (I subsequently took some time off from making art, returning to my practice in late 2019.) I decided to go right back to my childhood in the 80s and run through everything that seemed to inform my work so see if any patterns might emerge.

Audio was recorded on my phone resting on the table, so volume varies as I move around. Introduced by Antonio Roberts, leader of the BHC.

Fellow BHC member Emily Roderick kindly sent me her notes from my talk which I found fascinating.

All works done for the Black Hole Club:

Crit Club for Black Hole Club: A review of my art journey to this date, presented to my peers. (2018)

Scab: Microscopic photogrammetry of a wound on my leg. (2018)

Flash: A lighting flash as viewed by an insect. (2018)

City Arcadia mini-residency: Three days with Coventry Artspace (2018)

Optical Array: Installation for Stellar, a group show commissioned by Lumen on the theme on Space. (2018)

Blow-Up 2018: Imagining a reboot of the 1960s photography-based thriller where David Hemmings plays The Data Centre. (2018)

Spectrographic Manifestoes: Election speeches transformed from audio to graphical and back again. (2017)

Talks I've given, mostly in rooms:

Extreme Noticing under Lockdown: Video presentation of art-walking in Stirchley during the pandemic, for 4WCoP. (2020)

1972 v0.1: A first stab at figuring some stuff out. (2019)

Crit Club for Black Hole Club: A review of my art journey to this date, presented to my peers. (2018)

Stirchley Salon: A meetup for artists and makers to present their work to peers. (2018)

Dead Shrines: A camera obscura sculpture in Stirchley Park. (2018)

Instructions for Humans: A Cargo Cult for Artificial Intelligence - artworks exploring human interactions with machines. (2017)

Developed in Birmingham: A camera obscura studio in Birmingham Museum and a Speculative Cameras workshop. (2017)

APHE Human Interfaces conference: I spoke at the Academic Photography in Higher Education conference (2017)

The Delightful Impossibility of Cityscapes: A lecture to the Kings Norton Photography Society on how to document a city in curious ways. (2017)

Experimental Capture workshop for BOM: Sharing knowledge on weird cameras at Art & Tech Social. (2017)

Making it Matter at Random String: An unstructured talk about making politically aware art. (2016)

Speculative Cameras at BOM: Fellowship research project into what cameras could be. (2016)

Live Sonification of Photography: Lecture and Performance of a system for turning photos into sound. (2014)

Typologies of Hypernetworked Vernacular Self-Portraiture: A video essay about selfies. (2014)

Birmingham Zine Festival 2010 Talk: I spoke about The Emergence of the British Small Press Comics Scene in the Early 1980s to an audience of zine enthusiasts. (2010)

A Few Of My Favourite Things - Ikon talk: A talk given at the Ikon gallery as part of their series. (2010)

The 8-Bit Pete Lectures: A talk given at a videogame movie night run by Flatpack Film Festival (2010)

Next art:

Jo Gane's obscura research

June 2019: Helping a fellow artist master the camera obscura as a drawing device.

Previous art:

Stirchley Salon

September 2018: A meetup for artists and makers to present their work to peers.