We are pleased to re-open our venue on Friday and Saturday afternoons to present new exhibition Cut, Copy, Remix, in collaboration with Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. You can book a slot to visit with Eventbrite. 

For Cut Copy Remix, artists Alis Oldfield,  Rosa Francesca and Leanne O’Connor – all from our development programme Black Hole Club  – were co-commissioned alongside artist Mixed Milk to explore the creative potential of Birmingham Museums Trust’s Digital Image Resource. Birmingham Museums Trust is the only collection in the UK that makes all of its out-of-copyright artworks available for free under a Creative Commons Zero License (CC0). Over 3500 of these objects are now available as free digital images, with more being added every week. In April this year, the commissions were shared on social media and we are delighted to now present the works in our project space.

The new works and ongoing research respond to and reconfigures images from the Digital Image Resource. Shown at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery as a monitor work, for Vivid Projects Mixed Milk’s film Excerpt sequences hundreds of details from the BMAG collection and is presented as a large scale, multi-channel projection across three screens. Rosa Francesca’s Unreal Histories were made with Generative Adversarial Networks using BMAG’s Digital Image Resource to generate artificial intelligence artworks. On closer inspection, these works shed their initial connection to the way that we see the world and shows how a machine can create its own visual language. Alis Oldfield’s installation Rewilding ARP(L)ANET presents a landscape referencing terrestrial fossil fungi, where the internet lies in ruin; a reference to mycelial exchange and the ‘re-wilding’ proposed by the artist’s original net based commission.

Leanne O’Connor works with the exhibition to present the workshop Pick and Mix, developed from ongoing research into Birmingham School of Arts 35mm Slide Collection. Offering a delightful hands on opportunity to delve into a physical database, Pick and Mix raises questions about archival access and  the future of analogue items within collections as digitisation becomes the norm.

Cut Copy Remix is supported by a series of online talks and workshops that can be booked here.

Sat 10th of Oct 4-5pm: Cut Copy Remix Artists Talk.
Linda Spurdle, Digital Development Manager at Birmingham Museums Trust in conversation with, Mixed Milk, Rosa Francesca, Alis Oldfield and Cathy Wade.

Sat 17th of Oct 4-5pm: Collections and Permissions.
Yasmeen Baig-Clifford , Director of Vivid Projects in conversation with artists Antonio Roberts and Leanne O’Connor.

Sat 24th Oct 4-5pm Pick and Mix.
Join Black Hole Club’s Leanne O’Connor for a workshop that explores collective exchange around archival access and futurism.

The research undertaken by the artists for Cut Copy Remixed is accessible online throughout the exhibition, and the associated work by Cold War Steve including downloads of two new collages by Cold War Steve featuring the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood hosted on The Social and via Birmingham Museum.

Black Hole Club thanks Cold War Steve, Linda Spurdle, Emalee Beddoes-Davis, Victoria Osborne and Lara Ratnaraja for their ongoing collaborative work on this project.