Skip to main content
Menu

Vivid Projects

Cut Copy Remix

Cut Copy Remix

8 October 2020 – 24 October 2020

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery vs Black Hole Club.

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 2020, the commissions were shared on social media and we were delighted to present the works in our project space.

The works and ongoing research responded to and reconfigured 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 sequenced hundreds of details from the BMAG collection and was 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 presented 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 worked 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 raised questions about archival access and the future of analogue items within collections as digitisation becomes the norm.

Cut Copy Remix was supported by a series of online talks and workshops.

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 explored collective exchange around archival access and futurism.

The research undertaken by the artists for Cut Copy Remixed was 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 is hosted on The Social.

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.

You can now access the project online, including downloads of two new collages by Cold War Steve featuring the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood hosted on The Social.

Mixed Milk’s video work “Excerpt” a digital video made from the single jpeg images that are available for free download, the work creates new connections between objects and artworks and can be watched via this link. The video is a journey through Birmingham Museums Trust’s collection that makes a new narrative for its artefacts to live and breathe.

Alis Oldfield’s essay Re-wild the Internet can be read here. Rosa Francesca’s virtual exhibition of artificial intelligence artworks, made through Generative Adversarial Networks can be visited here.

Poster reading "Cut copy remix"
Cut Copy Remix, Keith Dodds

Related