October 27th, 2009 |
by Jez Collins
Published in
General
Sam and I recently submitted some of our audio pieces to the Radio Futura 2009 which is the radio station that operated during the Future Places event in Oporto, Portugal in October. We were really pleased to be asked to supply content for the station. We sent over seven pieces of work that were a mixture of Knowledge Transfer Fellowship work between BCU and the Birmingham Music Archive and other partners Sam has worked with as part of the AHRC project.
Future Places is explores Digital Media and Local Culture and is six days of exhibitions and events addressing the potential and the impact of digital media on local cultures and took place October 13-17, 2009 and is a project of the UT Austin|Portugal Program
http://colab.ic2.utexas.edu/futureplaces/
Radio Futura
Radiofutura broadcast 24/7 via RadioZero and from 91.5 FM Frequency during futureplaces 2009. A full webstream of the programme is now in the works.
FuturePlaces 2009 presents RADIO FUTURA
The official FuturePlaces radio station
Broadcasting live during FuturePlaces 2009 digital media festival.
October 14-17, 2009 – Porto, Portugal
A joint venture between Future Places and Rádio Zero.
LIVE EVENTS. SONGS. RANTS. FIELD RECORDINGS. SOUND POETRY. MUSIC. EXPERIMENTAL. HOT TOPICS. PURE WEIRDNESS.
Check the broadcasting schedule here. Contact: radiofutura2009 @ gmail.com
Portuguese radio jingle here. English radio jingle here.
The two pieces that Radio Futura ran were the Birmingham Popular Music Archive Phil Lynott documentary which also aired on BBC WM, Absolute and Spin FM and Music in Moseley.
This was another example of the Fellowship work in practice and the wide ranging ways of disseminating that work to audiences, in this case internationally.
To listen to the above pieces and other work by Sam follow the link: Sam Coley Vimeo
August 26th, 2009 |
by Jon Hickman
Published in
General, social media
The Ikon Gallery, in Birmingham City Centre – Image CC by ell-r-brown
I recently had an informal meeting with Ikon, Birmingham’s contemporary arts gallery, where we discussed how they can use social media effectively. Many galleries, museums, and other attractions have profiles in a number of social networks and Ikon is no exception. The main social media activity from Ikon is on Facebook and Twitter where they have developed a fairly active following. The Twitter account is particularly interesting when used to live blog from a series of talks. Encouraged by this initial success (which has come relatively easily), Ikon are keen to push forward and develop a more comprehensive social media strategy. I asked Ikon three key questions, and discussed a number of solutions for them. Ikon are keen for you to add more in the comments below.
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August 26th, 2009 |
by Jon Hickman
Published in
General
Our star turn on iTunes came to the attention of MacWorld – read their article here.
August 17th, 2009 |
by Jon Hickman
Published in
General
We’re pretty pleased with ourselves today. The Interactive Cultures podcast has been selected for global recognition on Apple’s education content service, iTunesU. Apple scan iTunes U content for podcasts that have relevance to a worldwide audience, and post them as star items on the iTunesU homepage. So now we’re happily sitting alongside eight other items from a number of well known institutions including Oxford and the Open University. We continue to publish content here on our own podcast feed. This will feature content before it hits iTunesU. To find more about the rest of BCU you might want to investigate the full range of content we publish.
August 14th, 2009 |
by Simon Barber
Published in
General, Music as Culture, Podcast
Andrew Dubber & Jez Collins spoke at Open Music Media London on the subject of “Music as Culture“.
Podcast: Play in new window
| Download (Duration: 1:14:38 — 34.2MB)
August 11th, 2009 |
by Jon Hickman
Published in
Community Media, General, Media for Development, social media
Marlon Parker addresses the Black Country Social Media Café
Last month I spent two days in the company of South African social media academic Marlon Parker. Regular readers will remember Marlon from his guest post several months ago. The purpose of the visit was to share thoughts and ideas in the field of social media, and to discuss social media education. We were fortunate that the visit coincided with a number of social media events in Birmingham, which meant I could give Marlon a real flavour of what we do in the West Midlands and I could introduce him to as many contacts as possible in a few short days. So what does an academic and social entrepreneur from Cape Town make of the social media activity in Birmingham? And what could we learn from him? The answer is: “a lot”.
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August 4th, 2009 |
by Jon Hickman
Published in
AHRC KTF, General
Birmingham City Council has come into criticism this week over the development of it’s new birmingham.gov.uk website. The coverage and the chatter on the topic got me thinking: how could public sector organisations commission these big projects in a way that might prevent embarrassing questions? Could large scale public web projects be done in a more innovative way? Here’s what I came up with.
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June 28th, 2009 |
by Andrew Dubber
Published in
AHRC KTF, General, Technology, social media
Singer Nima captures video of her fellow Aftershock participants on a dinner break in Genoa – Pic © After Shock Project
“I can’t believe how hard you work.” High praise from Nitin Sawhney, composer, multi-instrumentalist and (it turns out) heavy-duty arts and culture thinker.
Of course, work’s a relative term when you’re doing something really enjoyable and fascinating in a really amazing setting, but given that I was completely focused on (almost) nothing other than the task at hand from 8am till 2am over 5 consecutive days, perhaps he had a point.
I was in Genoa, Italy with Birmingham web developer and entrepreneur Stef Lewandowski to work on the Aftershock Project – a pan-European collaborative music event. In short, Nitin Sawhney turns up in a town, brings about a dozen musicians together, and they workshop, compose, rehearse and eventually perform about an hour’s worth of completely new music over the course of a week. Stef had been commissioned to make them a website, and he’d asked me on board for my perspective as the “online music guy”.
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June 19th, 2009 |
by Jon Hickman
Published in
Creative & Cultural Industries, Events, General
Pic: Lord Carter outside the Ikon and Fazeley Studios, CC Dave Harte
On Tuesday 16th June the Government published the Digital Britain report. The report outlines the direction of policy in several areas of digital media from infrastructure to digital literacy. On the following day Birmingham held the first in a series of regional debates on the report. The event was organised by Digital Birmingham, part of Birmingham City Council, and featured a keynote address by Lord Stephen Carter who oversaw the writing of the report. Parallel to this “official” event, a 2nd Digital Britain Unconference was held at Fazeley Studios. Lord Carter also attended this event where he spent some time taking questions from the floor.
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June 15th, 2009 |
by Nick Webber
Published in
General
Image CC willemvelthoven
I’ve not given a conference presentation in a number of years, and being part of a piece delivered at the Mobile Music for Everyday People: A Symposium on Mobile Music and Sound was consequently quite odd. What was even odder was seeing the proceedings from the perspective of a laptop. Neither Tim Wall nor I had been able to travel to the conference (which was in Minneapolis), but we did the next best thing: Tim pre-recorded the presentation, it was projected onto a big screen at the venue, and afterwards we took questions via Skype. So, first conference paper in ages, and being on a giant TV. Interesting day.
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