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St. John's Church, 7pm - 11pm188 Spon St, Coventry, CV1 3. location£6 Click here to buy tickets | Janek Schaefer British composer of the year, turntablist and sound artist will be performing a brand new commission especially for A Thing About Machines using an FM transmitter and processed samples of Tangerine Dream records. NB Please bring a battery powered FM radio/boombox to fully appreciate this performance. "Then it ended. The lights came softly on and Janek stood up and thanked everybody. People sat up blinking and bewildered and gave a huge applause. Slowly, the crowd gathered around Janek ... We really were all left quite speechless!" |
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| Modulate AV Sonic and visual manipulators. "The whole spectacle was replenished with abstract and geometrical visualizations, digital / laptop electronics appeared here as a fully developed rhythmical form … a space cruise of the highest degree" |
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| Threep exploring the sonic landscape of circuit bending, granular synthesis, max msp and unconventional methods of musical composition.
more on threep |
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| In a performance unique to A Thing About Machines, Ben Ramsay will be performing a selection of works based around recordings of jet engines in various states of motion, and canal barges frozen in ice. In keeping with the theme of the festival - 'Spaces Speak' - the performance will also incorporate the natural resonant frequencies of St. John’s Church as it responds to live vocal input from the performers, in an attempt to entice the space to collaborate in the creation and performance of the work. more on ben |
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| Interval music will be a composition by Stephen Eyre "The Breaking of the Waves". | |
Self Assembly Project Space, 7pm - 8pm35 City Arcade Coventry CV1 1DD. locationFREE Event | |
| Self Assembly Starting from the global phenomenon of ‘Ikea Hacking’ nine artists have been reinventing and repurposing everyday products in ways never intended by their designers. To close the six week project, a special opening of the exhibition will take place on Friday 25 September, 4-8pm with some of the artists involved present to talk about the experience of reflecting on making art about shops, within a shop. Taking part in the exhibition are Matt Boynton, Rachael Elwell, Ryan Gibbins , Mark Hancock, Josh Hancock, Johnny O’Hanlon, Janet Vaughan, Vortex Creates, and Louise Taylor. more on self assembly |
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The Herbert, 10am - 5pmJordan Well, Coventry, CV1 5QP. locationFREE Exhibitions - Full details coming soon. | |
| Felicity Pell ‘Triangulated Relief’.
Felicity’s contemporary art and craftwork explores the dynamic tension between the ‘handmade’ and the ‘industrial’. Through location and site, referencing the architectural extension of the Herbert’s modern grid-shell roof. Her current research investigates tessellation and exemplifies how mathematics can unify the aesthetic, natural and rational worlds. With an interest in illusion and chaotic patterning, she has subsequently developed new experiments with material. Felicity is postgraduate student at Coventry School of Art and Design.
“Through the Spaces Speak project and my related MA research, I have discovered and manifest a passion for minimal architecture, design, geometric forms, industrial surfaces and tactile materials”.. Located in the Herbert Foyer (facing gallery 3) |
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| Andrew Rowe will be exhibiting his hands-on sonic sculpture "enlarged jack plug touchable mains hum instrument and rehoused effect box amalgamation, yes" for you to play with and generally annoy gallery staff. more on andrew |
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| You will have the opportunity to see Nisha Duggal's stunning and mesmeric video installation, "Machine" "Machine investigates the interaction between two subjects. A grid format is used as a composite of many heads, separately shot and now symmetrically organised and disembodied within a black void. Despite their separation, their actions correspond throughout the work via a 'copying mechanism' familiar to the viewer." |
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| Hannah Downing uses CCTV footage as raw material for her oil paintings that explore the line between observation and control. "I hope to question where reality lies within the realism of the images. Imitating the look of the CCTV image with paint on canvas divorces the style from the presence as witness of the original medium and asks whether it is possible to contemplate one without the other." |
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| “Findings ” by Sarah Casey forms part of a corpus of projected drawings each composed of layered sheets of etched glass brought into visible existence though OHP. Developed from studies of microscopy and light-dependent medical imaging processes, this series of work deconstructs these forms of scientific imaging technology, and repositions them to develop a means of drawing to articulate the otherwise hidden or overlooked. more on sarah |
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| Binary by Wil Bolton is inspired by the Victorian wallpaper at Oxburgh Hall, a Tudor manor house in Norfolk. Computer software was used to convert a photograph of the wallpaper into sound, which was digitally edited and processed to produce a haunting atmospheric soundscape. The sound was also transferred back into images printed onto canvas, ghostly echoes of their origins. more on wil |
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Ode to the Appliance by Tom Richards is an electronically nonsensical and mysterious piece. It is over-engineered and old fashioned looking, harking back to 1970s science labs and James Bond villains. It is a lament for craftsmanship and quality in an age of ever more miniature and throwaway mass-produced and consumer led electronics.
Its ever changing rhythmic loops buzz and click away as if it is malfunctioning, which is in fact true. The machine has been designed to abuse its own components. |
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| Emilie Gould will be exhibiting her video installation, "Meadow House 1 and 2" which explores the psychological effects of architecture and the anxiety and pressure created by a space. |
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| "Ghosts", a sonic installation by Barry Farrimond, seeks to explore perceptions of both physical space and physical presence. As audience members make their way up or down the staircase at the Herbert Gallery they are accompanied by various sonic apparitions that ascend and descend with them, walking past or even seeming to pause and listen to the installation when they find audience members doing so themselves, and moving off only when they think no one is there any more. The work invites audience members to question their role in this exchange: Who is listening to who? Who is the installation? more on barry |
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Browns, 10am - 11pmEarl Street, Coventry, CV1 5RU. location / more infoFREE Event | |
| Holly Birtles will be showing some of her beautiful collection of large-scale metamorphosed photos 'Mechanical Selection'. "The work creates a sense of evolution - a process of evolution that not only incorporates the transmutation of mechanics - but demonstrates the transition of a person's physical and sensory perception of reality." more on holly |
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The Tin Angel, 12pm - 11pmMedieval Spon Street, Coventry, CV1 3AX. location | FREE Event|
| Facsimiles by Sarah Casey is a series of drawings of found objects worked on discarded fax paper which explore the liminal space that we call ‘lost’: a place between loser and finder, a territory charted only by the object establishing a distant connection between two unknown individuals. "This work stems from my ongoing interest in the dialogues between maker and machine, and results from my doctoral research developing hybrid forms of draughtsmanship to articulate the delicate or fugitive by usurping unpicking technologies and procedures designed to make sense of the visually elusive." more on sarah |
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