Monthly Archive for January, 2005

Off to Smithdown Rd again, that’s twice this week I’ve left the city centre, gosh! But its always nice to visit this friendly cafe with its LIssue gallery. The latest exhibition has paintings by Peter Barker, photographs by Joan Evans and Mike Badgers small sculptures.
Mike is famous for his fascinating sculptures of cars, ships, planes etc. made from recycled bits of metal. He was also a founder member of the La’s, I didn’t know that until I visited his website where you can see examples of his work.
In the back room there are Joan’s photographs of Liverpool and New York. I thought the NY ones had a timeless quality, the bustling streets and tall apartment blocks with those ubiquitous external fire-escapes.
The main area of the cafe has Peter’s paintings, all oil on canvas. There are some geometric shapes like the one pictured here which is called ‘Where’s the Point’, some others are similar to the landscapes of the surrealists inhabited by strange looking people and objects. Also a couple look a bit sci-fi with a glowing moon hanging over a dark atmospheric landscape. ‘Coffeemoon’ which is hanging above the archway is a good example of this. All the works are for sale at reasonable prices.

Regular readers will have noticed that Stuart Ian Burns has been posting to the blog for a while now. Stuart has been blogging far longer than I have. His feelinglistless blog is always a good read and he’s well respected in the online community. (He may even be highly regarded in the offline community too but I wouldn’t know). He recently started a collaborative blog called heardsaid to which I ocassionally post and was recently pick-of-the-day on the Guardian News Blog

Now Kaye Kent has joined us and her first post should appear soon. Kaye works as an art consultant for a local company has previously worked for Sothebys and the Mall Galleries and studied art to MA level. So I’m sure Kaye will be providing us with more professional articles and criticisms than my rather amateur efforts.

I’ve just returned from seeing Aleks Krotoski’s talk at the FACT regarding social interactions within virtual worlds and their implications within the real world. It’s a fascinating topic and was thoroughly explored in a talk which carefully balanced itself between introduction for newbies and explanation for the more knowledgable.

I haven’t actually played within any of these virtual worlds. Never actually being a very good gamer, and with my dial-up connection I spend more of my time online reading and writing. I tend to have quite an addictive/compulsive personality though, so assuming I could get to grips with a game in a meaningful way, hours and days of my life would disappar.

It’s interesting to compare the gaming experience or use of the internet with mine, and how even within my limits I still have a sort of online social life and at times it can be as intense as that felt by those who ‘live’ within a games environment and possibly moreso because I don’t have the face of a character or avatar to hide behind and neither does anyone else. Generally (within a weblog for example) what you see in what you get. Generally.

This is one of those entertainment forms which is yet to reach the popular mainstream in the UK, but is massively popular in other parts of the world. In Korea, for example, which has the strongest broadband infrastructure in the world, people spend more time playing these games than they do watching television to the extent that broadcasters are hemoraging and there are rumours that when Rupert Murdock tries to enter the country’s media, it’ll be in the in form on an online world and not as a television channel.

The event was absolutely the sort of the thing the FACT centre does very well. The space, The Box, is perfect with its couches and screen (although how it works as a cinema is a discussion for another time). It was busy tonight as well, a sell out, but I’m sure if it had been in a larger venue that would have been packed also. But the intimate atmosphere was condusive to the ensuing discussion after the talk during which we found out the audience included lawyers, game designers and gamers, so it was a tragedy when the timeslot and the need I think to show a film brought everything to an abrupt end. We could have chatted on for hours.

I went out to Smithdown Rd today, the South end of the road seems to be relatively thriving these days. I wanted to check out what was happening in the LIssue gallery which is in the Urban Coffee Lounge. The ‘Incredible Indelible’ exhibition finished recently so no surprise to find Lis Edgar there busily hanging pictures for the next show which starts on Saturday 29th, private view on Friday 7-9pm but I don’t have full details yet. In April there’ll be an exhibition by photographer Ben Zuhlcke, after that things change as there’ll be a series of shows curated by art students. Should be interesting.

Then just over the road I took my first look at the new South Bohemian gallery which opened in December. Its quite a large double-fronted shop space which seems to extend a long way back and its full of art of various styles and standards. There’s some good stuff by professional artists alongside some not-so-good amateur stuff but everything is reasonably priced and affordable and things seem to be turning round quite well.

The proprietors of both these places, Rosie at Urban Coffee and Peter at Bohemian are keen to involve the local community as much as they can. There’s craft workshops at Urban and painting classes at Bohemian. I’m sure I’ll be writing about them again soon.