Today's idea - The Basement presents Quantick, AND Lighthouse's First Monthly Media Talk

Today TWO fantastic sounding events are taking place. We recommend both wholeheartedly.

The Basement opens their doors to the author behind Brass Eye, the Day Today, and Charlie Brooker's Screen Wipe as he delves into his musical side, showing his face as the songwriter behind the legendary Ian Dury & the Blockheads. Tonight he performs in the Basement's artily titled 'The Space' alongside the Blockhead's Chaz Jankel, and will also provide a brilliant short set. If you don't know who he is, we recommend finding out more about the pop culture critic and finding him on Twitter @quaintick.


Cost: £7.50, £5 concessions
Time: Doors 7:30
Event information: here



SECONDLY, The Lighthouse is launching a Monthly Talks Programme to focus on moving image and digital art, with talks from some brilliant bigwigs from the BFI and art directors. Today's sounds well worth a visit as they invite filmmakers Semiconductor along who have just ended a NASA residency. If you're interested in video, sound and digital animation with a bit of a science spin, this is your thing.

More info: here
Time: Doors 6:30pm, 7pm start
Cost: £3
Tickets: here
Facebook event: here
Twitter: @lighthousearts

Today's idea idea - Berlin Horse by Brian Eno and Malcolm Le Grice

Today we recommend Brian Eno's Berlin Horse. His third exhibition piece for the Brighton Festival, Berlin Horse is based on two sequences - one shot originally in 8mm and re-filmed in 16mm - the other a piece of found early newsreel. Taking place at Lighthouse, Brian Eno creating the music and the film pieces by Malcolm Le Grice.

"The common subject is horses - a horse being exercised and horses being led from a burning stable. Le Grice made Berlin Horse in 1970, with both visual sequences being treated at the London Film Makers Cooperative.

The 8mm sequence was shot in the village of Berlin near Hamburg, northern Germany. It was re-filmed from the screen running the film at different speeds and directions and with the camera at different angles. Later it was re-coloured using theatrical lighting gelatins in the film-printer and subject to multiple superimposition. It was finally combined with early newsreel of horses being led from a burning barn. It is a poetic drama where the sequence of image transformations and the 'narratives' are integrated as the content."

Cost: Free
Time: Tue-Sun (closed Mon) 11am-6pm
Location: Lighthouse, 28 Kensington Street
Map: here

Today's idea - The National Testing Grounds of Live Art

Perplexing and intriguing live art comes today from the National Testing Grounds of Live Art taking place at The Permanent Gallery in response to The National Review of Live Art taking place in Glasgow next weekend. Pushing the boundaries of practice, the focus is on Boundaries, Fluidity and Dislocations, with the comissioned artists explicitly exploring ideas through artists: Mikhail Karikis, Mitch & Parry, Kristin Sherman, Dori Deng and Meta Drcar.

It's all about:

"The boundaries of the body – and the distance between bodies, the exploration of sound and the confinements of our physicality, the limitations of the gallery space, of the self, of the other, of the individual and of group migrations in our geography, identities and disruption across the artistic and the non artistic."

Supported by Lighthouse and curated with Permanent Gallery, two places known for filling up the South Eats arts scene with rich new ideas and provoking thoughts, the event starts at 7pm and costs £4. I've included 'the blurb' below with more details on what each artist does. It's a fine line I suspect between revealing nothing, and describing every details. It seems quite worth an investigation, and lasts for today only.

"For this Testing Grounds event Mikhail Karikis will draw parallels between the nature of the medium of sound and politics of migration; thinking of sound as a perpetual immigrant, always travelling away from its place and material of origin, penetrating invisibly into spaces where it may not be welcome.

Kristin Sherman explores structures of power made manifest through intricate performance machines. Her work for Testing Grounds paints a dark and humorous portrayal of power and control, a system made of bodies, where each actor monitors the other. Taken to extremes, the work questions and challenges our notions of freedom.
Mitch & Parry’s new working project examines the landscape of the body as a space for collecting and exhibiting the stains and marks of loss, love and labour, by developing their work of creating external discourse with internal bodily fluid – creating a tension between provoking and inviting the spectator.

Dori Deng and Meta Drcar’s Measuring series questions the relationship between space and different medias including the body, visuals and sound. The action of measuring is presented physically, but also through mathematical connections, for instance the connection between musical rhythm and time in order to change the dimension and the proportion of the gallery space, twisting our assumption or expectation of a given context."

Today's idea - Bonnie Mitchell: Interactive Installations and Experimental Animation

There's a few today depending on whether you're a digital media type, radio fan, or English geek. There's a peculiar mix of things on today in Brighton and I'm a digital media geek so this one's my favourite, I think - although they're all one-day events so I've got no prior knowledge here.

Bonnie Mitchell, digital artist and academic, is coming to Brighton today. At Lighthouse, on Kensington Street there's the chance to see her exhibition and hear some words on the matter of experimental animation and and creation of interactive art environments that "explore the concept of virtual presence and unencumbered immersion through her use of interactive media and experimental animation." ..I think I could do with a pamphlet to recap this on arrival.

Mitchell's artworks have been around internationally at a whole bunch of anagram-titled places I haven't heard of but immediately hold in revere: SIGGRAPH, SEAMUS, ICMA, ISEA, Prix Ars Electronica, Digital Salon, ArCADE, Gamut, amongst others in a giant list. There have also been awards which also involve large amounts of capital letters too.

There's some more detail below and I'm pretty much sold on the shiny-sounding bits in the last sentence.

"Over the past twenty years Mitchell has developed numerous interactive installations including Virtual Presence (1992), which used a Polaroid sonar sensor to measure the distance of a viewer to the installation, creating a pseudo-dialog between human and machine. Her recent installation 'Inhabitants' immersed the viewer in an abstract world populated with organic entities. Through the use of small handheld projection screens, the viewer caught animated elements projected from the ceiling to the floor to decipher the meaning of the piece. Many of Mitchell's installations explored the sculptural capabilities of light to form 3 dimensional spaces using abstract animation, sensors, projections, and computer programming. The installations often employed elements such as semitransparent scrims, mirrors, hundreds of fluorescent light bulbs and thousands of strands of yarn."

This is all free entry and opens at at 6:30, with the artist's talk at 7pm. Find it on Facebook here and a map here

For English geeks there's also spoken word event 'Sparks' and if you're a fan of Radio Reverb then head to Latest Music Bar where they're holding the show 'Up Yours' in front of a live audience - namely you if you attend.