Averaged Selly Oak
The other week I paid a visit to Claire Farrell of EC-Arts who was setting up the base for her current project 48 Sheet in one of the many empty shop units in the Mailbox. Claire, you’ll remember, was responsible for my exhibition at the Library last year which challenged me in such a way that I pretty much quit the style of art I was doing (TTV photography) and started from scratch again (the stuff you’re seeing on this site right now). So it was good to catch up.
I hadn’t submitted anything to 48 Sheet because I don’t think I’m ready right now but having talked to her about it I thought I’d see how I might approach it. With 48 Sheet she’s acquired a bunch of billboards around the city which artists can use as exhibition space. Some are alone, some are clustered. And that’s about it. The artists have a large rectangle to play with.
I decided to take the IMG_4228 piece as a starting point and downloaded 1,568 photos from a “Selly Oak” search on Flickr using the Bulkr app. A churned these through the same process as IMG_4228 and came up with this:
Which I then composited onto a screenshot from Google Maps (above). It’s fairly pleasing, though I’m not sure exactly what it’s saying.
The next step, I guess, would be to sample other areas in Birmingham and see how they compare. Maybe I’ll try that later.