Last week, Jimmy and I went to West Bromwich to attend a Digital Archiving conference organised by the lovely Screen WM people. Excellent event, with truly inspirational talks from Tony Ageh, the Home of Metal project and the National Fairground Archive. Perhaps most encouraging was the realisation that many of the activities we’re currently engaged in, both with the NVA and GameCity, are already forming some of the more progressive outputs of other archival projects. We’re currently failing to fully understand the potential significance and draw the right frame around much of what we do- number one in a relatively short list of things to urgently fix in 2010.
The venue for the day was the extraordinary ‘Public‘ arts space, situated at the edge of the West Brom shopping centre, which has not been without its share of well-documented problems(incidentally, Vaizey – depite his apparent hostility to the building, opened the whole day). It’s one of the strangest, emptiest, biggest, pinkest,most confusing buildings I’ve ever seen. As Jimmy remarked, it’s like being battered with a hammer made of air. Anyway, after walking round the venue we made our way to the summit where we came upon a fun animation installation/ tool which a nice bloke insisted on explaining to us. The Public is a strange, probably ill-advised building – but the stewards within it are very friendly.
Notes:
The local Express & Star was leading with a story about a dog that is a hero.
West Bromwich has no train station, but is easily accessible via tram.