Arts Council England are looking for arts organisations to apply to become Random Acts Network Centres. These new centres will operate in partnership with Channel 4 and will play a supporting role in the mentoring of new talent from 16-24 year olds by providing education, training and production support. The intended outcome is for the Network Centres to produce around 120 short films per year.

5 partnerships will form each network within the five Arts Council Areas (London, North, Midlands, South East, South West). Films produced at the centres will air on the Random Acts strand on television which is anticipated to have a prominent time slot.

For more information and to make an application, see the Arts Council website. Watch some of the existing 500+ Random Acts film on the Random Acts website.

Deadline: 29 September

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter

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Find more opportunities in our weekly bulletin here.

What:
The Gallery of Lost Art, an immersive online exhibition which reveals the stories behind lost artworks from some of the world’s most famous artists, has won the Interactive Art Award at South by Southwest (SXSW), the world’s largest interactive media festival.

Designed by ISO for Tate in partnership with Channel4, the innovative project takes the form of a virtual gallery, bringing together fragments of lost treasures to be explored online.

Each item, now destroyed, stolen, or erased from the real world, is shown on a table that contains an array of media fragments – all that is left of the original artworks. They include artist’s notes and letters, archive images and videos, eyewitness reports and press reviews. The tables are grouped in thematic areas, each dealing with a concept around loss in art.

Visitors are free to explore the individual pieces by unpacking each table and exploring the digital assets released; building a personal interpretation of the artworks as they reveal the stories behind each incident. Stacks of pictures can be revealed, high-resolution images zoomed into and explored and rich media clips played back, with supporting curatorial essays. A visitor blog allows users to ‘see behind the scenes’ of the exhibition, post their own contributions and links to the project, and engage with the curatorial staff.

A richly interactive and multi-layered experience, the project so impressed the SXSW judging panel in Austin, Texas, that the British production outshone some very strong entries from major players such as Disney, Cirque du Soleil and MoMA to win the Interactive Art award.

Jane Burton, creative director at Tate Media, said: “We had stiff competition for the award, so winning was fantastic. I’m really proud of the project and of our collaborators, the brilliant Glasgow-based agency ISO Design, who put so much into this. I hope that winning will bring The Gallery of Lost Art to a whole new audience.”

Tate and Channel4’s collaboration on The Gallery of Lost Art is rooted in a shared commitment to high quality arts content, creativity and digital innovation. As the Tate’s first purely online exhibition, it has given the gallery unprecedented insight into online user behaviour and the demand for deep and rich curated content. Channel4 is to broadcast documentaries specially created within the project as part of its ‘Shooting Gallery’ strand.

The Gallery of Lost Art shows how archives can be unlocked and explored in innovative, non-linear ways by audiences and how digital tools can be used to create installations impossible to host in the real world.

The project itself will become ‘lost’ when the site is destroyed in July, leaving behind a trail of digital fragments. The Gallery of Lost Art will live on as both an iBook and a physical book.

For now however, the project is still live and can be accessed here.

Find out more:
Website | Blog | Facebook | Twitter

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For more creative delights we’ve Spotted on the web take a look here.

What:
Art on the Underground aims to provide a top notch programme of contemporary art that enriches the Tube environment and their customers’ journey experience. Artist Michael Landy has been asking commuters for Acts of Kindness they’ve encountered on the Underground. As well as placing these stories in locations on the Tube, he has  also made a series of animations illustrating these which can be seen on Channel 4′s Random Acts website.

Acts of Kindness by Michael Landy

Bob & Roberta Smith are collaborating with Film Director Tim Newton for their Who is Community? series which will bring together a variety of different elements including a film telling the story of a fictional meeting between Pierre de Coubertin, father of the modern Olympics, and the German theorist Hannah Arendt.

Why we like it:
Brightening up the mundane circulation spaces in London, this project is perfect to counteract the otherwise rather dull environment.

Find out more:
Website | Facebook | Twitter

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For more creative delights we’ve Spotted on the web take a look here.

Random Acts is a new arts series currently showing nightly on Channel 4.

Television as art, rather than about art, Random Acts is providing a platform for both established and emerging visual artists to create their own pieces and experiment with form, unfettered by the conventions of traditional arts television. Spanning spoken word, dance, animation, fashion photography, video art and music.

The series has already created a stir with its distinctive approach to arts coverage – showcasing exciting new work from artists as varied as film-maker Emily Wardill, musicians Pepstar and Clean Bandit and dance team the BalletBoyz. Over the coming months the likes of Ghostpoet, David Shrigley and Sergei Polunin will all have original commissions in the strand.

Random Acts has also unearthed and given a platform to the most imaginative young talent in the UK, working with organisations such as Dazed & Confused, Vice, Tate Media, and Lupus Animation as well as developing partnerships with The Saatchi Gallery, Frieze, Film London and the Jarman Awards to uncover new artists.

If you haven’t seen the films yet, or you have missed the odd one take a look at the online gallery bringing together all of the films broadcast so far. You can also follow the chat on twitter by using #RandomActs.

Central Station was launched in September 2009. It began life as an ambitious digital project that could be used as a tool to facilitate creative works, as well as a place to make connections. The birth of the project can be read in full here in the opening pages of the Central Station book (it’s an interesting read, you should have a look).

We commissioned projects with professional partners and organisations, such as: Sound Image Art with Roddy Buchanan & Savalas; White Bikes with NVA; Phil Kay does GI; Social Landscape with David Zarah & Patricia Fleming Projects; Shadow Screen with Paul Kerlaff; Art/Roc/Doc to name just a few. We had pop-up events in Glasgow & in Dundee and, on top of this, we gave away £1500 a month to projects within our community. You can read all of these in the Member Fund blog.

It was a self contained community where members were showcased and encouraged to promote and discuss their work and methods. Fast forward to September 2011, and the Central Station community on Facebook & Twitter are just as vocal and active as the membership on the site. Somewhere in the past 2 years artists and creatives have embraced social networks as a form of promotion and audience building. We liked what we saw and got to work on finding ways to shift our methods to better suit the changing environment.

Cut to the new – improved – Central Station.

Our ethos stays the same – we aim to support, showcase and make accessible creative work from Scotland, the UK and beyond. How we go about doing it has changed slightly. With progression in technology comes some brilliant advancements in how creatives can engage online. All of our content is an amalgamation of this engagement.

We’ve selected a handful of networks where we will have a presence. These were chosen carefully from investigating where our site members were uploading their work and from talking to the community. That isn’t to say that we won’t add to them later – we love a social network and are always open to suggestion – we just wanted to stay contained for the moment until we all have a chance to work together in this new wider network.

We’ve divided our networks into two ways of communicating: Creative platforms [such as Vimeo & Behance] to build a database of creatives who want to share their work and find others to work with; and Social platforms [like Twitter & StumbleUpon] to showcase these members of our creative community. It’s more a networks of networks, if you like.

So there you have it. Supported by Creative Scotland and engineered by ISO, Central Station Mark II is just what it says on the tin – The Creative Social Network.

01. Handyman at Butlins. 

This involved making small repairs to holiday chalets – among the most common was repairing window locks. It was Minehead in Somerset and I was a teenager. I worked out what I thought was the perfect scam with two Scottish chalet-maids, I reckoned that if they listed bogus problems at their chalet I would then go and ‘repair’ them. We were caught within a week and disciplined but not sacked.

02. Assistant Northern and rare soul scene.
I moved from Perth to the North of England at 18 to pursue a lifetime passion for northern and rare soul. My job was unpacking records and then later in life acting as a ‘finder’ – an assistant who discovers records in ghetto shops in the USA, this coincided with studying for my PhD in the USA. I specialised in Washington DC.

03. Journalist – Black Echoes & NME. 

I started off writing for soul fanzines and moved to Black Echoes as a feature writer, then up through the ranks to become Media Editor of the NME, after a brief spell lecturing in Film and Media and boring people rigid about the semiotics of cinema. I was in very real danger of surrendering to the full-blown pretension.

04. Producer and Company owner Big Star.
From 1990 onwards against the backdrop of Glasgow’s reign as European City of Culture I set up and ran one of Scotland’s most successful indies – Big Star, which produced the po-mo variety-show Halfway to Paradise. I worked with my business partner Don Coutts a key ally and mentor. I loved running my own company but if truth be told its a tough gig, success brings with it more pressures and creative responsibilities than failure.

05. Channel 4 

After a few years running the indie start-up Big Star I went to a producer day and was effectively poached by Channel 4 to join them as a commissioner in first Independent Film and Video working with new talent like Shane Meadows, Clio Barnard and Paul McGuigan. It was the beginning of a 14-year love-affair that still lasts to this day I am now Director of Creative Diversity. The constants in my life.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

Central Station, Channel 4 and ISO present Shadow Screen with Paul Kerlaff.

Open to all!
Submissions are welcome by creatives of all disciplines for a piece of work which can be interpreted as a design pattern for With Kerlaff’s Shaddow Screen.

A shortlist of ten entrants will be selected for review by an invited panel. We are aiming to promote critical engagement, feedback and positive value for participants.

One design will be chosen for prototyping and will recieve a cash prize of £500, but a licence agreement may be offered to any number of the shortlisted entrants.

What is Shadow Screen?
Shadow Screens are sheets of rubber or aluminium. They are water jet or laser cut using patterns designed by leading textile artists. The Shadow Screens are used as freestanding room dividers, hanging panels and window panels in a variety of architectural and interior design projects.

Any patterns used remain the Intellectual Property of the artists and a percentage royalty is paid through a licence agreement with Paul Kerlaff. Current designers include Timorous Beasties and Jacqueline Poncelet.

Your Design
Be as creative as you like. Although the pattern range to date has been photograms of natural forms (maple leaves, flowers, birds) we are keen to see what else could work with the model. The sky’s the limit.

Submission instructions
Join the Shadow Screen with Paul Kerlaff group, then send your submission to the Censta dropbox. Don’t forget to let us know your Censta username.

Entries should be submitted in black and white and should be suitable for cutting from sheet material.
Patterns should be suitable for cropping to any proportion.
Please submit in the following format:
jpeg format
176mm high x 68mm wide
300dpi, RGB colour format
Maximum file size is 2GB.

Paul is keen to offer feedback on entries. If you’d like to receive industry feedback, please state that this when you submit your entry. Please note, any entries that have not requested this feedback will not receive it.

Paul will be writing a selections of blogs so keep an eye out here for any updates, or follow us on twitter to be kept up to date.

Here are some links you might find useful:
www.paulkerlaff.com
“Cutting out the flaws of the competition process” blog by Paul Kerlaff
“Process Makes Perfect” blog by Paul Kerlaff
“Waiter! Social Media for One, Please” blog by Paul Kerlaff