Let´s start with some of my favourite concert venues:

Arena  
The former slaughterhouse is a place where a lot of indie bands are playing. With 3 indoor stages and one open air stage they have the capacity for an audience which range from 50 to 3000 people. The big hall is the main spot for bands like dEUS, Mayer Hawthorne, Melvins, Adam Green, Naked and famous and many more. They have already a great line up for summer 2012 including Bon Iver, M83, Sigur Ros and Patti Smith. There are also a lot of Punk and Hardcore bands playing there. Little side note: Morrissey refused to play in the Arena, because of the history of the building (hint: “meat is murder“). Ticket prices range from 15 – 50 Euros.
How to get there: take the U3 to Erdberg. It´s a 5 min walk to the Arena which is an old brick house with graffiti all over, so you can’t miss it.

WUK
The WUK (an old locomotive factory) is located in the heart of the 9th district. They offer a  concert hall as well as a theatre, cafe and rehearsal rooms. The music program is versatile and I took pics of bands like Portugal. The man, Fink and Iron & Wine to name some. It has a nice foyer where you can have a drink before the concerts start and offer moderate prices for the tickets (15 – 35 Euro)
How to get there: take the U6 to Waehringerstrasse and walk down the street for 3 min.

Fink

Gasometer
The Gasometer consists of four old gas tanks which were revitalised and are used nowadays as apartments and entertainment centre. In one of the tanks is a big concert hall for 5000 people. In this location bands like Feist, Thievery Corporation, White Stripes or Goldfrapp are performing. To be honest the venue doesn’t have the charm of the Arena and the WUK. A big hall for big concerts. Unfortunately, not more. Ticket prizes ranges from 35 – 60 Euro.
How to get there: take the U3 to Gasometer and follow the crowd of people that get out of the underground.

Stadthalle
If you want to go to see the big acts like Manu Chao and Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Stadthalle is the place to be. With a capacity for 10 000 people it’s the biggest indoor concert venue in Vienna, but also the most expensive one. Ticket prizes ranges from 50 – 100 Euro.
How to get there: U6 Burgasse, 3min walk from there

Zola Jesus

Some other small clubs where you can satisfy your indie music needs:

Flex
Cool club for concerts and party all night at one of the danube canals. Hint: “London calling“ every Wednesday

Chelsea
Awesome location. It´s in the Guertelboegen and the train is driving directly above you. The have also special football nights if Chelsea is playing.

B72
Similar location as the Chelsea. Great view for concerts from the top floor.

Fluc + Fluc Wanne
This venue is located near the famous fun fair “Prater“. Here you can also watch a lot of electronic bands like TEED and Caribou.

I hope this short article will successfully guide you through the indie music scene in Vienna . If you have any questions don’t hesitate to drop me a line.

Visit Matthias Hombauer’s website here.
Follow Matthias on Twitter here.

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My Creative Scene is an insight into different creative & cultural happenings in cities where your members and readers live. Browse through more insider guides here or contact us to write about the arts scene where you are.

As Andy Stark, the photography tutor puts it, several of his graduates have successfully ‘transcended art school’. Whilst it’s typical to see students taking on ‘issues’, this isn’t ‘docu-porn’ – here are people who have gone into unchartered territory, lived and breathed their subject matter and thought about relevant ways in which they might affect some change.

Go and seek out James Bettney’s work. Having heard about the plight of Nepalese widows, ostracised by their society on account of long-held reincarnation beliefs, he worked tirelessly to record their lives. These are more than just moving portraits – in themseleves first rate – but complete life stories meticulously recorded and translated, and presented here in a beautiful artists book. He’s in the process of setting up a charity and a website which will be at mutunepal.com

In a similar vein, Sarah Fishlock has worked closely with the Scottish Middle Eastern Council telling highly personal stories of isolated Iraqi’s living in Glasgow, stuck in a cultural and physical no mans’s land after working for the British MOD. Shrouded by official secrecy that prevents their faces being photographed, Fishlock instead trains her camera on incidental details that tell you much about the transient state of the lives she’s documenting.

Alec Farmer’s slick graphic work belies much earthier concerns and practical ideas. His ‘Co-ordinate’ project is one of those devastatingly simple but brilliant ideas harnessing off the shelf technology. He uses reskinned Flickr Maps as the basis for connecting world issues with problem solvers and designers, and although hypothetical it’s easy to see it taking off.

Lu Sisi (another graduate familiar to CenSta members) is a motion graphic exponent who has carved out his own niche through an exploration of the merging of sound and image. His main piece is a tribute to the Heidelberg press in the art school caseroom, which he brings alive with it’s own clanking, whirring sounds boiled down into a sort of breakbeat soundtrack for his stop motion animation. (Industry watchers should note that he recently won an New York Festival Gold, where he was entered into a professional category by mistake!).

Robb Hetherington illustration show is sublime. I initially thought it was graphics, such is the attention to typographic craft and his exploration of the printed medium. He’s reset Samuel Beckett’s ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, his work responding to and translating Beckett’s ideas, produced as one-off monoprints. Made with an innovative technique blending black ink and golden-yellow varnish on perspex plates, each piece is singular and unique, an artwork rather than something set for reproduction. On an adjacent table a monitor showing a Beckett film is placed face down on a scanner, and new ‘translations’ of it – distorted black shapes and scan lines, are pumped out of a printer.

Sebastian Kalvik has an assured maturity about his work, an understanding of classic typography and layout with the conceptual ability to push projects. I’m making it sound dull, but it’s not, his ‘Cultural Cartographies’ and Scott vs Amundsen books are a joy, and will provoke severe designer envy.

Oliver Pitt. Illustration. I’ve used the word sublime already, and I’m not even sure how to categorise this work. Beguiling? Whetever it is it keeps drawing you back in though. And I want to own some of it. I’m also sure I’ll be seeing more of it commissioned. Tutor Dan Williams says that Pitt has ‘created his own visual language… a spiritual space’ and that makes sense when you’re in front of these largely mono works which seem to oscillate,
and describe entirely foreign shapes, objects and areas.

There’s almost too much to mention in detail, so here’s a few more in summary:

Dean Pauley ‘s delicately crafted manuscripts of of spam email;

Walter Hamilton’s ‘Last’ books – brick like documents of the soon to be demolished Foulis building;

Eva Dolgyra’s monoprints;

Rory Hamilton’s holographic type experiments;
Tau Siroko’s – Intertextual newspapers / format posters;
Lynsey Marshall’s HD films, scripted in collaboration with Louise Welsh.

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Thanks to Steve Rigley, Andy Stark, Dan Williams, Edwin Pickstone, Kerry Aylin, Mark Baines, and various students
for letting me in and around on the day.

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City Night Preview tonight – Thursday 9 June

Glasgow School of Art Degree Show 2011 | gsa.ac.uk  for further details.
Open: 11-18 June 2011.
Sat/Sun: 10am – 5pm
Mon – Thu: 10am – 9pm
Fri 17th June: 10am – 7pm

2011 marks a special year for the Glasgow School of Art Degree Show.  It’s the last time there will be a show in the Foulis Building and the Newbery Tower, the twin design obelisks that have faced the Mackintosh building for the past 35 years and are now to be replaced with a fine Steven Holl designed structure.

In this years Fine Art show in the ‘Mac’, there’s evidence of the fluctuating relationship between ‘art’ and ‘design’ – if not a ‘cross-disciplinary practice’ then at least the presence of parellel design languages, and design methods being interpreted. For example, Tim Savage references Buckminster Fuller geodesic domes and QR codes, and Kate Lampitt Adey and Theresa Malanay take textile craft as a starting point to explore feminist issues. Adey’s work references embroidery hoops installed as crafted collaged patchwork canvases, however it’s Malaney’s work which really engages with the internal architecture, semi-opaque monochrome hangings which drape the full double-height of the Mackintosh studios, creating a distinct ‘veil’.

Approaching both the design/fine art and gender politics paradigms in an equally refreshing way is Hells Gibson, whose beautifully understated letterpress posters pepper the vertical slats of the Mac with hard hitting sloganeering. Great graphic design, let alone art.

Hannah Brackston’s “Nomadic Workshop” – featuring a bike pulling a trolley with a tent and tools looks like it’s bumped into graduating visual communication student Alec Farmer’s Nomadic Shelter.   (maybe they could go on a tour together).

There’s plenty of enjoyable spectacle where the artists – perhaps in reaction to the nature of the degree show itself and the pressure to be ‘discovered’ or ‘make it’ – explore a self-exploitative side. The basement of the Mac this year at times resembles a tongue in cheek fetishistic dungeon. Alicia Mathews leads us, via a concealed door and Leonard Cohen, into a sort of onanist’s screening chamber complete with sticky cinema seats and red-lit flock wallpaper, whilst she writhes fully frontal and awkwardly humps a mattress. 

Max Prus manages to combine a vertically challenged scottish actor playing ‘Mark Chapman’ (“you might know me, ahm famous fur killin John Lennon”) in a time travelling fridge, and some rather explicit ‘love’ scenes with himself a friend in a Yoko Ono mask, whilst Ono’s “Mrs Lennon” plays in the background. He’s also aiming to catch Modern Institute curator Toby Webster’s attention by implicating him in Amazon shopping reviews of used pantyhose. “I’m disappointed, these are woolen, not opaque as advertised, this is not the first time…”.

In another darkened cove Claudia Nova invites us to “Applause” [in neon] for her absent self, and signs-off with a Warner Bros. cartoon style “That’s all folks”.

Meanwhile Beth Dynowski simply has a sign-up promising us that she will essentially be installing herself in her space all next week as a performance work. Insert art jokes about ‘absence and the self’ and ‘escaping the confines of the gallery space’ here.

Escaping the basement, there’s still much to seduce you in the large open Mackintosh gallery up the main staircase. You won’t really fail to spot the Alice Metila Steffen’s Essex inspired light installations, made up of white stilettos and a crude sunbed tube table. A must-see for all you TOWIE fans.

For the sheer aesthetic pleasures of good old paint on canvas, there’s Gillian Anderson’s marbled glories, tastefully tonal yet rooted in the process of alchemy and Rorsach ink blot tests.

Meanwhile, one to watch might be Silja Strom, who has a prolific output of intense collaged works

featuring strange distorted mystical creatures. Always great to see development of this type of work too (pictured).

In the same balcony space, Thomas Hatton provides possibly the most assured of the Fine Art Photography bunch, with a ‘barely there’ sort of a show, bleached out desert topographies with painstakingly dodged elements, a nod to a pre-digital craft yet stunningly contemporary.

If, after all this, you feel your senses have been barraged to the point where you can no longer think for yourself, Romany Dear’s installation will happily wrench the balance of control from the viewer back to artist. ”For the next eight minutes I would like to encourage you to fully embrace absolutely everything” a text on the wall instructs.  Dear’s retro cassette tape and headphone audio tour guide then proceeeds, in a Miranda July style deadpan naivety, to gently poke fun at the whole experience of viewing art as it implores the listener/viewer to stroke his chin or ‘become part of an art piece’.

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Glasgow School of Art Degree Show 2011 | gsa.ac.uk  for further details.

Open: 11-18 June 2011.
Sat/Sun: 10am – 5pm
Mon – Thu: 10am – 9pm
Fri 17th June: 10am – 7pm

Last week I walked to London in order to, amongst other things, see the Royal College of Art graduate show (2).

The show was a highly polished affair, a topic i’ll return to later, but as a result it made me think more about whether this type of exhibition is the best vehicle for communication art and design, product and interaction design, and so on. What the alternative would be, i’m not sure, but i can confirm that spending a week looking over the Communication Art and Design (CA&D) publication and associated websites (not a solid week, obviously, as a clarification for any pedants out there) proved a far more interesting experience than the show itself. However I’m not denying that it was a very pleasant day out, and perhaps as good a route into the work as any other.

For an overview of individual students work, these reports offer more detail. Plus: (Interaction Site / C&AD site)

A hot topic of debate around CA&D at the RCA is the imminent arrival of a new head of department. Readers of Creative Review (amongst others) will be aware of the art vs design rumblings (aside: probably best steer clear of the detritus in the comments section, a more accurate analysis of blog-comment-structures here) and the machinations about big-names vs unknowns and false dicotomies of practitioners vs theorists. There are various sides to these arguements, but one thing they possibly have in common is to locate the head of department too centrally (or at the top of a big pyramid) in the eco-system of this course. Interaction design is an interesting case-study at the RCA, as though much of the work is intriguing and engaging and does open up questions of sorts, this year it all felt very much in the mould of a particular type of critical-design, as practised by the course leaders, and though my visit was brief, I didn’t see much which challenged this world-view. Another point to return to later.

Tucked away, and modestly presented, some very interesting projects were on view as part of the RCA/V&A MA History of Design Course, and I’m interested to know how this course interacts with the others.

On that note, I was also very interested in Department 21 which was in evidence at different points and in different departments in the show. A student-led initiative, it took a temporarily empty painting studio and used it as the focus for an ongoing programme of inter-departmental projects, talks and events. This for me is another ‘indicator’ of a desire acrossformal and informal educational experiences for a inter-disciplinary approach. I am not trying to claim that this is a new or radical thing, but am suggesting that the desire is strong and does exist, and that institutions (in their heirarchical, top-down mould) seem incredibly ham-fisted at delivering them, prompting interesting experiments like this one to spring-up.

One particular aspect of dept21 that interested me was a workshop and seminar on ‘de-skilling’. I’m fascinated by the idea of amateurism (in the best sense), and the prospect of an ‘amateur masters course’ (or masters in amateurism) is one i’d (perhaps mis-guided) sign-up for.

In a circular fashion, this brings me back to the emphasis placed on the new head of C&AD, the professionalism of its show, and a wondering about whether the significant developments in the course are likely to happen at its boundaries, and away from any one individual.

With the appointment of Neville Brody, I would hate the CA&D course to come to mirror its leaders. There are already enough supersonic ego’s in design education, and the star-cult of the individual is writ large. Thankfully there are those challenging this view, and even if the appointment was made on that basis, hopefully Brody will fall into this latter camp— I suspect he’s well aware of this potential pit-fall, and am interested to see what happens.

Images: RCA show2, Printers: ©Xavier Antin, and various, and Those that Move, off-site exhibition of Camberwell BA Graphic Design, at the Rag Factory, off Brick Lane.

P.S: Thought this RCA project was good, in relation to Central Station.

Interactive Media @ Dundee Degree Show via imd.dundee.ac.uk

Being a fellow graduate this year – eca, sculpture – this was me checking out the competition. (This is unbiased, promise). Having not been before, I didn’t really have any expectations – these are usually dangerous things to have anyway.

So, after last years expedition down the steps and towards the Tay (I have connections) the degree show is back within the college grounds, swallowed up by the winding corridors and studios everywhere that – my stupidity aside – were rather difficult to negotiate.

(Rather than giving a room-by-room, department-by-department run through of the show, this is my overview of the exhibition, taking into consideration that I’m horrible with remember names, details and everything else that would be useful to anybody.)

Primarily, I was disappointed with fine art as a whole. As I have found with other degree shows – gsa, eca, london schools etc – there are usually a few works/people that either stand out or at least have something interesting about them. Though, to say everything was uninteresting within Fine Art would be a rather harsh and sweeping statement, but generally nothing excited me. There was a slight un-polished finish to a lot of the work – generally a degree show trait – like they were expecting to be down the road again, but didn’t quite make it. (I don’t know the story here, so I’m only guessing).

Brushing this department aside – and again taking my forgetfulness into considerations – the highlight/redeeming part of the show was the Interactive Media department that, though off my tracks somewhat, provided design that was thoughtful, interesting and engaging. (There’s a link at the bottom; they’re all worth a look).

Overall, it was a bit disappointing, suggestive that the design departments of Dundee are producing students who are in turn producing work that is more deserving and demanding of attention.

Interactive Media