Época

We are extremely excited to see the extInked project featured on the website of Época, a weekly publication in Brazil. To see the finished article entitled 'Tatuagens para salvar a natureza' (Tattoos to save Nature) please click here, alternatively you can visit the extInked blog for a translated version.

EXT INKED hit the radio waves!

106.1 Rock Radio Manchester invited Jai Redman and Timo Ten Feld to join Steve Berry on the breakfast show to talk about EXT INKED the forth coming UHC project celebrating Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday.

To download and listen again to this interview please see the EXT INKED profile page.

The Carbon Map

The Carbon Map created by UHC in 2007 as a commission for Platform for the Transport Planning Society will soon be on show at Arnolfini, a centre for contemporary arts in Bristol.

Artist-activist group PLATFORM and their collaborators propose C Words, a two-month investigation into carbon, climate, capital and culture. Based on PLATFORM's 25 years of research, art and action, C Words cross-examines the present and looks to the next two decades. How did we get here? Where are we going? Who's deciding? Who's made invisible? Whose future matters? PLATFORM members will be in residence at Arnolfini throughout the project.

Over 25 events, installations, performances, actions, walks, courses, discussions and skills-sharing will build towards the moment of public departure to the protests at the contested COP 15 in Copenhagen. This isn't art which merely describes the problems of climate justice. C Words investigates how everything from carbon offsets and transport, to racism and bank accounts play their part in the carbon web. How will culture be produced in a low energy future? Can we imagine our way from here to there?

The Carbon Map will form part of the exhibition entitled - C Words: Carbon, Climate, Capital, Culture, How did you get here and where are we going? The show will open on Saturday 3rd October 2009 through to Sunday 29th November.

Dyeing Breeds

Ext Inked has received further acclaim in the August 09 issue of Bizarre Magazine (UK). The article features information about UHC's latest and most controversial new art venture which invites 100 volunteers to become 'ambassadors' for a threatened species of insect, animal or plant and have a picture of it tattooed on their skin. Bizarre have also been given an exclusive peek at several of the designs including the Great Yellow Bumble Bee and the Erratic Ant created by UHC's co-founder Jai Redmen.

To find out more about Ext Inked or to register your interest in becoming an ambassador please visit the UHC website.

One and All

Our very own Joe Richardson was one of eight artists invited to take part in the 'I Don't Know About Community Networks But I Know What I Like' project organised by Alison Kershaw. The works were featured in the One and All exhibition at the Castlefield Galley, which ran from 3 April to 17 May 2009. 

   

 A review of this exhibition featured in the June issue of A-N Magazine.

Limited Edition Sushi

UHC has had the pleasure of working with Greenpeace for the Limited Edition Sushi Campaign, the aim of which is to stop trendy restaurant Nobu selling endangered species on their menu.

We are happy to see this campaign featured in the London Evening Standard newspaper and hope that through generating awareness for this issue people will realise that serving endangered species in restaurants such as Nobu is not cool!  

To find out more about this campaign please visit www.greenpeace.org.uk/nobu and watch www.endoftheline.com.

EXT INKED - en4m.org.uk

100 tattoos for conservation

"EXT INKED aims to show that our generation cares about the future of all species and is prepared to prove it in blood, sweat and tears", explain the organisers.

The project is launched today, on Darwin's birthday. "We really feel that Darwin would appreciate our desire to creatively celebrate evolution, the sheer beauty of these species and the human effort needed to save them," a participating artist writes.

EXT INKED is a new art project from Ultimate Holding Company, in conjunction with the Marine Conservation Society and Buglife (The Invertebrate Conservation Trust). Ultimate Holding Company is an award-winning, radical art and design collective operating in the heart of Manchester since 2002.

Volunteers will be permanently tattooed with the image of their chosen mammal, invertebrate, bird, reptile, fish or plant.

To keep EXT INKED free and avoid sponsorship, they are aiming to raise £5,000 from the public. They want the event to be free to attend and hope that it will attract a new wave of interest in conservationism.

With every successful free tattoo the project will create a new ambassador for another threatened species - a living exhibition of Charlie’s other angels!

If you think EXT INKED is a good idea and would like to help then sign up to the newsletter on their website linked below.

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, are dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us...” -Charles Darwin 'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection'

a little deeper

Art for art’s sake, ‘eye candy’ culture, an excess of passive entertainment, sanitisation vs street art, corporate conformity swapping independent identity…stop us if you want to get off yet. And while yours head’s still spinning from the merry-go-round of the Games, prepare for the Blitz. Cue sexily subversive soundbite: ‘We didn’t want to be bad kids, TV made us do it.’

Art for those intent on kicking in their television sets and doing something far more interesting instead comes to us courtesy of the Blitz Festival this month, promising a line-up of ‘consciously creative’ cultural events intent on providing some very welcome relief from the pre-packaged novelty-lite world of entertainment happening elsewhere.

Organised by local arts collective nATo (the Northern Arts Tactical Offensive), for one week only the festival is set to launch this particular arts offensive on the city to encourage city dwellers and visitors alike to think twice about the confines of ‘entertainment’ and the possibilities of public art. Agitate – an artistic exhibition of huge scale and ambition –brashly and rather brilliantly borrows space from the soon-to-be shopping mall of the Great Northern Warehouse to sell (amongst other things) its anti-consumerist and anti-corporate ideas.

Artists involved include infamous Crass album cover designer Gee Vaucher (pictured), contemporary art installations from the likes of Dickie fom Dundee’s self-contained live sound installation Black Box (pictured) and the UHC collective’s take on the less than sound claim of the Situationist intent behind the Factory Façade (also pictured below). Local graffiti, street and stencil artists are also offered a platform for expression minus the council’s pest-control. Elsewhere, a variety of photographers, painters and performance artists, including a more mindblowing live performance than most from The Jackofficer,and alternative film, video, multimedia and musical food for thought abound. Go play with the boundaries.

HANA BORROWMAN

Running until 27 July at Units 25-28, 1st floor, Great Northern Warehouse, Great Northern Square, Deansgate, M2 and The Greenroom, Whitworth Street. Opening times of exhibition 12noon-7pm. For more info and full programmes of events/ individual event times see www.nato.uk.net (also see listings sections for information on a series of multimedia film nights co-ordinated by BeyONdTV, presenting a selection of grassroots independent media).