Forum and Fringe

Due to practice commitments by the artists engaged, this project is now closed for the time being - thanks for your interest and feel free to contact AirSpace at airspacegallery.org for any further enquiry

12 March 2010

Last night - Thanks!

Another brilliant evening at Pecha Kucha vol 2 thanks to the imagination and passion of our presenters and all the friends of Pecha Kucha – a great turnout for a Thursday evening.
From a moving and campaigning account of prostrate cancer to the shambolic brilliance of Denim and Leather via Haiti, the beauty of substations, the value of collaboration, a story of identity and a rich collage of city voices, it ranged across the notes of experience which is how we see the Pecha Kucha project growing as we draw in more interest across the city and beyond.
We are in the early stages and on a learning curve as I brilliantly demonstrated by dropping out the slides of one of the presenters, who took it with great grace! He is our special guest next time out and cloth and ashes have been donned. It was a crazy last day with our dedicated computer crashing and presentations coming in right up to the line, not giving time for the full dummy run (for dummies, ok ok). One question is how we get presentations in early enough
to allow for ironing out everything for the night? As arts or other people, the stuff we do is usually squeezed between survival or bread and butter work, so we don’t want to discourage
anyone. Maybe it has to go on a bit of a knife edge like this until resources are built up a bit.
Anyway it was a great evening and we are looking forward to the next Pecha Kucha on Thursday May 13th! Get the ideas going and we’ll be glad to hear from you as early as you like.
A special thanks to bITjAM who give of there time without pay in a really busy schedule. They came up with a sound environment drawn from everyone’s talking in the room, a great idea. They are based in the Rigger with events every first Thursday of the month – go see, it’s good.

18 Feb 2010

Stoke-on-Trent Pecha Kucha Night - Volume 2 Thursday March 11th 2010

Yes, it's that time again, when originality flowers. We have a great set of presenters burning the midnight oil on their ideas. We look forward to seeing you at one of the coolest events in our fair city. It's free with a dedicated bar and great venue. Check out the Facebook and Blurb sites.

Details: Thursday 11th March Fat Cat Cafe&Bar, Hanley 7-10pm

Pecha Kucha (pronounced “pa-chok-cha” http://www.pecha-kucha.org )is an entertaining way to exchange ideas and experience. The aim is to get people from different walks of life and experience talking to each other in a way that is original, funny, unusual, serious or just different.
Using 20 images in total and a time of 20 seconds per image your presentation is then 6 mins 40 secs.
The format was devised and copyrighted by Royal College of Art architecture graduates Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, working from their multi-disciplined arts business base in Tokyo, originally as a way of getting art and design professionals talking to each other in a focused and inventive way. The idea has spread virally to many different walks of life and many city events have been held around the world.
Stoke-on-Tent becomes the first city in the West Midlands to win permission to hold a programme of Pecha Kucha Nights. This initiative came out of an alliance of two locally based projects, Headtalk, http://www.headtalk.org.uk/ , a project out of AirSpace, http://airspacegallery.org, and Blurb, http://blurbonline.ning.com/. Both these projects are focused on exchange and networking amongst arts people and equally the promotion of dialogue between the arts and other social groupings or communities in Stoke-on-Trent and regionally. We believe the introduction of the Pecha Kucha format to the city is an exciting and effective way to pursue these aims

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