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JEM NOBLE, ROD MACLACHLAN
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Blackout Arts is an art collective. Established in 2002, we create audio, visual and mixed-mode art works. We also design, curate and manage events for the delivery of such work. Evolving from Bristol’s inspirational, amorphous arts enclave and world-leading Microplex – The Cube Cinema – Blackout Arts is playful, serious and open to suggestion. Our work includes collaboration with professional and non-professional artists and social groups to produce challenging art work and events.
Blackout’s own creative productions include installation and performance using: generative, composed and found sound; live-feed, self-produced and found video; integrated RSL radio broadcasts; and site-specific, multi-screen and mobile video projection. (see ARCHIVE)
Blackout Arts’ creative practice evolves through shared concerns with the relationships between sound, image and space; with the possibilities generated through dialogue between creative practice and location; with the development of coherent collaborative opportunities for making and presenting work; and with engaging new audiences through subversion of the familiar.
Jem is a mixed-mode artist and music creator for whom a core interest in sound has generated a wider fascination with the relationships between sound, image and space. His work encompasses solo and collaborative projects including sound and video installations, audio-visual compositions, performed film-rescores and improvised electronic music performance.
Jem arrived in Bristol in 1996 to take up a position in public relations following a three-month stint in a West Midlands road gang, prior to which he had completed an honours degree in philosophy. After four years in the corporate sector, during which time he dabbled in band management and arts promotion, he left to take up the challenge of full-time parenting and began developing both his own creative practice and the promotion of cross-platform arts events that would provide a forum for his own work and for work by artists with similar concerns.
Jem’s growth as an artist and individual owes much to the influence of The Cube Microplex: the unique, volunteer-run cinema and experimental arts space in Bristol with which he has been a long-standing collaborator.
Video Artist, VJ , AV Technician, Production designer and sometime sculptor.
Rod still likes to think of himself as a Sculptor as this is how his brain approaches his various creative projects. However since arriving in Bristol in 1999 he has been lured into the thriving video and film experimentations that Bristol is so rich in. Rod’s work since has involved video and light installations, VJing shenanigans, and production design for arts events and music festivals. He has often worked collaboratively with community groups, musicians and Artists.
When away from his all engulfing internet reality Rod finds time to dabble
with more sculptural, alchemical endeavors; making a mess with dust, fizzing
chemical elements, candles, light sources, plants and spinning sticks as he
attempts to conjure golden video collages from base matter.
Rod is lucky enough to have his hybrid film re-edits Point to Point (Zabriskie
Point meets Vanishing Point) and Bug Planet (Phase VI melds with Microcosmos)
rescored live by Granzon Nodo.
As an eclectic VJ Rod has provided visuals for a hugely diverse range of acts
from Herbert’s big band to Melt Banana, Mark Stewart, Pete Tong and
Oxbow.
Rod runs Beam Productions.
He studied sculpture at Chelsea and Glasgow Art Schools.
Former actor, ghostwriter and international business person he is also longstanding involver of the arts. His solo work is normally consigned to give-a-ways and aliases. Chiz’s collaborative work within artist groups over the last twenty years has been his main focus and contribution to various economies. He has been involved, set up and contributed to Whose House, Jimell Brigades, Salter Film Society, The Cube Cinema, Downtown Movie Lounge, Chiz ‘n’ Dave and SGX’. Key projects include Ghostland Rave, My Future Wife, Compass, New Age Travelers In A Field Near You, Blackout Sound Cinema, DoZY and reams of time-lag poetry. Work includes conception, film, music, photography, fine art, installations, surveillance and location heavy multi-media pieces. As a musical tour adventurer he works with Mark Slater on Qu Junktions and with lots on The Venn Festival.
As a contributor and programmer work and ideas have appeared within subterranean zines as well as niche and mainstream festivals and organisations incl: Gunfight29, Naked, The Wire, BBC News, Dialect Radio, Independent Heroine, Lovebytes and Sleevenotes.
Chiz’s work scratches a line between lo-res strategy and hi-end lethargy. Elemental production, oil bubble cinematics and popular adventure fiction are strong aesthetic and thematic pulses throughout his work. Tendering him up as high entertainment and melodramatic (the audience and emotion are always vital to his work) and provocative and brutal (he recently had the plug pulled on a music project at a leading art gallery). His work is best without notes.