**COMMENT OF THE PAGE**
Hetain Patel:At Home exhibition

For every page of the comment book in the NAE gallery we're picking the best comment and publishing it on the blog... will your comment be **COMMENT OF THE PAGE**?

Name: Laura Millward

Age: 28

Job on the blog: errm not quite sure what the title for this would be.. maybe Picture Editor or something visual sounding?

Favourite creative: 

Craig Thompson

A bit about you and what you do: 

I work as a Creative Designer, and love to draw and take photos in my spare time. I can also be found reading comics, drinking tea and rifling through old records in charity shops.

Hetain Patel Launch

Name: Alice Thickett


Age: 23


Job on the blog: General Overseer


Favourite creative: 
Keith Tyson. And any geek that works with Data Visualisation.


A bit about you and what you do: 
I work at the NAE on the front desk so you'll see me about. I manage a project group called No Official Name and try to make time to make my own artwork and buy other people's! 

LAUNCH AND RE-LAUNCH!

So with tonight being the launch of the new main gallery exhibition at NAE from Hetain Patel, WE'RE RELAUNCHING THE BLOG!!

Our first posts will welcome some of the new team who are going to work hard to keep the blog going! They're a nice bunch!

If you have anything to say about art or the NAE, get in touch by emailing alice@nae.org.uk

Tara for now mi ducks!

Some words from our director...

“…Launching 2012 with Rashid Rana is thrilling. Rana works out of Lahore, Pakistan and brings to the UK a body of work challenging the representation of photography within objects. His practice is informed and contextualised by paradox and contradiction, capturing simplicities, extremities and opposing perspectives in his art. Rashid’s work is shockingly brilliant in both size and concepts. He is recognised as one of the most significant artists from the South Asian region. His work of course transcends borders and his place in contemporary visual art is recognised globally. With his entourage of enthusiasts, he could be likened to a travelling rock star; apt considering contemporary Pakistan’s fascination with rock music. We have a full program of films, talks, performances, workshops and debates responding to the array of complexities highlighted in Rashid’s work…”

Skinder Hundal

Culture Cloud - The Birth of the idea Part 2

The Birth of the idea Part 2

Returning from MAC (Midlands Art Centre) I distributed the notes I had collected between a team of NAE staff we had chosen to work on the cloud project. We had Andy Lindley our Technical Manager, Skinder Hundal our chief executive, Ravi Abbott (Me) project Assistant and Islam Muhammad EVS Volunteer. We sat around a table and started discussing what we thought the aims of the project would be and what NESTA would want. We found three very important points that would change our direction of thinking thus changing the project outcomes. The first point was that they were not focusing on new methods of creating interactive art and displaying it. This meant that the idea of interactive screens or robotic heads was not viable.  The Second important point was that they wanted a testable proposition, this meant that we could not make it over complex and it had to be created with current technology. The final important point was that they wanted control to be in the hands of the audience, this would mean it needed to be interactive but that interactivity must count towards something.

We became more focused on the cloud idea, this seems to be the idea that could be made less complicated. With making it a testable proposition we could achieve it by doing it on a much smaller scale then the initial idea. We could simply have one initial cloud based around the NAE area. We could allow artists to upload and share work. We decided to choose visual arts as an initial platform as arts as a subject matter is so wide spread it would be very complex to organise it and pointless for a trail.

We still did not have a name. We were coming up with different ideas, combinations of cloud and community. After jokingly suggesting Boy George’s ‘Culture Club’ we simple swapped the club for cloud. This seemed to fit and roll off the tongue well.

We still needed to define the idea, we had a good base for an online community but how do we bring this community into the gallery space (this is the whole aim of the project). We came up with lots of ideas such as interactive boards, displaying art works on the tram, projection on the side of the NAE. Eventually Andy Lindley suggested we simply made a box in the gallery space. This box would display the works digitally and people could come and see their work displayed in the gallery space.  This box would contain a Pc with a high quality screen or projector. We named this simply ‘media box’

This idea was strong but we felt it would not appeal to people who were not used to or unsure of visiting an art space. We needed something extra to pull them in. Skinder decided to get some advice from art companies and contacts he knew. 

Part 3 Coming soon

by Ravi James Abbott Project Assistant