If you have a project that you’d like to discuss, you’d like to find out whether we can provide the right type of consultancy service for you or if you’d simply like to ask for some quick impartial advice, you can call us on: 0151 707 4433 or use the contact form and we’ll get back to you.

Happy Christmas everyone!

Image: Michal Marcol / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Our services have historically including AV kit hire, exhibition installations and builds, video services and training. Now, we’re looking to develop those offers to ensure that we can continue to provide the services that are most sought after by artists and arts organisations at subsidised rates.

If you’re an artist or arts organisation, please help us to develop our offer for the industry by completing this survey. It should take no more than 5 minutes.

Thank you!

That the energy harvested during the day can then be used to make an artwork possible beautifully encapsulates Bataille’s notion of art as a form of general economy exemplified in the sun itself. The system that harnesses the sun’s extraordinary power for straightforward and restricted uses, such as supplying energy to the university and to the national grid, is ‘detourned’ to produce a work of art, or in other words something useless according to the restricted economy of reciprocity and exchange. This is, perhaps, the very definition of art itself.

You can see some of the spectacular images from the project on the BBC website.

(Article image: Chris Meigh-Andrews)

As part of it’s ‘Vienna Now or Never’ campaign, the Vienna Tourist Board projected this exciting piece of work on the Imagination Gallery in London. The work was the culmination of a larger campaign aimed at promoting Vienna as a tourist destination to a 20-something year-old UK audience by highlighting it’s ‘cooler’ aspects rather than its more traditional aspects. The piece makes use of some intricate projection mapping and some impressive 3D effects.

MITES provides AV equipment sales and hire, including the Christie Roadster S+20K, and offers an AV installation service. We can also provide consultancy on equipment and installations at low or no cost for some organisations.

To find out more you can contact us on: 0151 707 4433 or fill in our email contact form and we’ll get back to you asap.

‘Let’s Colour’ was a campaign run by Dulux to brighten up dull areas in cities around the world. The idea and execution of the above video make for a really exciting and fun piece of viewing. Dulux say:

This 2 minute global film was shot by multi-award winning director Adam Berg over four weeks in Brazil, France, London and India. Every location is real and they remain transformed by a palette consisting of 120 different colours. The people in the film are not actors, they are real people who rolled up their sleeves to transform their community with colour.

Team up with other local arts venues

It goes without saying that visitors to one local arts venue are likely to be interested in another – helping to promote each other’s exhibitions and events is a simple way to drum up awareness. But you don’t have to stop at putting flyers at different venues – scour the local arts listings for opportunities to run joint programming, provide offers to visitors to other venues who have kept hold of ticket stubs, swap guest blog posts with other venues.

The Liverpool Arts Regeneration Consortium (LARC) is a great example of how local arts organisations can work together. As well as running projects aimed at local regeneration and improving lives, the group helps to improve collaborative programming and marketing within the city.

Create lots of online collateral

While websites remain the main online tool for arts organisations to promote their events and sell tickets, people won’t necessarily visit them for these reasons alone. Websites can be used to add value to an organisation’s offer and provide something than may not be available at the venue. It doesn’t have to be time consuming or expensive – artist interviews, curator blog posts, exhibition photos, video tours, relevant links and videos of events are great ways of offering more to your audience, driving traffic to your website and helping to promote your organisation and its offers.

The English Touring Opera has an excellent website with lot’s of news and blog content as well as dynamic production pages full that mix production information with rich media content – like this one for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Interact and integrate

Marketing campaigns should enthuse and excite potential visitors about the upcoming exhibition or event. Try to engage your audience across multiple channels and make them part of the campaign. A good example might be inviting audience members to submit designs online that you can then use on flyers or posters. Campaigns are much more memorable and effective when audience members are involved.

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) ran an exciting campaign for its 2010 MyWar exhibition. Audience members were invited to submit thoughts and memories about war via SMS, email and Twitter. Submissions were moderated and posted to a MyWar micro-site as well as being projected outside the FACT building and displayed on the BBC Big Screen in Liverpool. By marketing an exhibition like this in an interactive way across different channels, a campaign can be much more than just another campaign.

MITES provides an installation service for shows and exhibitions. We can also provide consultancy on equipment and installations at low or no cost for some organisations.

To find out more you can contact us on: 0151 707 4433 or fill in our email contact form and we’ll get back to you asap.

Stuart said: “We wanted to use this opportunity to create something special here.  Part of the idea is to turn on its head the usual habit of passers-by glancing through the windows at a static display inside.

“Instead of mannequins frozen in poses, there are animated creatures shuffling, buzzing and walking about.  Those very same windows now allow these creatures to look back at you!”

The project is part of the Shops Upfront programme, which is jointly funded by the city council, the Department of Communities and Local Government, Arts Council England and supported by various property agents and owners.

You follow Creature Feature on Twitter and there are some photos up on its Facebook Page. There’s also a good article, as ever, on Art in Liverpool!

The installation runs at Lewis’s building, Renshaw Street, Liverpool until mid-April – be sure to visit…

Netia is a director of LIGHTMAP, a mixed media partnership with whom she has collaborated on video, film, installation and interactive media projects and she is also director of Transition, a performance group which combines live music and opera with new media, integrated video and film. This video is taken from of a Transition performance of Schoenberg’s seminal work Pierrot Lunaire and provides a great example of some of Netia’s work:

Music and video files, in particular, can be very large and so it is preferable to reduce their size if it can be done without losing too much quality. Thus, whilst some are lossless (i.e. retain the highest possible quality of audio or visual data) most are lossy (i.e. they sacrifice data quality slightly in favour or reducing file size).

Perhaps the best known of codecs is MP3 (Wiki). MP3 is a lossy format for audio data that became ubiquitous due to its relative efficiency in reducing the size of audio files while  maintaining audio quality. It was also made public around the same time as music sharing began to increase in popularity, making it a popular choice.

There are different codecs for different purposes, for example:

• Image Codecs (such as BMP, PNG, TGA and TIFF)
• Audio Codecs (such as AAC, AIFF, MP3, Ogg Vorbis and WMA)
• Speech Codecs (such as A-Law PCM, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, DV Audio, GSM 06.10)
• Video Codecs (such as X.264, H.264, MPEG-1, RM and WMV)

All codecs will offer differences in quality, however slight. This video provides a comparison of the X.264 and H.264 codecs:

Comparison of x.264 quicktime codec to h.264 codec from Kevin Gabriel on Vimeo.

The video description notes:

You can see the x.264 holds the colors better and maintains the blacks while the h.264 codec is more washed out. Also you can’t see it here but the x.264 codec renders about twice as fast with about a 30-40% reduction in file size.

It is good to know what codec is best for what you are trying to do. If you have spent a lot of time creating a video artwork for viewing in a gallery or online, then you would probably want to ensure that the video quality remains as high as possible. If you are streaming a live event though, you need to make sure the feed can be compressed and decompressed quickly enough for people to watch it – thus you would probably be prepared to sacrifice a little video quality.

MITES provides AV, film and video consultancy services as well as film and video production, editing and archiving services. To find out more contact MITES on: 0151 707 4433 or fill in the email contact form and we’ll get back to you asap.