June - November 2005 - Brave New Brum

Brave New Brum was a collaboration between A2:RT and The Real Monument Company. It questioned the process of regeneration by touring Birmingham in a mobile media lab, and looked at postive alternatives to prestige redevelopments by running workshops on mapping, open source alternative tourist guides, autonomous energy, wild food walks, seedbombs, drystores, peak oil, creating alternate realities out of cardboard boxes, a treasure hunt with a twist, and quite a bit more. Check out the Brave New Brum website, there's loads there.

June 2005 - The Feral Food Olympics

As part of the Brave New Brum project we has an afternoon of feral foody fun investigating the connections between consumers and producers, packaging and branding.  There were 3 varieties of roots to take and participants were encouraged to sample them all: Check out the itenary

June 2005 - Borderlines - Refugee Week 2005

A collaborative project creating a 32 page publication about asylum and refugee experiences, created entirely using open source DTP software. Borderlines is published under a Creative Commons license. Read about the project and download Borderlines here.

April - May 2005 - Lab of II/Brave New Brum caravan installation

Helped get ready the caravan for the Lab of Insurrectionary Imagination (on tour and at the G8). Involved painting, removing cupboards, installing woodburner and fitting 300w of solar panels to provide autonomus power for the show.The caravan is to be used after this by A2:RT in a new project happening soon. Read about the tour

February 2005 - March 2005

Had some time off. Also installed more computers at the media lab space we have. They are all donated/found machines running BLAG Linux ,our favourite distribution by a mile. Fits on 1 cd and comes ready to go with support available on the web Go to the Blag site, download and install

January 2005 - DIY Culture festival

We did workshops on lowtech computing and subvertising at this self organised, entirely unfunded weekend of autonomous and sustainable shebangs Read about it all on the website

November 2005 - Technique over Technology Workshop

If technology is considered as a mediation device to mitigate against loss or unwelcome facilitation of exploitation then any departure should be a step towards freedom and wealth. Presented workshops as part of the event focussing on non narcotic mind alteration.Photos here. Hosted by irational.org at the Cube Cinema

October 2004 - D:tour - Climb Spaghetti Junction

Climbing and mapping around, about, over and under,discover alternate routes, explore urban body mind environment. Duo from Irational.org came to play, about 20 people turned up.  View some photos

September 2004 - January 2004 Mapping Greets Green

We made a map charting green space, local histories and Xchanges in Greets Green, an area being 'regenerated' in Birmingham.We hung around and spoke to people about this process and created a blog and made an audio CD / compost installation. Supported by tHE PUBLIC

June 2004 - Mapping Asylum.Refugee Week 2004 

We encouraged members of Birmingham's refugee communities to use voicemail to communicate emotions, feelings, memories and expectations as they re-visit their first experiences of Birmingham's urban environment. As they moved around the city a map emerged that charted the refugees and asylum seekers experience of the city, re-tracing their initial encounters with the city.

Urban D:tour - 31st May 2004

Many people joined us for a day of disreputable and diversionary street theatre in the heart of 'Europe's new shopping capital'.

Click here for the full report

Tools and techniques - April /May 2004

Another day exploring open source multimedia tools, hosted by Open Advantage. Workshops with Jono Bacon showing Blender and Gimp , with us demoing Kino and Cinelerra. Also there was a pirate radio scanner workshop with heath bunting from irational.org

Network Firewall : Community Mapping - March/April 2004

Emotional Mapping : young adults with housing needs. Tales of newts, sticklebacks, falling and pissing in the river, buried treasure, tarzans, dens, fields, parents and stepparents,,,

Borderphonics - november 12th to 16th 2003

Borderphonics was a co-operative web radio project by artists, activists, collectives and non-profit organizations.It focussed on identities contemporary politics and practices, and on border zones, migrations, social filters, and counter-politics of control technologies. A2:RT contributed audio files from the Network:Firewall project which were remixed and streamed.

Inner City Life - Youth Festival 2003

In collaboration with St Basil's Resettlement Centre we produced a CD-Rom with some of the young people talking about their housing needs in the past, present and future. The Cd was shown on the 24th October as part of the Youth Festival.

Collective Manouvers - Bristol Summer Games, Urban Olympics 2003.

"Achieving social and culture generation via movement." For three days Bristol City was an Olympic arena for collaboration and competition. Collective Manouvers was a congregation of local and international cultural collectives, exploring universal urban architecture and furniture.

Tools & Techniques - Multimedia workshops for linux

A2:RT participated in a full day of discussions, workshops and demos looking into using Linux for multimedia tasks. Topics covered included Blender, the 3D graphics app, DadaImc, Indy media software, Linux audio, GIMP for graphics, and Cinelerra for Video

Network: Firewall - Refugee Week 2003

'Border Crossings and Leaving Home - Birmingham Refugees tell their stories' has now finished - read reports and download stuff
Also happening Saturday 21st June - 'BorderXing / Detour' - Heath Bunting and friends talk about Border crossing at Vivid, 1pm, followed by a Detour around Birmingham. All welcome!

Freegeek visit

We recently popped over to Portland, USA to visit Freegeek, a community based computer recycling scheme. It's a veritable hive of activity, and they have an interesting scheme where volunteers work 24 hours in exchange for a 'Freekbox'.
Check out our report and photos from the visit

Grow your own media lab!

From 25th November - 20th December 2002 we ran a series of workshops at Vivid. We talked about how to install Linux, James Wallbank from RTI hosted digital camera workshops, and the London Genderchangers did a women + tech event.
Read all the reports + documentation from the lab!

By combining recycled computer hardware with open source software we will establish a multimedia facility which provides resources and training packages that are open for all to use in a constructive and creative manner.

Read more about how this can work

Do you know of any empty buildings that would be suitable for our purposes? If you do please let us know.

Our prefered location is Digbeth/Eastside.

Obviously given that Digbeth/Eastside is currently being redeveloped we are aware that we will have to move fast if we are to get a building within this area

If you represent an organisation, or even if you're an individual user, we want to hear from you if you're considering an upgrade. Whether it's an entire network or a single machine that you're thinking of replacing, we'd be interested in taking it off your hands and putting it to a more constructive use than it's ever likely to see as landfill.

What do we do with the PCs?

All the latest A2:RT information using our edit through the browser content management system provided by protova.com.

Includes tutorials, software reviews, project ideas and discussion forum