Shabina and I just got back from showcasing Sounds Like Graffiti at the Future Places festival in Porto, Portugal, a festival looking at the intersection of digital media and local culture. The feedback was great and this was a good place to present amongst some of the most talented artists using digital media in Europe today.

See below the video we did as a showreel for the festival. As you can see, Bradford was well represented .

The description for the exhibition is below and like HERE. Good to know we were among 8 selected from more than hundred applications received:

Exhibition 2010 Catalog

This is the futureplaces Exhibition Catalog, a wiki-experiment in real time. Exhibition participants will be feeding info and images onto their own pages.

The futureplaces exhibition is the result of an international call to artists and digital media creatives to reflect on the Festival subject of Digital Media and Local Cultures. Many approaches to the subject resulted, in an incredibly varied uses of digital and analogue technology.

Over one hundred submissions were reviewed by an international jury panel of experts: the eight pieces presented are the result of this selection process.

The exhibition takes place between October 14 and 16 2010, at Maus Hábitos (Rua Passos Manuel 178 – 4º, Porto, Portugal). Performances will take place Oct 14, from 7pm onwards.

I will add some pictures once I get time to process them.   Meanwhile, all of us who worked for Sounds Like Graffiti should be proud and happy of the good work.  We have gone international.

While things may have seemed perhaps a bit slow here at Sounds Like Graffiti, the work has nonetheless been seething on behind the scenes.  A few exciting developments to report.  Some we can talk about publicly already here; others we hope to announce in a few weeks or so when the plans are finalised.

So, first of all, we are now happy to report that the book is now published on Lulu to buy and to download.  Please see and click on the link below to access it:

Secondly, we are glad to announce here that we have been selected to exhibit our artwork at the Future Places festival in Porto, Portugal, taking place October 12-17, 2010.  Future Places festival consists of five days of exhibitions, workshops and events addressing the potential and the impact of digital media on local cultures. We will blog actively from Portugal about how things go there. Meanwhile, keep on checking here at Sounds Like Graffiti blog as new and exciting things will keep on popping up…

Audiences listening to the audio plays in Lister Park

And so we have arrived to the happy end after a brilliant day.  A million thanks to all the family who participated in the events. Many more a farewell pictures video laughs future plans shall come later but that shall wait until after the World Cup finals and the after party and after we settle into our workshops in Estonia and Latvia.

While we prepare for our second day of activities, please find below few pictures from the ongoing launch for Sounds Like Graffiti taken by one of our youth collaborators.  Yesterday was a good and exciting day all in all and the artist “family” came quickly together to address all the difficulties setting up such an innovative project sometimes involves.  We now have 3 ways of accessing the plays in the park – SMS, MP3s and bluetooth – in addition to of course to what you see here online.

QUICK NOTE! Remember to scroll down to see more of the content produced, including the premiere of the short film we have now made public.

Even before the launch, we have been getting good press.  To find out more about what we plan to do this weekend, please see

Yorkshire Post

BBC News (Bradford / West Yorkshire)

We now have the interactive map of the exhibition online for our friends to see as we know everybody cannot unfortunately make the Lister Park event.   The idea behind the interactive map is simple: you access the sounds files your computer either in chronological order following the narrative or by choosing any specific file you want using the Map Guide we provide at the event. It is almost like being there.

The map we have designed comes with a set of navigational tools that allows you to either move back and forth in sequence or move around freely however you choose.  You can zoom in and out with your mouse and the arrows on your keyboard, make the file full screen to see it better.  So explore around the interface and – most importantly – enjoy the great stories!!

To get started click on the play button on the map below.

(NOTE: (We are using Prezi for displaying the map and you need to have Flash Player 10 installed for it ).

We have also provided here a sneak preview of each of the episodes to listen via our media player or to download for your own Mp3 players.

1  Looking for Ali

2. Mr. Lister

3. The Pidgeon

4. Ripples from the Past

5. Three Lions

6. Call of the MCs

7. Caged Storm

8. The Waterfall

9. MC Memory

10. Ghost of Shipley

11. Rap Punzel

12. The Ogre

13. Home

Please see below the web premiere of a short film we collectively shot over one sunny Wednesday afternoon early June together with the Toller Youth Cafe girl group.   The story is based on the fourth episode from the Sounds Like Graffiti project and tells a story of a young girl walking through magical Lister Park looking for her brother.  In the Mughal Gardens, she looks into one of the fountains there and gets magically transported in time to a strange encounter with her grandmother during the 1947 partition.

They story has been entirely written by the Toller Youth Cafe girl group and shot using methods from guerilla documentary film-making – mostly relying on one take for each scene and improvised acting.   We will make this next into DVDs that we can hand out to the participants of this short side-project and other friends.  Enjoy!!

Ripples from the past from objetpetitm on Vimeo.

UPDATE: Everything will become public today at 16.00, including the audio plays to download for your own mp3 players.  Stay tuned.

We have been working frantically behind the scenes to get everything ready for the launch/exhibition this weekend.  Audio plays, short film, banners, posters, brochures, training volunteers, mobile phones interface, mp3 players, interactive maps and what have we are now almost all done.  While we all slowly now drift towards Bradford in anticipation of a great weekend, here are a few samples of some of the work that we will be proud to introduce over the coming weekend.  Only a few teasers here as we cannot reveal all the secrets at once, can we?

BANNER: A 1×3 meter banner composed of almost a thousand pictures collaboratively taken during the workshops.  These pictures together will compose a Bradford landmark.

banner sample

BOOK: A print-on-demand book that we will be giving out to our collaborators and friends and that can be bought online. The book contains the script of the play as well as some of the collaboratively-produced poetry / photography by the young people that have inspired us.  We will have the .pdf version accessible for the weekend as well as online.

Sounds Like Graffiti book cover

MAP: A detailed map that will guide our audiences through the different locations in Lister Park.  This map will be available to the visiting public on the upcoming weekend as well as interactively online for our friends who cannot make the event in person.

Map for the story

SHORT FILM: A short film produced together with the Toller Youth Group Girl Group.  The film will be available online for the launch and as a DVD following the launch.  See a screenshot below to get some idea of what to expect.

Screenshot from Ripples from the Past

We have now been recording the audio plays in sunny Bradford with Jez Colborne of Mind the Gap, playing Mr. Lister, and Sean Cernow (soon to be seen in ‘Casualty’) playing Daddy Lion and of course some of our young people who have participated in the workshops.  While we process the audio into the finished plays, please find below some behind the scenes photos of a lovely weekend.