Pea Arts About

November's episodes of Audiovisual Cultures podcast have been all about audio drama. In 78 we heard from producer, director, writer and actor Jack Bowman about his varied career in audio drama since the emergence of the medium then known as digital downloads and now popularly considered to be podcasts. In 79 we hear even more about working in this medium from Brendon Connelly who talks in detail about the Scooby-Doo/Buffy-inspired spooky series Circles made in lockdown earlier this year, created and co-written by Brendon and directed by Jack. It's been a time of reflection for me about the podcast. It's been a long hustle to make it, promote it and keep gathering a following. Progress feels glacial, but it is progress. I've made tremendous improvements and developed many skills in editing, recording, presenting, interviewing and marketing, and am always making tweaks as I learn new things.  In these two episodes, we talk quite a lot about the logistics and challenges

It was our dear friend Sandra Johnston who was tasked with the difficult work of telling us that Sally had died on 11 November. When I first moved to Newcastle in August 2014, Sandra had already been here for a couple of years. She was travelling when I moved across, and put me in email contact with someone who had become a close friend and who was involved in organising a site-specific screening I'd find really interesting. Sally had me go round to her house and we chatted and got to know each other a little. I felt like I'd known her for ages, perhaps because we both felt affection for Sandra.  Sally drove us out to Lindisfarne and we parked up, met the rest of the group attending the screening, and all walked across to Holy Island, carrying the kit and supplies. Those with the tech and equipment set up a screen, a generator, a laptop and a projector. A bright, long summer's day in the North, we chatting and picnicked and listened to a Northumbrian piper as we waited for

Part 1 Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5   Part 6  Repeating History In addition to the similarities between Northern Ireland and Chile, Good Vibrations and No were produced and released in the wake of political shifts to the right in the leadership of both governments. A coalition government led by the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron was established in the UK in 2010, replacing the Labour leadership held since 1997. In Chile also in 2010, the right-wing Sebastián Piñera was elected President, replacing the now dissolved Concertación, or Coalition of Parties for Democracy, voted in after the 1989 general election. While the Conservative government remains in power due to the UK’s firmer shift to the right after the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections, Michelle Bachelet of the Chilean Socialist Party, was returned as President in 2014, only for the billionaire Pi ñera to be re-elected in 2018 (Chilean Presidents understandably cannot hold office for consec

Part 1 Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5   Reconfiguring Time and Place A number of years before the resurgence of Belfast’s live music scene in the early 2000s and the more widespread simultaneous nostalgia for punk, vintage and vinyl that has emerged and grown since, Duncan Campbell’s video installation Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2003) captures the intensity of the working class youth culture in the 1970s and 1980s that gathered around energetic live music and was fuelled by an ethos of dissent against distension. The video’s title derives from a phrase commonly seen in graffiti in Belfast during the conflict, and is indicative of class tensions between different areas of the city. This same class tension, or more specifically, anger against privilege, emerges in much of the punk lyrics of the time. 1 The images in Campbell’s work consist of photographs from the time held in the Belfast Exposed photographic gallery’s archives. It gives movement to still photographs of underpr