Join artist Duncan Poulton for a virtual workshop which offers an introduction to techniques for mining and misusing the web for creative reuse. Attendees will learn to delve deep into the internet to find images which have been lost and or hidden by search engines, and have a hands-on demonstration of how to make their own digital collages from the materials they gather.

The workshop will be delivered using the open-source image editing software GIMP. If you want to follow along with the workshop, please download GIMP in advance here: https://www.gimp.org

Duncan Poulton is an artist based between Birmingham and London. His practice centres around an obsessive gathering of online content into a vast digital archive, which he then recombines into still and moving image collages. Made exclusively with found materials, his works address our visual culture of overabundance, ambivalence and the collapsing down of history and meaning engendered by the internet. He is a hoarder, a selector and combiner who uses the internet as his palette and imagination.

Poulton scours website upon website for lost, ‘poor’ and arbitrary images buried by biased algorithms, in a process he describes as an ‘archaeology of the new’ – a real-time archiving and remediation of our increasingly virtual world. His recent works have explored digital waste, obsolescence and the death of privacy, whilst recurring interests lie in ideas of appropriation, ownership and excess.

His work has recently been shown at Ars Electronica; MOSTYN, Llandudno; Coventry Biennial; Art Licks Weekend, London; QUAD, Derby; OUTPOST, Norwich; MIT Museum, Massachusetts; Eastside Projects, Birmingham; arebyte, London; CICA Museum, South Korea; and Transmediale, Berlin. In 2020 he was selected for The Syllabus, an alternative learning programme led by Wysing Arts Centre and arts venues across England.

About Od Arts Festival

Od Arts Festival returns this May, bringing exhibitions, performances, film and workshops by local and international artists to not-so-sleepy Somerset. New and specially-sited artworks will pop up around the villages of East Coker and West Coker, in cafes, halls, houses, chapels and fields, and also online for a special digital programme.

Devised before the hiatus of the global pandemic, the guiding theme for the festival of ‘Alone with Everybody’, explores loneliness. A programme of playful, experimental and performative artworks will probe different aspects of aloneness, and ask visitors to discuss how it might be liberating as well as difficult to be alone.

Visit odartsfestival.co.uk for full information about Od Arts Festival: Alone With Everybody, 28-30 May 2021.