One Five West will be exhibiting Code and Carpentry, a series of interactive objects that the audience can manipulate through movement, sound and touch. This new body of work is a continuation of Feedback, an installation developed through Fierce Festival’s artist development scheme, Fierce FWD, 2014.

One Five West are interested in tactile creativity and play in a digital age. The structures they build draw inspiration from minimalist sculpture and retrofuturism, and wish to encourage physical interactions in a rapidly evolving digital world that favours the virtual.

The technologies One Five West employ – light bulbs, mini-spy cameras, LED lights and so on – are affordable and readily accessible to audiences. Their objects have no prescribed instructions, so audiences can intuitively create and play according to their individual or collective approach.

Code and Carpentry uses a blend of traditional woodwork with low-fi technological elements to create interactive pieces. This work invites audiences to physically engage with the artwork in order to change the outcomes of the physical and digital elements: using body movement and altering the structures to creating visuals and sounds.

At a website dedicated to the work of a cult novelist and his personal obsessions, fans gather to interact with their hero – and each other.

In this delirious space where identity is slippery and ideas are everything, an anarchic virtual community of queer punks and lonely teens, paranoid artists and wannabe slaves, forms and endlessly re-forms, until it’s hard to know what’s scarier: that a lot of what happens here isn’t really real – or that some of it is.

Inspired by and loosely based on the notorious blog of writer and artist Dennis Cooper, Weaklings disorientingly blurs fiction and documentary, fact and fantasy, to create a compelling portrait of people on the edge, finding a strange refuge together in dangerous times.

Featuring a specially composed soundtrack by Scanner, Weaklings brings together a remarkable cast, including Karen Christopher (ex- Goat Island) and Christopher Brett Bailey (This Is How We Die) as well as two members of Chris Goode’s ‘avant-garde performance boyband’ Ponyboy Curtis.

[1h 20]

WEDNESDAY 7 October

Post show discussion with Chris Goode and Dr Cath Lambert (University of Warwick sociology department)

THURSDAY 8 October

Weaklings Theatre Club with Maddy Costa

Join writer and blogger Maddy Costa after the show for Theatre Club: an informal discussion (with biscuits and wine) that works like a book group. No one who made the show will be present: it’s a space for audiences to share what they thought and interpret the show with and for each other.

Presented by Fierce Festival and mac birmingham as part of BIRMINGHAM WEEKENDER

“We find a space in the margins of the city in which to gather: to start an ad-hoc ceremony, to stamp our feet and shake our limbs, to dance in the face of an ending.”

Of Riders and Running Horses is a stirring and visceral new dance event by Still House created as a communal animation of urban spaces. Five female dancers and a live band conjure a new kind of old dance, an insistent rhythm, a joyful step into what it means to move together.

This performance will take place off-site – on the top floor of a Birmingham car park with sweeping views across the city.