47. A Celebration of the Words, Music and Art of the Beat Generation
31st
January to 2nd
February, Ipswich Town Hall
Featuring performers such as: Michael Horowitz, Vanessa Vie, Henry Lawrence,
Attila the Stockbroker, Luke Wright, John Row, Matthew Levi Stevens, John
Power, Jordan Savage, Joe Runnacles and many more....
So as Greg stated, I’m Jim Horsfield and I’m Co-founder and Director of As Described, which is based here in Ipswich and also has an office in Brighton which is run by my business partner Adam Seaman.
I’m originally a brummie and moved from hackney to ipswich 7 years ago after meeting and marrying a local girl
I’ve been working in the creative industry for the past 12 years after starting to VJ as a hobby which turned into a career about 2 years after I played my first gig.
This was after I originally studied hotel and catering management and worked for 10 years in hotels, restaurants and latterly worked internationally as a coffee consultant, opening espresso bars and training baristas.
It always surprises me that I now work in the creative sector, as i was never encouraged to pursue art, because I couldn’t draw. It surprised me then years later when I realised that there was more to being creative than putting colour to paper.
In my mid 20’s I’d gotten into writing music with a friend on a pc and even had one track released on a home pressed compilation cd, which unsurprisingly didn’t amount to me touring the world and playing at undergound raves!
In the late nineties I went to a small festival in dorset called The Big Chill and saw an act called Hextstatic who were AV pioneers and I had an ephiphany about vjing. I can remember standing in a field and just saying to myself, ‘that’s what I’m going to do’ there was no doubt in my mind that I would become a VJ.
So my first creative endeavour was setting up and promoting clubnights in Birmingham then Oxford and London as this was a guaranteed way of getting live experience of Vjing, in a short space of time this led to headline gigs at festivals such as The Big Chill, Glastonbury and Bestival.
We founded As Described in 2008. We design and tour bespoke visual systems for artists such as Portishead, Jon Hopkins and Tom Middleton, and have played at venues such as The Sydney Opera house & the Royal Festival Hall.
Setup for K & D at Big chill
Jon Hopkins in Poland
Portishead at Coachella
Bays & Heritage
Brighton festival
Earlier this year I performed with Beardyman at the main TED conference in California.
3 years ago we took on the role of the beatboxer Beardyman’s Video Director and we’ve worked closely designing firstly a new show for his live music shows which we tour globally. This year I designed a system for his new comedy show ‘One album per hour” which debued at Edinburgh a few months ago which we sold out and had 5 star reviews.
Live shows are just one element of what we do as we also do AV project management and video production. We’ve directed and produced mulitple documentaries, live concerts and promos for madness, fatboy slim and pete tong, as well as working for corporate clients such as nokia, cancer research and nike.
In 2010 we were approached by Samsung to provide and operate a custom video package that was built into the Samsung Torch Relay Bus for the 70 days of the tour
Moving to Ipswich was a shock to me for the first few years as I was used to the diversity and mass that comes with working in cities, at first, I thought that there was a dirth of talent in the town,
but over the past few years I’ve discovered that there is masses of talent in the way of designers, producers and makers,but you have to look very hard to discover them as currently it seems to be very secular with individuals working on their own or in small organisations.
I’m not talking about traditional or fine art here as there are already many organisations such as Ipart, another name, and places such as the atrium studios, I’m talking about creative proffesionals who carry out screen and lens based work on a commercial level. This hopefully will be one of the successs of re-create that these creative professionals can develop a network as I feel that its waiting to be discovered and has the potential to help and grow the local economy through local collaboration and networking opportunities.
Hope that recreate will bring a sense of pride within the creative professional network of town, having spent a long periods of time in brighton I know what can be achieved and have experienced the benefits, but it’d be nice if I didn’t have to travel long distances to reap these rewards.
