Culture shock incuded

• Digital Animation
• Analogue Animation
• Actionscript
• Graphic design

Culture Shock formed the hub of the Arts and Cultural Strand of the nationwide Spirit of Friendship festival, in the build up to the XVII Commonwealth Games. Cultureshock produced a groundbreaking programme encompassing a broad range of exciting work that presented refreshingly contemporary understandings of the Commonwealth. The festival included over 200 fantastic events by North West artists and promoters in collaboration with national and international partners. Cultureshock documented and creatively interpreted events across England's northwest in 2002.

I was lucky enough to be commissioned by cheryl Martin (artist in residence) to produce a number of animations to illustrate her work. The animations were based on photographs by Matt Squire (artist in residence) and the music was produced by Tim Browne and Arun Gosh.

Work for Inktank

• Print work
• dentity
• Branding

Inktank was established in September 2002. It is an ongoing collective of artists and designers that are involved in various projects. A quarterly magazine, INKTANK, is also published.

"Our artists have a vast amount of experience within the creative industries and are able to meet any design challenges. Inktank is a dedicated collective of artists determined to bring you the most innovative creative work of its time." Founder/Artist Ben Pepper.

Project areas

• ActionScript
• XML
• Video Optimisation

This flash based 'drag-and-drop' gallery was designed to be a permanent record of the video work from the 2004 degree show.

Its main feature is the custom video player component. This is a prototype component written in ActionScript and XML. The component automatically 'grabs' FLV files from the server and generates the rollover thumbnails from them. The 'right-click-functionality' is also a proto-type component I have developed. You can try out the player by visiting the link below

IA:MMU video Gallery

Details of image

• (detail) "Horses"
• 90 cm x 100 cm
• vinyl matt emulsion on print

The New Academy Gallery opened in 1978 as part of the Royal Academy. Each year, since 1987, they have held the 'Northern Graduates' exhibition. The 2004 exhibition was composed of work selected from a broad range of arts courses at 16 Northern universities. I exhibited 5 paintings selected from a series produced for my degree show.

"There is a great deal of contemporary work out there that sits within recognisable genres. We selected work that represents the best of its type, or is an interesting divergence from the expected - such as Fraser Chapman's white paintings." - Karen Lyons (co-curator 2004)

Selected paintings | Northern Graduates 2004 | Catalogue Text

Adidas project included

• 2 x Paintings (1.5m X 1.5m)
• Print work for limited edition magazine

Adidas Originals UK Launch (2004) Artwork commissioned for the launch of the flag ship Adidas Originals store, Manchester. The brief for this work was to produce original art work based on the theme of 'Manchester Heroes'. The heroes included here are Roy Chadwick (designer of the Lancaster Bomber) and Kenneth Wolstenholme (voice of the 1966 World Cup final).

Project included

• PHP development
• Flash development
• Graphic design
• Administration

The Interactive Arts Forum was I project I started whilst studying in Manchester. The forum provides an online space for student tutor interaction. As well as providing an area for students to present and discuss their own work, the forum also servers as a structured area to discuss other ideas and events.

The forum is based on flat-flie custom database written in PHP, by PHP outburst who are a Californian based open source development initiative. From Dec 2004 to 2006 I worked as a core developer for PHP outburst, in my spare time, developing administration features and functions.

The forum lasted around 4 years, but with the rise of facebook and twitter its use and usefulness declined somewhat. In 2008 the forum was retired and taken off-line, although the database and content were preserved and archived.

Details of work

• HTML
• PHP

The Imaage lookup is a proprietary search engine that uses googles image search to display a string of images from a given sentence. This started life as a script which was used to make a music video for a friends band. After coding the original it sat in a directory for a while until I decided to revive it, give it a interface and put it on the web. The image here was produced using the first verse to 'Seven Ages Of Man' by William Shakespeare.

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players, They have their exits and entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages."

Immage - (off-line)

Languages used

• c++
• c#
• VB
• Actionscript
• PHP
• Processing

Wiring is an open project initiated by Hernando Barragan (University of Los Andes | Architecture and Design School). Wiring started life at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy and it is currently developed at the University of Los Andes in Colombia. I have contributed tutorials to the project that cover basic IO serial communication with Wiring via c#.

The project is still in the BETA stages but there are still some excellent projects that use the device. If you want to know more about Wiring or the Wiring IO Board are then have a look at the site www.wiring.org.co or you can view my Wiring Play Ground

Languages used

• c#
• JavaScript
• XHTML

The Google Earth Plug-in and its JavaScript API let you embed Google Earth, a true 3D digital globe, into your web pages. In 2008 I created an open source library of controls that extend this by allowing one to embed the Google Earth Plug-in into full windows applications.

This project was developed in the hope that it would be useful to people wishing to integrate the Api in to their own applications. To date over 10,000 people have downloaded the controls for use in their projects. After first releasing the controls in December 2008 I was asked to join the Google Guru Program and was very happy to be made the first official Google Earth API Guru.

If you would like to see my project it is hosted on Google Code. You can also see a few of my experiments with the plug-in on the web.

Project areas

• photography
• web design

• Koln
• Manchester Toilets
• Letraset stickers
• Islington Mill
• Gdansk
• Reading for Reading's Sake
• Sounds from the Other City
• Box Office

Details of images

• Digital Photography
• Large format
• Documentation

A series of wide-angle representations of physical spaces. The images here are composites, constucted from multiple hi-resolution digital images. The construction images themselves were stiched using the Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE).

Salford & Manchester - Islington Mill
Object Lessons - Islington Mill
Grotto - Oldham Street
Grotto - Edge Street
Joyride Playground - open studio

work incuded

• Screen Printing
• Drawing
• Photography
• Graphic design

Object Lessons was a Collaboration between Islington Mill and the Working Class Movement Library, Salford.

"This October the gallery at Islington Mill hosts an unlikely collection of ephemera from the Working Class Movement Library: paper napkins, games, household ceramics, badges, photographs, t-shirts, ties, tablecloths, coasters, calendars, clocks, ashtrays, album covers, chairs, books, pamphlets, scarves and a suitcase of souvenirs from the USSR. At first glance a disparate collection of objects, these everyday items are drawn together in an installation embodying daily life saturated and shaped by political endeavour.

Considering themes of politics, identity, the archive, and the obsessions of a collector, a group of artists will interpret and rework items within the collection. Shaping the gallery space as it evolves over the course of the exhibition, this new body of work reawakens the archive, connecting the items held within to current issues and identities."

Main areas

• Branding
• Promotion
• Interior design
• Project management

Part shop, part gallery, part event space - Grotto was a place for local artists to perform, or to sell their work, in the centre of Manchester's Northern Quarter. There were a two principals I really wanted to run the project under: Firstly - to be, as far as possible, a free market i.e. not selecting products on any personal aesthetic criteria or intervening with pricing. Secondly, not to profit from others work - only by selling my own art work in the space.

By being a 'free market' shop Grotto allowed anyone - from students to established artists - a chance to sell work and gain exposure. Further more Grotto helped to brighten and give vibrancy to the Northern Quarter as both locations used in the project would have been 'shuttered up' for the duration of the Christmas period. In some sense Grotto had economic reasoning behind it as as well - by giving a chance to local artists to sell directly Grotto kept money spent in the run-up to Christmas within the local community.

The final goal of the project was to respond to the rencent cuts in arts funding. Grotto served as a proactive response to this situation - albeit in a localised way. Not taking any commission from the sale of work (most institutions take between 40% and 70%) meant that many artists were able to lower the price of their work considerably whilst still making more than they would in a traditional environment. This, in turn, also meant that customers could find amazing, original, art work at low prices. In total we had 65 artists work for sale over the course of the project and the vast majority made money from their work. The range in prices for work was from 50p (for hand printed wrapping paper and cards) to £3000 (for the amazing Thomas Mills rocking-chair/library/clock).

Along with all the great art work on sale we had live performances from groups such as Monkeys in Love, Maria and the Gay and Mind on Fire Band. Other impromptu happenings took place over the course of the project such as live printing and a film screenings.

Panoramic views of the two spaces
Grotto - Oldham Street | Grotto - Edge Street

Grotto | Facebook | Twitter

Details of image

• "(Detail) Geologic Map of the North Side of the Moon"
• 100 cm x 100 cm
• Acrylic on canvas
• 2012

"For this show Manchester-based Fraser Chapman is presenting two bodies of work. In the bar are a series of large colourful disk shaped paintings that map the different rock types found on the moon. They are accurate depictions of the geological makeup of the lunar surface, originally visualised by the astronomical community. Chapman has taken these maps and adjusted the colours, playing with their graphic potential. In the café are a series of small mass-produced canvases of the kind typically found in thrift stores. Fraser has ‘added’ to them by ‘subtracting’ their content. What is left are floating indications of the total scene, now hidden under a flat surface of white paint. Chapman is highly active in Manchester as an artist and supporter of creative practice, through his nomadic shop ‘Grotto’."

Exhibition details