Welcome to the wonderful world of b-side. Explore the flipside of the seaside.

The second b-side Multi Media Festival took place between the 17th and 26th September 2010 - presenting an ambitious, experimental, contemporary programme of artists' commissions in sound, installation, film, photography, visual art and live art in unusual and unexpected locations across Weymouth & Portland.

Inspired by the flipside of vinyl recordings, b-side offers the opportunity to explore our coastal resorts with new eyes. It's not all kiss-me-quick hats, ice creams on the esplanade and amusements – there is more...

In 2010 we commissioned brand new work by leading artists that delighted, amused, inspired and provoked. Take a deep breath, this is what was on offer...

You may have accompanied Monsieur Poopouri his brass band and majorettes as he took a dip, or maybe you dared to enter the I Scream Van? Perhaps you sat amongst the wild beauty of a coastal community garden and let Portland Islanders birdsong coo you to sleep, did you tune in and absorb the sounds and voices of history as they drifted on the airwaves?

Enjoy some tapas or a coffee with a tasty helping of Weymouth inspired short films on the side? Maybe you combed the beach and helped to create the beautiful Beachcombers Museum, did you take a ride on the No 1 bus and get more than you bargained for, whizz past bus stops and seen a host of familiar Dorset faces? Possibly you sat overlooking the wonderful stark beauty of Chesil beach and listen to a gentle melody composed by the wind itself, explored boats and fishing huts as voices, sea shanties and stories floated in the air, watched as a Victorian Fort was transformed before your eyes by breathtaking projections... not too mention a strange, dream like evening of music and film, a guerilla screening of the best vampire film ever, an installation in a mortuary, live work being created on the beach, an Olympic metaphor with a irresitable crash, a film that asked you to reflect on a monstrous time in our history, and a glorious celebration of young people's lives, creativity and humour...

...well, if you did, the question is: are you ready for b-side 2012? Go to Archive 2010 to for a wonderful Festival visual recap by Festival photographer Pete Millson.

Get ready to be once-again challenged, inspired and delightfully provoked - embrace the b-side...

Paintings first escaped from gilded frames about a century ago. Ever since then, sculptures and characters and dances and performances have been escaping out of their frames, their stages, their halls, their galleries, their studios and into everyday places and epic landscapes. Not only do these events – whether rigorously specific or gently allusive to the sites they are made in – reinvigorate themselves from what they take from their sites (after all, that's just the rest of the arts catching up with landscape gardening), but they also can reveal their sites, bathe their sites, illuminate and initiate their sites.

For the visitor or audience, there is a journey to be taken, a baptism of perhaps unfamiliar senses to be received, an evolution of new organs, or a simple encounter with a place often passed through but never really seen, never really touched, never really heard, never really felt.

For the artists, the balance of skills can be turned upside down; vulnerability and restraint may be great virtues, listening as much as declaiming, taking away as much as adding.

Together, audiences and artists, meet, travel, discover and share a 'commonplace'.

Phil Smith

Wrights & Sites
www.mis-guide.com

b-side is an artist led community interest company made up of individuals from partner agencies and independent artists: Alan Rogers - Weymouth and Portland Arts Development Officer, Julie Penfold - PVA MediaLab, Amanda Wallwork - Sherborne House Arts, Independent Creative Producers/artists Becca Gill and Sally Watkins, Rosie Russell - Departure Arts.