Whales can't smell (or so they say)which seems a shame now summer is deepening with a shock of scents here in southeast London. The turn of the year leads inevitably to several events held in different parts of the city on the same night - Monday this week was a good example: Tony White reading from his fabulous Albertopolis Disparu - produced during his recent residency at the Science Museum, sample reading at: http://allumination.wordpress.com/2009/05/19/return-to-albertopolis/ -  at the Green Fingernail pub in Romilly Street, Soho (part of the London Short Story Festival) - and in Farringdon, the Art&Architecture organisation organised a very nice evening of presentations relating to the immaterial and invisible - with Minimaforms -http://www.minimaforms.com/video/memorycloud/- and Usman Haque describing the process behind creating some of his inspiring -  http://www.haque.co.uk/skyear/ -  works that tend to the sky and offer memorials in transitory form of something resonant in place.

This week also is the 4th Takeaway Festival now held at the rather 'precious' Dana Centre in London's South Kensington  - a festival that migrated from Ravensbourne College when it was spawned under Karel Dudesek and Armin Medosch (who initiated the name) -and which has been offering a space for public encounters with for demos and debates at the edges of contemporary art, media, robotics, software and hardware. This year's festival has been supported by Arts Council London which has offered some commissions for work related to RFIDs - more at http://www.takeawayfestival.com. 

A tv programme tonight on BBC4 about clouds describes diamond dust, a kind of effect caused by freezing air that becomes visible. I have not had access to my website for about six weeks for some reason the hosting service stopped letting me into it, leaving me a little bereft. In the meantime, I had a good time at Paralelo - the wikisite at http://paralelo.wikidot.com/is still a good place to find out more about what happened and the flicker site at http://www.flickr.com/groups/paralelo/conveys much of the energy and joy.

 I also went to Dublin to the Science Gallery to the show about INFECTION which opened a week or so ago, uncanningly timely as the visitors to the gallery are given nose-masks and upstairs we are given a chance to interact with an exhibit that visually shows how fast the spread of a pandemic flu would occur  - spread through air flights for eg between Korea and Dublin. Since I have been writing here, there has been a pandemic scare - now receding. The Dublin Gallery show was clearly very infectious.