The old forms are the best when they come in book covers, all hard backed and intricate. It's been a week of encounters with new books raining down a bit like the weather with a series of launches in London and even some coming through the post with loud knocks on a Slow Saturday Morning.  Some people get fat bonuses some get fat books  (rewards for MIT Press reviews done seems like aeons ago...some things take their time and may it ever be so...)

The first launch took place in Maggs a gentile and apparently haunted bookshop off Berkeley Square in London's Mayfair - see http://www.maggs.com -  which called many of the residual elite of London's 60s counterculture together to toast the publication of Barry Miles's LONDON CALLING (A Countercultural History of London since 1945) which called out loudly to be read once one got home and which certainly impresses in terms of the quality of recollection shown in the numerous microscopic conversations and incidents recorded in the 450 pages ... disproving all rumours that experimentation can destroy the power of recall; here we are invited to eavesdrop on fascinating conversations from the decades past and read about the real story behind the brief flickering of venues like Jim Haynes 'Arts Lab' in Drury Lane -a Temporary Autonomous Zone well before its time which imploded in a seeming battle of 'art -v- people' or 'laboratory -v- entertainment' after months of intensive collision, collusion and communal living during the infamous year of the Summer of Love.

At the Architectural Association in Bedford Square last night a new AA publication 'Enabling - The Work of Minimaforms' was sent off into the sky with a sound and light and smoke performance leading some boring voices to say ' what's this got to do with architecture ' - and inside Stelarc and various bioart academics and dignitaries and James Powderley of Graffiti Research Lab (whose latest project idea relates to launching his ashes into space when he dies) fought to claim copies of the book which also contains essays by Roger F Malina and Krzysztof Wodiczko as well as assemblages and texts by David Greene of Archigram and something resembling a concrete poem by me which I wrote after walking along the beach in Santa Catarina last year - about the work of the brothers Theo and Stephen Spyropoulos who combine software, design and architecture to make malleable light constructions that defy gravity and time.

On my floor this morning a copy dropped in of a book which I had reviewed for MIT Press, it seems like aeons ago, of a book now called Rethinking Curating, Art after New Media, by Sarah Cook and Beryl Graham which has an index it more interesting for what it leaves out than what is seals into the script - it feels like it is caught between seeming new and being dated, as new media related books often are, feeling the panic of time passing and not sure if it should go with or stay behind.  

During the week also I took part in an IRC chat across the bricolabs network which brought people living in 7 countries together in real time to debate and discuss challenges relating to water in their place, work and locality which has now been published on the bricolabs.net wiki and which will hopefully inspire some future projects together or eg educational and community based as well as skills and knowledge sharing between different locality. The immediacy of this publishing without filter editorial or printing demands a different kind of approach from contributors - restrained collaborative and intent to making something work in the world now.  Here there is no sense of being dated rather we are trying to catch up with the future. 

Meanwhile somewhere in Sao Paulo the book about the Paralelo initiative which took place there almost a year ago has seemingly arrived at the Museum of Image and Sound ready to be shipped to the contributors from the UK Netherlands and Brasil who took part in the network events which led to the writing addressing questions of Art, Technology and the Environment and how these things converge in on the ground projects. We'll have an online version soon also available on the Virtual Platform website in the Netherlands with texts from Felipe Fonseca, Karla Brunet, Paula Lara, Giles Lane and Proboscis, Jane Prophet, Daniela Boussos, Tapio Makela, Rob La Frenais, Wapke Feenstra, Ivan Henriques and Silvia Leal, Gisela Domschke and many others.   

To Kinetica tonight, London's art fair devoted to kinetic art in all its wondrous forms. The show this year is being held in the same space as last year but it has expanded greatly in terms of its content - and tonight I found myself wandering around through and into stall after stall of luminous,fragile, stable/unstable work some of it made in the 60s some of it made this year somehow following a continuum and in a genre that has now come into its own. Congratulations to curator Dianne Harris and her team who have brought together works from various places including most notably in terms of the quality of the work - from Gallery A22 in Budapest who are showing some rather special work - and The Kitchen also from Budapest turned up here with a flower which responds to breath producing light and sounds. During the next few days there will be some crazy performances and serious talks.  It is also the place to drop into to listen in on random detailed conversations about cellular automata and to revisit some works from Cybernetic Serendipity, swim mentally through light curtains assembled by Squid Soup and feel your heart beat loudly in colour to the backdrop of a Edward Ihnatowicz sound work. www.kinetica-artfair.com