And so here we go, slip and slide along the radiant gradient down into the new year.  The last days peel off like skins from over-ripened plums.Last daze, haze: where are we now?

 I'm preping for the onrush of high velocity Visualisecambridge.org events and exhibitions next month - including a series of computer art history moving images works which we will show in a shop-window gallery - with works co-curated with Nick Lambert of Computer Arts Society which will include Tony Pritchard's 1967 computer animation, The Flexipede and Jean Crow and Alan Kitching's (incredible) Finite Elements made between 1970 and 1975 with his Antics system that  'allowed inbetweening between master frames'....And enjoying also the postings on the often errant bricolabs list about the disappearance of notions of the social into social media.I'm searching meantime for a copy of Gustav Metzger's 1969 text 'The Crisis in Technological Art' which I suspect I should read before we go together to visit Wittgenstein's grave in two weeks time.   

Great performance tonight - a little out of the blue - at Anglia Ruskin University, with Till Bovermann from Helsinki Media Lab who has spent around ten days 'in residence' with Tom Hall, of ARU Music Faculty at the Digital Performance Lab. Audience members were given individual headphones and control devices and listened to a piece which had all the thrills of severe listening.  This response was superbly provoked by Till (working with Tom) making tangible and felt (in their words) 'the very nature of digital material.
and its representation in sound...the project investigates a dataset on a sub-semantic level, incorporating the very basics of computing: a stack, a heap, an instruction set and a program counter. Using a software probe inserted into a virtual chip, we are able to listen to the raw materials of a dataset executing as an assembler program'. On Till's website http://tangibleauditoryinterfaces.de/index.php/category/project-materials/project-betablocker-ugen/ 
he describes how 'a tangible controlling component is complemented by an auditory display, forming a multimodal gestalt. While the tangible part is primarily focused on input capabilities, its sonic characteristic supplements these haptic and visual cues. The primary output modality of a tangible auditory interfaces therefore is sound. A tangible auditory interface is capable of turning into physical, graspable artifacts what otherwise remains abstract: data, algorithms, everything borne digital'.  The net effect is like touching your own consciousness.....so cool I couldn't not tell you.