With ten high definition large screens installed into the walls of the Ruskin Gallery making some sense of the Watchout software (www.dataton.com/watchout#) in order to show work has been a fascinating challenge. Luckily the current artists Liliane Lijn and Jamie Allen managed to get the hang of it enough to turn out a miraculously good show - images here.  I sat in the dark and quiet space yesterday whilst one of the other visitors sat quietly studying the images for 45 minutes sitting almost contemplatively still and afterwards she told me she felt like she had been a cathedral which is due credit to the illuminated quality of Lijn and Allens' images that in their sheerness come close to convincing one that high definition can restore faith (if it is needed) in screen-based work and that software such as Watchout plus the multiple screens can show technology has something to offer art beyond gadgetry and so called new methods of distribution.  At the opening the other night there were improvisations over skype (with Bernhard Garnicniq in Vienna who featured in two different works) and at the back of the Recital Room Gustav Metzger sat after turning up half-way through having made his own way from Hackney to Cambridge ...not performing, simply being. Duncan Speakman and violinist Sarah Anderson played a lovely duo drawing on material experienced and caught during recent psychogeographical soundings around Cambridge which will also become part of public events and walks in midsummer  (see www.productofcircumstance.com) Composer Tom Hall recruited four of his male colleagues to play with toy cars in a tribute to George Brecht and in a sweet but dark vignette David Ryan rustled and turned over the pages of the day's Guardian Newspaper saying nothing but speaking eloquently as the headlines by chance said that higher education cuts would affect nation's happiness. Nuff said.

Last dance of the material world - so Liliane Lijn and Jamie Allen describe their exhibition 'Caution Matter' which opens tonight at the Ruskin Gallery at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge filling the ten digital screens with audio visual images made on documentary journeys into  factories and related spaces of heavy manufacturing. Grow more heavy, be more light - those famous lines from Celan echo in my mind as I study these works that delve into the hidden mythologies of industry seen though the lens of art - the poetic vision of Lijn and the darker perspective of Allen. They will both also perform at the Fluxus 50th Birthday celebration we're doing later this evening also at Anglia Ruskin - with post Cagean, post-Brechtian (George that is - with toy cars), post Maciunas actions that should at the very least cause some frisson of music/fine art exchange and at the best we will arrive after the flow of effluence and flux of interdisciplinary interactions at some measure of stillness. 

In Cambridge in a temporarily empty retail space we're installing an exhibition that takes the idea of vacancy and fills it with light, literally - with long fluorescent tubes that hang sideways like coloured trajectories into the still newish year - and at the back, in two small carpeted rooms, there are two installations relating to the moon and to tides and to time and to the forces of gravity. 

Down the road in a darker part of the city centre, in another empty shop this time only with access to the windows we've back projection lit a film/video compilations including works from the earliest days of computer art  - including documentation of The Senster by Edward Ihnatowicz and some of the earliest examples of computer animation made in the UK, inclluding Tony Pritchett's The Flexipede from 1967....and the extraordinary Finite Elements made by Alan Kitching and Jean Crow using the Antics computer system between 1970 and 1975. Another piece, Halls Curtain, made by Paul Brown in 1982 knocks me out by its fitness in this oddly decontextualised place - the wintry windows adding an additional layer of vacancy and absence to many of these works which often appear to float critically  in time lacking any particular home.

Speaking of spectres and places that fit I went round Gina Czernecki's 'Wasted' exhibition at the Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool yesterday. It's been a critically very well-received show that seems to have struck a public nerve with its focus on human identity, control and agency in the context of bio-ethics, stem cellery and genetics research. Writing in the foreword to her superb book 'Humancraft' I mention her capacity to spring open trapdoors in our childhood imaginations to places where goblins and other spectral creatures dwell on threshlds between fantasy and horror.  The writing in the comments book conveys much of the same - in childish writing it appears the visitors love it, they find it disturbing, it is disconcerting, it is appalling., it is scary.  In the nearby FACT gallery I go see the latest Arts Catalyst exhibition, The Republic of the Moon - www.fact.co.uk/exhibitions/republic-of-the-moon - and find myself inside the room where Liliane Lijn's Moonmeme instellation is with two boys shouting 'she' 'she' 'she' 'he' 'he' he' back at the sceeen where she has depicted the female name on the surface of a bright full moon.  

The last day of the year and at 3.00 pm we assemble at Trinity Buoy Wharf on the river Thames, opposite the Millennium Dome, in the lighthouse built for Michael Faradays' experiments with light and time, to listen to the melodies of Jem Finer's Longplayer piece from the top of the structure like standing in a bell-tower and yet seeing out.

Later I walk through the buzz of London's Chinatown and see 'the Artist' - a new film that puts into one tiny capsule the complex neccessities of silence as a prelude to speech and then in St James's Park there is an atmosphere of New Year's Eve with subtlety before the jubilation: a white bird almost imperceptible in the middle of the water on its perch waiting.