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

It's a bland term for something very powerful - how things translate, migrate, relate to audiences, sites and context in different ways. Last year I was invited by Yanki Lee of Exhibit Gallery in London and the RCA to contribute some text and interview Nadav Kander the photographer who had spent some time travelling along the Yangtze River travelling from mouth to source taking images of an extraordinary landscape and context shifting perilously almost beyond the scope of the imagination.In the interview he spoke of how he visited the landscape with 'an empty mind' and sought to respond to what he found felt and saw there in a country he felt was 'mimicking the worst of the west'.  The work became part of a touring exhibition in China last summer called Constant Stream. Kander - who is also the photographer behind the exhibition Obama's People -  'http://www.obamaspeopleexhibition.com/ - justly won the prestigious Prix Pictet  - http://www.prixpictet.com/ - for Environmentally engaged Photography in Paris last November - and you can hear our interview  and see some of his enthralling pictures now at www.youtube.com/user/NadavKanderTube. In this he reflects on how a sense of the sublime suffused his encounter with the river and its changes, both on human and environmental scale,

I got back to London this evening from a short sojourn in Northern Ireland. My flight back coincided nicely with a lunar eclipse - as I got to the airport I saw a shadow form over a lower corner of the big full moon - and by the time I had got to Gatwick a pink shadow had crossed over it fully - making this a rather special New Year's Eve.....suddenly everything feels new: a new year, a New Year and winter remains ...as it should, with partial snow.  Yesterday my nephew and I went to see Avatar - a quite amazing experience.....maybe there is future in film..I dreamt last night that London had cheetahs swmming in the Thames and elephants on its banks. 

I recently met a chemistry professor at Imperial College who is investigating the subtle differences between representation and meaning.....his blog shows some images which look like snowflakes but which are apparently 'Clar islands....found not so much in an ocean, but in a type of molecule known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH)' and he talks of how 'one member of this class, graphene, .is 'attracting a lot of attention recently as a potential material for use in computer chips'....

I also visited artist Liliane Lijn's studio last week where she had a birthday party amidst her formidable poetic and kinetic sculptures including one that breathed fire and one that discharged dry ice. Among the other guests were Barry Miles of the infamous Indica Gallery (back in London swinging 60s, famous for its Pink Floyd light performances as well as the place where Yoko met Johnny Lennon among many other thing) and Pearce Marchbank the graphic designer whose works graced OZ magazine before its close. One of the conversational strands now many years later is the high trading price of OZ mags on e-bay; I also met someone who is working at Maggs the rare books shop and gallery in Berkeley Square in London which is specialising in works (also at quite high prices) about urban terror, revolution, agitation, propaganda and countercuture.....seems like the prices if not the value of such strategies are growing higher and higher in these perhaps curiously counter-counter-culture times....

London is sharpening for snow and if it comes it will coincide with the feasts which are going on formally and informally across this recession-hit city: this week before Christmas people go out to reap the remnants and residue of the year gone by. This year the arts world (or what is left of it) has decided to hold events to mark a transfer from one era to another. Last night, at the veritable Toynbee Hall off Brick Lane and Petticoat Lane in east London, the remarkable arts management organisation - Artadmin - celebrated thirty years of its existence, as the leading support agency for work which sits merrily in the cracks between live art, visual performance, performance art, dance and collaborative practice. Lined up in the room for a stirring performance of voice with handbells (a beautiful rap on the theme of ding dong) by Graeme Millar were zillions of luminaries who have benefited from Artsadmin -  from Julian Maynard Smith of Station House Opera to Anne Bean, to Gary Stevens, Dan Ackroyd, Nicola Triscott, Ghislaine Boddington, Hugo Glendinning, Lois Keidan, Michael Atavar, Silvia Ziranek - a poem written by John Fox and Sue Gill from Welfare State was read to mark the moment and in a dark performance spaces participants were invited to participate in a capsule performance - to hold three tiny pieces of thistledown in our hands and to blow these around in whatever fashion we wished together or alone but to hold them for a few minutes and not to leave these behind but to return them safely when we chose to end.  We all left the event clasping a new book to mark this key anniversary with sublime pictures by Hugo Glendinning made with many of the artists connected with Artsadmin based on sites within Toynbee Hall - it opens with a piece from the Bow Gamelan Ensemble (we recall that sadly Paul Burwell was absent from last night's reverie) which  includes five pictures made by Glendinning with Tim Etchells called Live Forever with small letters carved from ice which performs appropriately melting into water at the close. I had noticed in the room that artists often do not appear older just perhaps harder as the years evolve - like diamonds hardening into their images and their manifold identities and as a group, they take joy in occasionally warming themselves on the common path taking time out for an hour or so of real celebration for survival on the journey thanking people like Artsadmin who somehow make ephemeral work take place and have presence in an all too solid world.

We're about to spread word about the Jumeleizhi project which I am working closely on with Vanessa Gocksch (Pata de Perro) in Colombia.  I was inspired earlier this year by her account of attending a meeting of shamans from across Latin America which can be read at her website - <http://intermundos.org> where you can also see more of the amazing photographs (right).

Vanessa has built up trust with a group of people called the Mamos in Colombia over many years. Since September we have been in close touch to see if we might be able to produce a work in co-operation with the  Mamos, who belong to the Kogis, part of the Tairona tribe,The image to the right is of a Kogi village in the Sierra Nevada mountains and the picture below shows Jorge Dib, who is one of the project collaborators on the beach with one of the Mamos whose way of life, described by Vanessa and Jorge, follows a complex system deeply entwined with natural forces. Among the many things they have lost in the past centuries, as a result of European marauding and subsequent displacements, are sacred relics and objects which they place in the landscape not only to guide others on trails across the Nevada but also to demarcate in a visual, material sense, the close ritualistic relationship they have with nature. They believe this intrinsic relationship has been damaged by the spoiling of their sacred territories and that this is also part of the world's current crisis in relation to environmental concerns. Vanessa and I have decided to work together to respond to their call which can be read at <www.tairona.myzen.co.uk/index.php/about/news> and to ask our friends and others for help to  track down the missing objects which are held it is believed in collections and museums across the world. We seek to use media tools and collaborative networks  to trace these sacred objects which have been displaced from their real context and to encourage their return. The websites www.jumeliezhi.org and jumeleizhi.net will soon be up and we'll be inviting friends and others to contribute whatever they can to this project.  Earlier this week down in Cornwall at the Tregmouth campus of Exeter University - where they have a new course, a MA In Writing Nature and Place, I heard Robert MacFarlane author of three excellent books - Mountains of the Mind, Original Copy and Wild Places - question if literature can have any role in raising public consciousness of environmental and ecological issues (or crises). We hope that somehow our project can avail of new writing options online and through social media/blogs etc to build awareness of the importance of the Tairona's quest. It is important to say though that their own message at the site noted above can't be bettered in terms of moving one to respond. Check it out. The project which is partly funded by Alt Art in Romania, as part of their e-tribal art initiative, will also have some offline manifestations including we hope at an exhibition in Transylvania in February next year.

After six days in Sao Paulo  with temperatures around 38 degrees - I have travelled south to Florianopolis on Santa Catarina  an island of high tech development mixed with mangroves and two universities - as well as free software activites unconnected with the 'creative industries'. It is cooler here and last night brought welcome rain.Tomorrow I will go out to the mangroves with Yara Guasque my host and Karla Brunet who will come down from Salvador for our talk together at the state university on Monday.

The events in Sao Paulo earlier this week were organised by the Institute Sergio Motta. Motta was a former Minister of Telecommunications in Brasil responsible for laying out the telephony network throughout the country and making television accessible throughout. He died young. His daughter, Renata Motta, who works at PUC SP University along with Giselle Beiglemann who leads the acclaimed  Semiotics and Communications course there has set up the institute which gives awards annually to talented practitioners specialising in work related to art and technology. Among the winners in the early stage career section this year was Fernando Rabelo, whose work I had known a little from the bricolabs list, and it was a pleasure for me to be invited to give feedback on his work which included his low tech vj control piece installed in a black box in the entrance foyer of the British Council building in Sao Paulo (a building which enshrines British influence in Brasil with a beautiful garden that acts as the perfect backdrop for conversations addressing multiple angles on the world).   Rabelo has programming as well as artistic skills and has been evolving an approach which takes the idea of minimalism into interesting directions related to behaviours and choices for presentation and production. He produced a panoramic piece in Amsterdam earlier in the year using one computer rather than multiple which goes against the grain of much artistic production using technologies and so is asking what can we do with less? Keynotes were given by Gerfried Stocker who was asked to describe the history and current direction of media culture in German speaking countries, Yukiko Shikata from ICC (who has worked in the past with Armin Mesodoch and with Dumb Type) who tackled the subject in relation to Japan starting with systems and robotic work in the 1950s bringing us through to exhibitions she is curating about media, architecture and ecological issues today; others attending included Sabine Himmelsbach from Haus fur Medienhunst in Oldenburg and Rosina Gomez-Baeza Tintura from laboral in Gijon, northern Spain. Giselle Beiglemann, who is combining curating/organising the Motta prize with her work as an academic and artist, gave a fascinating talk which she titled Technofagia - echoing anthrofagia - defining a new generation of Brasilian artists, activists and thinkers specialising in low tech, collaborative, DIY practices engaging with social and environmental questions in ways that she feels break significantly with the tactics evolved in the generation which she represents who were dependent on academic posts and relations with commercial companies to gain access to the high tech resources they felt neccessary for their work.

Next week Brasil continues to ripple with an intensive level of activity  in art/technology fields -  on 11th Mobilefest- Paulo Hartmann and Marcelo Godoy's annual extravaganza of screen based practices targeted at the general public will commence at the Museum of Image and Sound in Sao Paulo, on the same day as the artemov festival led by Lucas Bambozzi, Marcus Bastos and others will open in Belo Horizonte in advance of associated programmes over a course of month in three other cities - Salvador, Recife and Porto Alegre.  

A publication resuting from the Paralelo events held also at MIS earlier this year - with researchers practitioners  in art, technology, design, science and environment areas - from Brasil, the Netherlands and the UK, will be available by December in book form followed by a POD extended series of papers which will be found on the Virtueel Platform site.  The book's title - Paralelo, Unfolding Narratives in Art, Technology and Environment - will show how developments from this week-long network event are already spiralling off in many interesting ways.  Participant Rachel Jacons from Active Ingredient in Nottingham will spend time in Brasil this month continuing collaborations with Mobilefest and also with the Mobile Lab project curated by Ivan Henriques and Silvia Leal n Rio which is investigating environmental issues through artistic residencies in a van travelling around the Guanabara Bay. Later in the month Giles Lane from Proboscis will take part in the artemov events; in October James Wallbank and Mike Stubbs from England came back to Sao Paulo, to MIS, to contribute to a symposium in advance of hopefully future cooperation between these organisations.  James spoke about the connections between waste and media a live subject for bricos anywhere. Meantime, two hours away from Rio, on an eco reserve in Mata Atlantica forest, Jo Joelson and Bruce Gilchrist of London Fieldworks are now on a six week residency (with their one year son Jetson), through an Artists Links award from the British Council which will allow them to explore an ongoing project idea - relating to the idea of the Arctic tern bird, which flies from northern hemispheres including northern Scotland to the ice-capped south via the Brasilian coastline, annually, in search of maximum daylight.They hope to make links between their time here and a series of tree-houses which they are constructing in the Highlands of Scotland, which will be ready next year to host visitors, researchers in art, science and beyond - as temporary, nature-based studios.  Although Scotland will no doubt be colder than Brasil, we all feel we have to pay back somehow ....if not in warmth and light, then somehow....revealing the reverse path of those birds whose trajectory no doubt has meaning, waiting to be revealed.

Took a walk yesterday in the Botanic Gardens at Cambridge, where Bristol based artist Luke Jerram will produce a work with plants in the glasshouses later this week (as part of the NightJar festival) and spent some time considering the history of the rose, not through looking at books or walls, but by wandering around the displays which are living, scented, tangible, real flowers growing laid out in chronological beds which somehow all look the same now it is autumn and apart from a few pale tea-roses most flowerheads are dead, shiveringly leafless.  What strikes me most is how the history of English roses in the past two centuries is bound in with China - how Chinese models provided the basis for development of the hybrids which have become most familiar today. It strikes me most clearly as I am currently developing a summer school, with colleagues at the RCA in London and at Tsinghua University in Beijing, which we hope to hold next year there, exploring co-design and participatory processes, linking older people (including retired professors) living in Beijing with researchers in fields of textiles, ageing, communication technologies, industrial and product design.....to achieve a mutual flow and hopefully successful hybridity.....design for an ageing society is one potential title, the other (which I prefer) is design environment, art, research......or DEAR for short. I'm also busily working with Vanessa - a bricolabs network colleague - on a project related to the Kogi people who live in the Sierra Nevada in Colombia....who are also Elders, or Elder Brothers as they name themselves in their writings - they say 'in the strength of the Mamo's wisdom lies the force of our roots...'.and preparing to return to Brasil on Halloween for the Sergio Motta Instituto anniversary events in Sao Paulo before heading to Florianopolis to Santa Catarina for a talk, with Paralelo colleague, Karla Brunet, about art, technology and environment......we are all working hard in 'this trembling world' as the Kogi Mamos have named it.

To the Serpentine Gallery in London this evening for the Opening Night of the long awaited Gustav Metzger Exhibition (extraordinarily the first one person show in the UK for this 83 year old artist). The works on display reveal his range of preoccupations from torture of the human soul caught up in war and violent situations (drawing on his own experience during the second world war as a Jewish child in Nuremberg, when he lost both his parents in the Holocaust and was exiled to Britain travelling as part of the Kindertransport). His foundation in the late 50s of the Auto-Destructive Art Movement, his organisation of the Destruction in Art Symposium, involvement with the Committee of 100 anti-nuclear movement with Bertrand Russell and others, combined with his work as Secretary of  the then fledging Computer Art Society, makes Metzger an antecedent figure whose influence on many key members of the generation of artists who followed has been immense.  Acknowledgement in the form of this major exhibition in a leading London is greatly overdue.

The title of the show, Decades 1959-2009, seems ill-fitting though. This is primarily an exhibition that reminds one starkly of Merzger's childhood in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and early 40s and demonstrates the extent to which this trauma shaped and formed him.  His later preoccupations with environmental damage, the ruination of nature, the terror of the car, the damage caused by capitalism and the temporarility of media are linked in his work to an industrial and machine aesthetic that together achieve terrifying effect - reminding us all of our own role in (hu)man's self destruction and his annihilation of the world. Metzger's vision and voice are from the third and fourth decades of the 20th century - its deprivations, conflicts and its tragedies which are still playing out today and which are echoing in many ways on a number of different levels, the legacy of which have locked this new century in a tight fist. This is a charged and strange exhibition, a room full of liquid crystals is disturbingly beautiful, immersive and stilling - other pieces rip apart any sense of comfort and deny any ease.

It's the season of events before leaffalls. On Tuesday I will do a ten minute presentation on future possibilities for collaborative research in arts and humanities related fields in  the UK and Brazil at an event at the Department of Innovation and Skills in London which will see the launch of a long awaited Memorandum of Understanding between Research Funding Agencies in the two countries. I will talk about the recent Paralelo event in Sao Paulo which brought together around forty designers, artists, media researchers and others working in the spaces between in Brazil, the Netherlands and the UK and how the simple act of meeting has led to numerous unforeseen developments which simply required the spark of being together to generate results.  I will also talk about bricolabs and how it grew from nothing and runs on nothing apart from language (citing Octavio Paz on Breton, that nature is language and language for its part is nothing but a double of nature). I will also recall that Paralelo was about nature and language and the languages that connect us, months after the initial talking ceased. The reverberation of networks that grow through autopoiesis is something that perhaps the new research memorandum can help supprt us to explain. Or perhaps we just need to keep jamming. I also spent an evening last week addressing the topic of 'art, science and beyond' for a meeting as part of the British Science Festival held in a nearby art college, advertised for both artists and scientists but predominantly attended by artists (and three scientists) and numerous who said they were from the 'beyond'. My conclusion was this event was that all we need to consider are the three 'e's: education, empathy and environment - showing some great pics by North American photographer Berenice Abbott whose evocative works say more than a thousand textbooks and citing Naum Gabo, the great constructivist engineer and sculptor, - 'art acts, art asserts'....whilst science, dear old science, simply 'explores, apprehends, inform and proves' ..

I took a few days out to go down below Sofia, to the south-west, towards the Greek Border, to a town called Sandanski famous for its mineral waters, its restful spas and now (in my view) the lack of any other UK tourists. It's main attraction for me was that hardly anyone spoke any English so I could read and read to my heart's content, test out some words on paper, solve some complicated conceptual twists and stare at the blue sky otherwise, and think about nothing (always a good thing to do I find in times of synaptic overload). Also, clutched in my hand was some desirous reading material - a book about Ubermorgen.com (see previous post) a newspaper about African Maximalism and slum.tv given to me by the inspirational Alexander Nikolic  - www.slum-tv.info - who I met in Sofia and the latest London Review of Books with a diary article about Pakistan by Tariq Ali  - www.lrb.co.uk.v31/n14/ali_01_html -  which I would love to discuss with my friends at Mauj who have been keeping us posted also about happenings in Karachi over the past eight months. What would they say to Ali's claim that Pakistan's largest city is in his view 'the Naples of the East' with its 'muggings, burglaries, murders, many of them part of protection rackets linked to politicians..'. There are other articles in the issue which burn into my skull as I lie in the blazing heat of southern Europe and I give myself time to think. The issues raised by the e-tribalisation workshop, particularly the ideas for projects which emerged at warp speed in the final session after two days of warbling and meandering - specifically the ideas linked to deepest deep Europe and its collective socio-religious histories (spawned by Romanian participants including Stefan Tiron) - moved me also to some thoughts that could lead somewhere - we shall see. I read also this week some postings on bricolabs including Rob Van Kranenburg's summer writing about his fav topic the Internet of Things and a rather stylised response from a Berlin based US photographer - Tim Syth - who has decided to sign up to the belief that the world is divided into digital natives and non-natives. I wonder where this leaves e-tribes? I also wonder where this leaves Hans Bernhard, who is described luminously in the Ubermorgen book by  Domenico Quaranta as follows: ' a child of the generation that wanted to 'leave reality behind' that appreciated the openness of the net, the freedom, the ability to make the body of the artist disappear, Hans Bernhard saw reality crashing down on him, or rather, he saw the net acting on his mind and body, infecting it. He experienced first hand the transition from the internet to the internet of things, his own transformation from user to 'node' on the network.'...they say ' we are children of the 1980s. We are the first internet-pop -generation...'. Quaranta goes on: ' Hans Bernhard's neural networks are connected to the global network.... 'These analogue texts offer me some counterpoint to a view I've been thinking lately that never before in history has so much been said by so many about so little.

It's the second day of the 'e-tribalisation' meeting in Sofia which turns out to be British Council supported under their Creative Collaborations programme - and so we are sitting in their building on the edge of Oborishe near to the Bulgarian National Library and the Art Academy. The temperature outside is around 40 degrees and inside there has been an uneven series of presentations from those attending - some of which have addressed issues relating to e-tribalisation, others which haven't. The best was the last - by Hans Bernard of Ubermorgen.com who lucidly and succinctly described the course of his work with key collaborators from e-toy in the mid 90s to today, including the successful 'auto-cannibalistic' project - Google Will Eat Itself - as well as Amazon Noir, a piece of code so successful that said company have offered to buy it. More at - http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php -  Hans reminds us that information is free and it is impossible to keep it anyway - so best idea is to put out as much contradictory information as possible......'we are hallucinating that we are sitting here' he says.....

Hans will do a key note at this year's ISEA Festival, in Belfast, on 26th August, at 5. pm. Topic: Torture.

There's a book now called UM. Ubermorgen.Com Media Hacking vs Conceptual Art (Christop Merian Verlag 2009). Orders to Amazon now?

Looking forward to next week, I am going to Sofia in Bulgaria to participate in a workshop convened by AltArt linked to a project about E-Tribalisation. The organisers say:

"The time of global retribalization is now. Social dynamics becomes unbound by geography, but dissipates in a maze of shallow  communication. As communication mazes fill or unfill with meaning, communities (tribes) sink and emerge, capable of asserting notable -even global - power at the height of their tide. As tribes unite or collapse, migrate and change shape, so do their ways of negotiating value and truth.

The project brings together 12 international artists to test new ways of reaching electronic tribes with their work, to see how is the art discourse altered in this context, to test the difference an artwork cand make in an electronic tribe. During the 10 month process artists explore new perspectives on communicating with audiences and brings electronic communities a deeper understanding of the new social structures they are engaging. Welcome aboard!"

 

 It's an exciting time to be going to Bulgaria. Beforehand I will be participating in a panel discussion at Sadlers Wells in London, at an event organised by Arts Council England, which addresses the impact of digital media on arts organisations from across the spectrum of their regularly funded organisational portfolio. DO THE ARTS SPEAK DIGITAL is the rather strange title of the event. The panel I'm on has Jamie King and Gavin Starks as well as a media lawyer Lawrence Kaye and we'll be asked to comment on whether artists need 'a digital rights agency'. It should be interesting. 

 

Just got back from a day out in Manchester, where the International Festival is happening - with lots of good stuff doing on, including an hour long procession devised by Jeremy Deller which created a series of  beautiful moments out in the city streets conjuring up memories and melodies of a north west region which was familiar to some, unfamiliar to others  - with former mill workers on a float called The Last Industrial Revolution, flowering hearses with blossoms mourning the passing of the Hacienda, brass bands playing Joy Division tracks and Oldham's oldest fish and chip shop celebrated by a great group going by on a float singing of how Chips are Heavenly. You couldn't make it up, as they in northern parts!!

 Behind the city hall, on a day filled with activities, children gathered and climbed up the upside down willow trees which artist Gustav Metgzer has used to make his public artwork, having fun regardless of the serious messages behind the work....where Metzger has sunk the treetops into concrete symbolising the end of nature. The crowd sitting around watching in the Peace Garden included many locals - and among them the Community Radio team wandered asking for views and opinions on the work and on the festival so far. I listen in.....close range.....and am moved to hear a woman beside me speak lucidly and with great depth of insight about why this piece of public art works for her. She mentions in particular the way in which people have gathered and congregated around it and also laments the fact that at the procession earlier, she found herself having to lead the crowd into clapping as floats passed. She thinks it may now not be seen as cool to clap.

Inside the City Art Gallery, Zaha Hadid has worked with Manchester sound engineers/acousticians from  Sandy Brown Associates  to create a Bach Pavilion - a temporary auditorium made from stretched lycra that contorts across a room like a snake, or a musical note....

It's been as bright as Brasil in London these last few weeks. We're staggering under the weight of so much sun.

I'm glad also to see the emergence of a few things I've been working on lately - a Proboscis 'Diffusion' text (using a nice new format) - is available at:

 http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=1238

Having worked on this gothic piece in the cold and dark of New Year's Eve 08, it's fun to see it reach the light of day now n dense July.

The essay I recently wrote for the BBC is now up at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/knowledgeexchange/8.pdf

along with some essays by Pat Kane, Bill Thompson, Stephen Heppell etc commenting on a recent programme of collaborative research which the Beeb supported with UK academics funded by the AHRC. In the piece I wrote I was asked to concentrate on the nature of the knowledge, innovation and partnerships involved in the programme which brought academic researchers together with broadcasters for collaborative research into shifting media trends, public engagement through social media etc.  I argue for openess of processes and 'sharism' (citing Isaac Mao) as an essential part of any research into the impact of so called new media on the traditional public sector broadcast domain.

Yesterday, I went to see the Architectural Association end of year student show in London and was mightily impressed. There's a Latin American theme to some of the diploma work. One project group were seeking to design a new high speed railway line to run the whole way down through Chile and they link this back to London's railway stations, to Paddington Station in particular, one of Brunel's great accomplishments. With the graduation party going on in the park opposite beyond this year's temporary Pavilion it was possible to find some space in the small hot galleries, enjoy the accompaniment of Brasilian Music whilst looking at beautifully intricate designs for micro-infrastructure development within the Port of Rio de Janeiro and pick up at reduced price - for one night - copy of a new publication, Articulated Grounds: Mediating Environment and Culture.

This June is a blast - as ever. It's end of year Show at the RCA: the work the design students is open to the public for another week and is well worth a visit. Jonathan Ive of Apple will be among the visitors on Tuesday during Innovation Day when he is also due to give a talk at the Royal Geographical Society. Among the works on show is a Wind Knitting Machine which is attached to the outside of the RCA building, facing Hyde Park which is producing a woolly sock using the natural elements....see http://blog.mydeco.com/2009/06/26/wind-powered-knitting-machines-solar-flowers-and-chairs-that-turn-into-bedside-tables-it-must-be-the-rca-graduate-show/

and inside  other works include Jose Garcia Huidboro's Branch which you can view occasionally 'live' on the web.....athttp://www.thebigbranch.com/

 The report on Digital Culture in Brasil which I -co-wrote with Felipe Fonseca has finally been launched in Sao Paulo (unfortunately without either myself or Felipe who was much too busy getting married the same week).....but it can be easily read now on the Virtueel Platform site at http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/en/#2646

 We're happy to see it out in the world....and Felipe and Ricardo Ruiz and others have been working on a translation into Portuguese  which is an essential step - and can be viewed at http://desvio.weblab.tk/pub/mapeamentobr

 I'm also just recovering from writing a report for the BBC here in the UK on the 'nature of knowledge, innovation and partnerships' in their recent collaboration with the Arts and Humanities Research Council - more about which later.

We're just about to embark on commissioning some publishing related to Paralelo, the workshop held in Sao Paulo a couple of months ago which looked at how artists, designers, scientists and engineers are working together to address environmental and ecological concerns in Brasil, the Netherlands and the UK.  The ensuing essays will also be available on the Virtueel Platform website where you can also find out more about their recent E-Culture limited edition publication which contains essays on the Network as Laboratory and another which I have written called Tracing the Trace (reflections on doing the digital mapping document in Brasil for the Netherlands Ministry of Culture). The 'deluxe box' publication contain many other interesting pieces written by various national and international commentators on trends in media culture ......more at: http://www.virtueelplatform.nl/en/#2653

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.

& so to Cambridge to hear the illustrious Law Professor and Chair of Creative Commons - James Boyle, from the Centre for the Public Domain at Duke University - present a talk at Wolfson College, introduced by John Naughton. It takes me back, partially, to the CODE conference we did at Queen's College in the same city, in April 2001, when Boyle and Naughton were among the star turns at a pregnant and prescient moment in terms of IP law and all the associated issues, linked to the growth of interest in peer to peer production, the Microsoft anti trust case, IBM beginning to use Linux etc. It is funny that today's Guardian newspaper has an article in its Technology section mentioning that open source software is doing very well during (and because of) this global recession. Boyle's talk tonight manages to remind me of the importance of advocacy. Ben White from the British Library asked him a great question: given that politicians tend to respond best to emotion rather than wonderfully intricate and often correct cerebral arguments, how does one win out?
Hahha. That is indeed the question.........