New snow in London gardens like fresh mind-stuff falling tonight.  Earlier this week the opening on Tuesday of 'Between - Mind and Matter' an exhibition of the work of Susan Aldworth and Karen Ingham at the Ruskin Gallery gathered an audience of artists, scientists, psychologists, sociologists, medics, film-makers, writers and journalists.  Ingham's work  'Variance' tackles some difficult issues - catching the idea or notion of a shifting self, a person-ality who is both hidden and revealed, private and yet on show, in-formation and ex-pressive.  How far a digital image might bestow some kind of reality on 'the other' so that we think we can see into their consciousness is part of the terrain being explored  here. She also decided to show for the first time anywhere, her new works called 'Brain-Masks' as high projections over blind-folded windows.  The overall effect of this show was art that combines the sensorial and the cerebral; an appropriate opening to lead into the launch of a new Cambridge art and science 'circle' with really fab short talks by Nick Humphrey (author of Soul-Dust - The Magic of Consciousness) and Scott Lash (author of Intensive Culture). I showed the emblemmatic diagram  that Odile Crick (wife of Francis) drew for her husband when he came home and described the 'discovery' of DNA to her; she was an art teacher at CambridgeSchool of Art (where the Ruskin Gallery is) so it came naturally to her to visualise it. On the following night again in Cambridge I attended a lecture by Jaan Tallinn chief engineer of Skype, whose Pressi-ntation was prepared for audience of computer scientists, privacy experts, science policy makers and a few scattered philosophers many of whom emerged sceptical from a talk that predicted 'ecological disaster' as a result of machine intelligence leaving human ethics behin . He started by commenting on relationship between what he would say and Cambridge figures like Newton, Darwin and Turing. Tallinn's big obsession now is the development of AGI (or artificial general intelligence) which you can read more about at www.agiri.org/wiki/artificial_general_intelligence or www.agiri.org/wiki/Mind_Ontology - and as Cambridge blogger John Naughton conveys - see www.memex.naughtons.org  - in his entry for February 2nd - and called for introduction of some kind of system of restraint   (such as he said now applied within bio-engineering)  to manage the high speed generation of AGI (*quote: technology moves faster than evolution). It was all rather troubling being delivered in a context ominously close to where Newton did his best with alchemy before he conceded to gravity and the falling of the apple and round the corner from the pub where Watson and Crick (again) celebrated their breakthrough.It was perhaps not that surprising though if one checks out www.lifeboat.com/ex/bios.jaan.tallinn which tells us his student thesis in Estonia involved travelling interstellar distances using warps in space-time.Skype being one of the best inventions of our time - does this mean where the chief engineer leads we should follow, warps and all?

There is to quote Alastair Brotchie - of the marvellous Atlas Press, the BookArtBookShop, arch pataphysician and recent biographer of Alfred Jarry (MIT Press 2011) - a shift bigger than that of 1968 now going on and it is manifestly clear in the work of this year's RCA graduates (at least this interim spring). Despite ongoing Professorial preoccupations with heading over to Boston to 'meet MIT' as if somehow that will cross the RCA's palm with silver the students are rapidly forging ahead with modelling new forms of 'anti-disciplinary' pratices that new Media Lab head Ito is seeing for someone to head. Like many other arts and humanities institutions the RCA is pursuing 'knowledge exchange and knowledge transfer' often interpreted like knowledge is something out there, a product or a fixity to be bought, sold and guaranteed (biodegradable).  If there is really some knd of revolution underway it can be possibly be found within own walls in the preoccupations of this years' students as they break open fixity of design categories and find meaning and inspiration in disorder, disruptive innovation and a kind of attenuated brio-logic that lays out the innards of things, so that we see 'things thinking' if designed then only in name and beyond that bare, ready to face the social, open and exposed. The social breakdowns that are now increasingly implicit within UK society are being manifest in and around all the design disciplines - rveealing a capacity to make disorder a highly attenuated and vital part of the creative process.  This kind of style-anti-style is arch brico: discordant and yet timeless, like untied shoe laces causing all of us to bow down.

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. 

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.

Am finally finding time to write again after a few months slavery doing some things about which I am hazy, but they probably involved language of another sort being applied to other peoples' projects.  I have been getting the Visualise Public Art programme going at the Ruskin Gallery in Cambridge where I am acting as Guest Curator through to next summer - just organised a successful talk by audio visual environments pioneer Naut Humon - and am pretty excited at what lies ahead: with shows by Liliane Lijn, Jamie Allen, Susan Aldworth and Karen Inghams happening in January/February preceded by an open lab looking at various tools applications and approaches to sound walks through the city working with Enrique Tomas and Duncan Speakman as well as members of the Music Technology team at Anglia Ruskin University.  In March we hope to have Alessandro Ludovico (and Paolo Cirio) visit helped partly by European Erasmus funding and I'll organise a talk by them about the brilliant Face to Facebook as well as the other radical projects with which they have been involved. There's also be a talk about 'The Limits of Seeing' during Cambridge Science Festival when the Outreach Officer from the Institute of Astronomy will explain how exo-planets are discerned alongside other speakers from the Vision and Science Lab at ARU and an artist or two also discussing their powers of perception.  In June/July to coincide with the celebration of Alan Turing's centenary I'll do a show on 'Poetry Language Code' with Liliane Lijn, William Latham, John Cayley, Eduardo Kac and a few others and at the Institute of Astronomy we'll have a day about art, science and perception of space....erecting black marquees on the lawns and engaging in acts of collaborative observation.  In the middle of scheming all of this, I had a few days in Paris where I met Zhang Ga and Dominique Moulon for coffee in le Marais and am trying to decide if I should return my Apple first gen nano to its Maker.  

Surely I would if I could.  The news of the exo-planet made fully from diamond made my media week. It wasn't hard as the competition wasn't that strong.  Sentences that appear to have little resemblance to the normal expectation continue to be handed out to those looters and 'rioters' that were unlucky enough to have been caught or in several cases to have handed themselves in in anticipation (it now appears clearly wrongly) of relative leniency.  Even the Spectator (a normally conservative journal) commented critically on the sentencing of one man for sixteen months for the crime of licking two ice-creams and handing them on to someone else (as he didn't even like them!!) in a shop which he didn't even break into. This in a country which also this week had pictures in the tabloid press of a man convicted for killing a baby boy in his care now walking free after less than two years in jail. The Times also reported that the Government had an 'hour long meeting' with representatives of Fakebook, Twitter, Google and RIM following the point two weeks ago 'at the height of the rioting and shooting' (what shooting??) ..when ' police commanders considered shutting social networking sites but discovered they had no power to do so'.....now it seems 'Senior Officers oppose any move to curtail the use of the sites as they use them to provide information to the public and to pick up chatter or intelligence'......The journalists reporting on the meeting between the Government and the communications corps conclude that the meeting concluded: 'Although it would be technically possible to shut social networks, the move would rsk damaging the UK's reputation as such measures are more usually associated with authoritarian governments in China and the Middle East'...  They used to call August the silly season in the UK newspapers - when there would be fantasy stories invented with due hype and overkill to fill the gap between seasons and serious reporting. This time sadly it's all real, unimaginably real.   

An odd week: riotous and blitz-like - the city caving into itself reflexively reflecting its anxieties. Pictures on the media of darkness alight. I paint the bathroom white whilst listening to Mahler my attention regularly drawn to what's happening in Hackney and along Mare Street where my friends live luckily behind closed gates tonight as random car fires take hold between there and London Fields. On Thursday the city calms down and with a sudden need for water I head to Greenwich, down by the long rolling river, along with Ben and Phil from Gaianova to visit the Observatory and the National Maritime Museum where we view the UVA (United Visual Artists) exhibition about climate change which has been made in collaboration with Cape Farewell an organisation which specialises in bringing artists and scientists (musicians, curators etc) on boat expeditions around the Northern Polar reaches. This exhibition is described to us by Duncan the helpful museum invigilator who turns out to be an artist in disguise as a bit of a 'marmite' show (ie the public seem to either love it or hate it).  At the front desk buying tickets the lady selling it to me warns me loudly that 'it is DIGITAL INTERACTIVE ART' and in response to my gentle enquiry confirms YES THERE HAVE BEEN SOME COMPLAINTS! We enter armed with our little infrared torches and listen to the soundscape (of poems about changing ecologies) and move around the space which has been designed beautifully with rectangles like stalagnites showing names of glaciers that reveal themselves if you shine a torch and in between floor pieces that shift and change according to the movement and dwelling of the pointed light. It's curiously effective and funnier still to hear that many of the museum visitors apparently emerge totally confused about what they have been witnessing, unable to integrate the different bits and wondering where on earth are the trad museum cases, plinths and descriptive labels.  The day before I had spent a few hours at the HQ of the Computer Art Society - an office at 43-46 Russell Square (where members of the Bloomsbury Group used to live - ahh! how they would turn in their graves at this weeks' sub-Dionysian upsurges) transcribing an interview carried out by Professor Jeremy Gardner at Halloween 2008 with the extraordinary computer art pioneer, Manfred Mohr, who explains in the interview that he has no truck, none whatsoever, with interactive art - he says it may be fun, entertainment even, but it is in his mind anyway certainly not art.  Yet the UVA floor installations remind me strongly of some of his work. As far as art and technology goes, we are living in a slowly evolving continuum. As far as the ice goes, its disappearance balances the fire in a week of strange contrasts and juxtapositions. 

The garden is wet. It is raining in London inevitably being mid-June and Bloomsday. Time for a celebration.  I have been doing some writing recently for METAL in Chalkwell Hall in Southend on Sea, for an exhibition about Water curated by Simon Poulter which opens on 15th July.  The exhibition theme is a perfectly chosen topic for this gallery sitting close by the lower Thames estuary. The show tours to Liverpool and possibly Newcastle after its opening in Essex.  The text I wrote is called 'Drying the Buddhas' Tears' inspired by a conversation on board a flight from Vienna after doing the Hybrid Arts Jury work in Linz in May. I've also just returned from a short sojourn in Marseille (where we had a meeting about The Human Project - an emerging centre for art, science, technology and ecology in North East Brasil - and where I visited the IMeRA research centre and attended a workshop on Invisible Dynamics in the City on an island off Marseille led by Peter and Sue Richards from the Exploratorium in San Francisco who have a research fellowship currently with Roger Malina and others in the IMeRA team.  While we were there a Parisian anthropologist was delivering a talk showing a dynamic map of riots around the world which is growing more populated daily it seems. Marseille is in the preparatory stages for assuming European Capital of Culture status in 2013. We heard from a woman working on analysing the extent of plastic infiltration of the beaches and the sea-life along the coastline with a view to educating citizenry about how to clean up their ways.  The images she showed were terrifying - - fish found with tangled knots of plastic inside them - and in many places along this mythical South of France coastline the granularity of sand corrupted by 30% plastic content and sometimes more. I stayed for a few days at the remarkable Cite Radieuse designed in the late 40s as a utopian community by Le Corbusier with a rooftop that hosted the first performance of Nicolas Shoffers Cybernetic Spatiodynamic Experimental Show in 1956 I lay briefly on the concrete beach there then lunched at O'Brady's an Irish pub nearby its green and golden flags framed against a gentle sky. 

An essay I wrote over last few months is now up at www.proboscis.org.uk/2665/in-through-a-dark-lens-by-bronac-ferran.

In writing it I found myself preoccupied by the latency of glass.  

I had a bit of a tail spin in my mind on Thursday evening last standing listening to Stelarc at the opening of the new exhibition, Human+, at the Science Gallery in Pearse Street in Dublin, intoning the significance of the circularity of the flesh, its fractal expansiveness and how 'what it means to be dead becomes almost as meaningful as what constitutes a body that is alive'..' with plastination dead bodies need no longer decompose'...and of 'how agents of fractal flesh bodies'...'spatially separate but electronically connected' ..create 'alternate anatomies' and suddenly I'm transfixed by a curious thought that this might be Leopold Bloom suddenly hybridised into the 21st century, still preoccupied by the cycle of the human body and its circulations as he was in Ulysses in 1904 walking near Pearse by undertakers and commenting on 'the sweet oaten reek of horse-piss'...As Stelarc eloquently intones the 'climate of circulating flesh' I'm reminiscing on Joyce's celebration of how 'Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcombs, fried hencods roes'....

I took a bike ride up to All Soul's Lane not far from the Science Park in Cambridge (after a two day workshop here last few days) to visit the grave of Ludwig Wittgenstein which a Professor of Ethics told me last night was here, in same cemetery as Moral Philosopher G E Moore. It's a lovely old dappled place and after a close scrunity of fading headstones of local residents - astronomers, nobel prize winners, poets, sons of Darwin, gardeners, mothers and painters - I located the unfussy Wittgenstein stone which (in contrast to all the others in this place of stone and light) has candles on it plus coins, reminding me of New Year's Eve ritual offerings on Flamengo beach in Rio.  The workshop I'd been attending was organised by the Cambridge Philosophy Department and held at Corpus Christi the college where Andrew Marvell and Christopher Marlowe had studied and which was on trend with its topic of Trust and Cloud Computing, bringing together theorists in moral logic, ethics experts and technologists to debate what's going on in the cloud or clouds that increasingly make our data amorphous and distanced from our lives, raising some great chunky ethical questions that we felt probably deserved some Wittgensteinean insights.  The best we got was some nice readings of trust and its breaches from Professor Rod Hunter who is based at Paris-Tech (he is a sociologist who has specialised in studies of criminology and conversation analysis) which was a nice prelude to the final lecture from Professor Ian Kerr a privacy lawyer from Ottawa whose talk called 'In Machines We Trust? - Cloud computing, ambient intelligence and robotics' showed the sophistry of the natural language patterns which occur now online under the guise of helpful bots or virtual agents who seek to help us (buy) through machinically smooth dialogic interaction when we seek something online. For more about Kerr's work including his book On the Identity Trail see www.iankerr.ca.  

Activities this week:  The Arts Council (where I used to work and helped to create support structures for collaborative, media and interdisciplinary practices) has decided to cur support to several of its funded portfolio of digital media and interdisciplinary arts organisations including some of the most critical and worthy recipients such as mute, proboscis, onedotzero, folly and access space in Sheffield. There are many good organisations still receiving funds such as furtherfield and arts catalyst and blast theory and futureverything - but ACE is now receiving heavy criticism for heralding this as investment in excellence and innovation whilst entirely removing the £30000 a year that was going to James Wallbank for doing something entirely ethically sustainable that has been admired worldwide, not least in Brazil where Felipe Fonseca and others in metareciclagem have openly acknowledged the learning that they'd got from this self-generated street level initiative in Sheffield.  The focus of the ACE digital strategy is now building what's called 'capacity' ie ability to use media tools to market and distribute your work. Paradox - in order to push this strategy forward with larger organisations across the artforms they are cutting numerous specialist organisations which already have this capacity....

More this week: I attended a sort of 'wake' at the Arts Catalyst space beside the Wyvern Bindery in Clerkenwell for US nuclear artist James Acord ( called 'one of the great naive artists of our time' by Gustav Metzger). Acord was found dead in January this year after a career of immense intensity pummelling away at the nuclear industry through a combination of performative engagement, participation and intervention. The event was deeply moving, with novelist Jim Flint, who wrote a sucessful work of fiction called The Book of Ash. giving us some insight into the extraordinary highs and lows of becoming close to Acord who he said had stories and a capacity for telling them which his attempts at novel-writing couldn't hope to come anywhere near. He also showed us an image which Acord had sent through the post to him in November last year of a sort of icon, combining nuclear imagery and wind turbine - with no message attached. It's worth noting also that Flint, like many other successful novelists writing out of London in the past decade, had spent part of his emergence as a youthful author authoring texts for mute and metamute. 

One of Flint's peers, and former colleague in Interdisciplinary Arts, Tony White also held forth at an event this week - at the Russian Club Gallery in the East End - publishing a wonderfully timed essay called Auto-Destructive Arts Policy, as a contribution to an exhibition by Rupert Ackroyd and Alison Turnbull. White cut and mixed two texts - Gustav Metzger's call for an Art Strike frm 1974 and a speech by a UK minister for culture made last month - achieving a brilliantly dark, amalgalm of the two that completely undercuts and subverts rhetoric, full of voids and avoidances.

Metzger meantime is 85 in 7 days time and still going strong.  A book written by Mathieu Copeland about his work and in collaboration with him is going to be published by MIT Press, featuring among other things an interview which Gustav made with Buckminster Fuller, back in the early 70s, along with Computer Art Society founder, Alan Sutcliffe.  Finally in this week of creative destruction I visited Beaconsfield for their latest opening in the Ragged School near Lambeth Walk and caught a strange little performance in the gallery under the railway arch of a rocking-horse burning, set on fire by the energy created by a rowing machine.  Still London burns. 

Today and St Patrick's Day by coincidence I am walking through Cambridge wending my way through greenery to the railway station from Microsoft Research Labs and notice that exemplary Parisian domiciled elemental duo HeHe have come to town and are part of the Invisible Dust exhibition opening that same evening at the Lido on Jesus Green.  I stick around for a few hours taking my time so much in Jim Ede's perfectly preserved modernist house by Kettles Yard that they leave me in there after closing (I am sitting in the library reading a book on Machine Aesthetics - probably I vanished into the text) anyway they finally discover me and Michael Harrison, the erudite Director, takes me down to view their latest acquisition, a donated Antony Gormley sculpture, all aesthetically rusting...which they can sell to raise funds for their new Education wing which will be a nice addition to the overall space. I go over to Jesus Green in the deepening afternoon to find Heiko - in red - kneedeep in water with Helen - in blue, ill, almost voiceless - on the side of the pool, both sorting out everything for the opening at dusk.  It is a work resulting partly from their residency at University of East Anglia during the past six months - and gosh, once it launches - green lights, plumes of purple smoke, loud bang, great replication in model size of the Deep Water Horizon disaster, transformed beautifully with amazing timing given the stark despairing news now reaching us from Japan of yet another man-made convulsion of nuclear energy worsening by the minute, far outreaching in terms of fear than the full tumult of tsunami or even earthquake.  There is performative poetry here - with the green-lit oilrig installation and little boat finding its place in greeny water under a curving moon, circling bands of small birds and kids from over the wall behind the pool shouting 'Aliens aliens' towards HeHe and the rest of us giggling.  

It's February and in various ways this week London has been illuminated. The Chinese New Year and Brasilian celebration of Yemanja led to many warm greetings and on Thursday the Kinetica Artfair the annual feast of all things electric opened at the space in Marylebone opposite Madame Tussaud's. That afternoon the sky was totally blue with a swirl oflight clouds tossed by a wind that was apparently coming the whole way across the Atlantic.

At the Freedom Bookshop in Whitechapel last night was the launch of a post-Blakean illuminated pamphlet 'The Wine-Presses of Luvah' combined with exhibition of drawings and punk-poetry-performance by artist Dave Byers-Brown (with Mitalef) and his merry band comprising Angel of Death complete with scythe and pink bricks for feet, robot-man with plastic eyes and someone not in costume playing a curious instrument that whined behind the main chanting, foot stomping and general mayhem.  The pamphlet cost 50p which I thought was the best value this decade I had had for this outlay but someone in the audience immediately borrowed and kept mine. Hopefully it will become a collector's piece in the near future.

Kinetica now in its third iteration, had a theme this year of Evolution of Consciousness showing a broad church of work with everything from rather playful amateur electronics (borderland tacky when presented like they are works of art) to studied elaborate constructions that one might see as aesthetically the real thing! It's a vital event to consider the edges between disciplines and how they combine into one field that can be labelled kinetic.  For the first time this year I felt the mix was just too hybrid with work of genuine interest in danger of being submerged within a cacophony of other pieces all crowded into a quite tight place ironically leaving little or no room for reflective consciousness.  There is an absence of real space between work and maybe not enough rigour curatorially which may simply be a result of there not being enough money to run the show to say no to those who wish to pay to be there.  Whilst a few nice pieces were included I still had a deep sense that the aggregation of the whole *under the banner of kinetic art* diminishes the capacity of the audience to get behind and beyond the bright lights, weird noises, clicks and clunks of electronica. This feeling of being slightly under-whelmed was the concensus among some of London's leading creative producers - those weird creatures who move across and between boundaries of light, science, music, performance, visuals, graphics, fashion, web, collaboration, style and architecture - who showed up en masse for the opening. An event full of potential but somehow not quite delivering was the general conversational theme along with discussions of the Third Dimension (3D and fulldomes being one current preoccupation).  The producers have their eyes on moving into Madame Tussaud's where there is an under-utilised digital projection screen inside the tourist attractor dome.  I attended some of the talks and presentations on the second day and was a little depressed to see presenters take to the stage unintroduced with little if any critical feedback and contextualisation. No doubt it is probably also a case of inadequate finance. Sometimes the presentations were competing with clunks and whirrs of machinery offstage.  following the Fair's theme this year of the Brain and Consciousness (how we see, what happened when works move, what happens when we interact =---etc). I enjoyed very  much a clear and beautiful presentation by Lab(au) from Brussels on metadata and a double act by Gary Kennard of the Art & Mind Festival with science writer Rita Carter on Art & the Brain -  Picturing Perception who told me afterwards she thinks maybe language helps bring the world into being.  During the presentation she had also mentioned that recent research in science is displacing the notion of imagination with discoveries during brain-scanning that there is a intricate relationship between the zones of memory and the zones of visualisation. Scientists are suggesting we don't use the term imagination anymore and suggest we change it instead to 'preserving memory'. Gosh what a conservative time we are living in....this week I also headed down to the University of East London (for a conversation about London and Rio Olympics and the power of art to radiate against the logical positivism of the Olympic machinery) using the overland DLR train system which makes you feel like you are on some kind of moving image journey, looking out at the loops of high rise buildings, mixed with not yet demolished old churches, the river Thames occasionally emerging between focus points of waste and wealth.  

 

Snow on the silent streets.  Julian Assange has been released.  In the British Museum the Egyptian Book of the Dead (about the Afterlife) in on show until March.  

I just got back from the Lovely Weather conference in Donegal, North West Ireland which brought me via Dublin coincidentally sharing a bumpy aeroplane ride with all the members of the current Gorillaz band led by the fey Damon Albarn - all on their way together to play the first gig of their now current UK tour at the Point venue in the city. We were travelling last Thursday a day when the winds roared up O'Connell Street at 120 miles an hour with the wind howling through the trees all night and rain lashing across a country which had begun to acknowledge a financial crisis and the weather itself seemed in harmony!  In true Irish style the title of the Donegal event was funnily inappropriate being all about art and climate change.  A series of residencies have been taking place in the country supported by funds (now in danger of totally drying up) from new public buildings over the last year or so and underpinned also by the expertise of Roger Malina and Annick Bureaud from the Leonardo/OLATS organisation - who brought a certain French flavour to the proceedings - and indeed it seems someone from the south of France who shall remain nameless was responsible for suggesting the programme title, with true Gallic if not Gaelic wit.  The residencies themselves were stirring - one was about peat bogs (the miraculous turf of Ireland which can preserve bones, fossils, insects and many other things for millenia; another about the 'dead zones' being increasingly found in Northern European waters, with data based on this turned into an experimental sound performance by the Limerick based 'Softday' duo and another being about wool and sheep shearing with the shocking fact emerging that you can no longer buy wool for domestic use in this north west country though sheeps are still shorn by sympathetic farmers who pay two euros fifty to shear them then dispose of the beautiful fleece or sell it to the odd craftsperson/artist who asks for the sum of two total euros.  Its an odd time and an odd place that forgets the value of its sheep's fleece when all over the world woollen clothes go for extremely high prices. For my talk about artists globally working with themes of climate change and environmental fragility, I drew on the work of some people I have met recently like the talented UK artist Helen Couchman now based in China working on a deceptive series of pictures depicting a strange yellow streak she saw within the clouds whilst flying over Beijing. Could the economic clouds have golden linings? One outturn of the residencies is that some of the participants in the wool project are now forming a local cooperative and seemingly collectivism is back in business.  Gorillaz are also going down a storm across the UK this November having returned to the physical from the virtual.  On my way back from Ireland I stopped off at my Father's grave - he died three years ago this week - and found a piece of ice at the bottom of a vase with lavender I'd left there on my last visit: perfectly circular and perfectly temporary.