After a weekend of drinking fizzy wine, vigorously baking cupcakes, and hanging up bunting and garden lantern lighting paraphernalia (which looked beautifully festival-like in the evening), Jamie’s attempt at having two birthdays in two weeks is over. Staying at a friends for the aftermath, we spent Sunday on a walk through fields and woods; me with inappropriate gripless shoes and hungover muscles. “Well, you’re hardly Indiana Jones,” I was told as I failed to pull myself over a fence on a minor incline.

We also went to an art gallery, Spacex, that trod a brilliant line down a mix of installations, photography, video and drawings – without being up its own ass – and wonderfully avoided any nonsensical art which hinged on enjoying gallons of pseudo-intellectual art blurb. I suspect that Brighton is sometimes a bit guilty of pseudo-intellectual blurb (I know it is). It was refreshing.

I liked the squid that attacked a submarine, turning on every fifteen minutes and reacting with motion sensors to terrify everyone around it. Perhaps I just like bright electronics and fuzzy fibre optics. It also had a submarine pinging noise to press with a satisfying big red button. I tested it a lot. Here I can be seen not only demonstrating the glory of the Squid Submarine but also doing a loud sort of Cartman/Weebl & Bob impression for unknown reasons.

Straight from the pages of Jules Verne – a motorised model submarine by Cut and Scrape lurches about in the clutches of a giant squid.

Amongst other pieces the slightly porny ink drawings of sea creatures looked like the animals out of George Orwell’s 1984 that used to scare me as a kid.

This year’s Brighton Festival might come across as “Brian Eno Week” as Nicola says, because he’s been curating the Festival. We have a big day out and finally pottered around all the bits I’ve been mourning over from behind a window, glued to a dissertation.

Out of the assorted faff of red, blue, yellow and green rooms, bored looking attendants, and quotes on the walls that don’t put much in context (although I nod knowingly, and think “oooh, disco balls” when I spot them) there’s good bits.

Whilst the patch of synthetic grass in the middle of the room makes no sense, and the peculiar humming of flower-shapes-on-sticks and disco balls are mindlessly nice, and we sit on armchairs listening to strange music surrounded by firs, this catches me eye.

There’s a nice electronic music piece. Nothing fancy, but comparatively fun and interactive (nouns Eno might not be a fan of). It involves long benches with thin strands of wire going from a sensor at one end, to the other where buckets of rocks hung off the end. I stand gormlessly for a while until the ‘art lady’ starts lifting taking some out of the basket, changing the idle hum from the speaker. We leap on it, idly worrying that we’ll destroy the exhibition by throwing the rocks into the basket all at once. But it doesn’t, and the pitch goes from very high to very low. It’s incredibly simple in a way, but really nice (especially compared to the other bits..)

Later we stumble into Fabrica where Eno’s out again. Jonathan wrote a brilliant description so I’m shameless stealing it.

“Rather misleadingly titled ‘77 Million Paintings’, the show actually focuses on one piece – a large, evolving graphic up on a large screen at the far end of the dark church. The same aesthetic which drives much of Eno’s music is apparent in the work; it is neither instantly rewarding nor demanding, but instead a kind of slow, transformative experience for which the term ‘ambient’ (traditionally used to characterise much of Eno’s music) remains the best descriptive term I can conjure up.

It’s essentially a series of locked geometric shapes which move through a range of patterns and colours in a sequence determined by ‘generative software’ which is capable – as the title of the piece suggests – of 77 million possible permutations (which would take, apparently, over a thousand years to unfold). The transformations are slow but remarkably evocative.
..
Imagine yourself sat in a church, half-dozing, glancing down at the cobbled floor. As the sun progresses slowly across the sky outside, light catches panes of the stained glass windows high above, and casts a reflection down on the floor in front of you. The light shimmers and shines, ducks behind a cloud, comes up for air. The quality of light changes, and different parts of the window are alternately obscured and revealed. What plays out on the floor in front of you is the combination of chance, nature and design, and it is playing only for you.”

We loved it. Later in the week my parents visit and I show them this cultural hi-light. My Father falls asleep.

Oh hello, lots of shoes hanging infront of a balcony? This sort of arty shit makes me happy. I pottered around Clerkenwell Design Week (by which I mean they lie as it lasts only 3 days) before going to the Pop Up Pirate typography bar thing (Bitchbuzz review here).

I thought a light by Dare Studio was cool, but distracted myself from a lot of things that weren’t that interesting by trying to juggle a camera and a square of pizza. Pepperoni can be a tricky bitch.

It was all pretty interesting apart from the section about floor panels. The band that played from the balcony was pretty good, though I don’t know their name. There was lots of shiny stuff to keep me entertained. And fancy back-lighting of a wall behind a chair. Some of it came in mirrored cubicles. I could have wept. Photos instead of words.

Oh, and a Robot thing that doubled as a bike rack. CAN I HAVE ONE?

The V&A is a very nice museum. There is a mad hanging thing made of glass from the ceiling. We queue and I stare at it. (There is another ceiling made from flattened trumpets in a different hall which we’ve seen something similar to in the Tate and disliked its new art status but we like it at the V&A.) It warrants spectacles. After admiring the stairs and finding the toilets, which we admire slightly less, we hunt out Decode.

The entrance has lights on the end of sticks that react as you make noise and rattle them. “Ah, art” I revel gleefully. It is full of good things.

There is a board which creates a shadow on itself when you stand in front of it. I peer at the side of the board; a whirring weave of light-reactive electronics which pulls strips of light/dark material back and forth to form the shadow.

The best part is outside around the corner in a modern tech section where I find a big table-sized machine that makes music (it looks a bit like something very expensive used by very rich musicians I’ve forgotten the name of). I have a play, and the man who made it explains it brilliantly.

“Oh,” I think as I listen. “This would be ace if I’d got a recording.” My powers of foresight avoid me for the rest of the day but I make haphazard video clips left right and center. And now I put them on youtube. Tada! They are in order of favourite bits – the shadow-making machine and the musical thingummy are best, and there are lots of colourful things (hit HD for decent quality).

I went last month but Decode finishes on Friday, WEEP WEEP! So you must go now! That said, I liked Kinetica a bit more (where I was given EVEN MORE brilliant explanations of things I don’t have clips of) because it was so mad and busy and bustling. I suppose that’s the difference between a weekend event and a three-month event.

I’ve wanted to make this for a while (click ‘more’ for a bit of thrilling backstory). Building on some unprofessional yogurt pot candles I made during summer, I had a go at making a candle dipped in a different layers of colours (three; blue, red, and yellow. We like our primary colours). It was pretty difficult as you’re no doubt meant to use giant vats of wax, which I unsurprisingly don’t have and instead started with small Activia pots to begin with and ended up using bean cans. It’s pretty bumpy since towards the end it outgrew the beans pot and I ended up just pouring the wax over it. It should be nice when it melts. I suppose it’s one of those ugly children type things again. I think it’s lovely anyway.

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I help at Brownies because where I come from we all believe that the quintessential Tuesday evening should be spent with high-pitched children who enjoy shuffling. Also because I get to help kids make finger puppets, and make my own. Here is Mr Lion:

Here’s my very old video from Kinetica that I’ve just put together. Because of camera ineptitude there’s no video of my favourite part: the lights that reacted to sound, but there’s an inadequate photo of them here on Flickr.

The exhibition had a section with the pencils that rotate and make circles (above) – which drew on our ability to stand aimlessly watching pencils draw motorised circles. Something I noticed is that the holder design didn’t allow for the pencils to get shorter – it didn’t compensate by pushing defaultly against the wall, but left them suspended away from the paper when they were blunt going round in sad little circles. Perhaps I’ve got too much pencil empathy.

There’s also the small beer robot that poured you beer into plastic cups and then flashed red in an alert to tell you it’s drinking time. Lots of good stuff there.

New from OK GO – move over Honda. Bright colours and simple things for my eyes seem to be a keen trend in music videos. “No doubt an intern that did the dominoes” was my first thought, although I can’t imagine any dominoes I’d be happier stacking. I love the glasses that make up a musical part of it, although wonder if that was done separately. Ideally in a magical word each glass would contain a small microphone and sound would be directly recorded from the video filming. Perhaps not.

“Filmed in a two story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The “machine” was designed and built by the band, along with members of Synn Labs over the course of several months.

“This is the Rube Goldberg machine version. In other words, a video depicting complex devices that perform simple tasks in indirect, convoluted ways.” – hellokinsella

Kinetica, a number of Saturdays ago, was a mad mess of flashing lights and things that swirled. I love that it counts as art. I spent the day joining the league of irritating people with cameras, toting an EP-1 that’s never left the house – and thus have video footage.

Beside the robot that served you beer, my favourite bit was a block of hanging lights that reacted to sound. Simple but wonderful to watch. As part of the league of camera holders the adults lined up against the wall to do camera jiggery pokery, whilst a small kid ROARED at them. It was lovely, but I failed to hit the record button or some more technical error (very sad). May have to practice my button-pressing. Video on way – my laziness with it has already delayed this brief post. It will appear one day.

A little Flickr set lives here.

I did some work (and continue to) for (untitled) over summer during which they were idly plotting Toby Triumph, art friend and cohort of graphic designer Dudley Wild, coming in to draw illustrations all over the big white studio walls. Toby does nice pictures of giraffes and fat people. He did the wall this month, and the video is lovely. With lots of posing.