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.

Two weeks ago in January, before I lost the ability to blog on my own site I went to ‘If You Could Collaborate’ at an obscure school hall (Rochelle’s Foundation Gallery) near Shoreditch that was rather nice. It was made up of 33 collaborations in which pairs of people made arty things. There were some Four Dimensional Glasses in a beautifully made vintage wallpapered box with lovely instructions; overall really well put together.

The dark rooms filled with brightly lit things caught my eye with colourful bits, and quite unoriginally liked the AVEC designs most. Sorry. I’ve made the obligatory video of the Neon signs, which was the nicest neon sign I have seen. They’ve also turned the text-based building designs into a downloadable font.

There is my little Flickr set about here, and I took my Dad’s old analogue camera and managed to to use it without looking blundering like a ninny.

(Overall downside, I managed to miss The Rainbowgun though.)

I’m working on my digital media project today (It really needs a snappier name than this). In theory we’re experimenting around our ideas rather than making them (because we’re a theory course, a notion I find very strange) and my proposal comes out something like the stopmotion below. It’s in HD so choose this function if you’re a fan of legibility. There’s more about it here, joining the trend that one day we will exist solely in a world of blogs.

“A stop motion visualisation of my digital media project. Will scan a twitter feed for tweets talking about Windows 7, pick out keywords grouped into 6 major emotions categories and display one of six video (will be 10 seconds) depending on the most popular emotion at that point in time. Video will display emotions acted out by a PC man of Mac vs PC adverts fame – acted out by my dear friend Liam, who will be rotoscoped.”

I’m currently rotoscoping scenes of a friend vibrantly acting out the role of PC, beautifully displaying the six emotions of “disgust, happiness, anger, neutrality, sadness and surprise”. For ‘sadness’ we decided drinking and weeping was a good way to portray this, so he drank cold coffee (for the colour, and to avoid doing shots) for a couple of takes out of a whiskey bottle. The disgust was authentic.

Faris recently Tumbled this image. Interesting, I thought. But I have no radio (and in other news my TV watching stretches to iPlayer, surfthechannel, and 4od, the latter of which I rarely go near out of interface laziness) and wasn’t sure this average quite applied to me*, so I reflected upon my week of insane laziness and drew a picture of what I’ve probably done.

*or perhaps I was just fidgety and had a tablet handy.

I suspect that the book part is in fact fictitious. I’ve been halfway through 2001: A Space Odyssey for three months now, although perhaps this is because I’m more of a Phillip K Dick fan, rather than having a dislike of books (which I do not).

A nice things I have found today via Simon Law who writes a far better post on it than I. Firstly, a fascinating video of 24 hours of plane travel condensed into 2 minutes. Each yellow dot is an aeroplane. It seems a bit as though Americans are far less keen on night travel than Europe. Either way it’s a lovely video.

And then this lovely advert about pollution by Ogilvy New York which is far more nice and arty than the “Plane Stupid” polar bears falling out of the sky advert. I like it a lot, although I’m not sure how well it works.