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.
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.
I saw this today and ooh ooh it’s very good. It’s made solely of music segments from Disney’s ‘Up’. The music’s all made by Pogo. Unfortunately with a library of songs made of copyrighted material he’s not on Spotify (just last.fm instead…).
It reminded me of Alice, a similar track that cuts Alice in Wonderland in the same way which turns out to be by the same guy. This made sense when I found out. I saw Alice on yoooooooooutube.com – a site which delayed and tiled Youtube videos to make strange and hypnotic patterns – and made it all look mad. Yoooooooooutube seems to be gone now though, which is sad because it was silly and nice.
I’m practicing rotoscoping (think ‘a scanner darkly’) at the moment. I’m terrible (my drawing skills have slumped since age 9) but getting better. So far I’ve animated a hand and a tap. Luckily for me I shot some slightly more engaging footage after that or I suspect I would have gone mad.
I noticed, in the leap from a point-and-shoot camera’s video function to a handy-cam, the invention of mini DV tapes which surprised me because I quite primitively expect all image and film equipment to use an SD card (luckily our media department comes with some long-haired and technical resident types who are lifesavers). DV tapes remind me a bit of mini-disks, which were peculiar and abysmal things, neither of which stopped me nagging my Mother to buy some so I could make mixes, which were in turn also abysmal.
I like this rotoscoped video. Kids are so informative.
I made some candles recently. They didn’t require a massive attention span, and the internet told me I could use yogurt pots as molds, which pretty much sold it for me.
It was lots of fun. I suppose these have turned out to be one of the “well they’re ugly as hell, but they’re mine and I love them” things. They’re probably not very nice for you but I love my little blue and white-ish candles. They’ve been sitting around looking very pretty and I’ve only just braved some terrible fear that lighting them will break them (by break I mean I’ll have fundamentally made them wrong and they’ll explode).
I’ve written up how to make them over at Bitchbuzz.
As for today I’m beginning a long slow fight with a pair of knitting needles. I’m using happy red thread to keep my spirit up.
I am enjoying illustrated tweets today. Lovely and peculiar illustrations by Katie Vernon of tweets plucked from the public timeline. Of particular note are the father-like hairy legged animals; my father is made of 90% beard and had some glasses exactly like these in the 80s. (He was a trend setter, and is still rocking the look today.) Anyway these are ace.
Yeah, okay it’s really old. But everytime I watch it I love it a little bit more. More UK venues please Mr Etienne de Crecy, and bring those nice shiny cubes along too.
This is a really good idea executed brilliantly. “A real human interface” – basically a human in a box being a computer. Not just any any old human; one with thick glasses and a spinning rainbow loading/freezing circle so you know it’s a mac.
Am I sold because it uses cardboard props? Not solely. It’s got nice style (the hand-pushed loading bars, the small bits of ham floating around, nice use of selotape, and silly nice details like the windcatcher), and I like that it pretends to be interactive, even if isn’t.
