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.

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.

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.

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 feel like I’ve done a lot of new things this summer, so I made a big list (all with tedious links to relevant posts) because lists please me.

Lived in a big city
Cycled in london
went to barcelona, rome and naples
Saw two lots of prostitutes (Naples)
Saw dead bodies in pompei
Went to a wedding reception as a grown-up (conclusions: danced better as child)
Went to Lovebox and Bestival
Saw Florence and the Machine a lot accidentally
Went to first Tweetups – Cozytweetup in St James’ park, Ale 2.0 and Twestival,
Became a paid blogger,
Started writing for Bitchbuzz,
Went to pretentious grad and grown-up design shows
Went to my first company party (Moo). Stole balloons.
Went to a press conference
Did my longest placement to date.
Walked my soles out in london.
Saw my favourite comedians: Bill Bailey and Eddie Izzard
Was excited by seeing the countryside (felt horrified by this since i come from the countryside and clearly need to leave the city.)
Went to Ben and Jerry’s festival and did Press Pit runs. In front of the crowd is good.
Made candles.
Learned to cook more.

I haven’t made Naples sound great. It was very prostitue-ridden and a restaurant hunt ended in McDonalds. Also best driving at crossroads have ever seen in life – may not be of interest to those who do not like 6 minute videos of driving (I am mystified as to where the 102 views came from: Youtube search must be gold). I would love an aerial view of this:

Cycled to Regent’s Park Treehouses today. Consumed ice cream and saw two Lord Byrons (aka quiffy haired solitary men possing and reading books). We ambled around treehouses and I was reminded about numerous years of childhood naggings for a treehouse – nothing quite as fancy as these things, I’d have been happy with a wooden platform (or rather, that’s what I was pitching to my Dad as the simplest starting point).

At Uni there were rumours of a treehouse two students had made years ago. The directions were ‘up the hill, on the left near the field,’ which was great, but Sussex University happens to be on the Sussex downs: There are a lot of trees. Turns out it existed, and after a good forage round a massive wood we found it. It was miles off the ground and after drunk attempts, a few people made it up into the tree. It wasn’t bad, but needed some love. Then we navigated home with no torch with me using my camera as an occasional torch, ruining everyone’s night vision.

Today ended cycling home avoiding a big rain cloud. The treehouses were pretty sorted; they had umbrellas.

Here’s some photos that don’t ruin surprises, and the flickr set is here.

Today was Ben and Jerry’s Summer Sundae on Clapham Common. I may be interning for Cake, the company behind the B&J PR but this report shall be wildly unbiased.

There was free ice cream.

I ate six. I may mean seven.

Here is Mr Super Furry Animals* holding a sign. This made me happy.

There was also band Marina and the Diamonds. Everyone raved about how Florence + the Machine played this slot the year before. (And before this, Lilly Allen) Maybe they will be big next year. She was skinny and had an 80s jacket and some silly but slightly staged dance moves – people seemed pleased by them.

I was with the photographers in the pit at the front of the stage so couldn’t take photos. Not a bad place to stand though.

*Gruff Rhys

I may still be having confused fights with my new mac’s keypad (where is the ‘home’ button please?), but yesterday I had a play at furthering my ‘London chic’ side.  My bike’s just been fixed after a string of tedious punctures, which took a long time to fix since my bicycle capabilities stretch to removing the quick-release wheels.  Helpfully, a few friends have told me I’d be mad to cycle on London roads, which is tosh.

So I cycled off to the Super Contemporary exhibition at the Design Museum on the South Bank.  It’s essentially a big time line with designs, events, people and news that have shaped our perception of design that goes around the room, which is really quite nicely done and reminded me a bit of the Science Museum in the way that when I was younger I discovered that information stuff didn’t have to be dull.  It was pretty browsey and lightweight, which was quite nice because there were lots and lots of brightly coloured small things to look at (I am a sucker for brightly coloured things, especially if made out of paper it seems).

The nicest part was from a couple of companies asked to make maps of London.  A few were pretty standard – not bad, just the sort of thing I’d have leapt to do in a silly crafty girly way e.g. pictures stuck around parts of the map to indicate memories.  Airlift, a company I feel quite unintelligent not to have heard of, made a lovely map which ignored the logistics of London but was very impressive.  A hand-drawn St Pancras monster was roaring, small people were discussing cheese on the Eurostar, and ‘the Devil and his Cock’ made an appearance.  The photos are a bit full of reflections, but my favourite bits came out legibly.

This was a nice big sculpture of Trafalgar Square with a big raised garden field.  Nelson ends up being a statue, and there’s also some funky slides at the top.

There was also a chalkboard that said Protect me from my Protectors above it. We didn’t need protecting, so played noughts and crosses instead.

There was an upstairs with more design ‘stuff’ that centered around big clever designs – something about big modern designers pushing boats and stuff.  My favourite parts  of this section (and I suspect here that my version of good art isn’t the same as everyone else’s) were the child that sat on an installation, some dangling coat hangers, some sort of robot with page-tabs for shoulders, and the screen that said erection on it.  Unfortunately I couldn’t take a photo of this joy since the TV blurred and fuzzed at my camera, but I did of the child, much like a skulking anoraked man.

We then proceeded to spend as much time in the gift shop as in the exhibition. And then we went home. by which I mean the pub.