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.
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 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.
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).
I have some tapes left over from when I was three made by my Father.
My Dad’s the computery type. When I was young I used to sit on his knee whilst he would show me the exciting things you could do with excel (changing the colour of cell backgrounds mostly). Which was great..
He also got hold of some tapes and read me stories into them. I think the idea was that I’d master the tape machine and play them back to myself; some sort of Utopian parenting. Unfortunately the recordings captured real life which involves small-me talking and prodding the tape machine. That said, there’s a great rendition of chicken licken on them.
I’ve got hold of this archaic thing, from Maplins. It records tapes into Mp3 format via USB, which is nice because you don’t loose too much quality and the original’s pretty 1990s quality so could do with being preserved.
So I’ve now got tapes full of my Father’s story-telling voice and my small interruptions onto my laptop (apparently far before the story even started I was quite aware of Chicken Licken’s impending doom). There’s also also some unpleasant recordings from when I was seven and had learned to sing Fara Jacque out of tune which have pointedly not been digitalised.
We’ve never had a video camera, and I think this might be better.
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.
This is one gorgeous, sexy and wildly inappropriate camera that I do not in any way need (apparently you can stick a bit of leather on any old camera and I’ll love it).
It’s a lovely-looking camera with some specs that mean a limited amount to me, it has some down sides:
It’s called the E-P1 pen – which is a pun in the same realm as the Harman Kardon GLA-55 speakers, so called because they are made of glass.
Their advertising uses Stop Motion. And whilst this is not full-stop a bad thing and follows a man from 1959 when the E-P1 camera was released through to the present day (I see chuffed people in a brainstorm following that), it’s dull. Think Wolf and Pig (in fact it’s a direct Youtube response) but longer, and released when Stop Motion had definitely become old. So it’s dull and long.
Which is a shame because the camera is the sex. Feel free to disagree with me on either.
