Final Year Degree Show Exhibition 2008
Preview Night, Friday 13th June 7pm.

The University of Huddersfield
School of Art, Design and Architecture

http://studio309.org

Feltron Annual Report
Meticulously crafted, and interesting visual annual report of the doings of Nicholas Fenton a graphic designer who works professionally under the moniker megafone
Its no surprise that he also gets paid to do NYTimes work.

http://unrealart.co.uk/

yep that’s a glitch, (on a Nasa HD itunes podcast) that particular flavour of hi-def video apparently does painterly glitches and so long as we have consumer electronics we will have varied visual and audio glitches to examine and play with.

anyway the point of this post is, twofold:

1. I’m very pleased to announce that GLITCH: Perfect Imperfection ‘Designing Imperfection’ is to be published by Mark Batty and distributed by Thames and Hudson in Sep 2008. This is the book I’ve been working on for the past three years with Ant Scott and designed by the ever skillfull maestros Joe Gilmore and Chris Murphy. More posts as developments occur!
2. As though I hadnt had enough of glitches, I’m about to start my PhD on “Glitch Art” supervised by the brilliant Mathew Adkins. if any academics out there are interested in joining the supervisory team please get in touch with me at organised AT gmail dot com.

I wrote an article for it and now I write a plug for The Digital Artists Handbook

folly - the digital arts agency and charity based in England’s NorthWest - today announced the completion of the first edition of an important new project, the Digital Artists Handbook.

“The digital artist handbook has developed out of ongoing consultation with artists working with technology, which has shown a need for removing the barriers for artists to use digital tools. The project is supported by Arts Council England.”

“The artists and practitioners who participated in the first stage of writing the Handbook are: Kristina Andersen, Frank Barknecht, Tom Betts, Florian Cramer, Phil Chandler, Olga Goriunova, Kathryn Lambert, Olivier Laruelle, Thor Magnusson, Nicolas Malevé, Aymeric Mansoux, Iman Moradi, Jon Phillips, Tom Schouten, Marloes de Valk, Peter Westenberg, and Simon Yuill.”

“The Digital Artists Handbook is a new, up to date, reliable and accessible source of information that introduces artists to different tools, resources and ways of working related to digital art. The touchstone of this new compendium is free/libre open source software (FLOSS) and technologies.”

Several festivals I’ve been to over the years have displayed sms messages from the crowd on screens that often sit next to stage. It does the job but lacks any integration with the event itself, which is why the wall at the electric proms worked so well. The typography and positioning of the text itself worked really well in the space and it provided good material for people to read while they were waiting for friends or queuing at the bar.’

Yasser Rashid, BBC Senior Interaction Designer, BBC Radio and Music Interactive

Secondly, Asi introduced me to the new visualisation layer which has been added to the video’s to introduce you to related clips, it’s accessed via the network icon when you go fullscreen. At first I thought that it was an interesting way to discover stuff, but when I clicked on a video balloon and the mind map of sorts started to grow, ‘interesting’ became ‘confusing’ very quickly. My confusion is with the outline colours of the bubbles, as there is no suggestion to why the clips are grouped by a certain colour, is it just me or is the relationships between the clips unclear?

Last night I followed up my rediscovery of Cornelius with some world wide web digging which led me to director Koichiro Tsujikawa, long-term collaborator of said music artist.

As you will see his portfolio displays a fine body of work ranging commercials, music videos, short film and tv. The music video’s he has produced compliment Cornelius’s sound perfectly, below is the excellent video he produced for ‘Fit Song’ from the album ‘Sensuous’. Amazing!

If you like what you see and hear read a brief interview with him that touches on his background and process here, and then view more video’s.

What I’ve read

On top of my daily ritual of blog browsing, aggregated by the lovely Google Reader, there are a couple of things that have caught my attention online this past week. Firstly the intensifying US electoral run-in, the commentary of which has been provided by the Guardian online. Secondly, Mr Nuzzaci introduced me to Time.com’s 50 Top 10 lists for 2007 - where I naturally gravitated towards the listing’s for films, the featured ‘The Lives of Others’ pictured above.

My breakfast porridge microwave blasting sessions have seen me give Creative Review, Grafik and Campaign magazines a good skimming, whilst my xmas Amazon voucher was activated and soon I will be the proud new owner of a copy of ‘The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few’.

What I’ve watched

After being seduced by the blue, yellow and red of Channel 4’s Big Food Fight my Monday night attempt at tuning into the Hugh’s Chicken run failed miserably. What started with good intentions soon resulted in Hugh being relegated to background tv, the only thing I can recall is that intensively farmed chicken’s only live for 39 days, poor little blighters!

By midweek things had picked up as a friend introduced me to BBC Three’s ‘Man Stroke Woman’ which reduced me to man tears on several occasions. The comedy theme continued with BBC2 and the excellent ‘Never Mind the Buzzcocks’ where Mr Amstel’s target this week was ex Hollyoaks stud Jeremy Edwards, afterwhich I had my first experience of the laughter riot that is Little Miss Jocelyn.

The week of watching continued with a thrifty DVD night on Friday where I watched ‘The Bourne Ultmatium’ for the thrid time in as many weeks and we also pooped back and forth courtesy of ‘Me and You and Everyone We Know’. The final watch will be tonight as I have booked myself into ‘Louis Theroux: Behind Bars’, the documentary at California’s San Quentin prison.

What I’ve listened to
My brisk walks to and from the bus continue to be charmed by my festive soundscape of choice: Rufus Wainwright’s performance at Cancerigene Hall. The highlight of the week without a doubt was the rediscovery of my appreciation for the super Cornelius, who’s sound can be described as experimental and exploratory, well that’s what my recently restarted last fm widget thing told me!

I will now pass the meme baton of joy onto Joe, Asi and Iain. I will also leave you in Uncle Jack’s capable hands…