Stench.org.uk

Stenchival 2010 took place in Leicester on the 7th and 8th August. The festival was held at the Fabrika Independent Arts Centre in the heart of Leicester.

The first day saw us all at a workshop where we made our very own Atari Punk Console. At a past fizzPOP event Jimmie Rodgers brought a few of the kits to make these with him but unfortunatley I was spoilt for choice by all of the other kits and didn’t get to build one. The instructor for this workshop was Stu Smith, better known as ASMO (Anti Social Musik Order), who is a well known circuit bender from Leicester.

My soldering skills need a lot of work

My soldering skills weren’t quite up to scratch and I even managed to work on the wrong side of the veroboard, but luckily a lot of help was at hand. After a few hours I produced this finished Atari Punk Console. Thanks to Circuit Ben for providing the box that I’ll soon fit the device into properly

The evening was filled with VJ performances from some very talented people. I’ll let the video do the talking!

The second day started with a VJ workshop, although it seemed less of a workshop and more of a skills and ideas exchange. Tony from The Lab provided quite a good in depth overview of VJing without using laptops, which seems to be the norm recently.

Sean Clark of Cuttlefish also showed how he VJs using Max/MSP. This really interested me as I’d used Pure Data (the open source equivalent) for a while and was interested in how I could use it in live performances.

Unfortunately I was unable to stay for the final performances of the evening but Sean did suggest that we make a habit of meeting regularly to discuss and share our VJing skills. He recently set up the Leicester AV group on Facebook, which I hope to attend as long as it doesn’t clash with GLI.TC/H

Overall I was really glad to have gone to Stench. Whereas my past work tended to lean towards traditional media my more recent output involves more performance and video and so learning from VJs and other performers will benefit me greatly!

Thanks to New Generation Space for funding this trip

Above all thank you so much to New Generation Space, based in Stoke-On-Trent, for providing a bursary to fund my day at this rather awesome event!