Blog

On Saturday 2nd February myself and 15 other artists/hackers/tinkerers/people descended upon West Bromwich to hack The Public. A little more about what it actually is:

The Gallery Hack Camp is a new initiative developed by The Public and the first delivered in February 2013. It will bring together artists, producers, creative entrepreneurs and technologists from across the West Midlands and wider United Kingdom.

We aim to develop new ideas at the intersection of art, technology and culture. Setting out to make new work which you would like to see in a gallery of the future. It is also intended to be an active community of peer learning and development.

I was personally interested in converting the railings that go along the walkway into a kind of guitar or harp. All that you’d need is a vibration sensor hooked up to an Arduino that would trigger a sound to play on Pure Data. Easy, in theory…

It was very interesting to see that most of the other ideas ignored the infrastructures already in place for installations and instead either worked around them, or were situated in unlikely places

[caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“333”] Me and David.Checkley doing very safe things. Don’t tell the HSE![/caption]

More photos here

No thing has been developed for this yet, but hopefully one of the may exciting ideas developed over the weekend will be making its way to The Public soon!

Peterborough Museum has published a monograph of the work of Michael Takeo Magruder, entitled Remediations. It covers various projects that he produced between 2000-2010.

One of the projects (or two, depending on how you interpret it) of his that I was involved in was Changing Room v1.0 in 2009 and v2.0 in 2010.

[caption id=“attachment_4121” align=“alignnone” width=“500”] Changing Room v1.0[/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_4122” align=“alignnone” width=“500”] Changing Room v2.0[/caption]

In these projects, myself and several artists were given the opportunity to construct a virtual exhibition in a Second-Life remodelling of Eastside Projects (v1.0) and an empty green space (v2.0). I’d never worked in Second Life before, or any virtual work for that matter, so it proved to be quite a challenge but still very enjoyable!

Go download the book!

My only confirmed gig of this year will be to provide visuals at SuperByte Festival on 13th and 14th September. Even though the festival is months away, the line-up already includes many great chiptune/8-Bit Sabrepulse, Ultrasyd and 8GB!

The first SuperByte took place in September 2012, and I was there to perform with Freecode:

To make the festival happen this year, the organisers have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise £2000. With 26 days to go, there’s only £953 to go! Go spend your money!