Its been a strange month, I have moved to Morden (I tell people its Wimbledon) in our 5 bedroom student house slash Granny Mansion so have been somewhat preoccupied with doing grown up things rather than artistic thoughts. There also is a crippling lack of wireless internet and therefore my iphone and 3G dongle have been getting a lot of usage. It also means I have had even more than the usual backlog of witterings to blog about...

BESTIVAL
From the 10th to the 13th of September I went to Bestival on the Isle of Wight. Aside from the music and all the other amazing things that I saw there were a variety of visual delights on offer.

The animations on the screens were more than just accompanying pretty patterns, Roxy Music had live footage interspersed with Kandinsky paintings!

The last video is of the animation from the Flaming Lips performance...

Colourscape Music Festival

The festival was held in Clapham Common in September. I found it on the timeout website and assumed it was some highly respectable art installation but it turned out to be full of small children. Nevertheless it was amazing. It is basically a huge inflatable maze of beautifully lit tunnels, with a music performance in the centre.

The coolest part was when my eyes started going crazy with all the different colours they were trying to adjust to. It is also a brilliant place to take photos because everything is so smooth and you get interesting lighting effects depending on where you stand.


Under the Sea

We held an underwater themed party for our housewarming / my birthday. As the conservatory has a glass wall facing the garden we decided to go with an aquarium feel, using the cheapest materials available to create coral, seaweed and fish. Along with the fairy lights and the soundtrack to The Little Mermaid, the overall effect was beautiful.
We had sainsbury’s coral, tesco’s wine box fish with ink and acrylic, and Budgens bags with bin bags for seaweed. There were hanging bubbles made of various findings from Holly’s art box, and a ‘pin the tail on the whale’ made from one particularly large piece of cardboard. I also painted some acetate coral reef style for the OHP over the food table. (I wanted a digital projector to play my aquarium screensaver, alas)
(Unfortunately my phone went awol for the entire party so I couldn’t get any photos, what I have is what I could find or take afterwards. Will update as soon as I can)


College
I’ve got to come up with a piece for a start of term exhibition on Tuesday. The way I see it, a final piece is the last thing on anyone’s mind when they start back at college, but hey. Of course I have plenty of ideas but I haven’t made anything all summer except silly iphone doodles, so I’m either going to present them or cobble together something inspired by my planesphere and constellations. Here are the things I’m currently working with, hoping to turn into something this weekend.

I’ve had a few more project ideas as I continue to be a science geek..

Time and Space
The concept that time passes slower nearer larger objects is something that I’m still trying to get my head around.

If you watch this from roughly 4 minutes in it explains how gravity warps time and that although on Earth we barely detect it, around massive objects time slows down much more.. So time ticks slower near the sun than it does here.
When I was at the recording of BBC4’s infinite monkey cage, Alan Moore joked that he had once written the most implausible piece of fiction...
“I remember in Halo Jones I’ve got a planet of such mass that time was actually being bent – as a function of gravity.” - Moore
“-That’s absolutely correct! And if you wrote that before 1915 you’re a genius!” - Cox
Another time related concept I’m grappling with is that of time dilation. I first heard about it at the Q&A session after the showing of Wonders at Clapham Picture House, and was reeling from it for days – then I heard Carl Sagan talking about the same thing decades earlier, so it is by no means a new idea.

Here Sagan explains how when you travel near to the speed of light, time slows down for you. This means that if you could go fast enough, you could reach distant stars within your own lifetime. But if you wanted to come home, hundreds or thousands of years may have passed. The possibilities of involving this idea in an art project are vast, because you could concentrate on the very small – it is due to atoms that they developed this theory, or the very large as it concerns massive distances, or even possibly the human perspective, the idea of everyone you know being long dead when you return from the stars.

Curved Light

Light trapped on curved surfaces
17 September 2010 by Rachel Courtland, New Scientist
LIGHT, which in everyday experience travels in straight beams, has been trapped on complex curved surfaces. The feat is not just a parlour trick - it could help people visualise how light travels in the curved fabric of space.
According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, gravity is the result of an object's mass deforming space itself, like a bowling ball on a trampoline. To model how light's path would change in space curved by gravity, Ulf Peschel of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and colleagues constructed smooth 3D objects and sent laser beams shooting along their surfaces (Physical Review Letters, in press).
They took advantage of the fact that light bends, or refracts, when it moves from one medium to another. In their simplest experiment, they shot laser light at the edge of a solid glass sphere. The angle of the beam was chosen so that the light - initially travelling in air - would be bent just enough when it entered the glass that it would keep reflecting off the inside surface of the sphere, and so travel along it. When the light inside the sphere reflected off its inner surface, some was also transmitted through the glass, creating a glowing ring on the outside surface.
The team also constructed an object shaped like two trumpet bells stuck end to end - called a hyperbolic surface. The object was made out of aluminium and then coated with oil. Light sent into the oil layer was confined there, bouncing between the metal and air boundaries. The beam spread out ever more quickly, generating a trumpet-shaped glow.
For the light to be trapped in two dimensions, the object's surface needed to be smooth enough to cleanly reflect most of the light into the oil layer rather than scattering it at all angles. That required diamond polishing machines that have only become available in the last 10 years or so, Peschel says.
The experiments help visualise how light travels in space warped by gravity. The sphere, for instance, represents how space is bent around a star or other mass - light passing through this warped space bends in an effect called gravitational lensing. The hyperbolic surface, which has so-called negative curvature because its surface curves up and down at the same time, like a saddle, just might represent the shape of the universe.
"It's a beautiful fundamental experiment," says Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St Andrews in the UK, who was not involved in the work. "It's just fun, good physics."

The idea of the sphere attracting light interests me, because it can be beautiful while also relating to a complicated scientific discovery.
My idea for this would involve glass spheres, possibly hanging by fishing wire, and I’d like to test different lights on them. I know that it would definitely be a good starting point for some interesting photography but not sure where it would lead on from there.

Horizon
I’ve applied for work experience at the BBC with Horizon over December, I’m not yet sure if this would be okay with college but I think it would be ideal for me. At the moment I can see my ideal job as being a film editor, and if I continue to enjoy science this much I could end up being perfect for a very specialised job.
They asked in the application for an idea for a show that they haven’t done yet. I couldn’t decide on one idea so I told them these two:

The way the internet is affecting our brains
A very current issue which was written about only recently in New Scientist by Nicholas Carr in his article 'Surfing Our Way To Stupid'. He is also the author of The 'Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember' which could provide the basis for many of the topics covered. The program could investigate how the internet affects people of different ages - it seemed to improve brainpower in old people for example, how it affects productivity, and weigh up its pros and cons.

Synaesthesia
A fascinating neurological condition which affects around 1 in 23 people where the senses are mixed up, for example some can 'see sound'. The programme could investigate how and why it occurs, and could show an on screen test for the viewers to see whether they hear anything as they watch the silent animation. The audience would be interested because most people have some sort of letter / colour association. The programme could investigate the work of famous synaesthetes, including Kandinsky, Richard Feynman and Duke Ellington.


Visualising information

I’ve realised recently that I often find myself thinking in terms of visualising information.. Just the other night I was working out how much I had of my loan left after paying rent and wondered how my bank account over the year would look in a graph, with the three highest points just as my loan goes in.
I have an obsession with dodging crowds on the street, it really gets to me, and I honestly usually imagine the street from above with each person represented by a dot. How ridiculous some of our movements would look if you could see it like that, you could watch people wildly bending their paths to avoid others or you could see my speedy dot get stuck behind two slow moving dots etc. Etc....
Finally what made me notice this strange obsession was when I caught myself imagining my house and housemates in terms of glowing circles, like this:

So each person is represented by a colour, and when they first move in they keep to themselves and establish their place in their rooms. Over time as they get to know each other better the colours spread into each other and overlap, and in the end the house is just one big colourful glow......Yep.
Anyway fingers crossed for Horizon! I’ve decided to leave some things out of this blog post for another one which should be sooner than usual. Until next time...

It's Art o'clock

It has come to my attention that the summer holidays are drawing to a close and I will soon be back at college, on my course at Wimbledon, Fine Art - Print and Time Based Media. And I haven't done any work yet.
I am hoping to use this blog or something similar to document my work over the coming year, not just for fun but instead of a research folder, so it might start getting very arty soon.

Before I start wittering, I went to the Ernesto Neto exhibition the other day and thoroughly enjoyed it. My only regret was that I went by myself, because it made me feel like a little kid. I had to pretend I didn't have the urge to run around squeaking with delight.
It was beautiful. I loved the colours, I loved the skin idea, the thin layers, the organic shapes. I loved the way that there was lavender sewn into the purple section. I liked the fact that we had to take off our shoes. It was just fantastic.

My only worry was that it reminded me a little of playzone. And it's a very strange thing, when you're presented with a place that feels like a kids play area but it still asks for the respect of an art piece. It's like trying to have it both ways, and its disappointing becuase you really do want to roll around and have a party in there, but you're constantly worried the security guy is about to tell you off.

Here are some of the project ideas that have been on my mind.

This summer I have immersed myself in science. I've become addicted to newscientist and popsci.com, I've been reading 'Why does E=MC2' and 'Pale Blue Dot', downloaded space simulators, kept up with nasa and cassini, attended Physics Q&A sessions, and even visited the science museum for their brilliant late night party. Even the music I've been listening to has been science related..

It is almost like i'm only doing it because its the opposite thing to art. I have a tendency to enjoy things only when I'm not supposed to. If I were studying phsyics I wouldn't shut up about art exhibitions. You would be right in pointing out that it has got a lot to do with Brian Cox, but my interests often stem from an initial wonderful male's input, so no surprises there.
Anyway I made a list of notes while watching George Smoot on the design of the universe on TED. Space is such an amazing thing to make art about. Not only is it incredibly beautiful, it has mysteries and concepts that you could do all sorts with.

The most obvious thing for me is to use some of the already beautiful imagery of space and turn it into a painterly, involving animation. Imagine something along the lines of the very first few seconds of this music video [which doesn't allow embedding]:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFolUn88q-o&ob=av2e

I had an idea for an interactive projection, based on the textures and colours found in space. Similar to Mehmet Akten's 'Body Paint'

I would need to make my own film effect that reacted similarly but with a painterly animated texture e.g. of spattered paint 'stars', interspersed with looped space themed animations.. No idea how that would work.

'Space is Massive'
Sometimes when I'm on google earth or Worldwide Telescope I lose control of the cursor and the planet ends up spinning out of control, or I end up zooming really really fast and it genuinely scares me. One time I was looking at Mars and searched 'Earth', my screen zoomed THROUGH the sun. really fast. Terrifying.
I'd like to try and communicate the feeling of being really tiny and powerless into an installation. I guess you'd probably need a really big room.

'Cosmic Spheres of Time'
One of the most amazing concepts I've come across is the fact that the further away a star is, the longer ago we're seeing it.

So we can actually see what happened just after the big bang, because the light that it created is only just reaching us. This would make a very cool artwork. I'm thinking cross sectioned paper spheres, with projection.

The Environment of Space
If not an idea by itself, its important to bear in mind the possibility of using senses to imitate space as much as possible, so making the room cold, and completely pitch black. Nothingness is an idea, but I hate cop outs. :)

Image from Cassini Equinox Mission http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm

Light in space
Finally, I've always wanted to do a project about light and I think space is a great angle to use with it. I could look at the way light travels, hits things, bounces off, based on the way that it travels through space. I could try putting light through glass spheres, or through various liquids, or quality street wrappers (always a winner). or I could use partial lighting, highlighting the mysteries of space.

The thing about science is that it seems to be more about looking outward, where art seems to often be looking inward. I'd like to try and pull in some of the inspiring and humbling qualities of Space into my art.


My other idea for a project is synaesthesia. I think its a good starting point for a sketchbook at least, because you could do lots of work on colour and texture.
I think my interest in the subject started at GCSE when I did my exam project on Kandisky, and for my final piece painted a song. It wasn't bad actually, I printed the sound levels of the song and doodled around them on the appropriate part, trying to fit the right shape and colour to each section, then arranged my favourite shapes into a composition.
But that wasn't how Kandisnky did it by any means, he actually saw the colours and shapes he painted when he heard music. Are you jealous? I know I am.
In fact, here's a test so you can see whether you do have it.

A friend on twitter showed me her own synaesthetic portrait of her mother which made me decide to make my own, and here it is.

Its hard to explain why it is how it is, but I guess my Mum is ovals and hexagons because they are safe shapes, the colours are really just colours that suit her but they are all warm, which is again a safe thing. The texture too is important, she's definitely a knitted or fleece like texture over an oily or cold hard surface. But I do not have synaesthesia, so I have to think these things through, so I can't say whether there's even a point to it all.
However I have been wondering about starting an experiment on myself to teach myself colour/sound synaesthesia. This article suggested it was possible.
I do believe that my own links between colours and letters are due to the toys I played with as a child. And I think that films like fantasia would have influenced a lot of people.

My idea was to listen to different instruments and cover my eyes with a piece of coloured film, and look at the sky or something large and blank. For example I could use a yellow film and listen to high pitched trumpet sounds. I would need to do it repeatedly over a period of time, but maybe eventually I would listen to music and at the very least be reminded of these colours.
Alternatively I could just take some LSD.
So how does this relate to art? Well I feel that the best art is completely involving. As with the space ideas, I would love to make an installation that puts the viewer in an environment that makes them FEEL something. I could either make an installation where senses are linked in a way that tries to imitate the way a synaesthite perceives them, or I could make it interactive, e.g. the viewer could mix their own choice of visuals to what they are hearing.

Either way its an ambitious idea but I am always over ambitious with my ideas. And then I end up doing nothing, which I'll be getting back to doing now thankyou very much.

I can't stop using doodlekids

Last night I found myself up at 2am obsessively making pictures using a combination of photoshop, pokemon and doodlekids. my wrists were hurting from using the keyboard and I was falling asleep. Why? I think I have an addiction to doodlekids.
Doodlekids is an app on the iphone which paints a different shape with every touch. if you hold your finger down and paint you get scattered lines of the same shape, in different colours. It's just a perfect combination of pretty and unpredictable to keep you experimenting. Here are some of my early doodles.

Then I discovered that you can doodle over photos. So this opened up a world of possibilities. First I had a go at using the stills from a Stan Brackhage animation that I had already saved for backgrounds etc.

Then I had a go at combining it with screenshots of other apps, my favourites are from combining it with 'ps mobile' 'planets' app and with 'ibeams lite'.

After that I started trying out putting the images into photoshop at different stages and combining them with underwater screenshots from my pokemon sapphire game on the VBA. Here is a progression of a few things I tried with this image.

And here I used one of the earlier photos, cutting lots of holes in the layers to let the shapes show through

Finally here's my favourite, combining the opening of pokemon sapphire, a photo of me at a festival and of course doodlekids. I call it 'step into laptopland'!

Connan Mockasin

This is Important at The Camp, Old Street.

I got to the gig quite late so I caught about half of what must have been Blue on Blue's set. The first thing I noticed was it was bloody loud, but the music was alright. the bassist had a really ridiculous haircut which was the most amusing thing. After I sneaked my beer outside past the knob of a bouncer and waited for connan to play.
The only disappointing aspect of connan's set was that it finished too soon. I can't remember all the songs but forever dolphin love was there, and Egon - which has a new arrangement that I really enjoyed. There was a bit of feedback which he got upset about but it didn't matter at all. Also the bassist was apparently a last minute replacement but you really couldn't tell.

For anyone who hasn't heard of him before Connan Mockasin is a small new zealander with a blonde mop of hair (which is surprisingly soft) whose music is described as alternative / japanese pop / showtunes but I think thats a little misleading. he's also totally adorable and super friendly.
his songs seem to be mostly about private jokes, or his cat, or stuff that generally doesn't make much sense. he also does lots of drawings and paintings which are usually disturbing. That's a really bad summary so just watch this for a better idea.




Connan's sound has really changed over the past 2 years that i've been listening, originally it had a brighter, more raw sorta sound and he used to use a sqeaky singing voice. Check out sneaky sneaky dogfriend to see what I mean




Nowadays there's these waves of basslines and percussion and cowbells that makes it way more psychedelic. Its more professional sounding to be honest. I couldn't say which style I prefered although I think his new style live is fantastic because you get all the bass-y vibrations. Here's megumi the milky way above



I think if he'd gone on for longer we'd have got some of his trademark audience involvement; he'd have got off the stage and had a walk around while singing or told us all to sit on the floor like he did at his album launch.

The art projections were kind of interesting, there was one of a woman in heels walking over and over some material, and ping pong onto van gogh pictures, and something else..

I've been to a gig by myself before but for some reason this time was way more awkward, I may put it down to the layout of the club - the audience also make up the only route to the bar so its harder to mind your own business. but the seating area is good, some proper sofas.
Anyway I missed the DJ bits wandering around looking for people, but we went back to their place and met some really interesting people and played that game where you draw parts of a person and fold it over. there was some pretty hilarious dancing going on. i also got some free pants so all in all a good evening.

Lois and I walked to hoxton station at 6 in the pouring rain but it was sort of refreshing, then some guy asked us to take a picture of him naked which I thought was an imaginative way of being creepy
SO basically the point is connans great and you should all go see him and/or spend all your money on his album.
One last thing, this is probably my favourite song but he doesn't play it any more.
OVER AND OUT