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Take yourself and your gear seriously. Spend some money on a decent hard case to protect your things. You’ll thank yourself for it.

Hey.

I don’t think I’ve yet shared the news, but I’ve been awarded an International Artists Fellowship residency from the Arts Council of England. It was offered by the Modulate Collective, who are based in Digbeth, Birmingham, UK.

This means:

• I get flown to Birmingham – in a week and a half, to be exact
• They put me up in a flat
• They buy my food
• They provide me with an allowance

In return, I’m to be an Artist In Residence, which means we share ideas, they inspire me and I inspire them, and we hang out together; the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere share and swap and make beautiful things, with no other cares in the world.

I’m enormously honoured, even if I can’t quite believe it.

Well, Sounds Like Light is now finished, quite well and truly. It won the Best Visual Arts award for Fringe 07, which is such an amazing honour for me. Thanks Fringe.

The installation was a resounding success. Everyone either loved it, or they thought it was weird, which I take as a compliment. The scheme I had of reviewing and upgrading the code each evening based on audience reactions really worked a treat, it was like several days of user testing, although it did mean that people who arrived early didn’t get as good a show as people who arrived a bit later.

Being part of the Fringe festival was awesome as well. Fringe gave me something larger than myself to plan towards – an organized framework that placed me and my art in a broader ‘art’ context, which meant that as a first-time visual-arts exhibitor I felt like I wasn’t on my own in any way, that what I was doing had meaning outside of itself, and that even if my show hadn’t worked, the fact that it was part of a festival would have given it significance anyway.

Fringe for me was like a platform for doing something awesome — something that I probably wouldn’t’ve done had there not been this larger context in which to set it. I recommend to anyone else thinking of putting on something for the Fringe — do it, do it, do it.

Video footage is to follow. It needs to be edited and gained and colour-corrected and things like that, as video cameras don’t seem to like darkness very much — funny that.