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Warren Ellis writes a great little every-when-he-feels-like-it mail thingy called Bad Signal:

I’d like you to ignore, for a while,
anything that smacks of Web 3.0,
or even Web 2.0, or any of the other
dumb ideas that distract from
production of actual content on the
web. Instead, consider these simple
things:

You can find the rest here.

We were treated last night to four talks from four different speakers, as part of the Interactivos seminar series, looking at Technology and Magic (white or black?).

First off Simone Jones spoke about her work involving machines and bodies. She spoke about discovering electronics and building electronic and mechanical machines as art, in particular her Mobility Machines and Perfect Vehicle projects, which use augment body functions – usually breathing – to activate mechanical functions.

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I decided to brave the rain and the lack of language today and go out briefly into the city, returning triumphant with a bag of oranges, apples, and roasted almonds, and having fed myself on a 2.50 Euro felafel kebab. Holy crap the food here is good.

I’m taking part in Interactivos?, a festival/conference/workshop programme being put on by Medialab Madrid. The seminar programme looks like it’s going to be great. I’m here as a ‘collaborator’ which means that I get to use my skills and knowledge in computer vision and programming to help other people make their interactive new-media projects work. It promises to be heaps of fun, and will be taken in English, fortunately, as I only speak a-few-hours-reading-the-phrasebook’s worth of Spanish.

Arrived last night at the Madrid airport at about 10pm and had to find the Metro (subway) station: the signs pointing the way to the Metro tried to direct me through a building zone. So I went up to an official looking person and asked, in halting tones, “Ola, quiero ir metro..?” (”Hello, I would like to go to the metro..?”). My pronounciation must have been all right because he reeled off a complex set of instructions in rapid Spanish which I was able to follow mainly through body language and picking out a few words here and there. I was to go up an escalator, around a corner and then along towards Terminal 2, following the signs for Metro. My bags and the trolley they were on couldn’t be taken up the stairs, so – this was where I lost it completely, but I assume he was saying I could leave them or take a lift..? Anyway I made it to the metro, which is quite flash and a whole heap less claustrophobic and tiny than the London metro, even though it seems to run just as deep under the city.

And now it’s rainin. And I didn’t bring my raincoat, which was not so clever.

Will let you know how it goes.

On my way to Madrid (where I am right now) I stopped by London to visit my very good friend Steven, whom I’ve known since we were both about 7. This involved riding the Tube, which was an overwhelming experience of vast crushing masses of people, and combined with the growing homesickness I’ve been feeling over the last week reduced me to something of a shambling mess. Disgorged on the South Bank I wandered the streets for a while, eventually coming across Southwark Cathedral, which gave an absolutely lovely moment, or several, of calm. The design of cathedrals to bring about a sense of peace and majesty makes itself present as a physical force sometimes. I had to sit down and recover for a bit. I’m not sure how I would’ve kept myself together if there had been some sacred music playing, I’d've probably collapsed in sobbing mess of hopelessness.

I’m hardly a Christian of any kind other than the kind that one is by default, living in a Christian-based society; I agree with Richard Dawkins that religion debases us, belittles us and removes our dignity. But that doesn’t stop places like this having an effect on me. In fact quite the opposite: it demonstrates to me just how powerful the culture of the world outside us is, how strongly consumption and monetarism press and guide our moves, define our morality and the way we treat each other. When you come and sit in a temple built under the belief of a God that is merciful and kind and majestic, it is these values and senses – merciful, kind, majestic – that come through. Go into a shopping mall (the nearest to a temple in our society you will find) and the values that feel are speed, gloss, and consumption. I know which I’d rather have.

Headed off to the Tate Modern after that. The most interesting part of it, for me, was the Turbine Hall, a vast empty space (there was no exhibition in it at the time) that made the most amazing airconditioning noises I have heard for a long while. I have made an audio recording of a very slow walk from one end of the hall to the other and then out the door, over about ten minutes.

The next day I went off to visit the United Visual Artists, who were a bunch of very friendly and evidently highly talented artists, geeks, and programmers. For what are in my opinion the best examples of their work, check out Hereafter and Echo. Volume is also interesting if you’re into behind-the-scenes geeky shots, but there’s no video of the project, or a good description of it: basically, it was a bunch of vertical columns, each with an embedded speaker, that responded to people moving through it by playing sounds and making lights on the columns depending on how close they were to the columns. Anyway they seem to be into a lot of the same sorts of things as I’m into, which is neat.

I went up to Sheffield on Friday to check out Lovebytes. It went a bit like this:

8 am Caught a train from Birmingham to Sheffield.

10 am Arrived in Sheffield. Sought out the Millenium Gallery to see Rose Butler’s 3-screen video installation Tent. The work is based on Muslim ideas of pottery design, apparently, which seemed to my mind to play out as a kind of mirroring and inverted mirroring effect. Sometimes the central screen had a mirror line down the middle, and the video stretched over the left one and a half screens was repeated on the right. Sometimes the left screen and the right screen showed the same thing but the middle was mirrored, sometimes the three screens showed video staggered in time; and variations on the above. In all shots though a tent appears, adorned with brightly-coloured paintings, posters, and bits of colour.. the idea seems to be that the tent formed some kind of base of operations for the filming process, connecting the bits of otherwise fairly random landscape photography together.

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I’ve been away in the countryside in Wales visiting Emma Macey and Benjamin Storch. They’re both artists and two of the loveliest people I’ve met since arriving here.

Emma is an artist, originally from Australia, who works with video/sound installation and forgotten inventions. She’s commisioned a type of movie projector that never saw the light of day after its invention to play a film of a sunset, for a kind of video installation project. We’re hopefully going to be working together on a project using this custom-built projector – I’ll be doing some kind of interpretive lighting system to light the space its installed in, based on the tech I developed for Sounds Like Light.

Ben is a sculptor who bases his works on visualisations of mathematical figures, like strange attractors which are kind of 3D Lissajous figures, and minimal surfaces, producing beautiful works that look like this. I ended up coding some quick real-time strange attractor stuff on their couch while visiting, but it’s very WIP.

They live in the old kennel master’s accommodation on a country estate that is still owned by the same people, even though they no longer live at the house. They fed me organic food, home-made sprouts and bread, and the most amazing smoothies a la Ben. At night there was not a single sound to be heard, except nightbirds and the occasional sheep. I went outside every night and just stood in the quiet for a while.

Must admit – I kind of didn’t want to come back to Birmingham.. aah well.

Bobby Higher Intelligence Agency has let me have the run of his studio, showing me roughly how to work the mixing desk and how to plug things in, how to work the MIDI-CV converter, that sort of thing..

I set to work straight away on Thursday night making some music. We plugged his 808 into the MIDI-CV box thing and I fed it a sequence… suddenly I’m making beats that sound just like Orbital’s circa In-Sides. Funny, I’ve never actually played with a proper hardware analog drum machine before, and it’s remarkable how much of the feel of the music comes from the hardware itself.

Some of the outputs of the 808 were meanwhile being fed into a vintage Space Echo, through a Zoom effects box to add some reverb, and then back into the Space Echo in a lovely little feedback loop.. I’ve never played with a tape delay before either, they’re really quite lovely things.

We got a couple of layers down, rhythm (in 5/4) straight out of the 808 plus some of the effects returns, and a layer of sound from a Sequential Circuits Pro One. Of course, once that’s all down into the computer, all you’ve got is a big block of sound that makes a single nice loop. And we’re then onto the composition side of things: how to turn this mass of sound into some kind of a piece of music, that moves places and has dynamics too it.. the tricky part, in other words.

I had a good run at it tonight. There’s now maybe three minutes of music, it still needs a heap of editing plus some more development. There’s an intro, an A section, and bit of bridge to a B section in a different key.. there’s some melodic development going on via an SH-101, again using the MIDI-CV converter box to sequence it, as it’s pre-MIDI.

Gear is so much fun! Bed time now.

Went along today to the Design and Multimedia 4talent inspiration session.

It was something. I got to meet a bunch of interesting people, including Shane Walter of onedotzero and Kate Pemberton of endfile.com (who besides me was the only other artist, everyone else were designers; she had a ‘Designers are Wankers’ badge on her bag too, which was kind of amusing..

Anyway tiny world, as it turns out Kate knows Kakariki of Bloggreen and the Radical Cross Stitch Posse fame — and doubly interesting in that I’m currently in the midst of reading Zeros and Ones by Sadie Plant, which compares (among other things) the punched card systems used to automate Industrial Revolution-era weaving looms with programming languages, arguing that the designers and operators of the punched-card patterns and systems, usually women, were in fact the first computer programmers. (Sadie apparently lives in the area, is friends with one of the Modulate collective, and could’ve potentially come to the talk I gave on Sunday! amazing)

I’m enjoying being in Birmingham. It’s actually quite a pretty city — for every block of industrial gross there’s a block of pretty park with enormous English trees, and apparently Birmingham has one of the highest if not the highest percentage of green space of any English city. Pretty. Plus there’s an elaborate canal system, with more kilometres of canal than Venice; all of the canals have a towpath running alongside them, which is just perfect for navigating by bicycle, and they spread out in a network all across the country, so at least in theory a bicycle ride from here to anywhere along the canals should be a simple and easy (and pretty) task. I headed off towards the countryside on my bike on Monday, except a left turn when I should have made a right turn meant I ended up taking an enormous loop back into the city — oops. Oh well, next time.

Being on a residency is turning out to be an interesting experience as well. I’m finding I’m doing an enormous amount of everything, almost all of it related directly to my personal development as an artist.. I have a flat to myself which provides a good place to lay low and contemplate, plus a shared warehouse space which gets regular foot-traffic from a couple of the Modulate collective members. As usual I’m a little frustrated with my apparent lack of concrete output, but I’m hoping to kickstart some initiatives tomorrow and Friday to produce some actual stuff. All things going according to plan (things around the Green St warehouse seem to be deliciously loose), me and Bobby Higher Intelligence Agency Bird are going to attempt some kind of collaborative music making tomorrow in his studio full of amazing amounts of analog gear; plus me and Joseph Potts will try to do some kind of quickfire sound-video filmmaking on Friday or Saturday. I’m going to try and restart the AV Chinese whispers thing that kind of stillbirthed when we tried it in Wellington, plus I’d like to organise at least one random-sound-video-person jam afternoon in the Green St warehouse while I’m here.

Anyways, enough words for now. Hope you’re all lovely.