The Curiosity Collective will be at the Maker Faire in Newcastle again this year, March 13th & 14th.
This year we propose something slightly different… we intend to walk from Ipswich to Newcastle - bringing a traveling band of curious technologies!
In our preparation for Maker Faire 2009, one evening in the pub we consulted Google Maps on the iPhone to determine the route to drive from Ipswich, where we are based, to Newcastle. Google told us to go via Harwich and the Netherlands with two ferries making up the route - it had defaulted to a walking route but presented us with an adventure!
Evidently this is the quickest way to walk from Ipswich to Newcastle. The folly of this suggested to us that we should indeed make this trip for Maker Faire 2010 and that we should take as many of our portable makes with us as we can - especially those which give our curious take on wayfinding, navigation, geographical information, mobile social networking and the like.
PIKELPUSHER
(generates video out of a controlled chaos of photographic images, simple shapes, animations, sounds, and live video feeds. All software is homemade, all imagery are created live)
BUTTERCUP INSURGENT
(dark ambient catharsis on the most basic of equipment; a mobile phone, guitar, radio and manual distortion)
Tuesday 29th December - from 8pm - Ronnie’s Bar - in McGinty’s - Ipswich (map).
(the event on Facebook)
In preparation for The Dark Show, and to learn some psychogeography, and cos it’ll be fun, and because it ends in the pub - next Tuesday we’re going on the Ipswich Ghost Walk!
It starts at 8pm from the Ipswich Tourist Information Office. I should think there’ll be some time afterwards in the pub to catch-up on people’s adventures and the progress towards the show.
Let Angela know if you’ll be coming along and bring curious friends too! Here’s the event on Facebook.
Recently I Pixelh8 have had the good fortune, with the help of The National Museum of Computing and the Performing Rights Society Foundation, to have a huge music project of mine funded. The project is to write a piece of music composed from sounds from some of the rarest and earliest computers and computing devices in the world to be performed at the World War II code breaking centre Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes on March 20th and 21st 2009.
The project entitled “Obsolete?” will make use of machines such as Colossus Mark 2 world’s first programmable, digital, electronic, computing device used for code breaking in World War II and probably one of, if not the most significant computer in the world. Another computer to be used is Elliot 803 from 1960, a giant machine that has only 4k!!! I think it’s one of only three left in the world and I love it!
The blogs leading up to it have now also been declassified and can be accessed by clicking here.
On the flipside the piece will also feature several other commonplace computing devices that have either been discarded or branded as “Obsolete?” as time moved on, so yes I will be using the ubiquitous BBC Micro too.
This will be chip tune music but unlike any other you have ever heard.
These machines have been restored to working order and in some cases completely reconstructed by volunteers and researchers at TNMOC, and I am honoured to be associated with these hard working men and women and the unique history of Bletchley Park.
This is to be one of many computer music related projects I am hoping to bring to the museum and I am very, very excited. I strongly recommend you go and visit The National Museum of Computing in the meantime, but you won’t get any more information about “Obsolete?” just yet, as it is classified information.
March 20th, 2009 tickets can be purchased here and March 21st, 2009 tickets can be purchased here. The evening will include the performance, Q&A with myself about the music, a special tour of the museum and a visit to Colossus. Only one hundred tickets per evening so hurry!
Our friend Mark Dixon is currently showing his study of the demolition of Cranfield’s Mill on Ipswich Docks, Breaking Up, at the Focal Point Gallery in Southend.
Mark used cameras mounted inside the building to capture events. “The resulting footage was often very raw, and during the process of recording, fifteen wireless cameras (small spy cameras), which were wired up inside the destruction scene – together with seven VHS cameras and one DVD camera – were completely wrecked by falling masonry, joists, rivets, cables and water used to damp down dust. ...each camera or machine systematically documents its own destruction.“
The main presentation was from Nick Stedman who spoke about his robotic Blanket Project, a blanket that rolls and crawls of its our free will. His second project was After Deep Blue a robotic Rubik’s Snake that curls around whoever holds it. Nick’s work is currently on show in the Schematic exhibit in the SPACE studios, London.
Alex Zivanovic gave a great opendork on Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots, a project he’s been working on with James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau. These are robots that get power by eating flies and in one case mice! This is a robot that steals flies from spider’s webs:
“During her month-long residency, Isabella Pitisci is using ambient light and pinhole photography to explore the architecture of the church, and the effects of recent urban regeneration taking place on Key Street.“
The exhibit is on until Sunday (9th); weekdays 11am to 3pm, Saturday and Sunday 11am to 4pm. There’s a family workshops on Saturday (noon to 3pm) and a talk on Sunday (1pm).
There are pieces from 10 artists, “experimenting with evolution, hybridisation and the infiltration of technology”. One of my favourites was Reuben Margolin‘s Pentagonal Wave, a kinetic sculpture with 288 strings:
The show is open until 17th October, but closed Sunday 5th & Sunday 12th.
