Slow reaction

Pask Present

The Maverick Machines exhibition resulted in the development of Pask Present, a new Pask inspired exhibition held in Vienna (25thMarch-4thApril) co-curated with Ranulph Glanville and Stephen Gage from the Bartlett.

Ranulph was instrumental in making the exhibition happen in Vienna, finding a gallery space and arranging funding through his contacts at EMSCR.

Stephen and his students from the Bartlett designed and created the exhibition space, and in true UK style the exhibition was packed in a van and driven from London to Vienna and back again by two pioneering students .

Ruairi Glynn (famous for his Interactive Architecture website) designed the Pask Present website using the wonderful wordpress authoring system.

Albert Mueller and Ranulph produced a wonderful catalogue of the exhibition - details to follow..

I reworked many of the exhibits at Maverick Machines, including a new Electrochemical Glass System:


The exhibition was a great success and raised much interest in the work of Gordon Pask. There were many visitors, Cyberneticians from the EMSCR conference, Art and Architecture students from Vienna and a great deal of curious people who happened by the gallery - watch this space for further developments!

Maverick Machines

Maverick Machines - an exhibition inspired by the work of Gordon Pask will run from 23rd July - 10th August in the Matthew Gallery, Edinburgh University.

Gordon Pask, from "An Approach to Cybernetics", 1961

See Paskian Research for more on Gordon Pask.

OnSite Opening 25th October

OnSite is a series of Arts and Informatics interventions on and around the building site of the new Informatics Building.
See onsite01.blogspot.com for more details.

Kinetica Opening

Kinetica a new gallery dedicated to Kinetic art opened last week in Spitalfields London, where you can interact with the Mimetic Starfish between Oct-Nov 14th 2006.

Photo by Mark Pilkington : Strange Attractor



Upstairs you can also see some beautiful kinetic works: solar powered mobiles by Daniel Chadwick:


and servo controlled floating forms in space by Elias Crespin ...


plus automated arms endlessly writing "la la la.." and signing Dali, ebbing colour kinetic neon forms..

For the next 2 weeks only - downstairs a robo-drummer-performance happening.

See Kinetica BBC news items on youtube and the more in depth item on C4.

Great video documentary here

Free Processing!

The new Open Source Processing language is being used to create some very interesting interactive applets on the web. Its free, easy to use and full of powerful tools - vision blob analysis, google searching, quality real time rendering, particle systems etc
Processing is enabling a wide range of people to program - creating powerful interactive real-time generative graphic web ideas, visual tools and simulations.

"Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound"










(simulated interactive real-time smoke web app)


Web graph of this site, grows organically using simulated physics as the site is analysed - see the structure of any website!









my work site: www.mimetics.com








Analyse a site: WebSites as Graphics


The Processing library is growing and its applications are moving into areas such as Mobile projects and embedding on micro processors

The creation of novel interfaces via projection and vision analysis: Musical surface / instrument













This may be the language of choice for the interactive cafe tables proposal and other interactive arts & communications and informatics projects requiring web, visualisation, interaction and real-time simulation - plus its easy to use and develop - and its free.

Light + Building

Just back from an entreprenurial visit to the biggest lighting exhibition in the world!
Light+ Building in Frankfurt - over 2000 exhibitors - anything connected with lighting, LED's, spotlights, architecural constructions, domestic lamps, modern, classical, fittings, energy saving, controllers etc etc.
It took nearly seven hours to walk around the exhbition without actually stopping to look at anything in depth.
It was THE place to see where the future of lighting is heading - LED's everywhere, exhibiting strange and wonderful effects - pulsing, phasing and flowing colours, blinding in their new intensities, animating with cellular imagery..










Something for the new Informatics building? An LED curtain? Some LED wall tiles? Building as information display?











Walls, tubes and curtains of LED Lights: ElementLabs and G-Lec
Huge USA company: anything LED on any scale: ColorKinetics
Experimental walls, tiles and creative effects: Traxon (tunnel above)
Magic Monkey (webcam on cooling tower!)