_ Web.log

For those on the other side of the North Sea, a new video recording of AtomSwarm is being shown at this weekend's New Media Meeting festival, in Norrköping, Sweden. Aside from an impressive roster of media artists by day, and some hot European techno by night, they've also got a damn fine website - apparently created as part of a web development training exercise!

Claude Vonstroke's warped house label Dirtybird are running a remix competition for the new single by the Martin Brothers, a dark, breathy cut with the ubiquitous half-compelling/half-infuriating vocal line. I didn't intend to actually create a complete remix - submitting a remix a week before the voting deadline ends is essentially a pointless exercise - but after paring down a couple of the parts to their skeletal forms, I wound up creating this witchy phantasm of the original:

The Martin Brothers - Dum (Ad Hoc's invocation remix)

To be played at the opening and close of your next seance.

So, the Edinburgh micro-festival is over, and echoes of megaphones, filmreels, synthesizers and lasers are beginning to fade to half-real memories. We'll be collating the photographic highlights on the What They Could Do website imminently. Many thanks to the wild assortment of friends, strangers and co-conspirators who made it the magic that it was...

It's busy season again. The dead laptop has returned from its 5-week absence to be greeted with a nonstop influx of work: some for The Fragmented Orchestra, whose systems development is now well underway, giving me a new insight into the perils of pthreads, concurrent programming and network resilience; soundtracking this unbelievably auteured gem, alongside filmmaker Garry Sykes; and, most of all, this:

The annual show by What They Could Do is once more almost upon us, and as frantic preparations come to a close, a thrilling lineup has emerged from the dust, featuring the world premiere of Karaoke amongst other things. One week to go...

I've been tasked with curating and co-ordinating this Thursday's episode of the monthly What They Could Do: Escape! event series. It's billed as "an "incandescent spectacle of all things electric", with the rough idea that each of the acts are working in some way with electricity - see the full lineup for more details. I'm particularly excited to finally be able to see the marvellous Strange Attractor vs Disinformation in the flesh, after recently catching screenings of their performances at Open Source City.

I've also used this as motivation to realise the long-germinating idea of the "Glitch-a-Sketch", a modified version of a TV Etch-a-Sketch game which will be projected onto a big screen at the event and playable by visitors. As the sketcher draws on screen, a second "player" can experimentally short-circuit the innards of the device via a series of exposed wires, creating chaotic glitch graphics as shown above.

five takes a reductionist approach to the similarly obsessive practices of blogging and listmaking, presented as an open series of short and often playful lists.

It's a project that I started in 2006 but then left dormant for some time. I really liked the idea, so I'm happy to say that it's recently been rekindled with a handful of new authors.

The unspoken reliance on being wired into the system only becomes visible when the wires are severed -- which is unfortunately my current situation, as I watch my laptop go through the latest of its death-throes, beginning with optical drive issues and now mutating into what I suspect to be logic board or IDE controller failure. Whatever, I'm laptopless for the moment, so only checking email sporadically.

Inevitably, the part of me that secretly wants to escape technology is rejoicing, as it's finally allowed the time to pick up one of the many unread books that seem to continually accumulate next to my bed...

I'm playing as Ad Hoc at this Saturday's Open Source City event in Liverpool, at the tail end of a diverse week of workshops and presentations. The set is going to be built around a glitchy live cutup of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate, rendering this arrhythmic vocal piece into something metrical and (hopefully) danceable...

Also this week is the second What They Could Do: Escape! (Herne Hill, London) with one of our strongest lineups yet. Thursday 19th June night, free.

It's times like this I ask myself, Why the hell did I skip past every herb alpert record I ever came across when rummaging through charity shop vinyl? He is in.cred.ible.

The trumpet falling into the picture frame pool! The band playing on the stalls of an empty stadium! The trumpeter running across the beachfront! The army of Charlie Chaplin impersonators! The mysterious lone man at the end - Alpert himself?

Why did nobody ever tell me?

+ more, + more...

New stuff, and some old:

• erase labs are an ancient gathering ground for experiments and web doodles, defunct until recently when I was encouraged to revive them by the simple starfield CSS sketch. All source code provided.
• In my day job, as web developer at Goldsmiths art college, we've just relaunched the Student and Staff parts of the site, the first phases of a comprehensive restructure/redesign. It's quite an improvement.
• Photos are also now up from the Ad Hoc gig at Cybersonica Çonic Social. Good night in a good little venue.