SubSub blog

As promised, here’s some more Light Up Bristol footage.

Light Up Bristol from crustea on Vimeo.

Last night I headed over to Bluescreen @ the Cube Cinema, mainly to see the latest piece of work by Chuen Hung Tsang and Chris Hawkes. Chuen’s work so far has been beautiful, so this latest project, a personal project funded and supported by Black Dog Films held a lot of potential.

The work didn’t fail to deliver. Their work does so well because even in such a small team (of 2), they have a plethora of skills, from technical to storytelling. The visual styling is rich, with bleak apocalyptic settings with classic anime’esqe over exposed sky, the edits and cuts were strong and the story held you throughout. Well done boys.

Nothings online yet to view, so you’ll have to bide your time with their last endeavor, a music video for Leave Land For Water.

Also to note from the evening: Some fun and well put together stop frame animation from a recent UWE grad (who’s name I missed, but hopefully will get to add here soon) and the intimate-INTIMATE documentation, a piece commissioned by Black Out Arts for the tollgate house projections by Minton Film

Another long break between posts, sorry. It’s always frustrating, because these long breaks normally mean we’ve been involved in even more stuff to blog about. The vicious circle continues until eventually we’ll be drowned in our own adventures. With that in mind we better get on with it…

Been in London over the last few days at the Free Range graduate shows. We went down to see the Bournemouth New Media course, but also had a good look at the other goings on.

The Bournemouth show (i Heart Play) did live up to it’s title, many of the pieces including gaming to some degree. The pieces ranged from mediocre to damn interesting. They included sonic controlled interfaces, interactive films, alternative reality games, API mash ups, and some good old html and flash interfaces. The show was well coordinated, and felt coherent.

Although no animators/designers stood out, a number of people seemed to know their coding, so I hope to get them working with us at SubSub.

The Brighton Graphics and Illustration courses were also on show. Their work was exceptional in places, with some very powerful graphical pieces. As always it was highly ‘fine art’ influenced, with a conceptual feel throughout, therefore difficult to comprehend employing outside of illustration work.

Epson had a huge show on, with almost 120 students on show, split between new media and graphics. The interactive work was limited, with only a couple of pieces to note, and even these were reasonably unoriginal (although, the guy who had created one of them was particular nice, so good luck to him). There was someone playing with the Wii Remote API, but that wasn’t working when I was about.

The rest of the ‘new media’ course had some great design though, with one guy in particular shining out as skilled with a massive body of work. The rest was mainly motion based, of pretty good quality.

All in all a good show, but I’m disappointed with the lack of digital/interactive courses this year. Perhaps we should move next years exhibition to Free Range and put on the digital stuff?

Start thinking, they want your projects.

Building Interactive Plagrounds (BIP) is a project promoting the creation of interactive spaces. Running alongside Elettrowave, they plan to use your projects in real world situations… so need solid, well constructed pieces/spaces of interaction to be passed around drunken hordes or sweaty dancers… the perfect situation for electronics.

The guys at I-Dat, this time with Kurator, continue to educate and entertain, this time with their Social Hacking event.

A number of international artists invaded the public spaces of Plymouth. These artist included The Institute for Applied Autonomy, Mikro Orchestra Project. Ludic Society and c6. They were also joined by Saul and keynote speaker McKenzie Wark (writer of A Hacker Manifesto, an inspirating read during Uni) for the seminar on Saturday.

Personally, The Institute for Applied Autonomy guys seemed the most interesting of the artists, with both their content and techniques. They seem to be somewhere between activists and tool makers. Terminal Air, which can still be seen at the Plymotuth Art Centre (be quick, ends 31st March), is an ‘installation to document the American CIA’s practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’ flights’. I had no idea what extraordinary rendition flights were, and the reality was scary and enlightening. If you can’t make it down to Plymouth be sure to check out the work’s description at a minimum.

The Ludic Society made street gaming a little darker, by tagging 25 individuals with RFID tags, under their skin! The game allowed them to adjust, tag (well un-tag) and react to the city.

The event was wrapped up with a Mikroparty, with both live and DJ performances from Tetine… who rocked in their very special way.

The second Dorkbot happened last night.  I’ll have to admit to only witnessing the beginning before having to run away.  But the turn out then was already great, with a number of weird and wonderful inventions and inventors.

It seems all the physical geeks are coming out of the woodwork, which I’m very excited about.