Yes, it may not be directly relevant to this blog, but I’ve been reading a lot lately about generative art and Voronoi diagrams and felt overwhelmed by the maths, so it’s refreshing to see a different, non-technical approach.

His latest post is about another of his rapid-prototyping projects, where he created a cup using Processing, based on meteorological data. It looks slipshod to say the least, but those variations are caused by climate change, and they reveal a trend. It’s a particularly interesting example of data visualisation, an area which will only grow in importance.

The Guardian newspaper has published many articles over recent years on opening up data e.g. on Ordnance Survey maps and crime, the London datastore is perhaps the first for many cities in this country (see also Transport for London), and the recent publication of the COINS database on government spending could lead to some interesting work.

At an apparently more prosaic, or at least human scale, Jeremy Wood is a GPS artist capturing activities like mowing the lawn, on display at Tenderpixel in London until 22 June.

There is so much potential for digital artists to use this data (though being confident in the use of APIs is a hefty requirement). But [the teeming void] doesn’t just capture data in interesting ways. He writes about it too. His post on the underlying messages about data in a series of IBM commericals is fascinating, and highly recommended reading on the slyly manipulative approach.

This sounds like an exciting opportunity to exploit new media to the full, to show how it can transform writing, or more accurately experiencing a story. That’s what some people are claiming the iPad will do for the magazine industry, but it could be much wider than that.

One of the many activities associated with the exhibition was Recode Decode: the opportunity to remix the exhibition’s ident created by Karsten  Schmidt, with the winner’s submission being displayed on screens in London Underground stations.

This is a great idea, and a lot of remixes are appearing in various places on the web in addition to the V&A’s website, especially Flickr and Vimeo, so it seems to have captured people’s imaginations.

http://vimeo.com/10885776

http://vimeo.com/9590019

http://vimeo.com/9496288

http://vimeo.com/8658509

http://vimeo.com/8636469

http://vimeo.com/8217274

http://vimeo.com/8217357

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ambgab/4262661874/in/pool-13813978@N00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dietapete/4193219903/in/pool-13813978@N00

 I wonder if we could borrow and adapt this idea for our exhibition?

Since then, we’ve held the selection process for Leave No Trace, and the exhibition is shaping up to be very interesting. It’s a shame we couldn’t accept more of the proposals because there were some great ideas, but space is limited and we have to select not just on the merits of individual pieces but also so that the exhibition works as a whole.

The next steps in preparing the exhibition are to compare costs with the funds available and talk to the Arts Council about the pieces we’d like to borrow from their collection. We’re also starting to think about the community elements of the exhibition, to involve a wide range of people in different ways, but with a few high-quality events rather than stretch ourselves too thinly and give people a poor introduction to digital art.

Perhaps this could be the start of a new way for the museum and art gallery to work with local artists, keeping in touch more closely with what’s going on in the area and discussing ways to improve the activities and events at the museum to encourage more people to take part in different ways.

• computer art and cybernetics
• computer art and time
• computer art and space
• computer art and output
• computer art and technocultures

Starting the following day is the two-day conference at the V&A on Decoding the Digital. Bonnie Mitchell, one of the speakers at the symposium, will also be talking in Brighton on 2nd February on Interactive Art Environments and Experimental Animation. There’s suddenly so much going on – it’s a shame it’s all down south. Or do you know of things away from the capital?

Anyway, there’s another meeting tonight at 5pm at the Burslem School of Art. If you’re on our mailing list, you should have received an e-mail reminder of this recently. Tonight’s meeting will have less of a clear agenda than the last meeting. Its main purpose is a general discussion of progress and ideas – more of a chance to catch up and ask any questions that may have arisen since the previous meeting.

I can’t promise to post on this blog quite as much as I did before Christmas, but I’ve been accumulating a list of links to interesting digital and multimedia activities, so perhaps for the next few weeks, this blog may become more of a referral site.

Remember, if you find anything you think is relevant or intersting to the Leave No Trace exhibition or the people involved in one way or another, feel free to add a post on this blog. (You’ll have to register first, if you haven’t already done so.)

Hope to see you this afternoon/evening.

PLAYLIST is an exhibition that wants to explore the role played by music in the adoption and manipulation, since the mid Nineties, of obsolete, digital as well as analogue, technologies: vinyls, old computers, game platforms and alikes.