I know most of you are not thinking about uni work at the moment but its a great time to go see some student shows and get a feel for the level of work produced by students around the country studying similar topics to you.

So, go to this MA show by the RCA students cos I saw it last Saturday and its good, so go cos I said!!

The Great Exhibition 2007
Royal College of Art Summer Show
Kensington Gardens and the RCA Galleries
15–28 June

2007 is the 150th birthday of all the great South Kensington cultural and educational institutions, from the Victoria and Albert Museum to Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, all of which were born in the wake of the Great Exhibition of 1851.

To celebrate this birthday in style, the RCA is holding an even more spectacular Summer Show than usual. In homage to the original Great Exhibition itself, we have erected a huge, custom-designed tent in Kensington Gardens located near the site of the original exposition.

Across the road, the College galleries will be open as usual, meaning that for the first time in living memory we are showing the work of all our graduating students at the same time. Fine Art and Applied Art postgraduate students are exhibiting with Design, Architecture, Humanities, Communications and Fashion and Textiles – the art and design of the 21st century coming together in a radically contemporary take on the spirit of 1851.

Previous Shows have been described in the press as showcases for ‘the cream of young artists’ and a chance to ‘discover big names of the future’. With 385 students from over 36 countries and 20 courses exhibiting their work, this year promises no less.

Here are some write ups of works I spotted that I liked:

Semaclock
Flat Futures
Veer

And here are directions of how to get to the RCA.

Some of what you all missed on friday the 18th at the campus.

Garrett Lynch – RE:soundings (below): Every sound produced during the performance is captured and manipulated live from radio signals. Both location and surrounding architecture dictate reception of signals, their quality and use. The version here is a recording of a view of the stage performance. See an alternative view of the performance here.

Paul Adams – Snd> Arc (below): Re-imagining Visual Structures through captured sound frequencies.

More videos of the nights performances and experimental films can be seen here.

If any of you are up in london before June, Tiny, Funny, Big and Sad is an exhibition worth popping in to see by Jennifer & Kevin McCoy. Its a free exhibition at the BFI on Southbank comprising of four live cinematic constructions depicting the artists watching famous films. See if you can guess which ones from the models without reading a review or the catalog.

Open Ear presents Snd:arc- (Sound and Architecture) a free evening of live sound art and visual experimentation on Friday 11th May 8:00 – 11:30pm (Bar until 12:00am) in the Campus Hall at Canterbury Christ Church University, Broadstairs Campus, Northwood Road, Broadstairs.

The event will feature performances and experimental video works by a number of artists including:

Performances by:
Matt Wright
Andy Birtwistle
Garrett Lynch
Paul Adams

Experimental videos by:
Pascal Bouchet
Ampersand

and more

Time: Friday 18th May 8:00 – 11:30pm
Location: Canterbury Christ Church University, Broadstairs Campus, Northwood Road, Broadstairs.

Open Ear website
http://openear.wordpress.com/

Gamers wanting a deeper narrative, story lovers wishing they could step inside the action, or simply anyone interested in the next wave of gaming will want to check out Storytron, software for interactive storytelling that is now available in pre-alpha.

Founded by gaming legend Chris Crawford, whose credits include developing Atari classics like Excalibur and penning the seminal text The Art of Computer Game Design, Storytron intends to bring dynamic, character-driven narratives to the world of gaming. Creative types can use Storytron’s Storyworld Authoring Tool (called Swat) to construct a “universe of dramatic possibilities” by establishing the personalities and agendas of a set of characters, along with other elements like locations, props and occurrences. Players within one of these created Storyworlds are story protagonists; their actions shape events.

Some in the gaming community are skeptical of Crawford’s efforts. He has apparently been working on Storytron for years and the website’s mid-’90s design aesthetic doesn’t help his case. But if you’re an intrepid early adopter, you can download a version of Swat and start creating your dramas today.

Reblogged from Coolhunting.

Somebody asked me ages ago about how to design a favicon for a website, you know those small icons in the address bar which become really useful if you use bookmarks as you can visually spot the bookmark amongst others.

So heres a tutorial on how to do that: How to make a website icon.
Note that the application used in the tutorial is Photoshop on Windows however Photoshop on Mac OSX does not have the .ico format. Instead use IconFactory Pro (the app we used to create CD-ROM icons) to export this format from Photoshops filter menu. It’s installed on all the Macs in ALF19.

Failing this you can always design your image in photoshop, save it as a flatten .gif and us this online tool to generate the favicon.

When you add the code to your html document head make sure you do so in lowercase and not in uppercase as the tutorial suggests (thats not valid xhtml).

A simple idea to look at for year 2, Multimedia Authoring, Non-linear Narrative, Storycubes:

StoryCubes are a tactile thinking and storytelling tool for exploring relationships and narratives. Each face of the cube can illustrate or describe an idea, a thing or an action, placed together it is possible to build up multiple narratives or explore the relationships between them in a novel three-dimensional way. StoryCubes can be folded in two different ways, giving each cube twelve possible faces – and thus two different ways of telling a story, two musings around an idea. Like books turned inside out and upside down they are read by turning and twisting in your hand and combining in vertical and horizontal constructions.

Not sure how many of you saw the new documentary by Adam Curtis on BBC2, Sunday night The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams… but it was as stunning good as his previous work. The documentary continues next Sunday and the following Sunday.

Hopefully the documentary will be online somewhere soon but in the meantime to see some of Curtis’ previous work see archive.org for:

Century of the Self
and
The Power of Nightmares

Strongly recommend The Power of Nightmares.

An interesting visualisation of the future of the London Underground.

Some sites to find opensource software:

OSX only
http://www.opensourcemac.org/
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/
http://www.nothickmanuals.info/doku.php/opensourcemac

Windows only
http://www.opensourcewindows.org/
http://www.myopensource.org/

Cross platform
http://freshmeat.net/
http://sourceforge.net/
http://www.webi.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_software_packages