Decode is an exhibition about Code, Interactivity and Network organized by the V&A and onedotzero. Nothing new here as far as I'm concerned... Programming art is everywhere, from small gallery spaces to open source activity groups and all over the web. But this exhibition is important for two reasons: it's highly funded and well organized (two of the pieces were temporarily out of order at the time of my visit - but hey... welcome to technology) and most importantly the V&A attracts crowds that haven't been in touch with this form of art before.

Body Paint by Mehmet Akten (2009). And my mother who doesn't even know how to use a mouse.

Decode: Digital Design Sensations is on until the 11th of April and it's definitely worth a visit.

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Posted in: arts, programming

They make great dance music, give perfect material for remixes [1,2] and they're from America but their music sounds European: The Golden Filter. Can't wait for the full album...

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Posted in: music

Last night and almost by chance I saw As One / Rushes – Fragments of a Lost Story / Infra at the Royal Opera House. That was the first time I attended a dance event and I was mesmerized...

Out of the three works, Infra by Wayne McGregor in collaboration with Julian Opie was the most impressive and most informative in terms of the possibilities of contemporary dance. From what I read in the programme this is not the first time McGregor worked with other artists. From what I saw dance, apart from being potentially the most expressive art of all, is probably the best channel for combining all other forms of art - visual, sound, design, installation etc. The nature of McGregor's work especially makes dance a very close relative of (bio)technology if not it itself: fragmented bodies (of people, images, sounds) put together in a continuous flow and in a visual and emotional pattern forming a Body. That Body transfers a message that is too condensed to be expressed in spoken words. If this is not programming then I don't know what it is...

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Posted in: arts, dance

When it comes to synchronisation of sounds with visuals, I always thought of it as a linear, one-way interaction: shapes and colours generated by sounds. Alex McLean is surprisingly experimenting with the opposite in an attempt to talk "about visual languages and the morphology of symbols (as opposed to words)", and the result is pretty impressive. 

http://yaxu.org/acid-sketching/

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Posted in: arts, music

I started a blog a couple of years ago which I never made an effort to keep up to date. It looked ok but it had lots of problems: the code wasn't very organised and it was difficult to maintain, it was built in a very old-fashioned way, it didn't have a backend so it was a pain to publish a post... in other words it was not really meant to be used for blogging but only to show off some skills and to promote my stuff - I was looking for work back then. 

This website is a different story. I'm luckily and happily at the same job for more than a year now and I'm definitely not looking for one through this site or in general... To be honest I have no idea what I'll be writing about here. I like discovering new and old, exciting things - online and offline - so I guess that's a good start. It's also true that it feels quite lonely "behind the scenes" of the web (I'm a web developer), so maybe that's one of the best ways I found to reach out and communicate with the rest of the (web) world.

But at the end of the day does it really matter? It's just a simple blog out of the million sites with "perfect" content and the "perfect" purpose out there. So I might as well take it as it comes...

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Posted in: updates