Should have blogged this yesterday. Lazy blogger gain no audience. Anyway, the Furtherfield networking party on Saturday was good fun and very interesting.

The music side was a bit of a failure really. I didn't take any headphones and the gallery didn't have any, so, despite having lugged a crapload of vinyl all the way there (and later all the way back), I didn't do any mixing. Doh! Bad DJ, no twinkie. The MP3's went well, unsurprisingly, but there was actually a lot more content than I had expected and so I didn't play very much music at all.

The other side of things, the art side, organised by everybody else, went well and was very interesting. There were several talks about projects people were working on, many of which looked interesting. They responded to each other as well, addressing the question of who's an artist a couple of times and building into a discussion about net art as an area at the end of the last talk. I found this discussion particularly interesting. Several of the speakers and organisers talked a bit about how they'd started and the processes of their work.

I felt like a bit of an outsider some of the time. I was the only non-artist that I met. Everybody else's work had some kind of meaning whereas mine is just technological faffing. More than that, the work that I appreciated I appreciated on a fairly shallow visual or auditory level, without any real feeling for the underlying importance. A lot of people talked about the coming together of artists and technologists but it seemed to me that it was much easier for an artist to start using technology than a technologist to start producing art. I wonder where it all starts for an artist. Many of the people there, particularly Tom Corby of Corby and Bailey seemed to have had a very long and deep association with the art world that I could never hope to replicate. This informed their work greatly.

It was a fairly fascinating event and I met some interesting people and held conversations in which I was completely out of my depth. I learnt quite a lot about the art community and I merrily drank a fair amount of booze. I'm very grateful to Marc and Ruth for letting me come along and I look forward to retreading the connections I created and attending more events.

I've put up the photos I took whilst in Norwich a couple of weeks ago. Took me far too long. However, I give you Baby Grace's Christening and The Beginning Of The Summer At Thickthorn.

Sorry for the lack of real title. This is going to be a two-parter.

Part 1

I still can't quite get used to the size of Margaret the Powerbook. I guess I did stare at Diane the iBook all day everyday for almost two years. I booted Diane up to copy some stuff today and felt slightly more at home, though not as cool. The screen on the Powerbook is fantastic. It's brighter and the colours are more vibrant. It's also noticeably clearer. It's is a lovely piece of engineering. Each curve and corner perfect. I'm enjoying the keyboard as well, it's slightly sturdier than the iBook one.

Part 2

I went to Hoxton yesterday. Hoxton is part of the Old Street/Shoreditch/Hackney area that just oozes cool. Old Street itself is a bit nasty, but dip off the main road and suddenly every other building is a gallery or a media company or something cool. It's run down, there's a lot of graffiti, but the graffiti is really cool and the run downness just gives it a lived in feel rather than a broken one. I did go to that area for two interviews, Lateral and Lshift, and I would still happily work there.

I went there to meet the people of furtherfield.org. They're holding a party on Saturday at the Deluxe Arts gallery on Hoxton Square. It's a networking thing for anyone vaguely creative. That makes it sound a bit marketing-horror, but the furtherfield people are cool and it's just a little get together really. It's nice and low tech, with a table for exhibiting stuff if you want to. I'm going to be in charge of the music, because I asked to be :-). I'm going to play some MP3s, mess around with Live and then smack some decks up with some bleeping electro for a bit. All in I'll be making nasty sounds for about eight hours. I'll also be curating the PA. If other people want to make sounds, I'll hook them up. It should be fun, but I'm a bit nervous. I'm slightly worried about looking like a bit of an amateur next to some really hardcore sound artist dudes. I'll maybe learn a thing or two. Mainly I'm feeling really good about the fact that my first gig in London and for ages is such a cool one. It's miles cooler than anything else I've done.

I'm also looking forward to the networking part of it. The guys at furtherfield mentioned funding for projects and I said I would definitely be interested in providing know how to projects if there was money to be had. They mentioned phones, which is something that I'd like to explore, particularly network apps and stuff making use of photo messaging.

I need ones that go to 11...

Woo hoo! It arrived finally. First impressions:

• It's actually surprisingly light for it's size
• The screen is huge
• It's very quick
• The titanium feels really quite nice, very tactile
• It's a bit noisier
• The keyboard is mostly the same, but my fingers are nervous
• OS X is much happier on a 1Ghz G4 than a 500Mhz G3
• Much happier
• It's very pretty
• Hard disk space! Woo hoo!
• Setting everything up is going to take time and I have work to do

And much, much more...

← previous page, next page →

Choose another page: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113 or return to the most recent entries.

Last updated at 11:32, Wednesday June 18th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

Rate my journal on bloghop.com: