SteamSHIFT

Went to London a few weeks back; I went up for the RCA Interaction Design show - which was great! Saw some absolutely fab work (blog more on that another time maybe). On the way home, I picked up a few magazines - most notably Dazed and Confused (Vol2#27) - The climate change special. It struck me hard how there are all these people out there doing really great and exciting work; and me … well, I kind of feel like I am dying a slow death of lack of creative expression! And then there is Southampton; grrr. I have got to make something happen. It really upsets me that a city the size of Southampton should have so little creative stuff going on.

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I love these: the organic shapes and the promise of outdoor comfort and being out of the sun really appeals.

Available here.

(Via design*sponge.)

Grand Theft Iraq

Originally uploaded by steamshift.

Seen on the streets of Brighton, UK

Sculpted by email and spam: “E-mail Erosion automatically creates sculptures, using spam and e-mail as data to trigger the sculpting process.

The work, viewable via four webcams, consists of a powder-coat steel frame. Each of its sides has a ‘bot’ which can move to any point on the side’s face, working much like a flat-bed plotter. The bots can also squirt water into the frame, causing a section of a large block of the starch-based styrofoam to dissolve.

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DataTiles: “

Datatiles , by Jun Rekimoto at Sony CSL, merges dynamic graphical information with digitally tagged physical tiles. The highly developed prototype looks promising.[video]

(Via core77 Via Future Feeder.)”

It’s been forever since I last posted anything; I’ve been stacked out with weddings, freelance work and my boy’s birthday! Also finding out that I’m not able to have the day per week off I needed to do my MA has really taken the wind out of my sails; especially on this blog which I first started as a means of collating my diverse thoughts, primarily with regard to the MA.

I have since managed to agree 5 weeks unpaid leave per year with my employer (on top of my holiday), in order to begin exploring some of the MA projects I have in mind. As and when I get to do the course, I’ll be hitting the ground running and will perhaps get more out of it.

However, first project has nothing to do with the MA; I’m doing some visuals for a mate’s band Gojira … and man is it hard going! I’m using Quartz Composer which despite apparent simplicity, I’m finding immensely hard work! I don’t know whether it’s just that I’m so used to working with scripting languages that things like control structures seem overly complicated, or whether it’s simply a mind-set kind of thing that the more I use it the more obvious it will become?

The one thing I have definitely realised is that in order to actually create some kind of well crafted visual interest, it needs to actually be story-boarded in some fashion; by creating sets of colours, effects, graphics, images, movies and so on, based around each song, which can be combined in different ways in the live show, I might have a chance of creating something vaguely coherent!? We’ll see!

Over the next week or so, I’ll try to post at least some screen shots of how it’s going, in the lead up to the 2 gigs they (we) are playing at Greenbelt this year.