I got to see Julian Cope play at the Rescue Rooms in Nottingham! I don't think he's toured much recently (or maybe I keep missing him) so it was good to get to see the Arch Drude in the flesh. He played a real mixture of songs from his Teardrop Explode days, though the classic Jehovahkill/Peggy Suicide phase and his more recent Black Sheep stuff. He was on top form, with plenty of banter between songs a new hat (apparently).

I'm just back from a two week course at Schumacher College in Devon. The course was entitled "Creativity, Perception and the Modern Mind" and was taught by artist Peter Adams and system theorist Fritjof Capra with a guest appearance from Iain McGilchrist (author of 'The Master and His Emissary').

As with my first visit to the college last year, it was a very enlightening experience. The lectures - with Fritjof talking about the science of Leonard Da Vinci, and Peter talking about his own creative practice - presented a view on the processes and practice of creativity and its connection to the living Earth. Both lecturers offered views which helped me think out my own creative work and it's wider contextualisation. Plus, talking to other members of the Faculty has given me a number of ideas for new artworks.

Schumacher is a truly special place. As well as the unique courses it offers, you also get to spend time enjoying the surroundings, cooking tasty food, talking with other course members and generally helping out around the college. For me it's a real creative treat and, despite having a stinking cold for much of my visit, is somewhere I get to recharge and reflect.

P.S. I took the picture just after a rainstorm. It's amazing how something as fragile as a dandelion can survive such a downpour!

Last night was the first "Maximal" event at Phoenix Square in Leicester. I provided live visuals for Steve Gibson's live and DJ sets. It was an opportunity for me to try out some new visual ideas involving visual feedback. When they worked they worked very well and I aim to continue the the development further. The plan is to use the imagery generated through the visual feedback loops as the environment in which the "multimedia organisms" I'm creating for my PhD work will grow. More about this soon. See pictures from the event on Flickr.

We ran another Stench Event - Stench VII - on Friday 9th April. Artists playing were Plutonic Pleasures with MSB, DJ Myoptik, Threep, The Stylus Scribbler and Cursor Miner (pictured), plus we had visuals from theLab. Not the best turnout, but an excellent night nevertheless. The next planned Stench event will be Stenchival'10 in August. Details to follow soon. Picture from Stench VII can be found on Flickr, plus a short video of the night on YouTube.

I'm just back from a 4 day trip to Istanbul. It was a great opportunity to explore the city and take lots of pictures, videos and sound recordings. I've yet to sort through everything I collected, but my pictures can be found here on Flickr. The video material will probably see the light of day at a future Stench event.

February 3rd to 5th 2010 was a very busy time in London for people interested in digital arts. The Computer Arts Society held a one-day "Ideas Before Their Time" symposium, there was the two day V&A "Decoding the Digital" conference, plus the "Decode" and "Digital Arts Pioneers" exhibitions were on at at the V&A and their was the opening of the 2010 Kinetica Art Fair. See my pictures from the events here.

(Pictured, Weave Mirror by Daniel Rozin)

I'm now over three months in to my PhD research and am starting to get my ideas together. I recently gave a short 'Petcha Kutcha' presentation at the IOCT about my research so far. It can be found on YouTube here.

We ran our latest Stench night on Saturday 12th. This was the first full Stench event to take place at The Independent Arts Centre on Humberstone Gate in Leicester. The venue seved us well and the audience was treated to some great electronic music and visuals. See the event's Pineapster page for pictures.

I gave a talk at Amplified Leicester today about pervasive media and mobile mapping today. We discussed the ways in which the Internet is changing from being 'location independent' to highly 'location aware'. The group displayed a great deal of interest in the topic and I hope to be able to work with them on projects in the future. See http://amplifiedcity.typepad.com/leicester/ for more information about the Amplified Leicester project.

I've uploaded some new videos to my YouTube account at https://www.youtube.com/user/seancuttlefish. They include a live performance by Peter Wyeth at Stench, Morgan and Parkin doing their comedy styings, Penfold Gate playing at the Pineapster Party and a trip through a Bulgarian town...