I had an opportunity to do my first piece of truly interactive laser work at the recent Stench event. Working with music from James Kelly, I mixed a live laser sequence based around six-sided patterns. I used the Fiesta! laser control software with MIDI control coming from my external controller (in the studio I have it working with Max/MSP control, but I need to do a bit more work before using it live). During the event Bathysphere's Stu Smith took a number of pictures and included the laser show in his video of the event. Visit the event's Stench page to have a look.

I've been a fan of persistence of vision toys for quite a long time. Indeed, I produced an exhibition about them back in 2002.

Recently started to get in to them again and have been scouring eBay for the the newer LED-based toys. These typically use the POV effect by spinning the LEDs to create interesting displays.

I plan to use the toys in my live work by creating live video loops of them that I will synchronise with music. The first outing of this new set will hopefully be with Stu Smith's ASMO in early May.

The latest Stench event took place at the Phoenix in Leicester last night. A good size crowd saw a variety of performances from Leicester-based artists and musician plus a film showing form 7" Cinema. For pictures and video clips from the event visit the Stench web site.

I went to see the "Solder Soldiers" event at the new Great Central Gallery in Leicester last night. The event was organised by Bathysphere and featured performances by kREEPA, ASMO and Wrongbot with DJ Myoptik. I did lights. If you haven't come across cirtcuit bending before then it's basically music made using modified electronic toys and home-build circuitry. The challenge (at least to me) is to turn the chaotic sounds produced by the cirtcuits in to something resembling a composition :-) Last night was a good showcase of the art. At times seemingly random, but with enough rhythms and beats to hold my attention.

I was also very impressed with the venue. The Great Central is a new gallery and studio being set up by Eric Rosoman and Stephen Lynch. Small and independent, this sort of activity is the perfect counterpoint to the large top-down arts developments taking place in Leicester at the moment.

My pictures from the event can be found on my Flickr page.

A great show tonight. Janek Schaefer and James Kelly played tonight at St Nicholas in Leicester. See pictures and video from the show.

I love finding old hard drives, you never know what you are going to find! On an old 12Gb USB drive I found a few gems. There were a whole bundle of pictures from a Shamen show at The Forum in 1995 plus some pictures from a Zion Train show in the early 2000s. I also found some good video material. There were some Zion Train videos from Glastonbury 2000, a Love Grocer video from 2003 and some video footage from the Fragments of Identity installation in 2003.

I went to see artist Stelarc give a presentation at Loughborough University. I've been aware of his work for many years but this was the first time I've actually heard him talk about it. I was very impressed. I had previously associated his work with extreme "techno fetishism", but I can see there is a lot more depth to his work than this. There's also a lot more humour than I expected!

See some pictures from the presentation here. I'm the one with only two ears.

I've just booked to go on a two week course being co-taught by physicist and writer Fritjof Capra. I've been a follower of Capra's work since I read "The Tao of Physics" whilst a graduate researcher. His later books introduced me to systems theory, which has been a constant inspiration in my art work and was the focus of my MA research. The course is titled "Living Networks: From Leonardo to Lovelock & Beyond" and is being run at the Schumacher College in May. I can't wait!

Despite calling myself an "Artist and Technologist", most of my blogging is actually about my arts work. So to make a change I'm going to talk tech for a bit.

I got hold of a Nokia N810 at the weekend. This is a wifi-enabled Internet tablet that runs a version of Linux and contains a GPS receiver. It struck me as a perfect platform for developing location-based services on (such as SoundMappr). I'm already doing iPhone development and, despite being a fantastic platform, all software has to be released through the iTunes store. This makes it somewhat cumbersome when developing software for release to an Open Source community.

What's more, I'm ultimately more interested in developing *web-based* GPS aware applications (not dedicated software programs) and the N810 comes with a decent Mozilla browser, as well as having the potential to host a full web development environment.

So, after unpacking the machine I went about setting up my development environment. First, I found a version of the Apache 2 web server that could be installed on it, then the PHP5 programming language, then the sqlite database system and finally a few editing tools to allow me to write programs. It works great! A complete web-application development system that fits in my pocket.

Next was to get to grips with reading data from the GPS receiver. GPS on Linux was new to me, but I found that the standard way of doing it was to install a GPSd, or "GPS daemon", that communicates with the GPS hardware and passes location data to the applications that need it. This was easy enough to do, I installed the "Navit" system on the N810 which automatically starts the GPSd when you run it. I've since found that other, better, GPSd software is available, but I'll stick with what I know works for now.

Finally was the task of getting the PHP programming language reading data from the GPSd. A search of the internet found a script entitled, appropriately enough, "php-gpsd" which did exactly that. A little bt of fiddling later and I was able to write a web page that ran on the N810 and displayed the current location of the device via the GPS reading.

It all works seamlessly and everything was available as free downloads. My next job is to write a version of my SoundMap player running in a web environment on the N810. I'll naturally be releasing the software as Open Source when I've finished it...

We've made some good progress on a number of projects in January. The new SoundMappr iPhone application is currently in alpha testing, ArtScanner was installed in Nottingham for a couple of weeks, the new Stench web community is also being tested, and we are starting to move on organising the Summer Sundae Fringe Festival.

We hope to be launching at least some of these projects in February, so keep watching this blog for details.