We're starting to get our ideas together for this year's Summer Sundae Fringe Festival. We hoping to get a two week programme of events together focussing on Leicester's grassroots music and arts scene. If you are interested then visit the www.summersundaefringe.com website for more information.

My ArtScanner installation is now running at The Broadway in Nottingham. It will be in the main foyer area for at least two weeks to coincide with the Radiator festival.

Go to www.artscanner.org and upload your images in exchange for barcodes. Put them near the scanner and let visitors view them. Remember, ArtScanner is a creative *infrastructure* - you can be creative with it.

Phew. A busy 2008 is about to give way to a busy 2009 I think. This year I finished my part-time MA, did some good arts projects, shows and festivals, successfully navigated some business challenges with Cuttlefish Multimedia Ltd, traveled to 10 or so counties (with temperatures ranging from -15degC to 40degC), took lots of pictures, made a few videos and wrote 64 blog posts. Plus of course all the general stuff that goes with living (with varying degrees of success).

These are some of the things I have my eye on for 2009. I want to push my ArtScanner and SoundMappr interactive tagging/social mapping projects, make the Polyp.TV installation as part of my residency at the MTI, start work on my Artificial Light digital-meets-organic-structures idea, begin a part-time PhD at DMU, start firming up a plan for a film about my friend's blues band in Bulgaria (see my YouTube channel for a few test pieces), make the Summer Sundae Fringe Festival bigger and better, visit Macedonia and Syria (as well as Bulgaria again of course), have a UK family holiday, increase the business' turnover, sleep properly.

Er, and a few other things, but the list is getting a bit long. I hope I achieve at least some. Happy 2009 to everyone.

A few years back archdrude Julian Cope wrote an excellent book about megalithic sites in the British Isles. It's an amazing piece of work, well-researched, beautifully illustrated and authoritative. A website based on the book as been established at www.themodernantiquarian.com and now contains one of the best Google mapping projects I have ever seen. Their KML (Google Earth) file contains the location of every megalithic site on these islands, and over much of Europe. It really is an impressive project and I strongly recommend a browse.

I've just watched the film "There is No Authority But Yourself" about the anarcho-punk band Crass. It's an interesting mixture of interviews and archive material that tells the story of the band from the perspective of former members Penny Rimbaud, Gee Vaucher and Steve Ignorant. It's a good film.

While there are no real revelations for those who are familiar with the Crass story (see George Berger's "Story of Crass" book, or Penny's own writings), I liked the way much of the filming took place during workshops at Dial House (a naked Penny Rimbaud talking nonchalantly about compost toilets is quite amusing) and how the band members (at least the three interviewed) seem to be a lot happier with the band's legacy in their lives.

I often feel that Crass casts a shadow of exhaustion, resentment and anger over its former members and that this is often the dominant message that comes across in interviews. It was good, though, to see that these members are pretty much at ease with themselves when it comes to Crass and are now comfortable with what happened with the band. They should be, they did some great things.

You can watch the film on Google Video.

I attended the launch of GivingWorldOnline.Com today. This is the latest project of the charity Konnect9 who help companies with surplus goods find charities who need them.

The new website is a sort of eBay meets Freecycle with a charity twist. A great idea that works in many ways. It helps companies get rid wearhouse-hogging surplus items, it helps charities find things they need, and it prevents these items ending up in landfill (which in many cases they would have).

If you want to know more then visit the site.

I plan to reactivate my www.autopoiesis.org.uk research site shortly as part of a PhD programme. Stay tuned if you are interested.

I went to the Institute of Creative Technologies' 'The Future of Creative Technologies' event this week at De Montfort University. It consisted of presentations and workshops that explored various aspects of creativity and technology.

It was an interesting event. I particularly enjoyed Howard Rheingold's presentation about an on-line learning project he's involved in. I also found the workshop on 'Design' useful.

If there was anything missing though, I would say that there wasn't much in the way of 'creative technologies' on show. It would have been good to see some more of the work the IOCT does being demonstrated, or even an associated exhibition of current research projects.

Still, I plan to find out more about the IOCT's work over the coming months as it is my intention to start a part-time PhD there in the new year...

Tomorrow night sees a one-off Megatripolis reunion.

Back in the early ninties I attended half-a-dozen Megatripolis nights at the Heaven nightclub in London and the experience has remained with me ever since. Part club, part festival and part gig, Megatripolis was a bright light in what seemed fairly dark times. It brought together ravers, crusties, hippies, cybergeeks and alternative-lifestylers and fed them with plenty of co-organiser Fraser Clark's 'you can change the world by changing yourself' philosophy. This was mixed with loud music, 'smart drinks' and psychedelic lights and projections. It was great.

It's a pity then to hear that the reason for the reunion is to be a benefit for Fraser Clark, who has been diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer. While I never personally knew the guy (and friends who did sometimes found him difficult!) he helped create something really special in that club.

If you're interested in knowing more about Megatripolis then watch this video, visit his Parallel University website or try this Megatripolis archive. I'm going to have to dig out my old copies of 'Encyclopedia Phychadelica' and have a re-read. Do watch out though, much of what he says is nuts - but in a good way.

Saturday night saw the Many Coloured Days / Threep event in the Space Theatre at the National Space Centre in Leicester.

A decent-sized audience was treated to a true audiovisual extravaganza that included the premier of Chris Cousin's new 'Many Coloured Days' project supported by 360 visuals (produced by myself and Stu Smith) and a live Threep performance with visuals by Vent Media.

Quite a few people have asked me how the 360 degree dome projections worked, so here is a little overview.

Seven video projectors are used to cover the domed screen. Either the same video image can be shown through all of the projectors, or the a video can be 'pre-processed' and sliced in to seven separate images - each one intended for a specific projector.

While the latter method allows a single video image to be shown over the entire dome, the equipment needed to do it is expensive (and the source video material needs to be very high quality), so for this show (and the last show we did here) we were showing a single image on all seven screens.

Doing this leads to something of a 'kaleidoscopic' effect, which I further enhance by running my video clips through a special Max/MSP patch that rotates and tiles the video clips before they are projected.

To help synchronise the visuals with the music I use my computer's microphone to sample the music and automatically change various video parameters, such as contrast, playback speed etc. Plus I do a bit of live knob-twiddling that allows me to 'tweak' the video images in response to what I am hearing.

A selection of photographs from the event can be seen on my Flickr page.

Well done to Bathysphere for organisising the event and Arena for supporting it.