I managed to catch the members' exhibition at Two Queens in Leicester this week, just before it finished.

Two Queens is an independent, artist-led gallery in Leicester's Cultural Quarter, located just a few minutes walk from Curve and Phoenix. Despite running on a low budget, and being wonderfully rough around the edges, it is starting to carve out its own niche in Leicester and an experimental and contemporary gallery that favours local artists and recent graduates. The latest member show was suitably eclectic, with predominantly installation artworks, plus some video work and paintings on (and a performance on the opening night which I missed).

There is often a criticism of contemporary art (I don't think we call it "modern" anymore) that it can be overly conceptual and often inaccessible. On the surface, the exhibition at Two Queens might appear to be guilty of this - there are video recordings of a camera being raised on ropes, a living room with broken chairs and glitchy TVs, and a dress hung on a wall with an accompanying wig and shoes. However, with a little effort on the part of the viewer it starts to make sense very quickly.

I picked up a strong feeling of "deconstruction" and "reconstruction" among the artworks - with some pieces showing the world around us stripped down to its basic elements, and others recombining the everyday in new and unexpected ways. There was also an amazing "soundtrack" to the exhibition. A number of the pieces made sound, and these ended up combining to produce an engaging artwork in its own right. I don't know if this was intentional. Perhaps it was an "emergent property" of the exhibition as a whole?

It was a well-curated exhibition and one that pays credit to the group of artists involved in the space. Leicester needs a gallery like Two Queens and I hope it goes from strength to strength. I also hope that with ongoing success (and perhaps funding) it doesn't loose it's lo-fi appeal. Not all galleries need perfectly white painted walls, or heating(!). You can see my set of pictures from the show on my Flickr page. Visit the Two Queens web site for details of their future exhibitions.

I managed to get hold of a copy of the catalogue for the In All Our Decadence People Die exhibition of Crass-relatated materials. The exhibition ran between 30th September and 20th October 2011 at the Boo-Hooray gallery in New York and featured original Crass artwork as well as a selection of the 3,000 or so fanzines the band collected between 1976 and 1984. Many of the fanzines were given to members of Crass at gigs, others were sent to them from around the world. Amazingly, they were kept safe all these years by ex-members of the band at Dial House in Essex.

I've had a long-time interest in so-called 'punk art' and I think it's good to see it being recognised in exhibitions such as this, and last year's Some Day All The Adults Will Die. Punk's strong visual (anti-)aesthetic was as important as the music and adopted the same Do It Yourself attitude. Like the music, some of it was brilliant and some was rubbish. Punk was always both beautiful and ugly, angry and peaceful, often cheap, yet at times very polished. This catalogue demonstrates all these contradictions - from the sophisticated gouache paintings and cut-up collages of Gee Vaucher, to the anonymous Letraset and hand written flyers and posters, and the nasty tabloid-esque shockers of the publication Class War. Some of the work included in the exhibition was most definitely in the realm of 'art', some is certainly not. Ultimately, though, this is not the point, every page says something.

I've taken some pictures of the catalogue and uploaded the to my Flickr page. If you want a copy of the book yourself then it is currently in its 3rd edition and available from Boo-Hooray for a reasonable $40 plus postage. It contains over 100 illustrations and is in a large 11" x 17" format.

I found a great little Raspberry Pi stepper motor kit recently. Costing less than £10, it allows you to use your little Raspberry Pi computer to drive two electric motors (one is provided in the kit). It's based on what looks like an established stepper motor circuit - simply adapted for the Pi. I'm going to build it at the weekend and I'll report back on how it works. For now, I'm imagining the weird and wonderful kinetic sculptures I could build with it.

UPDATE:

It was a really simply kit to make and worked first time with the supplied code. I'd highly recommend it for people wanting to have a go controlling motors with their Raspberry Pi. See a few pictures of it on my Flickr page.

Sally Sheinman's exhibition "What Makes You, You?" opens at Phoenix today. I had a quick peek during the set-up and it looks very interesting. I haven't quite got my head fully around it (it's not complex, but I think there is more to it than meets the eye!), but I like the look of the iPad-created images and the nature of the on-line participation. I'm going to get involved and will be submitting my thoughts as the project develops. Perhaps Sally with use my contribution as the inspiration for an image? You can find out more about it on the Phoenix site, or go direct to the wmyy.co.uk website.

The Raspberry Pi makes a great low-power web server that you can place on your desk. However, if you run it without a screen attached it doesn't really give you much in the way of visual feedback when it is being accessed. I thought would have a go at changing this by seeing if I could connect some coloured LEDs to my R-Pi and write a simple PHP lighting controller for it.

When hunting around for suitable hardware I found an excellent £14.49 kit from Meltwater that lets you connect up to five RGB LEDs to the Pi's GPIO port. It's a pretty simple board to build and comes with some example Shell and Python scripts to help you test it. In order to interface it to my web server software I installed the ronanguilloux / php-gpio library. I then rewrote the Meltwater Shell script in PHP with the php-gpio library - making sure that I sent exactly the same GPIO commands to the Meltwater board. Hey presto, it worked! A few more tweaks later and I now have my own PHP library for setting the colours of any of the five LEDs whenever I want to. All this was done within a couple of hours of receiving the Meltwater RGB-LED kit.

By adding a few lines of code to the bottom of my PHP web pages I can now blink the LEDs whenever a page is accessed, report on error or success states, or simply create PHP pages that trigger lighting sequences just for the fun of it. Isn't the Raspberry Pi great :-)

I received this flyer about a new series of events in Northampton. They look rather interesting:

Electrickal Séances
at the Legendary Labour Club,
Charles Street, Northampton NN1
(on the first Tuesday of each month)

March 5th 2013 Doors open at 7.00pm

At 7.30 - 8.30 pm we present
Rorschach Audio
A presentation and participatory event dedicated to sound and visual illusions from the author of Rorschach Audio (Strange Attractor Press).

At 9.00 - 10pm we present
Strange Attractor Vs. Disinformation
A Circuit-Blasting performance in darkness using contemporary & antique electrickal devices.

Entry £2
collider@thresholdstudios.tv
Featuring imaginary occurrence, aural happenings and casual electrocution

The latest technology workshop and performance event at Phoenix has been confirmed for 22nd - 24th March this year. "Code Control" builds on last year's Max6 event in January and the Ableton Live event in the Autumn and follows a similar format. The focus is Cycling 74's Max, MSP and Jitter software and will feature a world-class set of presentations, as well as workshops, demonstrations and evening performances. If you want to know more about Max then the event is unmissable. See code-control.com for more information.

There was a nice review of Simon Faithfull's Limbo in the Australian magazine Real Time Arts recently. The review shows a gallery installation in which drawings from Simon's Limbo drawing tool are automatically printed as soon as they are drawn and then manually pinned to a map of the area in which they were produced. Cuttlefish was involved in producing a range of technologies to support this work. Firstly, there is the custom drawing app itself that Simon uses on his iPhone. Then, the there is the application that monitors the incoming drawing stream and prints it in the gallery. Finally, of course, there is the Limbo iPhone app that you can use to view the drawings yourself. By the way, you may also notice a new subject in some of Simon's latest drawings. He has just become a father!

I went to see Sebastian Buerkner's 3D film "The Chimera of M" in the Cube at the Phoenix in Leicester yesterday. It finished its run today, so I just managed to get to it in time. To view the film you first had to put on some 3D glasses and then you were encouraged to sit on a bench in the gallery about 2m from the screen.

Often 3D is used to present what is essentially a 2D film, but with the illusion of depth. It adds to the spectacle of the film but does not add anything fundamentally new to the creative work. This work was somewhat different. Buerkner uses the technology to create genuinely 3D animations that can not be appreciated without the glasses on. Shards of light emanate from the screen, interacting with the subject matter, shifting your perspective and creating an effect that reminded me of early cubist painting. This was matched by a fractured narrative that further draws you in to the work.

I decided to get up from the bench and see if the 3D effect still worked up close to the screen. It did, and by moving around in front of the screen you get an extra opportunity to explore the imagery.

Sebastian's web site is at www.sebastianbuerkner.com. I took some pictures, but, of course, they don't show the 3D effect. If you get an opportunity to see any of his work in the future I'd recommend taking it.

With a PhD to finish I don't expect to start any new art projects this year. However, I have plenty of new ideas saved up for the future. One involves an exploration of the 1950s conception of the computer as an "electronic brain".

Over the past year I have been collecting materials from the era. I have found old electrical components, circuit boards, books and original photographs - such as the one above. I think they are perfect for some sort of recontextualisation.

This image particularly interests me. It dates from 1955 and has "Electronic Brains" written on the back, together with a description of how the electronic fire control system helps "seek and destroy" enemy planes.

It strikes me that although computers have changed beyond recognition after almost 60 years, some things don't change - we're still using them to help blow things up in ever more sophisticated ways.