There's a new wind turbine installed every day in China, according to Guardian Journalist, Jonathan Watts, who spoke tonight with Isobel Hilton at Asia House in London about his recent book, When A Billion Chinese Jump, which he spent four years researching, travelling north south east and west in China, exploring in dialogue with around 300 people, the contemporary and growing environmental crisis in a country which is facing drought in many areas of the north and where water is becoming an increasingly contested and scarce resource - a situation likely to worsen in future  to the extent that some people are proposing running pipes in from neighbouring countries - even from Khazistan and India - despite the water wars that might ensue.  As Watts's book says: 'with foul air, filthy water, rising temperatures and encroaching deserts, China is already suffering an environmental disaster. Now it faces a stark choice: either accept catastrophe, or make radical changes'.  The research for the book included seeking out people and sites exploring and experimenting with green and sustainable approaches to engineering and technology in a context where every week a new coal fired power plant opens.  The future looks pretty grim on the basis of this publication which portrays how even when central party commitment to innovative environmental solutions and sustainable standards exists it is not leading to implementation at local and regional level where property developers and planners collude and the leadership at the centre have no means of forcing regional buy in..  The idealism of a few years ago when people spoke of a Green China leading the way with notions of Green GDP has subsided into acknowledging a Coal dependent China where Beijing is referred to as Grey-Jing and Government Ministers who were driving the approach to environmental reform have been sidelined and their plans for assessing the environmental impact of developments shelved.  At the same time, we heard that the infamous Silk Road is now lined with Wind Turbines. I'm convening an event in China this September called DARE - Design Age Research Exchange - when with experts and researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing and the RCA in London we'll consider how design might interface with the challenges and demands of an ageing society  - looking at technologies, well-being and health, transportation, clothing, meta and co-design. We'll also look at what we can learn from the history of design in this country which often seems to be hurtling through the 21st century like there is no tomorrow.  We'll do this partly in the company of Retired Professors from Tsinghua who will have lived through the tumultous social revolution of the mid 20th century ...what do they I wonder think of the wind of changes now?

It's finally rained and the scorched grass in Southern England will, hopefully, if slowly, recover.  It's been probably 21 days without any sight or sign of raindrops - sigh! - but the drought's now broken and the sky is a reassuring grey.  I went last night to the Wellcome Trust's sparklingly clean bookshop in its imposing buildings at Euston for a launch of Stephen Wilson's latest art and science related publication: Art and Science Now, which has been published by Thames and Hudson and probably for the first time in terms of press coverage in relation to collaborative and interdisciplinary work, has had mainstream coverage - see <http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/feb/28/environmental-art> - something which is good to see for its rarity and yet somehow also it seems so late. Wilson has wisely produced the first 'illustrated survey of its kind' about practitioners who "see themselves as outside the worlds of both art and science, and are attempting to carve out a new niche of cultural experimentation and invention". The marketing blurbs sells this as about 250 works made since 2000.One of the livelier artists there last night admitted their work had actually been made in 1998 (oops). It is interesting that often research-based work has to be argued into a certain time period in order to be made visible or given some validation. We see this also with some prizes for media art that seek a certain legitimacy from things being recent or 'new.  Wilson's book argues that we are now seeing the 'first generation' of a new kind of hybrid artist. The coffee table nature of the publication, strong on visuals, not particulary strong on indepth analysis and lacking in many insights of a political nature, is inevitably being critiqued for its lack of depth (something which Wilson's earlier publication, Information Arts, was very strong on, digging into recent histories and plugging gaps in knowledge through drawing lines across decades of development.  Thinking about curves in time I found myself in the last few days at Plymouth University, where Professor Mike Phillips and his team have been well ahead also of academic curves in their occupancy and resourcing of a Visual Immersive Theatre (a digital dome structure) which acts an experimental space for visualisation of research from various disciplines as well as arts design and media content utilising emerging projector software and camera innovations which are an exciting research area in their own right. With an audience of forty people including Matt Black a pioneer of VJ culture in the UK in the 90s as well as representatives from the Weimar Bauhaus University where students can study full dome content production as part of their BA Media course - we watched some  brain-stirring material that combines (in my mind at least) aspects of audio visual, games, VR, science communication, data visualisation, film, engineering and design components into a new mesh, a new meld, a new form of mediated experience that borders on collective interaction as we experience the 'vection' effect where you sense you are moving actually into and within the borders of the work (an effect that remains later when you are well out of the dome and should no longer be experiencing a concensual hallucination). For example we had up and close experience of a fruitfly even more beautiful to my eyes at least than Robert Hooke's flea in the  marvellous Micrographica...the hours of rendering gave us insights into the deepest structures of this creature including perceiving a small parasite in its stomach which had been previously imperceptible even to the trained biologist eye using conventional microscopy.  The audience also included Jaromil who was in town for Roy Ascott's Planetary Collegium - or Interplanetary Collision as it will forever be known by this group of  Full Dome attendees.

In London - hottest day of the year so far, 30 degrees celsius - as England plunge to world cup doom and the tangible societal ecstasis on the streets of the city on Wednesday when the team actually managed to win a match has reverted to contemplative despair (rubbish, hopeless, useless are a few of the classier words being used).  It's still London at its most intense: wandering with Brasilian artist Camila Sposati yesterday around the RCA Summer Show iwe find the galleries filled with designerly objects and attitudes - the Innovation Design Engineering department (a joint MA/Msc with Imperial College) throws up a fine mix of material, networked and systems based work (all addressing social, medical or environmental challenges)....the sound ofbrass bands in the neighbouring Albert Hall foyer seeps into the Royal College and a bit later, sitting in the cafe beside the Serpentine lake (blessed with a strong swan  with attitude which descends over the water feet cascading like a racing car then parks herself at the water's edge arguing loudly with a small dog which dares to bark at her) we hear the sound of a crowd elsewhere in the park carousing then find out later in the night that Stevie Wonder has been performing somewhere there across the trees. Walking to Notting Hilll through the park that housed the original Crystal Palace, Camila tells me of her mother who worked on social projects in Brasil, as an academic and politician who engaed directly with public spaces and people for a time after the end of Military Dictatorship and of how her own work and many of her peers has skirted around direct involvement with such issues, taking a more abstract formalist bent. The night ends with a stroll around Portobello Road and talking about how some Brazilian political exiles had lived near there among the market stalls, the poets, the psychoanalysts and the Rastafarians during more troubled times back home.It reminds me of another evening a year or so ago when I walked along Portobello with Tony White and Claudio Prado, who was then Cultura Digital advisor to Gilberto Gil, and by complete chance we bumped into  fab novelist Stewart Home, clutching a box of books about anarchism bound for Eastern Europe - one of which naturally fell towards Claudio and thence towards Sao Paulo.  

309 Regent Street is the venue for a new show called How We Became Metadata which opened last night in London (at Westminster University's newly kitted out gallery space just up from Oxford Circus) which connects works by artists, designers and architects who the curator Marquard Smith selected on the basis of their relationship with 'the logic, the status, and the nature of data, information and knowledge' and their desire 'to follow and to intervene in its unchecked rhythm'.  Included are works by Thomson & Craighead - pretty tea-towels imprinted with pages showing results of Google searches made in 2002, stating 'Please listen to me' 'Can you hear me?' 'Is there anybody there?' and 'Please help me', which were originally part of www.dot-store.com - a brilliant early retail online artists initiative selling vintage products and services http://www.thomson-craighead.net/dotstore/system/index.html; as well as deft and delicate 'Lagoglyphs' made by Eduardo Kac in 2007, silkscreen prints of pictograms forming 'a kind of cryptolanguage' concealing and revealing simultaneously 'as counterpoint to the barrage of discourses generated through, with and around Kac's infamous 'green glowing bunny, called Alba, created in 2000'.  RCA PhD researcher Eunju Han from Korea shows a 2D form of her installation  'Telecommunications Weather Map' which uses nano carbon tubes and LED lights to depict the temporal and spatial flow of data based on actual readings of mobile telephone communications over a 24 hour period in Seoul made in 2008. Essays by Sas Mays (Meta-Data and the Archive) and Gary Hall (We Can Know It For You: The Secret Life of Metadata) critically tie these and the other works together in an informative catalogue with Hall's essay telling us: 'for all its associations with computer science, metadata is never neutral or objective. The specific ways in which metadata is created, organised and presented helps to produce (rather than merely passively reflect) what is classified as data and information - and what is not. Clearly then, it's not just a question of free and open access to the research data. It's also a question of who (and what) makes decisions regarding the metadata, and on what basis such decisions are made'. He paraphrases Lyotard' 'Who decides what metadata is, and who knows what needs to be decided'.... also that 'members of Facebook are labouring for free, not only to make the owners of this social network make a reputed $1Billion a year from demographically targeted advertising but to supply law enforcement agencieswith profile data about yourself, your family, friends and colleagues'.  The only real-time piece in the show - '/Make Westing/' 2010 by Corby & Baily and Jonathan Mackenzie wasn't yet working making the description in the catalogue appropriate - ' we hope to articulate an aesthetic of /system-ness/ - a metanym for the interconnected forces operative within ecosphere to which lived human behaviour contributes and is a part'.  Today I'm off to the Tate to check out the Surveillance exhibition with the master of counter-surveillance heath bunting and Peet Thomson who runs http://www.blackboxgallery.dk/. That's if I can find them in the cafe beforehand.

Bllbao now has another major venue to rival the Guggenheim (which still looks like an uncanny spaceship sitting alongside the river in this Basque city).  La Alhondiga is a striking and beautifully converted building right in the town centre, restored by the city and re-designed by Philippe Starck, containing galleries, cinema, sports hall and swimming pool - as well as several restaurants and cafes still being worked on by numerous men on ladders during our visit this week - which opened for business last weekend with 60,000 visitors passing through in three days.The opening exhibitions Native Land - curated by Paul Virilio with Raymond Depardon with an amazing data based installation by D&S&R - http://www.nativeland-stopeject.com/r2.php5 - and Proyecto Tierra which has been curated by Alicia Chillida who has also edited a publication of the same name featuring texts and images by Muntadas, Gordon Matta-Clark and others.  In contrast to the Guggenheim which charges everyone including local residents around 16 euros for entry, this new venue is targeted as being acessible and participatory, shaped for those living within the locality to feel at home: the signage is duly in Euskara and Spanish (with no English) and the price of entry is low, around 3 euros for the exhibitions and entering the venue itself is free.  It's an experiment in relation to housing a series of different activities under a common roof and one worth watching for those interested in development of flagship buildings as a means of stimulating 'culture'....often the model followed by local, city and regional governments is one of 'destination tourism' and ultimately this means consumption rather than production or participation within 'culture' - 'pull' rather than 'push'. In framing La Alhondiga primarily for the people who live in this region, something else might occur complementing and re-engineering notions of cultural tourism especially in this period of crisis for ideas of the creative economy among others.  The event I was part of was a really good example of how this might work. <http://www.alhondigabilbao.com/web/guest/programacion/proyecto-tierra/blog> Rather than staging cold presentations on the topic of 'visual arts in a period of global financial crisis' we spent the morning brainstorming the topic finding affinities among the speakers (who came from as far afield as Japan, US and Ecuador) and then doing presentations which inflected and reflected off the common and uncommon ground. In the evening we met up with Jorgen Leth Danish experimental film-maker who made The Perfect Human and who turned out to truly know more than we did about crisis - his house in Haiti where he lives and works was totally destroyed during the earthquake: he told us how he was working on editing his latest film - The Erotic Human - during the quake with his production team and found himself standing dazed and totally traumatized outside the house, clutching nothing but his Apple Mac which he thinks he must have brought with him as he had felt it to be part of his body - everything else was lost and left behind.  Two of his production team had done exactly the same thing.

Back on the road again these last two weeks - first to China where I spent two days in Shanghai managing to fit in a brief visit to the Expo which I found enthralling despite wondering how on earth one can justify this level of investment in something so temporary. The noises in the Chinese press about this being the greenest, most sustainable Expo in history (with the fleet of almost noiseless fuel powered buses that carry visitors along the site partially convincing one in this regard) are countered by the knowledge not just that the show will end before next Chinese New Year, but also that so much and so many have been disrupted, shifted, deterritorialised and ripped out to make way for this oh so grand extravaganza that is expected to draw in millions of people but on the first month's showing has fallen well short of target numbers.   The Briccocafe has to be the  place to head for sustenance and wifi access before you head into the gorgeous Seed Cathedral created by Thomas Heatherwick, described in one of the Expo websites as follows : 'The England Pavilion is themed by “Creation”, on the surface of which will witness a large number of colorful whiskers dancing with the wind'.....'  It's one of those rare constructions that makes you feel uncorrupted as you disappear back from the Pudong site back across the river, under the bridge, surrounded by gentle old Chinese people sipping water from jamjars and nibbling at cucumbers.

Finally back in London after some shared leftover days in Linz.  With Giselle Beiguelman and Rachel a US animator who worked on Alice we went on a derive to Vienna looking initially for Wittgenstein's House after a fine lunch at Cafe Central with Eduardo Kac. Instead we found the Colombian embassy or at least its mysterious entrance, and like us a little out of time. On the way back on the train to Linz, we sat beside an amused stranger who listened with me as Giselle, Eduardo and Rachel recited Hebrew phrases they all remembered from childhood and lit up the dark compartment with iPhone applications changing from blue to green to orange combined with chill out electronic sounds that registered like ghosts in the thin post-Volcanic air. 

Having speculated earlier this month on the constraints and limits of the nomadic media lifestyle (see below) it befits me to now have to linger a little longer than I had expected in Linz. I was part of the jury process for this year's Hybrid Arts award and it has involved much intensive head-scratching, debate and argument which has left me tired, exhausted yet happy to have been part of such a rich process. There's been a Brasilian connection almost inevitably - with Eduardo Kac as a fellow Hybrid jury member and Giselle Beiglemann here also to take part in the Interactive Media category.  Added to this, Koert van Mensvoort, who took part in last year's Paralelo event in Sao Paulo and wowed all with his Next Nature presentations was also part of our jury which made for considerable diversity of perspectives and hence, hopefully, also some unexpected decisions which will be announced later this year in preparation for the Festival. Ars has also some big news - it is moving venue along the river. The first press conference is tomorrow and so the straggling jury members will also be there to see the space.  It's fun to linger on somewhere like this - to lunch along the Danube at the Lentos Museum in unusual sunlight and lie on the grass outside the Brucknerhaus and feel you have worked yourself to the bone. A London based friend told me today he had lunch with seven people from China who came to London from Berlin via Oslo by taxi which makes me wonder about travelling on water.

I've just been to Covilha, a town 300 kms north east of Lisbon famous for its wool production and occasional snow. Known as the Manchester of Portugal it has a history of textile production and sits at 500-800 m altitude surrounded by the highest mountain range in the country (and an accompanying national park). Sadly I hadn't time to explore beyond the campus where Rudolfo Quintas and his team of students created a new festival there last week -  http://www.gear-up.info - /which combined talks and workshops about media research and production models with all night performances of sound/electronica held in a local club venue, featuring presentations from academics, design companies, researchers, policymakers, hack lab organisers, artists, producers etc. The Secretary of State for Science and Technology turned up on the first day to launch the event and showed an impressive grasp of the challenges of art/science collaborations befitting his PhD status (apparently most of the government in Portugal have doctorates). Computer science professors from Porto, Lisbon, Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and the University of Austin, Texas, joined the Director of STEIM Amsterdam and other researchers in in talks about the history of computing and its relationship to performance particularly sound and electronic media.  A great panel about creative labs showed off some of the new self-organising hack labs just getting going in various towns and cities around the country in the past two years. Portuguese science and innovation policy now also includes creating close partnerships with US universities with joint doctorate posts and development of research institutes iincluding a CMU centre on Madeira which offers experimental Masters courses combining design with psychology, computer science with fine art and various other interdisciplinary conjunctions. The panel I took part in looked at how practice based research is supported in the US, UK and elsewhere in Europe. An essay I have recently written on the value of the arts to higher education in London was usefully drawn on. (see www.lcace.org.uk/.../towards-ecologies-of-learning-enhancing-relations-between-arts-and-academia.html) A common theme among many of the presentations was the emergence of multitouch systems and Portugal's leading role in development of these, for exhibition, heritage, fashion, display etc. As a twenty four hour party place though Covilha can well rival Manchester and especially in the sunlight we were experiencing last week one couldn't not see the glittering river running alongside the campus, and the cafe built beside it just below an enormous and crumbling textile factory no doubt awaiting some future regeneration. I was a bit dumbstruck to find myself sleeping in an area of town they call the Pelourihno (or whipping post)  I had somehow thought the only Pelo was the throbbing heart of Salvador de Bahia. I did know that Covilha had been named a Royal Textiles centre back in the 18th century shortly before the Emperor of Portugal set sail for Rio with the country's national library and other significant cultural goods, in 1809, on his flight from the Napoleonic advances which came in through the northern mountains.  Generally I felt a bit of that strange deficit you get sometimes on journeys through nomadic media circuitries - of not having time enough to go deep enough, or far enough, to know enough, about the sources or locations we pass through or the waterfalls

we don't get

to

fully

yet

visit. 

It's a word I picked up from Suely Rolnik and Felix Guattari's brilliant 'Molecular Revolution in Brazil' (2008 MIT Press) text and it seems so apt in terms of the ways in which ideas and projects appear to be connecting to each other in my life at present. The area where I live in South London used to be almost artist-free - I could wander around at weekends to my heart's content and not run the risk of running into anyone who I knew from my professional life during the weekdays which I would tend to spend running from arts project to arts project often East London centred or north London bound.  Now its a case of bumping into related things at every step. Not only has Brixton Market been (justifiably if belatedly) infiltrated by design types occupying stores p(r)opping up shops and turning empty spaces into galleries alongside open source fairtrade coffee stalls, large-eyed fishmongered tables, handmade beef pies and Caribbean patties -  but also in Camberwell where I ventured this morning (seeking some fishballs, jack fruit and lychees from the Chinese supermarket) there's now a gallery showing concrete visual art. 'Crystallisations - Making Order Visible' is an exhibition by Raymond Brownell at GX Gallery of painting informed by geometry and mathematics on walls accompanied by explanations of by Fibonacci patterns. 

The new South London 'syncretic movement' continues  at Herne Hill where I finally go into a shop I've noticed for the past few months and where I find the price tags on the bric a brac and worn leather furniture etc has been tied on using ribbons honouring Senhor do Bonfim the sort of which I'd last touched when last in Salvador (ah saudade). So among the worn leather swivel chairs and gilt mirrors which define the right kind of post modernist furniture store down south london way we now have soft rag rugs and chair throws made from linen you can buy for less than you can in London on the warm streets of Northern Bahia.  Long may the global economy thrive if its bringing a bit of St Bonfim to Brixton.

The old forms are the best when they come in book covers, all hard backed and intricate. It's been a week of encounters with new books raining down a bit like the weather with a series of launches in London and even some coming through the post with loud knocks on a Slow Saturday Morning.  Some people get fat bonuses some get fat books  (rewards for MIT Press reviews done seems like aeons ago...some things take their time and may it ever be so...)

The first launch took place in Maggs a gentile and apparently haunted bookshop off Berkeley Square in London's Mayfair - see http://www.maggs.com -  which called many of the residual elite of London's 60s counterculture together to toast the publication of Barry Miles's LONDON CALLING (A Countercultural History of London since 1945) which called out loudly to be read once one got home and which certainly impresses in terms of the quality of recollection shown in the numerous microscopic conversations and incidents recorded in the 450 pages ... disproving all rumours that experimentation can destroy the power of recall; here we are invited to eavesdrop on fascinating conversations from the decades past and read about the real story behind the brief flickering of venues like Jim Haynes 'Arts Lab' in Drury Lane -a Temporary Autonomous Zone well before its time which imploded in a seeming battle of 'art -v- people' or 'laboratory -v- entertainment' after months of intensive collision, collusion and communal living during the infamous year of the Summer of Love.

At the Architectural Association in Bedford Square last night a new AA publication 'Enabling - The Work of Minimaforms' was sent off into the sky with a sound and light and smoke performance leading some boring voices to say ' what's this got to do with architecture ' - and inside Stelarc and various bioart academics and dignitaries and James Powderley of Graffiti Research Lab (whose latest project idea relates to launching his ashes into space when he dies) fought to claim copies of the book which also contains essays by Roger F Malina and Krzysztof Wodiczko as well as assemblages and texts by David Greene of Archigram and something resembling a concrete poem by me which I wrote after walking along the beach in Santa Catarina last year - about the work of the brothers Theo and Stephen Spyropoulos who combine software, design and architecture to make malleable light constructions that defy gravity and time.

On my floor this morning a copy dropped in of a book which I had reviewed for MIT Press, it seems like aeons ago, of a book now called Rethinking Curating, Art after New Media, by Sarah Cook and Beryl Graham which has an index it more interesting for what it leaves out than what is seals into the script - it feels like it is caught between seeming new and being dated, as new media related books often are, feeling the panic of time passing and not sure if it should go with or stay behind.  

During the week also I took part in an IRC chat across the bricolabs network which brought people living in 7 countries together in real time to debate and discuss challenges relating to water in their place, work and locality which has now been published on the bricolabs.net wiki and which will hopefully inspire some future projects together or eg educational and community based as well as skills and knowledge sharing between different locality. The immediacy of this publishing without filter editorial or printing demands a different kind of approach from contributors - restrained collaborative and intent to making something work in the world now.  Here there is no sense of being dated rather we are trying to catch up with the future. 

Meanwhile somewhere in Sao Paulo the book about the Paralelo initiative which took place there almost a year ago has seemingly arrived at the Museum of Image and Sound ready to be shipped to the contributors from the UK Netherlands and Brasil who took part in the network events which led to the writing addressing questions of Art, Technology and the Environment and how these things converge in on the ground projects. We'll have an online version soon also available on the Virtual Platform website in the Netherlands with texts from Felipe Fonseca, Karla Brunet, Paula Lara, Giles Lane and Proboscis, Jane Prophet, Daniela Boussos, Tapio Makela, Rob La Frenais, Wapke Feenstra, Ivan Henriques and Silvia Leal, Gisela Domschke and many others.   

To Kinetica tonight, London's art fair devoted to kinetic art in all its wondrous forms. The show this year is being held in the same space as last year but it has expanded greatly in terms of its content - and tonight I found myself wandering around through and into stall after stall of luminous,fragile, stable/unstable work some of it made in the 60s some of it made this year somehow following a continuum and in a genre that has now come into its own. Congratulations to curator Dianne Harris and her team who have brought together works from various places including most notably in terms of the quality of the work - from Gallery A22 in Budapest who are showing some rather special work - and The Kitchen also from Budapest turned up here with a flower which responds to breath producing light and sounds. During the next few days there will be some crazy performances and serious talks.  It is also the place to drop into to listen in on random detailed conversations about cellular automata and to revisit some works from Cybernetic Serendipity, swim mentally through light curtains assembled by Squid Soup and feel your heart beat loudly in colour to the backdrop of a Edward Ihnatowicz sound work. www.kinetica-artfair.com

It's a bland term for something very powerful - how things translate, migrate, relate to audiences, sites and context in different ways. Last year I was invited by Yanki Lee of Exhibit Gallery in London and the RCA to contribute some text and interview Nadav Kander the photographer who had spent some time travelling along the Yangtze River travelling from mouth to source taking images of an extraordinary landscape and context shifting perilously almost beyond the scope of the imagination.In the interview he spoke of how he visited the landscape with 'an empty mind' and sought to respond to what he found felt and saw there in a country he felt was 'mimicking the worst of the west'.  The work became part of a touring exhibition in China last summer called Constant Stream. Kander - who is also the photographer behind the exhibition Obama's People -  'http://www.obamaspeopleexhibition.com/ - justly won the prestigious Prix Pictet  - http://www.prixpictet.com/ - for Environmentally engaged Photography in Paris last November - and you can hear our interview  and see some of his enthralling pictures now at www.youtube.com/user/NadavKanderTube. In this he reflects on how a sense of the sublime suffused his encounter with the river and its changes, both on human and environmental scale,

I got back to London this evening from a short sojourn in Northern Ireland. My flight back coincided nicely with a lunar eclipse - as I got to the airport I saw a shadow form over a lower corner of the big full moon - and by the time I had got to Gatwick a pink shadow had crossed over it fully - making this a rather special New Year's Eve.....suddenly everything feels new: a new year, a New Year and winter remains ...as it should, with partial snow.  Yesterday my nephew and I went to see Avatar - a quite amazing experience.....maybe there is future in film..I dreamt last night that London had cheetahs swmming in the Thames and elephants on its banks. 

I recently met a chemistry professor at Imperial College who is investigating the subtle differences between representation and meaning.....his blog shows some images which look like snowflakes but which are apparently 'Clar islands....found not so much in an ocean, but in a type of molecule known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH)' and he talks of how 'one member of this class, graphene, .is 'attracting a lot of attention recently as a potential material for use in computer chips'....

I also visited artist Liliane Lijn's studio last week where she had a birthday party amidst her formidable poetic and kinetic sculptures including one that breathed fire and one that discharged dry ice. Among the other guests were Barry Miles of the infamous Indica Gallery (back in London swinging 60s, famous for its Pink Floyd light performances as well as the place where Yoko met Johnny Lennon among many other thing) and Pearce Marchbank the graphic designer whose works graced OZ magazine before its close. One of the conversational strands now many years later is the high trading price of OZ mags on e-bay; I also met someone who is working at Maggs the rare books shop and gallery in Berkeley Square in London which is specialising in works (also at quite high prices) about urban terror, revolution, agitation, propaganda and countercuture.....seems like the prices if not the value of such strategies are growing higher and higher in these perhaps curiously counter-counter-culture times....

London is sharpening for snow and if it comes it will coincide with the feasts which are going on formally and informally across this recession-hit city: this week before Christmas people go out to reap the remnants and residue of the year gone by. This year the arts world (or what is left of it) has decided to hold events to mark a transfer from one era to another. Last night, at the veritable Toynbee Hall off Brick Lane and Petticoat Lane in east London, the remarkable arts management organisation - Artadmin - celebrated thirty years of its existence, as the leading support agency for work which sits merrily in the cracks between live art, visual performance, performance art, dance and collaborative practice. Lined up in the room for a stirring performance of voice with handbells (a beautiful rap on the theme of ding dong) by Graeme Millar were zillions of luminaries who have benefited from Artsadmin -  from Julian Maynard Smith of Station House Opera to Anne Bean, to Gary Stevens, Dan Ackroyd, Nicola Triscott, Ghislaine Boddington, Hugo Glendinning, Lois Keidan, Michael Atavar, Silvia Ziranek - a poem written by John Fox and Sue Gill from Welfare State was read to mark the moment and in a dark performance spaces participants were invited to participate in a capsule performance - to hold three tiny pieces of thistledown in our hands and to blow these around in whatever fashion we wished together or alone but to hold them for a few minutes and not to leave these behind but to return them safely when we chose to end.  We all left the event clasping a new book to mark this key anniversary with sublime pictures by Hugo Glendinning made with many of the artists connected with Artsadmin based on sites within Toynbee Hall - it opens with a piece from the Bow Gamelan Ensemble (we recall that sadly Paul Burwell was absent from last night's reverie) which  includes five pictures made by Glendinning with Tim Etchells called Live Forever with small letters carved from ice which performs appropriately melting into water at the close. I had noticed in the room that artists often do not appear older just perhaps harder as the years evolve - like diamonds hardening into their images and their manifold identities and as a group, they take joy in occasionally warming themselves on the common path taking time out for an hour or so of real celebration for survival on the journey thanking people like Artsadmin who somehow make ephemeral work take place and have presence in an all too solid world.

We're about to spread word about the Jumeleizhi project which I am working closely on with Vanessa Gocksch (Pata de Perro) in Colombia.  I was inspired earlier this year by her account of attending a meeting of shamans from across Latin America which can be read at her website - <http://intermundos.org> where you can also see more of the amazing photographs (right).

Vanessa has built up trust with a group of people called the Mamos in Colombia over many years. Since September we have been in close touch to see if we might be able to produce a work in co-operation with the  Mamos, who belong to the Kogis, part of the Tairona tribe,The image to the right is of a Kogi village in the Sierra Nevada mountains and the picture below shows Jorge Dib, who is one of the project collaborators on the beach with one of the Mamos whose way of life, described by Vanessa and Jorge, follows a complex system deeply entwined with natural forces. Among the many things they have lost in the past centuries, as a result of European marauding and subsequent displacements, are sacred relics and objects which they place in the landscape not only to guide others on trails across the Nevada but also to demarcate in a visual, material sense, the close ritualistic relationship they have with nature. They believe this intrinsic relationship has been damaged by the spoiling of their sacred territories and that this is also part of the world's current crisis in relation to environmental concerns. Vanessa and I have decided to work together to respond to their call which can be read at <www.tairona.myzen.co.uk/index.php/about/news> and to ask our friends and others for help to  track down the missing objects which are held it is believed in collections and museums across the world. We seek to use media tools and collaborative networks  to trace these sacred objects which have been displaced from their real context and to encourage their return. The websites www.jumeliezhi.org and jumeleizhi.net will soon be up and we'll be inviting friends and others to contribute whatever they can to this project.  Earlier this week down in Cornwall at the Tregmouth campus of Exeter University - where they have a new course, a MA In Writing Nature and Place, I heard Robert MacFarlane author of three excellent books - Mountains of the Mind, Original Copy and Wild Places - question if literature can have any role in raising public consciousness of environmental and ecological issues (or crises). We hope that somehow our project can avail of new writing options online and through social media/blogs etc to build awareness of the importance of the Tairona's quest. It is important to say though that their own message at the site noted above can't be bettered in terms of moving one to respond. Check it out. The project which is partly funded by Alt Art in Romania, as part of their e-tribal art initiative, will also have some offline manifestations including we hope at an exhibition in Transylvania in February next year.

After six days in Sao Paulo  with temperatures around 38 degrees - I have travelled south to Florianopolis on Santa Catarina  an island of high tech development mixed with mangroves and two universities - as well as free software activites unconnected with the 'creative industries'. It is cooler here and last night brought welcome rain.Tomorrow I will go out to the mangroves with Yara Guasque my host and Karla Brunet who will come down from Salvador for our talk together at the state university on Monday.

The events in Sao Paulo earlier this week were organised by the Institute Sergio Motta. Motta was a former Minister of Telecommunications in Brasil responsible for laying out the telephony network throughout the country and making television accessible throughout. He died young. His daughter, Renata Motta, who works at PUC SP University along with Giselle Beiglemann who leads the acclaimed  Semiotics and Communications course there has set up the institute which gives awards annually to talented practitioners specialising in work related to art and technology. Among the winners in the early stage career section this year was Fernando Rabelo, whose work I had known a little from the bricolabs list, and it was a pleasure for me to be invited to give feedback on his work which included his low tech vj control piece installed in a black box in the entrance foyer of the British Council building in Sao Paulo (a building which enshrines British influence in Brasil with a beautiful garden that acts as the perfect backdrop for conversations addressing multiple angles on the world).   Rabelo has programming as well as artistic skills and has been evolving an approach which takes the idea of minimalism into interesting directions related to behaviours and choices for presentation and production. He produced a panoramic piece in Amsterdam earlier in the year using one computer rather than multiple which goes against the grain of much artistic production using technologies and so is asking what can we do with less? Keynotes were given by Gerfried Stocker who was asked to describe the history and current direction of media culture in German speaking countries, Yukiko Shikata from ICC (who has worked in the past with Armin Mesodoch and with Dumb Type) who tackled the subject in relation to Japan starting with systems and robotic work in the 1950s bringing us through to exhibitions she is curating about media, architecture and ecological issues today; others attending included Sabine Himmelsbach from Haus fur Medienhunst in Oldenburg and Rosina Gomez-Baeza Tintura from laboral in Gijon, northern Spain. Giselle Beiglemann, who is combining curating/organising the Motta prize with her work as an academic and artist, gave a fascinating talk which she titled Technofagia - echoing anthrofagia - defining a new generation of Brasilian artists, activists and thinkers specialising in low tech, collaborative, DIY practices engaging with social and environmental questions in ways that she feels break significantly with the tactics evolved in the generation which she represents who were dependent on academic posts and relations with commercial companies to gain access to the high tech resources they felt neccessary for their work.

Next week Brasil continues to ripple with an intensive level of activity  in art/technology fields -  on 11th Mobilefest- Paulo Hartmann and Marcelo Godoy's annual extravaganza of screen based practices targeted at the general public will commence at the Museum of Image and Sound in Sao Paulo, on the same day as the artemov festival led by Lucas Bambozzi, Marcus Bastos and others will open in Belo Horizonte in advance of associated programmes over a course of month in three other cities - Salvador, Recife and Porto Alegre.  

A publication resuting from the Paralelo events held also at MIS earlier this year - with researchers practitioners  in art, technology, design, science and environment areas - from Brasil, the Netherlands and the UK, will be available by December in book form followed by a POD extended series of papers which will be found on the Virtueel Platform site.  The book's title - Paralelo, Unfolding Narratives in Art, Technology and Environment - will show how developments from this week-long network event are already spiralling off in many interesting ways.  Participant Rachel Jacons from Active Ingredient in Nottingham will spend time in Brasil this month continuing collaborations with Mobilefest and also with the Mobile Lab project curated by Ivan Henriques and Silvia Leal n Rio which is investigating environmental issues through artistic residencies in a van travelling around the Guanabara Bay. Later in the month Giles Lane from Proboscis will take part in the artemov events; in October James Wallbank and Mike Stubbs from England came back to Sao Paulo, to MIS, to contribute to a symposium in advance of hopefully future cooperation between these organisations.  James spoke about the connections between waste and media a live subject for bricos anywhere. Meantime, two hours away from Rio, on an eco reserve in Mata Atlantica forest, Jo Joelson and Bruce Gilchrist of London Fieldworks are now on a six week residency (with their one year son Jetson), through an Artists Links award from the British Council which will allow them to explore an ongoing project idea - relating to the idea of the Arctic tern bird, which flies from northern hemispheres including northern Scotland to the ice-capped south via the Brasilian coastline, annually, in search of maximum daylight.They hope to make links between their time here and a series of tree-houses which they are constructing in the Highlands of Scotland, which will be ready next year to host visitors, researchers in art, science and beyond - as temporary, nature-based studios.  Although Scotland will no doubt be colder than Brasil, we all feel we have to pay back somehow ....if not in warmth and light, then somehow....revealing the reverse path of those birds whose trajectory no doubt has meaning, waiting to be revealed.

Took a walk yesterday in the Botanic Gardens at Cambridge, where Bristol based artist Luke Jerram will produce a work with plants in the glasshouses later this week (as part of the NightJar festival) and spent some time considering the history of the rose, not through looking at books or walls, but by wandering around the displays which are living, scented, tangible, real flowers growing laid out in chronological beds which somehow all look the same now it is autumn and apart from a few pale tea-roses most flowerheads are dead, shiveringly leafless.  What strikes me most is how the history of English roses in the past two centuries is bound in with China - how Chinese models provided the basis for development of the hybrids which have become most familiar today. It strikes me most clearly as I am currently developing a summer school, with colleagues at the RCA in London and at Tsinghua University in Beijing, which we hope to hold next year there, exploring co-design and participatory processes, linking older people (including retired professors) living in Beijing with researchers in fields of textiles, ageing, communication technologies, industrial and product design.....to achieve a mutual flow and hopefully successful hybridity.....design for an ageing society is one potential title, the other (which I prefer) is design environment, art, research......or DEAR for short. I'm also busily working with Vanessa - a bricolabs network colleague - on a project related to the Kogi people who live in the Sierra Nevada in Colombia....who are also Elders, or Elder Brothers as they name themselves in their writings - they say 'in the strength of the Mamo's wisdom lies the force of our roots...'.and preparing to return to Brasil on Halloween for the Sergio Motta Instituto anniversary events in Sao Paulo before heading to Florianopolis to Santa Catarina for a talk, with Paralelo colleague, Karla Brunet, about art, technology and environment......we are all working hard in 'this trembling world' as the Kogi Mamos have named it.

To the Serpentine Gallery in London this evening for the Opening Night of the long awaited Gustav Metzger Exhibition (extraordinarily the first one person show in the UK for this 83 year old artist). The works on display reveal his range of preoccupations from torture of the human soul caught up in war and violent situations (drawing on his own experience during the second world war as a Jewish child in Nuremberg, when he lost both his parents in the Holocaust and was exiled to Britain travelling as part of the Kindertransport). His foundation in the late 50s of the Auto-Destructive Art Movement, his organisation of the Destruction in Art Symposium, involvement with the Committee of 100 anti-nuclear movement with Bertrand Russell and others, combined with his work as Secretary of  the then fledging Computer Art Society, makes Metzger an antecedent figure whose influence on many key members of the generation of artists who followed has been immense.  Acknowledgement in the form of this major exhibition in a leading London is greatly overdue.

The title of the show, Decades 1959-2009, seems ill-fitting though. This is primarily an exhibition that reminds one starkly of Merzger's childhood in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and early 40s and demonstrates the extent to which this trauma shaped and formed him.  His later preoccupations with environmental damage, the ruination of nature, the terror of the car, the damage caused by capitalism and the temporarility of media are linked in his work to an industrial and machine aesthetic that together achieve terrifying effect - reminding us all of our own role in (hu)man's self destruction and his annihilation of the world. Metzger's vision and voice are from the third and fourth decades of the 20th century - its deprivations, conflicts and its tragedies which are still playing out today and which are echoing in many ways on a number of different levels, the legacy of which have locked this new century in a tight fist. This is a charged and strange exhibition, a room full of liquid crystals is disturbingly beautiful, immersive and stilling - other pieces rip apart any sense of comfort and deny any ease.