Kieran Nolan

The Random Album Cover Game has been around the last year, but I had a go at it a couple of days ago.

Not sure what genre it'd fit into exactly... possibly folk meets downtempo meets dnb...

Reverse Graffiti is something totally original and organic, Paul "Moose" Curtis uses a powerwasher and stencils to create his art, cleaning the grime off polluted city walls to create murals of scenic forest vistas. This video clip is from an upcoming documentary by Doug Pray (who directed the turntablism documentary Scratch). I'm looking forward to watching this... more information at reversegraffitiproject.com.

So the annual Darklight festival happened again in Dublin, one of the events I attended there was a video circuit bending workshop by Karl Klomp organised by DATA. Over two days participants found out about uncovering visual glitches in video effects hardware and then hardwiring and controlling these. Apart from distorting the inputted video we were also shown methods of hacking these machines text / graphics chip (the part that generates teletext text or channel information) and how to sync this up to an external audio source, making an audio visualiser.

It was a lot of use for my work, I found out a bit more about how all the components work and how to read the circuit board, also picked up some handy soldering tips. The piece of video hardware I had to play with was a Vanguard VA-445 A/V Edit System, now with 4 externally housed switches added to trigger off video glitches. Here's a good interview about Mr Klomps work from makezine and some youtube footage of another video bending workshop.

I downloaded the Zbrush demo and sculpted this head... it was fun to make, the process is very organic - you start off with a sphere and mould it like you would a piece of clay... this is pretty basic compared to what the pro's make with zbrush... like Beowulf!

"The Bubbles Of Radio" is an interesting project by students from AHO in Norway where they cataloged different radio frequency types in the style of a nature watch booklet. Each signal type was given a latin-style name, for instance Bluetooth is Nevrotis Dentus Aquarae and RFID is Raptus Arphadus and accompanied by creative illustrations that show them as visible, tangible parts of the environment. Full information including a PDF chart of the visualisations are at Nearfield.org.