Sean Clark's Blog
I had the pleasure of giving Stroud Cornock a tour around the Interact Gallery today. Stroud has had a long and distinguished career as a sculptor, systems thinker, interactive artist, curator and educator and co-authored an important early paper about systems thinking in art with Ernest Edmonds that I refer to in my research. He also spent over 20 years at Leicester Polytechnic, which is now De Montfort University. It was great to be able to show him around the gallery, as well as Leicester itself, which has changed somewhat since his time here. For more information about Stroud and his work visit http://stroudcornock.com/. The attached picture from 1970 shows Stroud seated and Ernest Edmonds standing.
Last night myself and Paul Gent ran live drawing season on the Sessions House building in Northampton. From between 6:30pm and 9pm people were invited to draw on the building using an iPad and video projector. A continuous stream of people then drew everything from spiders to robots, daleks and scarey faces (there was a bit of a Halloween theme going on!). Pictures from the event can be found here.
Citizens' Eye is a news agency for the people of Leicester. With John Coster at the helm they publish written stories on their blog, videos on YouTube, pictures on Flickr and radio programmes on Ipadio. They also run regular workshops about topics such as local democracy and citizens' journalism.
I wrote their iPhone app in my spare time this summer and last week I finished it off and sent it to the Apple App Store. It's now live and available as a FREE download from here or by simply searching the App Store for "citizens eye".
Let me know what you think. Once I have had some user feedback I'll fix any bugs and I'll issue an update with the next batch of features. Read more about the App on my project page.
The last of five Shine events took place in Oundel at the weekend. As with the previous events, Watch This Space produced a stunning event featuring audio tours, video and images, outdoor projections and live performance. Pictures from the event can be found here. Documentation from all of the events can be found on my Shine project page.
As something of a postscript to the events Paul Gent and myself will be showing the live-drawing and video projections work we developed for Shine at Night Run Northampton on Saturday 29th October.
I found a digital copy of a poster for an event I organised on April 11th 1998. "Club Cuttlefish" was a one-off event organised at Loughborough Town Hall as part of the Gallery of the Future project at Loughborough University and Art College. It was a live multimedia event with contributions from Charnwood Arts, Higher Intelligence Agency, Zion Train and others.
I remember enjoying the event, but my associations with this poster are not so positive. The marketing for the event was being handled by someone at the Art College. With less than two weeks to go before the event there was still nothing in the way of a poster for the event, so we decided to create our own and plaster the town with them. The marketeer was livid, it didn't match the "corporate guidelines" and we were ordered to take them all down.
The approved poster did finally arrive - but on the actual day of the event! Not much use for promoting it but, hey, it looked alright. Luckily the publicity we had done was enough to get an audience.
Another busy week. On Friday I was photographed for the Leicester Mercury for an article about Dropsketch that appeared in the paper on Saturday. The article had an immediate effect on the usage of the app, with 50+ downloads over the weekend.
On Saturday evening there was the latest Shine event, this time in Rothwell. A gallery of pictures can be found on Flickr. The final show is next Saturday in Oundel, Northamptonshire.
I have also upload more materials to my archive. There is a collection of materials about Virtual Reality from 1993 - 1996, the Resonance Arts Group 1993 - 1998 and Zion Train Live Multimedia Materials from 2000 - 2001.
I've been updating my various websites over the past few months. The cuttlefish.org site has been merged with www.seanclark.me.uk, meaning that all my current and past work since 2000 can be found in one place. I've kept the older projects on www.nemeton.com - although this site has had a bit of an update too. The work's not quite finished, but I hope you'll agree that the new site is easier to navigate and better maintained than the old.
For a non-believer I seem to be spending quite a bit of time at Churches these days! On Friday I went to the latest St Nicholas Church (Leicester) music event organised by Ola Szmidt. This featured and eclectic - and excellent - mix of music and poetry. I provided lighting for the event.
On Saturday was the latest Watch This Space Shine event. This time at All Saints Church in Northampton. As with the previous two events I ran a version of Memory Mirror that was projected on the church and worked with artist Paul Gent on "live drawing" during the show. It was well attended and seemed to go down well. Watch This Space have a great knack of creating spectacular and accessible arts events at historic places and it's always nice to be working with them.
No matter what you believe (or don't believe in), Churches are undoubtedly amazing buildings. It's particularly good to see them being put to more secular uses, such as hosting events like these.
From the Mac Plus in the 1980s to the iPhone in the 2010s Steve Jobs has provided the tools I've needed to realise my creative potential. He will be missed.
I haven't been able to watch the whole thing through yet (but then who does like to see themselves on video!). However, this video introduction to The Interact Galley that was filmed earlier today by John Coster from Citizens' Eye does a good job of getting the ideas across.