I attended Paul and Danny Brown's Symposium and book launch this weekend. Brown & Son (as they are known!) are a unique father and son duo who are both recognised digital artists. Normally working separately, they have come together to exhibit jointly for the first time at Watermans Art Centre in Brentford. This weekend's symposium was part of the exhibition programme and brought together some of the most respected digital artists and commentators from the past 40 years to help place Brown and Son's work in a broader context.

It was a very interesting event. There was a keynote by Frieder Nake, then talks by Paul and Danny, then panel sessions involving Margaret Bowden (Professor of Cognitive Science at Sussex University), Douglas Dodds (V&A), Nick Lambert (Computer Arts Society), Ernest Edmonds and more.

The symposium was video recorded by Brentford TV and I hope to be able to put it up on the Computer Arts Society website soon. The exhibition subtitled Art That Makes Itself and runs until 31st May. My photographs from the event can be found on Flickr.

I've been working on a project for Ernest Edmonds recently to re-construct one of his "Communication Game" artworks from the 1970s. The original artworks used light bulbs, switches and logic circuits to enable low-bandwidth communication between distributed users in ways that pre-dated computer networks by many years.

For the modern reconstruction I used three Arduino Nanos to implement the logic of the original artwork according to a supplied "truth table". The Arduino's were then embedded in a three-side pyramid structure with lights (LEDs) and switches arranged according to Ernest's plans.

Now that the piece is complete I will be handing it over to Ernest at the weekend ready for transportation to Brazil where it will be part of an (amazing) exhibition of work by him, Frieder Nake, Paul Brown and Harold Cohen. Códigos Primordiais (Primary Codes) opens on 16th June in Rio de Janeiro and runs until 16th August.

Ernest Edmonds can be heard talking about his Communication Games in this YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdSDoMBhhnA.

Last weekend saw the Art.CHI 2015 workshop take place at the CHI conference in South Korea. CHI (Computer Human Interaction) has been going for quite a while, but the idea of running arts activities in parallel with the main conference is fairly new.

I was involved in an exhibition of artworks when CHI came to Paris a couple of years ago (I showed a ColourNet piece in collaboration with Ernest Edmonds) and although I couldn't make it to South Korea for this one, I did produce the website for the workshop.

The website (there is a paper catalogue as well) presents 18 artworks that were selected from an open call made early in the year. The works were then presented at the workshop and served as the basis for discussion about how Art.CHI might develop further in the future.

There are some very interesting pieces in the selection and the website makes fascinating reading. May of the artworks have accompanying videos that explain them in more detail. The site can be found at http://art-chi.org.

Next year's CHI conference takes place in San Jose in early May 2016. There will be a full Art.CHI exhibition at the event - fingers crossed I can get to that one!

The Fading Afterglow of Evolution is a exhibition by Dave Briggs and Jack Squires in the Cube Gallery at Phoenix. Both Dave and Jack received Interact Labs bursaries last year and this is the first outing of their new work.

The exhibition is based around the idea of a archeological dig (perhaps in the future, or maybe a parallel present?) in which a number mysterious 'artefacts' have been found.

The artefacts include 3D rendered golden statuettes, an obelisk, a door that spews junk mail though a 'letter box', and a 'sensorama' that produces ambient smells based on the predicted weather reports for tomorrow. Collectively, these objects form an environment in which you are encouraged to explore and ponder. Drama is added to the experience through the use of a polythene tunnelled entrance!

To me, the exhibitions explores to main ideas. Firstly, what might future archeologists make of the artefacts they discover from our age? When stripped of their original context how do we make sense of past things? We do our best to understand found objects. But we can never really put ourselves in to the minds of the people who made them. Secondly, how do our imaginings of the future effect the future we actually get? We like to believe that we are in control of our technical and social development, but can any of us say what the world will be like in 50 years? Or a hundred, or let alone a thousand?

It's a thought-provoking show and well worth a visit. The exhibition runs until Friday 8th May at Phoenix and is free to enter. My photographs from the opening event can be found here on Flickr.

I've been working on the digital kaleidoscope project for over a year, but haven't been able to write anything about it until it went live. Well, it is now open to the public so I can share a few details.

The project involves a giant projected kaleidoscope inside a rocket ship structure and has been installed by Engineering Creatives at Yas Mall in Adu Dhabi. My role was to design the kaleidoscope software and create the control system - six iPads that allow users to select the materials to be displayed in the kaleidoscope.

It's come together really well and looks amazing. The screen is around three meters across with large mirrors reflecting the image so it appears to go on forever. With the booming audio and computer controlled lighting is makes quite a show!

See a gallery of pictures and a video of the piece here on Flickr. It has been quite a substantial piece of work. I hope there will be opportunities to show it in the UK sometime, for now, if you're ever in Abu Dhabi then head over to the Yas Mall and look for the Fun Works area. There are plenty of other things to see there too.

On Saturday, as an activity connected to Julian Oliver's exhibition at Phoenix in Leicester, I hosted a crystal radio making workshop at Interact Labs. The crystal radio (or crystal set) is a wonderful little device. It is the simplest possible radio receiver and despite being over one hundred years old it still has a magical quality to it.

Like many other people I first made a crystal set when I was a child. I remember being amazed how a bundle of wire, a couple of electrical components and an earpiece could be transformed in to something you could use to listen to radio stations from thousands of miles away. The whole thing was even more miraculous given the fact that it didn't require any external electrical power.

When I got my new crystal set working a couple of nights ago I had the exact same sense of wonder as I had as a child. Perhaps appropriately (since I live near Leicester) the first station I tuned in to was an Anglo-Indian channel with Indian music and English spoken word. The Bollywood tunes were literally "crystal clear" as they danced around the little earpiece.

As suggested by Julian Oliver's artwork, it can be argued that the crystal radio marked the beginning of the modern world. The invention of the telegraph (only half a century or so earlier) was itself a huge leap forward in communications. But voice and music? Transmitted wirelessly to millions of people in their homes and received on a device that could be made with a handful of parts. The impact of radio technology was world-changing.

The rate at which radio was developed was as impressive as the technology itself. The first audio radio transmission was in 1900, the BBC began broadcasting to the nation just 20 years later in 1920, and they were experimenting with broadcasting images over radio waves by 1932.

It's a timeline that was to be mirrored at the end of the century by the rise of the World Wide Web, another world-changing communication technology. I recall creating my first website in 1993. Just 22 years later and it's impossible to imagine a modern world without the web, and other Internet technologies.

I have a few crystal radio kits left over, so contact me if you would like to buy one. Or why not have a search on the internet and find out how to make one yourself? Julian Oliver's exhibition runs at Phoenix until 30th March. See my pictures from the workshop here.

A new exhibition in Phoenix's Cube Gallery opened on Friday. Julian Oliver's The Crystal Line makes use of a modern reproduction of a classic "Crystal Set" radio to receive audio transmitted by a computer that scours the World Wide Web for the latest developments in warfare.

Due to rather a lot of interference in the gallery space, it was not possible to actually hear the sound coming through the radio. However, Julian gave a very interested introduction to the ideas behind the project and the radio itself was fascinating to look at.

The radio should be fully functioning this week so you will now go to the Phoenix Cube Gallery and fully experience the installation. It will be operating until the 30th March.

There will be an opportunity to make your own Crystal Set radio at my workshop in Interact Labs on Saturday 14th March. You can book a place here at the Phoenix site.

My pictures from the opening can be found on Flickr.

I was involved in Honest Dave's second The Image Is The Servant event at Hansom Hall in Leicester on Friday.

TIITS2 was a follow up to last year's event and contained a similar combination live music and live multiscreen visuals. My involvement was to contribute to the live visuals using my wireless video system.

It was the first outing for the system, which features four wireless analogue video cameras and a multichannel video receiver. The output of the receiver is then fed in to a Mac running a version of my Memory Mirror Max patch. Just like the original Memory Mirror, the patch then builds up a dynamic collage of the incoming video material. For this event, two of the cameras were fixed on the stage and two were given to people to point at whatever interested them.

The results were pretty good. The glitchy video from the cameras was nicely mashed up by Memory Mirror and ended up resembling a combination of VHS video and security footage - in a good way!

The event itself was excellent with some great music and lots of interesting images being shown on the multiple video screens. It was good to be involved. See my pictures of the event up on Flickr. I'll be producing some video of the camera footage soon.

Today I attended the launch of the Spark Pop Up Play "mixed reality digital play" platform. This exciting project is the result of a one-year collaboration between The Spark Arts, researchers at De Montfort University and technology company Dotlib and was supported with funding from the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts.

The platform is based around a computer system that allows children and educations to create rich multimedia environments and then interact with them via a tracking system that places the user literally in the centre of the action.

During the launch I had plenty of opportunities to play with it and I was very impressed. It was fun and intuitive to use and clearly had the potential to be a powerful learning tool. My favourite environment was probably the pirate ship - partly because I got to wear a tricorn hat whilst interacting with it :-)

The platform is written in Max and the patches are being released as open source. The software and documentation can be downloaded from the Spark website at http://thesparkarts.co.uk/popupplay/. It's free to download and well worth a look.

Pineapster was a music website for Leicester that Cuttlefish ran between 2001 and 2012. The site started off as a simple showcase for local bands to share their music, but over the years grew in to a large, dynamic, community of bands, music fans, promoters, producers and others.

I have just finished a process of archiving the site and have re-uploaded everything to the pineapster.com web address. The archive includes the two main interactions of the site, with complete copies of the forums and profiles pages, and a growing library of music that was uploaded by members.

Visit the archive at pineapster.com and and follow the Twitter or Facebook accounts to keep up-to-date with developments.