Calling all human animals!

This weekend you'll get your chance to put these unappreciated skills to use while enjoying a wild night out in Dalston at The Human Zoo where your hidden talents will be welcome. *Find more details about this event here.

Go on, ask yourself:

What's Your Inner Beast?

Whether you are a monkey, an amphibious sort or a brightly feathered bird-like creature, Axel Rose would welcome you to this jungle, where cabaret acts, bands and DJs will be offering a mashup of rock, reggae and electro-fueled beats, to feed London’s savage beasts. The zoo-inspired fancy dress theme invites you to dig out you’re best fuzzy, fluffy, furry and furious wardrobe selections, and promises everything in-between on offer among the cast of colourful guests. Every zoo needs a keeper and there’s bound to be a lion tamer about to keep the wild crowd under control.

The Human Zoo may be one night of mayhem that sees The Naked Ape author Desmond Morris’s concept of urban

human animals fulfilled. This is what might happen when the cage of the city lets loose humanity’s apes, lions, tigers and bears to roam the streets of the East End for the night.

You could say that this crowd’s festival-style parties are back by popular demand, based on the adoration and following the organizers developed from their Nativity Hoedown in December. They are truly  growing their own stylish alternative to the usual boring clubbing night, and carving out a new little creative corner in Dalston, and we are all gratefully appreciative to the Passing Cloud Art Centre for the venue's ongoing support of these event organizing efforts.

• Join The Human Zoo Facebook Group
  

  Grrrrooooowwwl

• Connect with these animals through MySpace at myspace.com/handofglory7

• Email Miss Risk directly via her own blog on Vox.com here

It’s sure to be a roar of a good time!

And psssst…here’s a tip to bust ahead of the queue: show up in the best damn zoo-inspired outfit you can invent and you’re in the door!

 PS: Yes, I was part of the early stage planning on this, as the organizers have kindly annointed me as a resident artist with this new party scene, following the rocking hillbilly good time we all had at the Nativity Hoedown. Alas, some travel organizing has floundered my attendance at The Human Zoo, and unfortunately messed up my plans to debut a new lion tametress cabaret performance act I had in works for the night. I’m headed off this lovely British island this weekend for a trip I’m looking forward to, but will be growling it up in spirit with all my mates who are willingly putting themselves behind cage bars this weekend. Nonetheless, never mind worrying about whether I am going to be there (((who the ffff cares about that really unless you happen to be some sort of strange Lisa Devaney stalker))) the place will be packed with young, fun, beautiful creative people and plenty of great bands, DJs, and live performances from a circus-style cabaret group…and other surprises. Keep in mind:

You can only expect the unexpected at The Human Zoo.

 

Wishing I could be there,

but I do hope you give your inner beast

a good night out this Saturday

and have yourself a growl of a good time, 

-Lisa

Who’s Lisa Devaney?

I head the Hai Media Group, a multimedia communications company based in London, offering client’s traditional public relations, combined with new technology marketing strategies. I also perform, creating original Cabaret-style comedy skits for festivals, theatre and parties. Find out more about me, and the talented entrepreneurs I collaborate with, by visiting: www.haimediagroup.com

Over the holiday weekend, London was part of a global flashmob pillow fight,  bringing people together to wack each

other. A good crowd of a couple hundred people turned up in Leicester Square, pillows concealed in bags, and waited for the cue to begin to pummel each other, when the clock struck 3 PM. Nearly 30 cities were struck by feather flying madness this weekend, including Beijing, Sydney, Budapest, Boston, making for a 'thump' you could hear round the world.

A Pillow Fight Heard Round-the-World!

Unlike the movie Fight Club where the first rule of the club is that you do not talk about it, this is one fight that the organizers want the whole wide world to talk about it. In fact, hearing other people talk about it is the only way you may ever hear about a flashmob happening at all. Flashmob events are word-of-mouth, viral happenings where participants connect via the internet and mobile phone text messages.

I've missed past events where people show up for a dance gathering, clubbing silent-disco style in a public place, to groove to their own private tunes, with headphones on. I was lucky to make it along for this flashmob. Despite the awful weather of rain, sleet and even hail that threatened the fun there was no shortage of pillow fighters in attendance. Like magic, the sun came out just for the pillow fight to begin in London.

I'd say that those pillows are a lot harder than I expected, as I got walloped from a few other pillow fighters that were passionately aggressive about the gathering. It was a great place to take your kids for some fun -- many families were out for some afternoon flashmobing and they were LOVING it! I bumped into some friends who were full of smiles, as their kids were having a great time of it.
People got creative with their pillows, writing slogans and phrases on the pillow cases. I noticed that retro cartoon characters were popular among pillow case selections, with the owner of a Garfield pillow diving headfirst into the crowd, and others showed their affection for Transformers.Garfield Gets In On Pillow Fighting:
Ah, a pillow fight, it is like being 12 all over again, but this time with the biggest slumber party ever!

There are plenty of photos from the pillow fights around the world posted online, and my Flickr image stream from London's pillow fight is here.

Thames University senior lecturer for digital media and artist Richard Colson, this week debuted his new book The

Fundamentals of Digital Art to a sold-out audience of about 300 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London. His reference book traces the early days of digital art, beginning with a timeline that starts with the 1950 publication of Norbert Weiner’s ‘Cybernetics and Society’ essay exploring the integrated relationships machines have with humans.

Nearly six decades on, the field of digital art remains a discipline that is still being defined by both artists and technologists who are constantly experimenting with new approaches and applications. The artist’s tools rapidly emerge with new technology developments, transforming the medium, every few months. Richard Colson told the audience that his new book is original in its effort to put into context what has been emerging between the intersection of technology and art for these past decades. He talked about his favourite decade of attending art school in the 1970s, when, he fondly remembered, making art from technology had a very organic approach among its creators, who were boldly going where none had gone before. With no commercial objectives or support at that time, the creations that resulted were all conceived from pure creative motivation, and the human mind’s desire to build something, because you can.  This mindset is best put by Marshall McLuhan, who Colson quotes in his book:

“The artist is a man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.”

Colson’s book features his personal selections of digital artworks that he finds to be pivotal in the movement from the

earliest works such as James Seawright’s 1968 piece called Scanner. Scanner hangs from a ceiling, within labs of IBM and depicts the historical innovations in data-processing machines. It is an interesting place to think of finding art, dangling from the inner sanctum of the early days of the computer industry’s ‘Big Blue’ corporation. Comment from Jasia Reichardt explains this moment in time of the late 60s of an era when:

“What was significant was that the computer brought in its wake new people to become involved in making art and composing music. People who had never thought of putting pencil to paper, brush to canvas, started making images.”

Among those who were boldly exploring new territory is Steve Roberts, who in 1983, rode a a computerized recumbent bicycle across the America, that he kitted-out with technology gadgets, including an early version of a laptop, that allowed him to stay online during his journey. His contraption was the first known ‘mobile office’ and, as Colson features in his new book, makes us wonder – was it art or technology? Clearly it was a mix of both, with the spirit of an intrepid adventurer mixed in.

Steve Roberts Rides Across America

“The project took six months, a well-focused, fast-track, all-out effort that I recall with wistful fondness from my current perspective of overwhelming complexity.  The bike had to be fabricated from scratch, as the few recumbents of the day were too delicate for the anticipated abuse.  I hired a wizard frame builder to braze a strong and well-balanced substrate, a decision that proved correct countless times over the ensuing decade as it was subjected to 17,000 miles of overloading on often-inhospitable pavement.  I liquidated my suburban lifestyle, assembled a camping system and a simple electronics package powered by a 5-watt solar panel, established a base office and basic network protocols, and hit the road.” –Steve Roberts

The author’s cherry picking efforts of digital project highlights from this era of art, opens our own thought and imagination to how everyday gadgets and technologies are possibly art in themselves, or have been used as supplies for art creations. Locative art projects make use of GPS systems, PDAs, mobile phones and other easily available consumer gadgets to experiment with technology in new ways. An example of this is the Greenwich Emotion Map by Christian Nold, produced in 2006.

Among my own favourite selections in the book is Daniel Brown’s creation of mutating plants, in which a computer programme is set free to allow for digital plants to reproduce and mutate into any shape and style they wish. You can play with some of this artist’s creations at www.play-create.com.

How Do You Collect Digital Art?

In conversation with some of the attendants at the book launch this week, some of us wondered about what avid art collectors are doing to preserve some of the early works of digital art. Some of the earliest are run on now out-dated technology platforms, like those huge mainframes found at IBM, and how might you store and keep hold of such a piece and would it still be of value? It seems this area of art is still an affordable and highly collectible option for art appreciators.

I’ve certainly got a personal history with this form of art, much like Colson describes of his own experience, as I’ve visited a number of digital art galleries, supported the Cybersonica festival and Cybersalon organization, and watched my brother’s work evolved over two decades . My brother has been described as being among one of the earliest digital artists to emerge from the discipline, for work he did in the early 90s with his experimental website e13.com, as well as commissioned pieces with Gasbook, Shift and MoMa. My brother laughs about the day a high-brow art gallery owner phoned him up and informed him that he was looking for digital artists to exhibit in his gallery show and would my brother make something for it? That was around 1993, and it seemed the art world had suddenly turned its attention to the things web designers and technologists had been tinkering with for a few decades in their spare time.

With Colson’s new book, it does feel like a tipping point may be reached in this field, in which more attention will be given to the value of the creations of these visionary creative people operating in the intersection between art and technology. If you are a collector, it might be time to preserve your early CD rom and Floppy Disks that capture the early days of graphic programmes, and if you have the space, store the classic Apple computers so that you’ll have the technology platform to experience the original digital artist’s works.

If you want to get started understanding who’s who and pivotal in the field, Colson’s book is a good starting point and is packed with interesting reference points for anyone studying digital media today. The Fundatmentals of Digital Art will certainly be a course favourite among those training to become the next generation of digital generation of technology-savvy artists.

PS: While visiting the ICA for Richard Colson’s book launch, Vivienne Westwood past me in the lobby, and I was awestruck. She truly strikes an impressive display in real life as is fitting with her reputation. She was at the ICA for a speaking engagement.

Who’s Lisa Devaney? I head the Hai Media Group, a multimedia communications company based in London, offering client’s traditional public relations, combined with new technology marketing strategies. I also perform, creating original Cabaret-style comedy skits for festivals, theatre and parties. Find out more about me, and the talented entrepreneurs I collaborate with, by visiting: www.haimediagroup.com

Joy, joy, joy! I’m sporting a new hairstyle now. My head is topped off with a retro-fabulous flashback look that reproduces the styles of the 1920s flappers who wore finger waves. You’ll find modern celebrities with similar coiffs, all inspired by the original Hollywood divas of days long gone by, like one of my favourites -- Mae West.

I put my mess of a curly mop of big volume, frizzy hair that tends to look more hippy than I’d prefer, into the skilled hands of a stylist in Soho. I expressed my love for old fashioned styles, so he suggested a more manageable, bob cut, and combined it with a bit of razzle dazzle for me by adding finger waves. To instruct the shampooist, he told her that he’d be “doing a Gwen Stefani.” This made me laugh, because clearly this new look for me is a fairly off-the-shelf cut that must be popular among many London ladies.

I absolutely marveled at the talent the stylist had for producing finger waves. He molded my hair with his fingers, sculpting it with a bit of hair gel, so that it formed gently rolling waves that remind me of being at the seaside, watching the waves lap against the shore. It isn’t something I can easily replicate, but my hair naturally waves on its own anyways. I found some basic instructions on how to do it, so if you want to experiment, here’s a quick reference guide another fan of the look suggests:

Get the Look! Finger Wave It

Step 1: On towel-dried hair, apply the correct styling product for your hair type from hair roots to ends.

Step 2: Pre-dry hair with a blow dryer.

Step 3: Set up hair with desired part. Dividing hair into 1-inch sections, work a curling iron through, section by section. Starting from close to the scalp, spiral hair unto the iron's barrel, hold briefly, then release. Work through hair until complete.

Step 4: After allowing hair to cool, test curl - if curl has not taken, take the curl and pin it up to the scalp with a pin, rolling as you go. If curl is firm, separate with fingers and finger comb to desired look.

Step 5: Take hair accessory and pin back hair on one side back, away from the face

The website She’s A Betty also has some good tips here.

I’m thrilled to now be finger waving it, along with the likes of Renée Zellweger,

who carried the look in the movie of the musical Chicago, and, the fabulous Gwen Stefani. I lilke to think that I just might be keeping the spirit of Betty Davis and her era of gorgeous glamour flapper babes alive with my hair. Or, at least I hope so.

I hold no illusion about being able to take centre stage with proper divas, and certainly can’t hold a candle to the silver screen stars I admire so, but I am pleased with my new look.

Lot’s of thanks to Ricky at basecuts in London’s Soho on Berwick Street, who I’ll definitely be returning to for help with my hair.

If you want to the look, ring up basecuts on 02072876807 and tell them that you want Ricky to finger wave you.

 I’m finger waving it,

Who’s Lisa Devaney?

I head the Hai Media Group, a multimedia communications company based in London, offering client’s traditional public relations, combined with new technology marketing strategies. I also perform, creating original Cabaret-style comedy skits for festivals, theatre and parties. Find out more about me, and the talented entrepreneurs I collaborate with, by visiting: www.haimediagroup.com

 

Some people drink in excess, some people binge Twitter. This past weekend I embarked on a spontaneous, unplanned, excessive use of a little mobile messaging service called Twitter, that asks people the simple question of what are you doing -- right now!

By the way, I don't work for Twitter, I just use it. What started this weekend's mobile madness?

Maybe it was a combination of meeting up with friends in a pub on Friday evening, where I was trying to explain what Twitter was. This then kicked off what became my Extreme Twitter Weekend, in which I updated a small number of about 30 'followers' who have signed up to receive my random text message updates. I sent in a total of 117 twitters by the weekend's close, a personal record in being the most times I've ever twittered.

As the weekend got underway, my Twitter followers got to hear all about my attendance at the Hammersmith & Fulham Crime Summit on Saturday, they also got breaking news updates announcing that I was drinking a cup of chai tea, feeling jealous of those lucky enough to attend the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, saying hello to my kitty cat, going to a movie, writing a blog post, visiting the gym and countless other updates about my non-exceptional and fairly mundane weekend. My own little experiment with the service seems to have coincided with a milestone in Twitter's brief history, as it was first used widely, and introduced by its founder Jack Dorsey, at the SXSW music conference last year.

It was my own little experiment with Twitter, which I've been using sporadically for about a year now. It is free to sign up to the service and set it up on your mobile, but you need to check your data rates to understand what you'll pay for each twitter message you send, and receive. On the plus side of this mobile communication service, I've gotten friends around the world to join and 'follow' me via text messages. Now my friends in New York City, Switzerland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Hong Kong can receive mini text message updates about what I'm doing at any given time. It costs less for me to send out a Twitter to my local O2 mobile phone provider in London, than it does to call or text my overseas friends. It also lets me mass update a collection of people who I might want to share some news with. Don't worry, if you don't want to be bothered by the chirp of a mobile phone, all you have to do is turn it off, by sending OFF to Twitter.

During the weekend other followers decided to sign on and track what I was up to, and I even got an invite to test out a service called Xoost.com, which appears to be a new way to search the internet. I've been looking over the trail of Twitters from the weekend, and there are a few that have made me laugh, in reading the running stream of consciousness:

Lisadevaney! is 40~30~30 percent rock+electronica+all else in music!!! What are you???
Lisadevaney! The zombies are playing. Ggggrrrrrroooan (zombie noise)
Lisadevaney! Went to the men's loo by accident! Made new men friends.
Lisadevaney! Sitting near boris johnson. Must not heckle.
Lisadevaney! Announcement: Council member's car is blocking town hall entrance. Maybe boris can't get out.
Lisadevaney! @hillaryclinton- ok i'll call a cowboy in wyoming for you.
Lisadevaney! @barackobama- i want both!!!
Lisadevaney! I hate this nail polish color. White-ish, pink-ish hue. Off now!
Lisadevaney! my local post office among 200k closing. Rubbish! My future: plan a day to mail letters, to allow for time in long lines.
Lisadevaney! Can't move. Cat on my leg.
Lisadevaney! Hate toothpaste spots on clothes
Lisadevaney! Will dream of electric twitters.
Lisadevaney! Sent 117 twitters during her extreme twitter weekend & does not plan to break her own record next weekend.

Ask Yourself: In the world of Twitter are you a : or a !

Twitter Tip: Don't Scare Your Friends With Twitter
In learning how to twitter, I made some mistakes along the way. Including accidentally sending a text intended for my husband, to Twitter, by selecting the wrong contact entry on my phone. It was nothing serious, just a senseless text to anyone following me. I also got a concerned phone call from a friend in New York City, who had received about 30 consecutive text messages from me and, not having had a chance to read all of them, thought there was an emergency going on. No panic to friends intended -- sorry about that one!  Of the people I follow, I've seen plenty of Twitter accidents. My favourite Twitter text messages of hilarity have been the ones where people are clearly a bit off guard, likely drinking, and send out amusing updates with lots of misplaced letters, from a bit of loose fingers in texting on the mobile. I also get a lot of people who are trying to find other people in their immediate geographic area, and have been tempted to phone up the lost person, to inform them where the other person is. "Hey James! Prash is looking for your booth at the trade show and is in Aisle 208. Go find him!"

I personally had a blast with my weekend twitter binge, which amused me greatly, and, other than confusion and befuddlement, it doesn't seem to have caused any damage to anyone I know, but I won't be planning another text message adventure like that. I'm sure someone will break my personal best of a twitter record. I have met a fellow twitterer who has sent 3,000 updates. I think he is aiming to break some sort of world record for twittering. 

The Twitter culture is breeding its own expression, style and fun, like any underground movement that has yet to reach its absolute tipping point in the mainstream.  Thayer Driver, who twitter's here recently  took a serious look at the habits of those who twitter, by running a survey where she found out that:

• People mainly use Twitter mostly to see what their contacts are up to (50.6%).
• Most respondents to this survey are followed by twice the amount of people (101-200 followers) than they follow themselves (51-100 followers).
• You’re most likely to become un-followed if your Tweets aren’t deemed relevant to your followers
• Half the respondents (48.5%) had Twittered drunk…
• … Yet thankfully most people (65.7%) have never regretted a Twitter post

She's kindly offering her survey free to all, which you can download from her blog here.

If you end up loving Twitter, you can even let the whole wide world know to follow along with everything you are doing, by getting a t-shirt inviting random people in the street to follow you, on offer from iGadget Life .

Here in the UK, the mainstream media has (finally!!!) latched onto plastic bags. Plastic bags are making headlines in

the Daily Mail, a report that saw Marks & Spencer respond by putting a price of five pence to grocery bills for every plastic bag used. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for new green legislation that requires supermarkets to end reliance on plastic bags in the next year, or be required to charge customer’s 5p for plastic bags.

Bravo for all the hoopla and attention to the issue, and for listing the facts about the damage these horrible convenience items do to our wildlife and environment, a result in Britain alone of 13 Billion free disposable plastic bags being offered to shoppers. Worldwide, The thought of turtles being strangled by plastic bags on the bottom of the ocean, is a nightmarish image, among other innocent wildlife dying because of plastic bags. In my own nightmares over this issue, I had a dream that I was walking along and somehow was made entirely of plastic bags, then the wind came, and I blew away. I think it comes from a scene in the movie Brazil, where a man disappears among newspapers, view the trailer for Terry Gilliam’s film below.

The Consumer Climate is Changing

Politicians, businesses, the media and hopefully your average person-in-the-street are getting motivated to change behaviour with the attention to the issue. I’m glad that leaders are seeing the benefit of supporting and activating people on a grassroots level. Hey, it seems to boost viewer ratings and sells a lot of newspaper that will hopefully be recycled. The people of Britain are great at responding quickly to campaigns like this, a case in point is the recent Chicken Out! Campaign initiated by Channel 4, that I blogged about here.

Now, the demand is so high for free range, happy chickens here in the UK, that my local Tesco has big signs apologizing to customers about the fact that the supply of these chickens is not enough to meet demand right now. Instead, they are pointing us toward an alternative brand of chicken, and a sign on the shelves proclaims how this company’s chickens are also very happy, having been raised in well-lighted and spacious barns, with plenty of places to perch and lots of colourful balls to play with. The situation is somewhat comical, but I’m just glad to see this consumer power in action.

Mass consumer consciousness and activism, can totally make a difference, and these recent examples have given
me renewed hope about the state of the world. You see, I used to be more of an environmental activist, back in my high school and college days on Long Island, in New York. During the summer of 1987, a notorious garbage barge  was floating around off the coast of my favourite beach spots. The public watched the story unfold as the smelly barge travelled hundreds of miles trying to find a dump that would take it, facing rejections everywhere, including Belize and Mexico. The issue was quickly latched onto environmentalists, and at the time I got involved in helping out the New York Public Interest Research Group canvass suburban neighbourhoods across Long Island to raise attention to the issue, and raise funds for NYPIRG campaigns. It was a great learning experience, and certainly very hard work. The environmentalists got accused, as they always do, for messing around with the facts about the garbage barge and incorrectly stating that the roaming garbage barge was a result of a lack of landfill space from excessive waste. The

issue nonetheless, did compel people to increase recycling efforts at the time, and this was certainly a positive outcome of it all.

When Idealism Deflates We All Lose Out

Returning to the University of Stony Brook in the Fall, where I was studying

politics and journalism, I kept working with NYPIRG and even got to meet and have dinner with its founder Ralph Nader one evening. At the time, I was also fascinated by Abbie Hoffman, a radical 60s political activist, a founder of the Yippies! movement and author of Steal This Book. He was doing a campus lecture tour that year, debating neo-conservative G. Gordon Libby. I got to watch Abbie that year at University as well, and it was a great year, where I was really motivated and feeling positive that what we were doing as young activists on campus was going to start making a difference. At least it felt that way.

I’d volunteer to man the NYPIRG booth in the student union from time to

time, sharing space alongside SUNY Stony Brook’s legendary life-long political activist and poet Mitch Cohen, and was glad to be keeping the environmental issue alive, at least as a visual presence among students and faculty. Often, a group of radical Young Republicans on campus, made it an ongoing mission to visit my booth and try to debate and attack me in public. Of course they have a right to their opinion, but their sabotage approach was really mean. They’d come over, with smirks and giggles on their faces, and start arguing loudly with me about what a useless and erroneous left-leaning, hippie liberal cause I was wasting my time with. I could argue with them only so far, taking them on by myself often, and it would just deteriorate into foolishness that made me blush and want to run away and hide in my dorm room. I’m just not that tough in that kind of hostile situation.

The negativity that group was seeding against the environmental issue at the time, was certainly working on many other people’s opinions. It seemed that so many people were just looking for any excuse to not have to believe, and especially not have to do something about it. Long Island is all about convenience, and recycling for most was such a hassle that they didn’t want to bother with it. Meanwhile, depressingly so, scientists were finding out plenty of quantitative facts to show why dire consequences were in the works for the planet. Al Gore, waaaay prior to his success with An Inconvenient Truth, who was also someone I admired at the time and still do, was trying to get the powerful politicians to listen to the same warnings the environmental activists around me were talking about. It seemed the general electorate was a stubborn, lazy bunch back then, getting into the early nineties, and whenever anyone talked about environmental issues, they were quickly called tree huggers, lefties, freaks, hippies or other names invented to deflate credibility, and kill passionate spirit. I never thought I fell into the hippie category, as I was radically opposed to the heady over used scent of patchouli, and  couldn't  stand   birkenstocks, and didn't ever want to dreadlock my hair, although plenty of people on campus did and they did look pretty cool with dreads.

Adding to the negative climate against environmental activism, Abbie Hoffman tragically committed suicide, and reports came out citing that his own spirit was dis-heartened for the youth of America, who he did not think were motivated to make a positive difference. Watching his debate on camp