2 posts tagged “viviennewestwood”

What will Boris do?

 

Many Londoners are wondering the same thing I am, for better, for worse, for whatever. Boris Johnson is our new Mayor, and I’m looking forward to watching these things unfold, living under this new leadership:

Buffoonery

There is going to be a lot of it, and I get the feeling that Boris, in addition to outsourcing his entire professional team, is also recruiting a top comedy performance coach to keep his public laughing, as we get dragged along for this ride.

Comedy Sketch Shows

Can’t WAIT to see what the top British comedy talent comes up with. Will Matt Lucas step up to the plate on this one? There is plenty of material for him already.

Fancy Dress

Festival season, fancy dress parties (hey Americans, that means costume party) and club nights are going to be sprinkled with Boris look-a-likes. I suspect the fancy dress shops are now stocking up on floppy blonde haired wigs. Better get my order in.

Documentaries

I suspect that brainstorming is now in progress among Channel 4’s Dispatches, the BBC’s Panorama and all the other fantastic British documentary producers, who are planning for the next investigative piece about how and why Boris Johnson won the London Mayoral election. I’m looking forward to some hilarious ‘docudrama’ about the subject, and wondering who will be cast as the lead role for...Boris the West End Musical, or for Boris the Movie? Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis could dye his mop blonde, gain weight, and give a fantastic OTT moving performance, something he is great at, as a bonified card-carrying member of the Overactors Annoynmous. He won't take the gig though, as for him to play Boris, it would require him to do some actual acting.

Virals

I’m already seeing some citizen-created viral campaigns appear in response to this election, such as the folks over at I Didn’t Vote For Boris, who invite non-Boris voting Londoners to tag a photo with ididntvoteforboris and add it to the Flickrstream. The conservative viral online campaign viral Boriswatch, has had its day, and now I’m looking forward to other Citizen Journalist reports, such as the eye view of Sunny Hundal, from the frontlines of what may be a new sport in London of Boris Watching. Clearly with 2,000+ already signed up to the Facebook group, it will be a popular activity here.

Celebrity Commentary 

“Boris has as little knowledge of multiculturalism as I have of life on Jupiter. He used to go to this club in Oxford called the Bullingdon Club, full of snobs and creative conmen. The man has not only no physical ability to run anything, he is immoral and a bully. Boris as mayor would be like discovering you had piles and there was no cure for it.”

Vivienne Westwood

“In Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, there is a scene where a character is talking

about another who is a card player and he’s described as ‘a fucking liability’. That’s my idea of Boris. The mouth engages before the mind does. He doesn’t have any sense of diplomacy or tact. London is a cosmopolitan city. You can’t have someone who makes quotes like that [Johnson’s “piccaninnies” comment] representing London, regardless of the fact it was in the past [Johnson wrote the comment in 2002]. Of all the things people say about Ken, in my view he’s done a lot for London. When you go into the city it looks like a European capital now with all the regeneration, and it didn’t before. Trafalgar Square is a much more welcoming place.”

David Mitchell
Comedian, Peep Show

“Boris is mad. He wants to bring back bus conductors, but that’s never going to happen. I think he talks rubbish. He’s

out of touch and he doesn’t understand Londoners. People say Ken is obnoxious, but what can you do? One thing about him is he knows London.”

Charlie Brooker
Guardian columnist and Television Presenter

Thanks to this election result, I’ve now got a powerful retort to the next Brit who blames me for the conservative politics of George Bush, because clearly it can happen here as well, and I will not be surprised if David Cameron is this country's next Prime Minister.

 

I’m watching Boris,

-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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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