Shok-1

There is a bit of disused ground just by where I am working in Borough.
Shok-1 is a local street artist who uses this and some of the surrounding wall, doors, kiosks, and shop shutters as his gallery space.
I have been enjoying seeing new work appearing, sometimes watching a piece grow and change over a few days, a couple of times catching him in the act.
The work is big, but he puts in some lovely small details.



Check Shok-1's own flickr here.

Spoon Carving

Back in the summer, we went for a weekend camping, and I tried my hand at spoon carving.
I thought the main techniques would be similar to those I learned on the bowyer course. This was true, but just showed me how much I had forgotten! However, whilst making the bow was largely big strokes and the very fine finessing to finish, this was all about close shaping strokes with lots of control from the start, so I was shown and got to practice some new cutting strokes.
Tools used were straight knife for the primary shaping, and a crook knife for the bowl. (It is also possible to burn out the bowl with an ember, but that's not what I wanted to learn...)
The course was very informal and we chatted rather too much, so I didn't quite finish my spoon, although I did get it to a usable rough state. It just needed some fine shaping and smoothing to finish. I had intended to do this after I got home, but have decided to keep my first spoon as-is. I will polish up my next one.

Photos show the newly split Birch, through drawing and roughing out the spoon shape, to nearly complete project.



I shouldn't have tried the paddle shaped handle as this added significantly to the complexity of carving the handle, and I should probably have tried to make a smaller spoon overall. This would have meant less complex cutting so I might have finished, but I guess you find out more than the direct skills learning these crafts...

1bit audio / video

I was just sharing Tristan Perich with a friend and found mention of some other 1bit artists, Ryoji Ikeda and Alva Noto.

I have only had a quick look at Ryoji Ikeda's work, but it looks amazing - creating sound and visual from data / noise.

Spent a little longer with Alva Noto.
Check his videos - headphones on and prepare to be assailed.
Love his ringtones, and funkbugfx down at the bottom of the page is great!

A snippet of performance:


let me know your favorites...

Land Rover - 3D Driving

Just put another project live - a media serving site for Land Rover's latest concept, the DC100.

There are two vehicles: the standard DC100 (Tool), and the Sport (Cool) versions.

I programmed the 3D space and car driving engine using Away3D. Additional interface elements created in vanilla Flash (as3).

Lots of work optimizing the main driving engine to get fastest / smoothest performance whilst allowing for a (relatively) high poly-count so Land Rover's vehicles could look their best!

Media site:  media.dc100.co.uk
Agency:       FPCreative
Model optimisation: Sweet CGI

New Amon Tobin album

Amon Tobin release his latest album ISAM a short while ago, and some remixes are now coming through...

Check this version of Surge. It's gorgeous:


...and the more Amonesque 16Bit remix:


And, of course, the original if you haven't heard it yet:

Facebook competition T&Cs

Currently working on a Facebook campaign for F1 sponsors Santander, who are sponsoring F1 :: Lewis & Jenson Santander .

The campaign includes some games (that's me), a video wall (me too), loads of information, and there are going to be some competitions (with great prizes!).

The Facebook guidelines for competitions are not entirely straightforward.
I found this very useful information at the bluedoor here.

Heritage barefoot shoes

The sun is out and so today is for shorts and VFFs.
The usual attention was stirred up by my toe pockets (neatly avoiding any leg comments), when a classic car fan told me that the founder of Bugatti cars had a pair of shoes "with toes as if they were gloves"  100 years ago or so!

Check Natural Stride Sports article, where I pinched the image from :)