London Pleasure Gardens

What’s this? The Olympics are bringing something to East London for the rest of us who have little interest in watching enormous Russian women throwing metal balls around?

“Sited in the heart of the Olympic East End, London Pleasure Gardens is a major new 35k capacity arts and entertainment destination. Opening on the 30th June with Paradise Gardens and in place for 3 years, the 20 acre riverside site features open-air concerts, dance and theatre arenas, historic and contemporary architecture, an urban nature reserve, a boutique hotel and a floating cocktail bar. London Pleasure Gardens provides scope for both global and local audiences to experience world-class musical acts and DJs, circus and promenade performances, film screenings, visual art, community projects and family activities.”

It look like London Pleasure Gardens could be a lot of fun. Organised fun of course but fun none the less.

London Pleasure Gardens

Is There Life on Mars?

I saw Snoop Dogg at the 02 Arena a little while ago, loved it. But the place itself is still perplexing, as it was from day-one back when it was The Millennium Dome. One of Richard Roger’s many masterpieces but still seems like a building that know one knows quite what to do with. Its current incarnation looks like a ‘futuristic’ shopping mall in a big tent, which is sort of what it is, minus the shops. All blue neon lights and palm trees, sort of nearly almost Blade Runner’s vision of LA, but with out any of the glamour or excitement.

This James Ward article puts it really well – ‘…if humans ever colonised Mars, they’d end up building something like the O2 … there was a Harvester too: Why would anyone build a fucking Harvester on Mars? … the woman at the counter asked me if I wanted to “eat in” or “take away”. Where would I take it away too? I’m in a giant dome on Mars. Where would I go?’

Mapping

If all the design blogs are to be believed, projection mapping seems to be everywhere at the moment. Stand still in the street for long enough and someone will point three projectors at you and start paying loud glitch music. Makes for a great public event though; some nice example here from Diez

Stik

Am I the only person who prefers to see street art actually in the street? Don’t get me started on that Banksy guy. That said, I’ve been loving Stik’s work that seems to have been popping up on just about every East London street over the last year or so, so it’s cool to see that he has an exhibition indoors for a change. In West London. I suppose those West London guys deserve to see it somewhere.

‘The Clock’ by Christian Marclay

You may well be familiar with this, so many people have fallen head-over-heals in love with it. Saw this rumour that there may be a forthcoming iPhone app for those of us who don’t quite feel like spending 24 hours watching it in the Hayward Gallery.

Alt//Language

Our recent London show...

"Come in and shelter from a virtual thunderstorm, fight samurais in the dark, make music with paint and play in a Wiimote band, all in the atmospheric seting of Shoreditch Town Hall Basement. Expect screens, projectors and speakers, immersive environments and games, audio and visual installations, sonic experiences and performance."

altlanguage.com

Decode

If you haven't been to Decode at London's V&A yet you gotta go!! An extremely inspiring interactive digital art exhibition.

It's mostly screen based, but my favourite was Daniel Rozin's Weave Mirror (above), which is basically also basically a screen – only made of wood! Wooden pixels! Yeah! Go wooden pixels go!

On until 11 April, 2010
Decode

Lovebox Festival Annual

Lovebox are producing a 300 page book full of pictures of all the beautiful freaks at this year's summer festivals. You can look for yourself on their myspace site and add your own pics of you and all your crazy mates dressed in drag/spacesuits/naked etc which may or may not end up being included...
myspace.com/FestivalAnnual

Hackney Wicked

Open studios and gallery exhibitions throughout the former warehouses of London's latest bohemian capital, Hackney Wick. Spread out over about 40 spaces, many of which are the artists own live/work spaces and with lots of live 'happenings', the East London art scene has never looked more intimate. Just make sure you dodge all the fixed-gear bikes, those guys don't stop...
31 July – 2 August
hackneywicked.com

Walking In My Mind

Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery exploring the inner workings of the artist's imagination through huge room-size installations.
Until 6 September 09
Walking In My Mind

Loop Festival Brighton

Superb festival of leftfield recording artists, DJs and audio-visual instalations and performance including The Light Surgeons, Fever Ray, Squarepusher, a rare Mùm DJ set and the excellent Telepathe from Brooklyn. You missed it? No way! Hopefully they'll do it again next year...
loopbrighton.com

The Heritage Orchestra plays the music of The Clangers

'On the 40th Anniversary of the first moonwalk Southbank Centre and the Heritage Orchestra celebrate by bringing you an evening of the music and visuals of the Clangers...'
I'm there!!
Southbank
The Heritage Orchestra
Oliver Postgate, gone but not forgotten x

Print Club London

35 Illustrators. 35 Edition and hand signed prints. 35 Pounds each. Say no more.
MC Motors, Dalston, London. 26–28 June '09
Print Club London

The Old Ones Are The Best...

What goes around comes around, right? Duran Duran are headlining Lovebox, Kraftwerk are headlining Bestival. Do the kids know who Duran Duran and Kraftwerk are? They should, and buy the end of summer I guess they will. But who cares? it gives me an excuse to post the video for Rio and the amazing live version of Man Machine– Kraftwerk sind supergeil, ya!

Damien Poulain 'Totem 49'

Exhibition of the French born, London based designer's latest project at Kemistry Gallery from: 5 June - 18 July 2009

Sagmeister at Offf

There were lots of great stuff at Offf festival but seminal Austrian designer Stefan Sagmeister's talk about happiness in design really brought the house down. And he did the whole thing wearing a nice blue summer dress (the above version was filmed somewhere else though...)

The Noise of Art: Deep Space Disco

Audio-visual/performance extravaganza at Ether 09 included Chateau Flight's new score for the 1915 film Les Vampires, Orca from the Faroe Isles playing homemade instruments and featuring recordings by Yann Tiersen, DJ T and Thomas Schumacher from Berlin minimal techno label Get Physical and Severino from Horse Meat Disco. The highlight of the show was DFA's The Juan Maclean playing live and some pretty out-there performance art from Immaculate Extremists.
Pictures by Christian Smith.
Noise of Art

Offf Festival

Say Hello are heading to Lisbon for Offf 2009, the 'international festival for the post-digital creation culture', to rub shoulders with the cream of the world's digital designers, film makers and musicians, including Universal Everything (featured), Neville Brody and many many more. We'll report back in May.
Offf

Land of Kings?

Dalston never used to be cool. When I lived opposite Barden's Boudoir I'm sure it was in Stoke Newington. Now my old fashionista flatmates call it Dalston, as does everyone else in the area. All the cool kids live in Dalston now so it's about time they had their own music festival and it's called the Land of Kings. (Kingsland Road - get it? Clever.)

Held over two days at 10 venues including Barden's, The Haggerston and Vortex and with dozens of bands and DJs including An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, Sportsday Megaphone, Allez Allez and Greco Roman Soundsystem, it looks like Dalston's gonna stay cool for a while.
Land of Kings

Fever Ray at Ether 09

Fever Ray supported Röyksopp at this year's always excellent Ether festival at London's Royal Festival Hall. Fever Ray is the dark and haunting side-project of Karin Dreijer Andersson, singer with brother/sister elecro weirdists The Knife. The eerie and atmospheric set is performed in almost pitch darkness illuminated with just a few standard lamps and two lasers, while Karin's bizarre costume changes add to the wonderful strangeness of the performance.

She is also performing with long time collaborators Röyksopp along with Robyn and Lykke Li. For this she is dressed as an owl. Naturally. Röyksopp were great, but for me they just can't compete with the the haunting weirdness of Fever Ray's performance. There are a lot of great Scandinavian singers around at the moment, and three of them are here tonight but Karin Dreijer Andersson has got to be the best of them. And by far the strangest.
Ether 09