Locked in Place

Sculpture of keys in an empty shop in Byres Road.

Codebreaking

I spent the last few days down in Leeds at the CBBC Live event running digital making workshops with some of the team from CoderDojo.    We were saving the world from the evil Crime Minister with the help of M.I. High's agents and our young agents-in-training; an endeavour which involved web-programming, ciphers, and steganography.  Fortunately all went well and the world was saved (five times).

Rose, me, Oyiza (who plays Aneisha), Oscar (who plays Tom), Craig and Dan after the final workshop.

Leeds from my hotel room (both ways up).

And at night.

One of the many interesting sculptures round the city.

Silver Shell

Petunias on the IMAX at Glasgow Science Centre (using Blender).

Beat the Dust

I was really pleased to get a poem in volume II of Beat the Dust's Literary Experiment edition:

"Inspired by the idea that no piece of writing is ever truly finished, we asked writers to take what they consider to be an interesting last line of any published novel, short story, poem or song, and use it as the first line of a new piece of flash fiction or poem"

Mine is based on the last line of Charles Simic's "Popular Mechanics" and can be found here.  (Volume I is still online and is well worth a read too). 

Each entry also includes the writer's top 5 song intro/outros.

Holga

Got the prints back from the aforementioned trip to the Botanics, although there were only two that were really even slightly interesting:

this sundial with superimposed flowers

And this one with a strange flower and superimposed lacy plants in the bottom right.

However, I also put in a film that had been in the camera and exposed, but which I couldn't remember actually taking.  This turned out to be shots of the park in fog and worked rather better:

Reflected chutes

A memory of leaves (I quite like this one - it has a vaguely tintype feel to it)

Foggy

Branching

Swan on ice

Swans reflected

Found Plays

I've recently been fascinated by the Found Plays the Royal Court Theatre are collecting as part of their "Open Court" series.  According to the website:

"A Found play can be an overheard conversation, one side of a telephone call or a magazine article that you think belongs on stage."  

Particular favourites include "Evangelical Dave" and "Who Killed the Seagull".

This seemed a useful destination for the results of my terrible habit of writing down bits of overheard conversations in coffee shops/on buses/etc., specifically "A Photogenic Memory".   

Statuesque

I was at the Botanics yesterday with Morag for an experiment in double exposures that went from "very controlled conditions" on Morag's part as she had a new 10 year old Canon EOS film camera with multiple exposure setting, to "no control at all" on mine with my Holga. We traipsed round the equatorial reaches of the Kibble dodging multiple weddings and their photographers and indoor rain from the sprinkler system, double-exposing anything that didn't move.   The film is currently in Snappy Snaps, but I also took these with Hipstamatic, though on reflection it might have been better to take them first to see what worked (which equally might just have taken the fun right out of it).

 

I think this statue is "Ruth", with some giant purple oxalis flowers and leaves overlaid.

More Biblical statues "The Sisters of Bethany" with some sort of large, fig-like leaves.

"Cain" wrapped in reflections.

I failed to read the name of this statue - but she's probably not biblical, as she lacks clothes and isn't Eve (she's round the corner and on the pictures being developed).

Emoticon Hamlet

I finally found out what the cube-headed men quoting Shakespeare on the walls are: Emoticon Hamlet, a project by Australian artist Peter Drew.  It turns out he was also behind the mysterious pictures of people on the walls in Ashton Lane a while back...