We ran our latest Stench night on Saturday 12th. This was the first full Stench event to take place at The Independent Arts Centre on Humberstone Gate in Leicester. The venue seved us well and the audience was treated to some great electronic music and visuals. See the event's Pineapster page for pictures.

I gave a talk at Amplified Leicester today about pervasive media and mobile mapping today. We discussed the ways in which the Internet is changing from being 'location independent' to highly 'location aware'. The group displayed a great deal of interest in the topic and I hope to be able to work with them on projects in the future. See http://amplifiedcity.typepad.com/leicester/ for more information about the Amplified Leicester project.

I've uploaded some new videos to my YouTube account at http://www.youtube.com/user/seancuttlefish. They include a live performance by Peter Wyeth at Stench, Morgan and Parkin doing their comedy styings, Penfold Gate playing at the Pineapster Party and a trip through a Bulgarian town...

Stench ran an event at the OXJAM festival this weekend. Artists performing included Neal Unreal, Annelie Nederberg, Myoptik, James Kelly and Peter Wyeth. See the event's Pineapster page for pictures and video.

We hosted our first Pineapster event at The Art Organisation / Independent Arts Centre on Saturday 24th October. The event was part of the FD2D weekender - which saw events all around the Cultural Quarter in Leicester. Attendees were treated to some great music from Loughborough bands Penfold Gate and 40 Horses (pictured), plus an outside fire show. Pictures can be found on Flickr.

Today I start my PhD in the School of Art and Design at De Montfort University in Leicester. My supervisor will be Professor Martin Rieser and the subject is broadly the application of system theory to digital arts practice. It sort of takes off where my Masters work finished and will also be documented at www.autopoiesis.org.uk.

I arrived in Bulgaria again earlier in the week. I'm here for about 18 days, sorting out the house, reading in preparation for the start of my PhD, watching films and generally feeding my head! As an aside, I'm also doing some filming for a friend's band. The aim is to make a couple of videos while I'm here.

Today's filming took place in an old Bulgarian theatre in Dobrich. Maybe a 200 capacity place with velvet seats and classic wooden stage.

Apparently the next location lined up is a gypsy barbershop in General Toshevo. Should be an interesting place to shoot to say the least!

Looking through my pictures of Shambala this year I was reminded of the best random thing I saw. On Sunday afternoon we were walking past the Hurley Burley cafe (above) when all the cafe staff stopped serving and performed a great dance routine to "One Day Like This" by Elbow. It was very, very, good :-)

I always enjoy the Shambala Festival. It's relatively close (just south of Market Harborough), it's just the right size (Glasto's to big for me these days!), and I always bump in to plenty of people I know there.

This year I worked again with Modulate doing laser projections in the woodlands area. Modulate produced an amazing lighting installation using 40 light-fulled water containers and a multi-speaker sound system. My lasers slotted in nicely at the back to add some height to the lighting.

An added bonus was getting to catch-up with Zion Train who were playing on the main stage on Saturday. I hadn't seen them properly since around 2002/3 when I finished doing shows with them as their projection guy. It was a great opportunity for a bit of a reunion.

See my pictures from the event on my Flickr page.

We relaunched the Stench 'innovative performance' community in March 2009 with a show at The Phoenix in Leicester. This was followed by another Phoenix event in June.As part of the Summer Sundae Fringe we thought it would be good to host a 'mini-festival' at The Great Central gallery in Leicester.

'Stenchival' took place on 7th and 8th August. The first night was curated by Bathysphere and the second by PVC. Audience sizes were small but reasonable and all of those involved gave good feedback.

Both events were broadcast live on the Internet via Ustream and have been well-documented on Flickr and YouTube. See the past events page on the Stench website for details.