I'm just back from a 4 day trip to Istanbul. It was a great opportunity to explore the city and take lots of pictures, videos and sound recordings. I've yet to sort through everything I collected, but my pictures can be found here on Flickr. The video material will probably see the light of day at a future Stench event.

February 3rd to 5th 2010 was a very busy time in London for people interested in digital arts. The Computer Arts Society held a one-day "Ideas Before Their Time" symposium, there was the two day V&A "Decoding the Digital" conference, plus the "Decode" and "Digital Arts Pioneers" exhibitions were on at at the V&A and their was the opening of the 2010 Kinetica Art Fair. See my pictures from the events here.

(Pictured above, Weave Mirror by Daniel Rozin)

I'm now over three months in to my PhD research and am starting to get my ideas together. I recently gave a short 'Petcha Kutcha' presentation at the IOCT about my research so far. It can be found on YouTube here.

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!