Geoff and I made some good progress on the DNA sculpture this weekend. Geoff has been working on the double helix steel frame and the resin 'globes' that represent the base pairs, and I have sourced the lighting. I've gone for a type of LED lighting system called Triklits. I purchased two strings of lights plus a USB controller. The lights look great and I am now working out how to control them via a Max/MSP patch. You can see the latest pictures on my Flickr page.

Leicester theatre company Metro-Boulot-Dodo's latest show/installation finished its run at the City Gallery in Leicester last month.

Paul from the company brought me in to help with some of the video work on the project. In particular he wanted me to create a patch in Max/MSP that would allow up to five video projected screens to be controlled via a MIDI sequencer. This was quite an interesting challenge - especially since the computer they wanted to use for the task was a fairly old PowerMac G4.

Controlling the playback of videos in Max is very straightforward using the Jitter extensions together with the standard MIDI functions. However, the five screens was a bit of an unknown. While Macintoshes can happily drive multiple screens, how would the G4 cope?

In the end I found that adding a couple of dual-monitor Radeon 9200 (Mac Edition) cards together with an exsting single-monitor card I already had work pretty well.

While the older Mac was not able to run high-resolution video simultaneously on each screen, it was quite happy running medium resolution video on 2 or 3 of the 5 screens at once and showing stills on the others.

It proved to be a useful experience, and everything seemed to work well during the six week run of the show. The next challenge for me, though, is coming up with a system that can drive three HD (high definition) video screens at once from a single computer for a piece of work I am planning...

OK, I havn't been too good at updating my blog over the past month. But I have still been busy! I've updated my main blog on www.cuttlefish.org to document my activities over the past month and I will be pulling out specific issues and thoughts from them for this blog shortly. Honest.

I went over to Constanta in Romania in mid-September, in part to go to the 'SEAS Gathering' arts event, in part for fun and in another part to visit my place in Bulgaria just down the coast. I've uploaded a collection of pictures to my Flickr page.

One night on the train back from Leicester I discovered that my camera phone had a 'panorama' feature that allowed three images to be stitched together to form a single image. As I'm interested in the form of the triptych at the moment I thought I'd have a play.

I've uploaded a selection of images and a video from the 'Counterpoint' show I did with dancer Annie Ball and fellow digital-artist Monica Fernandez at Loughborough Town Hall on the 24th October. The show was a very good starting point for what we hope will be a on-going dance/digital arts collaboration. Visit the Counterpoint Web page for more details.

I've uploaded a few pictures of a work-in-progress 'DNA Sculpture' I'm doing with Geoff Broadway.

In the late 1990s I created a Web site for dub band Zion Train who were on China Records. "WobblyWeb" was filled with links to informative and bizarre sites selected by the band together with odd facts and general strangeness. Cuttlefish Multimedia still runs WobblyWeb for the current band - although it is now much more focused on dub music! The screen-grabs on this page were recovered from the archive.org "waybackmachine".

Gulp, a week's gone past I and haven't posted anything! I have been reading and researching online, but it has been a busy work for me at work and I haven't done as much as usual. I'm also starting to get ready for a Digital Arts and Dance show I'm involved in in a few weeks. I'll post some more about this sometime soon.

I've been researching "computational autopoiesis". This is a field of computing/mathematics that looks to simulate autopoietic systems using, typically, the tools and technologies developed in the field of artificial life.

Now, I was pretty sure that if there was one direction that my research wouldn't take me in then it was 'alife'. Not that I don't find it interesting in some respects, but aesthetically the idea of making work composed of blobs on a computer screen appearing to interact with each other doesn't appeal.

However, as is the nature of research, I'm finding my prejudices challenged over this topic. While, lot's of alife work *does* lead to blobs bouncing around computer screens, some of the underlying theory is actually rather good.

I'll introduce an 'alife' category in my del.icio.us links and see what else I can uncover that's of use.