I went to see Nick Cave at the Royal Festival Hall in Nottingham on 1st February. Despite being billed as a 'solo' show, he was joined on stage by fellow Bad Seeds Martyn P. Casey on bass, Jim Sclavunos on drums and Warren "Dirty Three" Ellis on violin. What a great show it was, a full set of stripped-down Nick Cave classics that were reworked and re-interpreted to suit the smaller band. Plus two encores. The guy is an inspiration.

Sean Clark will be perfoming with SofaLofa as part of a unique multimedia show at the National Space Centre in Leicester on the 18th March 2006. Stay tuned for more information about this special event.

Happy New Year to all of our friends and collaborators and stay tuned for some exciting new Cuttlefish Digital Arts projects in 2006!

Friday 2nd and Saturday 3rd December saw the latest Pineapster night at the Swan in Loughborough and then Club Sporadic.

The Pineapster night was packed, with a sell-out crowed being treated to a night of Pinapster bands.

We've really got this event running well and will be organising more monthly nights in the new year starting in February.

Club Sporadic was a little less busy, but still fun with some excellent music. In particular, Murray's 'Failed NASA Experiment' (pictured) was most enjoyable. I also performed my 'Not For Sale' Crass AV set.

Visit the Club Sporadic site for a full review of the event.

I thought I'd try to fit three things in to one blog posting today.

Firstly, I've updated the Cuttlefish AV podcast with a new video using the 'boats' footage I shot in Ireland last month. The music is a rehersal version of a Buoys track called 'Augusta'.

Secondly, this week and next I am running Max/MSP/Jitter workshops as part of the Radiator Festival. I think there are still some places available.

Finally, I will be doing my Crass Not For Sale show at Club Sporadic on the 3rd December at The Swan in Loughborough. Come along if you fancy seeing multimedia-anarcho-punk-thought-provoking madness.

We have been getting very excited about Podcasting recently - especially video podcasting. As a tool for independent and experimental film-makers to distribute their work it really is unbeatable. Our first video podcast 'Cuttlefish AV' can be found on our new Cuttlefish TV page, or via Apple's iTunes Music Store by searching for 'cuttlefish' or 'Sean Clark'. There are three video clips ups there are the moment, with many more to follow.

Sean Clark will be running two Max/MSP workshops at the Radiator Festival towards the end of November. Details are available from their Web site.

We have started to upload video footage from our archives and podcasts to the new Google Video service. Go to video.google.com and search for "Sean Clark" to find our clips.

Our busiest Pineapster at the Swan so far saw Toy Heroes, Vitriol ID, Hinterland and One Dog Clapping (pictured) go down down a treat. Make sure that you all come along to next month's event and see if we can completely fill the place...

The first Buoys show took place in Leicester at the Phoenix tonight. It was part of the second Bathysphere Nights event, which featured The Dead Texan headlining.

My contribution to The Buoys' performance was video projections and live lighting control.

The video projections were based around my usual themes of flow, rotation, connectedness and the subjective passing of time, and I had produced a completely new set of materials for this event.

The lighting control was also completely new, but more in the sense that this was the first time I had attempted to to take charge of the lights for a live event like this!

Technically, it was all done via the magic of DMX. For the show, I enhanced my usual live video mixing Max/MSP/Jitter patch to allow me to control the lighting rig via an Enttec DMX controller (which worked flawlessly).

I kept the lighting simple. Twenty-four lights (Par Cans) were arranged in six banks of four, with the outer two banks being used for sound responsive 'chases'.

The central four banks were used slightly differently. These were configured to 'wash' the surround of the projection screen and the stage with coloured light that reflected the colours that could be seen in the video. I did this by using the Cyclops extension to Max to track the colours in the video and produce four representative RBG values. I then set the light combinations in each bank to match these values.

I think it worked OK. The effect I was after was to attempt to break the video projection out of its usual rectangular box through the use of responsive light and this was certainly achieved in part In the future I would probably prefer to use combinations of 'colour changer' lights rather than attempting to mix the colours via 'gelled' Par Cans, but it was a good experiment.

There are pictures and video clips on The Buoys Web page.