Sean Clark - Page 2

Cuttlefish.Com (2001 - 2005)

I left Headland at the end of 2000 to form my own company Cuttlefish.Com with the aim of further developing both my commercial Web design and creative interests. It also allowed me to put some disappointments with the ownership of Headland behind me. I initially based myself in the Charnwood Arts office in Loughborough, before moving to my own office space. During this period Cuttlefish grew to employ five people gained commercial clients such as David Wilson Homes, Charnwood Borough Council, Leicestershire County Council, Andy Reed MP and the Leicester Shire Economic Partnership. In 2004 we moved to a large town-centre office in Loughborough that provides us with ample space for our commercial work as well as giving me my own multimedia studio. My creative work also progressed. In 2001 I toured with the band Zion Train providing live visuals at shows around Europe, including the Glastonbury Festival, and at a show at the 2001 solar eclipse festival in Zambia. I continued to work with ex-members of Oscillate (now Modulate) and other artists in Birmingham, formed new collaborative partnerships and with the support of an Arts Council grant in 2003 have been able to develop my own style of visual work using the Max/MSP/Jitter software.

2002

One of Cuttlefish's commercial services is a multimedia Content Management System that we began developing in 2002. It has undergone a number of development cycles and now allows sophisticated standards-based Websites to be built via a Web-based Interface. The software has been used in many of our arts-based Websites as well as in our commercial work. In 2002/03 I worked on a research project with Coventry University called UNITE. This involved me developing an XSLT-based user interface to a multimedia communication system. The European Union funded project had partners from France, Israel, Germany, Holland and Portugal, as well as the UK. This led to a significant amount of travel, including a week spent working at IBM Haifa, Israel.

2004

In 2004 I played a number of live shows with Leicester band Chin Chin, including the Big Chill and Summer Sundae Festivals. These performances made use of my new approach to live visuals which was based around producing simple video elements that were mixed live using Max/MSP/Jitter in response to the live audio.

Cuttlefish Multimedia Ltd / Cuttlefish Digital Arts (2005 - 2006)

As of April 2005 Cuttlefish.Com formally became Cuttlefish Multimedia Ltd, and was joined by Cuttlefish Digital Arts. The purpose of this restructure was to give the commercial and creative sides of the company the opportunity to develop individual identities as they continued to grow. It also allowed me to make Cuttlefish's first two employees - Anthony Dickens and Jude Venn - co-directors of the new Limited company.

2005

2005 proved to be a good year both commercially and creatively for Cuttlefish with existing business relationships cemented and new ones established. In particular, our commercial work with Leicestershire County Council, Charnwood Borough Council and David Wilson Homes progressed very well with much of our activity being related to XML Web Services. Creatively, I began working more closely with a number of new collaborators, including Leicester electronic music company Bathysphere and theatre company Metro-Boulot-Dodo. I started 2005 working with Metro-Boulot-Dodo on their 'Under Pressure' performance at Melton Mowbray Theatre. I then worked with poet and artist Raman Mundair on an installation at the City Gallery in Leicester entitled 'A Choreographer's Cartography'. This was followed by live multimedia shows with Bathysphere artists 'Chin Chin' at The Phoenix in Leicester and Summer Sundae later in the year. In 2005 I also began to undertake more educational work and started to offer digital arts training courses using Max/MSP/Jitter. I worked with Metro-Boulot-Dodo again in 2005, this time designing and helping to implement a control system for their large-scale installation project 'Spring'. This system used Max/MSP to allow 24 sensors wired to an I-CubeX control box to trigger audio played through 20 speakers around the installation. Toward the end of the year I worked with Bathysphere musicians The Buoys on another show at The Phoenix in Leicester. This time I synchronised video projections with DMX controllable lights with the aim of creating visuals that worked 'beyond the screen' of my typical video-based performances. I also worked with Bathysphere in 2005 to create a short film entitled 'Confluence' for showing in their Three Cities funded mini-cinema 'The Nanoplex'. The film combined photographs by Candice Moule and George Harris with music by Steve Gibbs. The visual and audio sides of the film were highly synchronised using a patch programmed using Max/MSP/Jitter.

2006

I started 2006 with the goal of making sure I documented my creative work better. To this end I began to regularly update my Cuttlefish Blog and started to upload archival material from earlier projects. By searching through old disks and computer I managed to find materials from Shamen, Zion Train, Oscillate shows as well as from early arts projects. I was particularly pleased to be able to restore a complete copy of the Shamen's Nemeton site from 1999 - a site that had been unavailable for a number of years following a server crash/hack. As well as hosting Shamen projects (including the Axis Mutatis website from 1995), I now use Nemeton to host other music and arts projects from the era. In March I provided visuals for a SofaLofa show at the National Space Centre in Leicester. This was an interesting opportunity to experiment with a 360 degree projection screen. I returned to the Space Centre later in the year for the Moving Science digital arts/dance project which was a collaboration involving myself, visual artist Monica Fernandez and a group of professional dancers. In the summer of 2006 I began a part-time MA in Digital Arts at Camberwell School of Art, University of the Arts London. This two year programme of study aimed to combine my interest in "systems theory" with my digital arts practice and is documented on my www.autopoiesis.org.uk website. The programme proved to be very influential in the further development of my creative work. Other creative projects in this year included Counterpoint, a DNA sculpture with Geoff Broadway and technical development for Metro-Boulot-Dodo's 'Autumn' project. Cuttlefish Multimedia also continued to develop in 2006 with a steady expansion of its client base and a new version of the Cuttlefish Content Management System (CMS). A major update of our Pineapster music community took place, and Cuttlefish began to integrate a wide range of social networking tools with is websites.