"Everybody right now in the 21st century is orientated towards innovation and creativity, as never before. Apple is a design company, an innovator, not a technology company."
Professor David Kirsh, University of California, San Diego
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Dancing with Science
Since 2003 Wayne McGregor has been collaborating with cognitive scientists to generate new understandings of creativity.
Whilst scientists have studied the visual arts, very little work has been done in the field of dance.
McGregor has been working with Dr Philip Barnard (MRC Cognition and Brain Unit at Cambridge) to understand, amongst other things, how to disrupt the messages in the brain to make someone discoordinated.
During this creative collaboration process he's learnt that before the body can move, the brain has to generate imagery. Dr Barnard has identified that we can build three types of imagery; verbal/auditory, visual or deep schemer (from instinct, emotion and experience).
Each of these are created through a different mental loop. McGregor is passionate about understanding the brain so he can unlock a new way to create dance:
"If you're always imagining in the same way, you're always moving in the same way."
He's applying this knowledge to generate unusal imagery and is creating beautiful and ground-breaking dance in the process.
His latest work is FAR.
Technology x Music x Art
These three ingredients are "coming together to produce radical new interactive forms" (Dazed & Confused).
Led by a new school of directors from Warp Films.
"The uneasy marriage between art and technology has gone from strength to strength since the birth of the net. Armed with a grab-bag of raw data and lines of code, creative technologists have developed a range of artistic forms - from image patterns that grow organically on screen, to repurposed video game engines. The impulse is subversive and playful - a digital decoupage that revisits early web design and drags it kicking and screaming into the here and now."
Aaron Meyers (the guy who did Radiohead's awesome House of Cards video):
Tron's Legacy
"Without Tron there would be no Toy Story"
John Lasseter, PIXAR.
Robot Opera
Tod Machover has been dubbed "America's most wired composer."
A renowned musician and forward-thinking inventor of music technology, he is Head of the Hyperinstruments/Opera of the Future group at MIT Media Lab and has collaborated on projects with Peter Gabriel and Prince. He also invented the interactive Brain Opera which set the technological template for Guitar Hero and twenty three years ago he created an opera called VALIS based on the Philip K Dick novel of the same name.
He's currently working on a robotic opera (that's been ten years in the making) called Death And The Powers.
Machover is naturally restless and experimental. He's always finding new ways to mix technology and music together.
In the same vein, and at the same time, Daft Punk are combining Classical music with Electronic sounds to create an Orchestral score for the year's biggest Sci-fi spectacular Tron: Legacy.
Not long until that drops. Can't wait.
Summer Shots
Peter Dench travelled the country this summer to capture the colourful and quirky images of a 21st Century English summer.
Me, Me, Me
Interesting art project that explores our growing obsession with beauty and the things that define people's personal identity in the modern world.
"Love Me explores the insidious power of the global beauty industry and our collective insecurity, vanity and fear of ageing."
