Art Thing

My new website art-thing.co.uk has come a little bit closer. Art-thing is going to be a place to find exhibition listings, artist’s opportunities, galleries guides and books – orientated at the more contemporary / conceptual end of things, but hey, anyone is welcome…

We will be looking for contributors to write reviews and keep up to date with what’s on, but the whole point is anybody can write a review, anybody can add a show they loved (or hated).

Art-thing.co.uk - reviews, listings, opportunities and books

If you would like to contribute or get involved in testing the site please send me a message and we will get in touch.

Art-thing book shop

The one thing up and running so far is our Artist’s Book shop with an ultra secure checkout powered by Amazon. We will regularly be updating the books to include editors choices, must have books for students etc.

Chocolate Factory Open Studios

Chocolate Factory Open Studios

Nothing to do with me, just a bit of shameless PR for my friends Sean, Claire and Nick who do have a studio there.

(BTW I used to have a studio in a completely different place, but which was also coincidentally called the Chocolate Factory…)

Sat 24 Nov 2007 – Sun 2 Dec 2007

The Chocolate Factory N16
Farleigh Place
Stoke Newington
London
N16 7SX

[email protected]

020 7503 7896

EXHIBITION AND SALE OF: CERAMICS, PAINTINGS, SCULPTURE, FINE ART, FASHION, HOME ACCESSORIES AND MORE

Opening times:

Saturday 24 November, 10am-6pm,
Sunday 25 November, 12noon-5pm,
Saturday 1 December, 10am-6pm,
Sunday 2 December, 12noon-5pm

The Chocolate Factory artist studios (N16) open their doors to the public. A hidden gem and hive of local creativity the Chocolate factory has long housed a diverse community of creative practitioners that has attracted interested locals, discerning shoppers and art buyers, hunting for unique and exceptional finds. Now following the addition of 14 new studio units the Chocolate Factory has become home to double the creative talent.

Chocolate Factory boasts one of the most eclectic mix of disciplines and talents under one roof. Unique ceramics, contemporary paintings and sculpture, exclusive fashion, illustration and home accessories are all on display to make the Chocolate Factory Winter Open Studios weekend the perfect opportunity for discovering some of freshest new local talent and buying some of the most covetable products.

Big Issue Article

I had a brief mention in the Big Issue Magazine recently about the ‘Stream‘ exhibition.

John Elliott has transformed the Wagon gallery at Tiverton Museum with Stream, an installation of more than 200 multicoloured butterflies dancing in swirls and eddies bewteen the wooden carts and hay wains, as the water onec flowed past Constable’s. It is inspired by the amazing huge butterflies he encountered on a trip through the Bolivian Rainforest, thier natural beauty replicated in plastic and steel against the organic wood of the ancient farmingmachinery, reminding us of our uneasy realtionship with nature.

Sarah Jane Downing
Big Issue South West September 10 -16 2007 No.578 p.37

I feel… everything

Recently my friend and ex colleague Hannah Storie pointed me towards a wonderful piece of online art called ‘We Feel Fine’ http://www.wefeelfine.org. We feel fine is a work of art both on the level of… well art and looks to be a beautiful demonstration of the programmer’s art. As an artist and as a programmer I feel many things… Jealous (but in a positive way), inspired, touched… it makes me feel lighter of spirit.

To tell the truth I had almost given up on the idea that (great) art could happen on the medium of the computer screen. I’ve tried – the results have been so so… and i can’t really think of anything much I’ve seen that works…

There is a great deal of beauty on the internet… films, photographs, design, typography but this isn’t art. The power of art is that it transcends, but there is no route to it because it is about errors and leaps of faith and the spaces between things (both physical and notional). I used to love the work of Jared Tarbell at www.levitated.net (actually I still do) but it always felt trapped by the screen and seems infinitely better now it has escaped into art galleries (I haven’t seen any pieces in the flesh but would love to)…

Anyway back to ‘We Feel Fine’… they describe waht they do far more elegantly than I could…

Mission

We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

Go and see it today – now.

We Feel Fine

We Feel Fine