That Was The Week That Was — 15th December 2019

It seems next year the theme is one of collaboration if this week's phone conversations is anything to go by. The last few weeks have been quiet but as often happens, I'm now getting various agencies and people contacting me for upcoming projects. I imagine many think when you get to a certain point in your career work just falls from the sky in droves. I find it's more like droughts followed by torrential down pours.

Apparently my most listened to artist in the last year according to Spotify was Jack White. I think that was largely spurred on by my visit last year to Detroit and White's record shop where I bought some Stripe's seven-inch vinyl.

Offf and Ideal told their Instagram followers about my upcoming free talk on the 19th December in Barcelona. The venue looks really impressive so can't wait to step into that space with its 360 degree projection and talk Data and Art.

The end of the week was hard for family reasons that I won't go into here — including having to cancel a planned podcast interview because of it, but it also ended with me doing the music and operating the lighting rig at the Christmas party my sister organised for her son's class. The desk and rig was impressive for a church hall, though I don't think the kids appreciated my highly curated dance playlist, preferring to mainly run around screaming for the most part. Still it was all appreciated by everyone there and I had fun messing with the Gobo lights. I did find a very cool piece of software from Rogue Amoeba called Farrago, which is a soundboard app for triggering sound fx on demand really easily. Came in useful.

I did some new experiments in Houdini, playing with inflating type using Vellum, using some of my favourite fonts from the Font of the Month club. The chosen word seemed to sum-up the week.

Very much enjoyed — if that's the correct word — Destroyer starring Nicole Kidman

Had an enquiry about an outdoor screen installation in Dubai — we'll see if it comes to anything.

Made an animation of flying baby Trumps just for fun after downloading this free model. Actually did it to also learn how to map textures onto imported 3D models — weirdly something I'd never done before in Houdini. A Principal Shader and importing the texture did the trick. Everyday is a school day.