A couple of weekends ago, we went to go check out Bristol as Ive never had a proper look around there.

Ive always been impressed by the creative output of the city, After all in recent times Bristol has brought us Banksy, Aardman and Will Barass amongst other things.

In the last 3-4 years Ive been finding some of my favourite musicians have been coming from Bristol. Joker, Gemmy and Ginz have been creating a new sound they they call ‘Purple’.
As Joker says: ‘Purple is a colour’ . Their truly unique sound is characterized by 8bit soundscapes and a melodic and mellow interpretation of Dubstep and Grime genres. Sonic the hedgehog’s soundtrack was obviously a massive influence on Joker’s synaesthetic melting pot of influences.

In these days of instant cultural Cross-pollination on the internet (yes I can see the irony here!), its great to see a city with such a unique and fiercely guarded identity.

The big surprise of the trip for me was the discovery of Paris’s new abstract murals scattered around the city on walls and various vehicles. I think fellow Bristolian Mr Jago, and also the stuff Futura2000 did for DJ krush’s Holonic album must have been an influence as all signs of any letter-forms have almost completely melted away in this new work. Great stuff.

For this year’s Bigman Christmas card I decided to use our Truchet++ program (see earlier post). To get the effect I wanted, I added functions for how randomized or true to the original image the colours were, and a small chance of the grid size doubling.

I’ve been having tons of fun with this so keen to develop it further, next on the list is a whole heap of animation parameters for making ‘tangram-ized’ video.

Ive been experimenting for the last year or so with a mix of aerosol paint and paint pens on paper.
Its a new, raw, fast and dirty style for me, no doubt induced by hours of painstaking photo-realistic work in the day job!

hoping to get together enough to show in 2012.

As a kid, when my ZX spectrum used to frustratingly crash mid game I used to find some consolation in the beautiful colourful images it would generate if you so much as looked at the joystick interface.

Ive been getting more and more obsessed with the use of digital artifacts as an artform in their own right

Wired Magazine have a good article on it.

Wikipedia have a few bits

Youtube has lots of cool stuff including the original data moshing trilogy

Heres an out-take from one of my 3D scenes.

Ive just ordered this cool looking book from Mark Batty publishers, cant wait to read it