Zane Berzina is a Latvian researcher working across the boundaries of textiles, electronics and theory to produce beautiful physical artefacts, with a strong focus on the design and production processes. Her recent practice, at LCF, manifest itself in a series of investigations using the skin as an analogy for textile surfaces to create "polysensual, therapeutic and interactive environments". She's now based at Goldsmiths, with links to the Constance Howard Resource and Research Centre in Textiles.

Her current work is, on display at the Science Museum's Dana Centre (last day today!), exposes the pervasive forces and potential of electrostatic in fabrics: E-Static Shadows.

It's the product of a two-year research project which is beautifully documented on her website. For those around London, there's a talk tonight exploring the issues surrounding this research:

How can electrostatic energy enhance the sensory experience of our surroundings? Join designer Zane Berzina, architect Jackson Tan and material scientist Mark Miodownik in our e-static shadows installation to talk future textiles. Explore the invisible forces of electrostatics in this night of playful interactions.

More information here.

Things change fast in the hypersphere. I've been absent for a couple of weeks, first journeying around Napoli on a working trip to EvoWorkshops 2008, then beginning intensive work on an electronics project that I'll outline shortly.

In the meantime, my friends seem to have sneakily entered productive overdrive with new written, drawn and photographed material from Scott, Mimi and Garry respectively. Mike has been involved in the Disclosures series at Gasworks, the Capsized Smiles have been furtively forging material for our impending EP, and new web projects are forthcoming from Julia and Josh (soon). Moreover, a plethora of excitable monome users have latched onto the alpha website for the Monome: Open Practice Project, an ongoing series of events that I'm involved in co-ordinating, so I returned to find a mass of unbelievable vimeo links of monome performances sitting in my inbox. Likewise, more news on this soon. Finally, my paper on AtomSwarm has been published as part of the proceedings of the above conference; to my delight, the nice people at Springer even corrected the shocking spelling error that I allowed into the camera-ready version ("anectodal", for reference).

There's also a frightening amount of exciting events happening in the next couple of weeks: lectures at Goldsmiths from Brian Massumi and Lev Manovich; a rare screening of Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europe Express at the BFI; the EYOE event series at the O2; Futuresonic festival in Manchester, and (later) Venn in Bristol; a They Did stall at the London Zine Symposium, alongside one from our cohorts at the Forest; and the first of a series of gigs that we'll be hosting in Herne Hill.

Yikes.