Imperial's Complexity and Networks group are hosting a day-long meeting on music, beauty perception and neuroscience this coming May (Wednesday 19th). With a focus on the neural correlates of creative and aesthetic processes, and the complex dynamics thereof, it's one not to miss for art-and-emergence junkies.

See the attached list of talks (PDF) for more info.

The Goldsmiths Digital Studios (GDS) is a new audiovisual interaction laboratory here at Goldsmiths, University of London. We're celebrating its opening with GDS EXPO 2010, a day of seminars, installations and performances taking place next Wednesday (17 Feb).

As part of the launch, I'll be showing a new AV work in the studio's ambisonic space, hooking into the 3D motion capture and projection system. Above is an advance screen grab; more info, video and code coming soon...

In T-minus one week, it's the second edition of our new monthly night of cosmic sounds at 93 Feat East, Signals From The Cosmos.

This month we have joined forces with London record label Thisisnotanexit (responsible for records from artists such as Hatchback, Detachments, Brain Machine and Spectral Empire) to celebrate their latest release, the new Ultralight EP from soon to be massive Canadian duo Parallels. Unfortunately we can't afford to get Parallels to London to play for us, but we do have TINAE label boss Simon A. Carr performing a rare DJ set. Expect future music of the highest order.

In addition we will be giving away a copy of this awesome record to one lucky winner. Best of all, entry is free.

Featuring:

Simon A. Carr (Thisisnotanexit)
http://www.thisisnotanexit.net

and your regular hosts:

Urlaubshits
http://www.urlaubshits.co.uk

Ad Hoc
http://www.adhoc.fm

Also find us on Facebook or last.fm.

This Thursday at the ICA, I'll be DJing to a night of live drawing by Mimi and Tom, as part the regular Heavy Pencil series. The idea is that I'll be creating live remixes of their own sound work, interspersed with tracks selected by them, for a kind of sensory cross-pollination: drawing in response to music in response to drawing, ad infinitum. It'll be great fun having such a wild and weird sonic (and visual) palette to work from.

Signals From The Cosmos is a new monthly residency at 93 Feet East that I am beginning this week (as Ad Hoc), alongside Scott Urlaubshits. Guests this month are the West End Boys, formerly of La Supercool Discotheque. We'll be playing (and I quote) cosmic disco, mutant house, future acid, radiophonic techno and low slung dubbed out grooves.

We're aesthetically angling it somewhere in the retro-futurist continuum somewhere between 1950s American comics and the cold-war Soviet space race. Here's the first flyer of the series...

If you're socially disposed, send a transmission to our Facebook group or MySpace profile.

I'll also be debuting a series of experimental live video pieces to accompany the night. The first is a live video kaleidoscope, created in a few fun minutes playing with Apple's Quartz Composer.

Not one, but three What They Could Do, They Did-related events this week for your delectation, all with free entry as usual...

The Pictures (Barden's Boudier, Wednesday 18 Feb)
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=26568428070
The latest installment of London's most entrenched underground film club, curated by Garry Sykes. This month featuring "Silver Jew" (exclusive UK screening), live music from Trace Fluids and The Super Shirani Nitemare Band, plus Boring Girls DJs, bingo, free popcorn...

A+B=C
Escape, Herne Hill, Thursday 19 Feb)
http://www.theydid.org.uk/2009/escape/

All bases are manned with our thrilling collaboration with Brighton's Beatabet collective (beatabet.net) for this month's Escape, featuring AK/DK, The Beatabet Band, The Capsized Smiles and so very much more.

"In C"
The Rochelle School, Arnold Circus, Saturday 21 Feb, 3pm
http://www.theydid.org.uk/2009/in-c/

As part of the "24 Fragments" event (thefragmentedorchestra.com), we're performing Terry Riley's classic piece of unpredictable modern minimalism "In C" using a homebrewed ensemble specially trained for the purpose. Also accompanied by a talk by the Stroke Assocation.

So it seems that 2009 has hit the ground running with cultural happenings in S/SE London. The Goldsmiths institution of the Thursday Club, a mostly-weekly showcase for innovative new works, kicks off with two talks on sensory interfaces by Ryan Jordan and Artemis Papageorgiou (today, 15 January, free). This is followed by the first of the monthly Electronic Music Studios concerts (16 January, free), at which I'll be performing with AtomSwarm on their 8-channel diffusion system.

Also related to Goldsmiths, though taking place further north, is a 2-day show of events and performances organised by students from Goldsmiths MFA Curating and Royal College of Art Curating Masters. Contested Ground is at Project Space 176 in Chalk Farm this Saturday/Sunday (16-17 January, free). I'll be heading down with Mike and others for the series of multi platform events on Saturday, followed by the amusingly-nomenclatured "artist disco" in the evening.

Gasworks in Vauxhall, meanwhile, is staging a radiophonic intervention by the Resonance FM Radio Orchestra on Friday (15 January, free) as part of its exhibition of South London artist-inventor Felix Thorn's amazing machines. Also features the long-awaited face off between sound theorist Nicolas Collins and SuperCollider/livecoding veteran Nick Collins, described in a mailout thus:

a live coding vs. live circuit building competition with Nick Collins (Sussex University) versus Nicolas Collins (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), vying for the annual award of the "Nic(k) Collins Cup," an exquisite ceramic vessel commissioned from Devon potter Nic Collins (no relation).

Finally, Herne Hill's 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning are hosting two further events as part of their current exhibition People, Signs and Resistance (28 Jan & 11 Feb, free). Next up is an audience with Sam The Wheels, a first-generation Jamaican migrant who arrived in London in the 1950s and has since been capturing video footage of the area which should be essential viewing for those interested in local heritage — through the Brixton Riots to their legacy.

So, the Edinburgh micro-festival is over, and echoes of megaphones, filmreels, synthesizers and lasers are beginning to fade to half-real memories. We'll be collating the photographic highlights on the What They Could Do website imminently. Many thanks to the wild assortment of friends, strangers and co-conspirators who made it the magic that it was...

I've been tasked with curating and co-ordinating this Thursday's episode of the monthly What They Could Do: Escape! event series. It's billed as "an "incandescent spectacle of all things electric", with the rough idea that each of the acts are working in some way with electricity - see the full lineup for more details. I'm particularly excited to finally be able to see the marvellous Strange Attractor vs Disinformation in the flesh, after recently catching screenings of their performances at Open Source City.

I've also used this as motivation to realise the long-germinating idea of the "Glitch-a-Sketch", a modified version of a TV Etch-a-Sketch game which will be projected onto a big screen at the event and playable by visitors. As the sketcher draws on screen, a second "player" can experimentally short-circuit the innards of the device via a series of exposed wires, creating chaotic glitch graphics as shown above.

I won't repeat verbatim what I've just written on the Ad Hoc blog - but I'm playing in this guise, along with the Capsized Smiles, in Herne Hill this Friday. Should be a good'un, and, like the rest of the WTCD: Escape events, it's freee.

I'm intending to curate one of the later editions of the Escape series, and have been harvesting appealing propositions from around the UK for a riotous bleepfest. More on this soon.