Politics, Friends, Hardware Hacking, Art, Books

Today we went into Bristol city centre and visited the Occupy event
there. We were on our way to an artist's community event where
Bristol Hackspace were also attending with their box
of hardware awesome. More of that in a moment.


Acting on the request of Bristol's excellent netizen, and scourge of
evil, @wood5y we delivered a note to Bristol City Council requesting
that they stop exporting UK tax monies to Microsoft. There are
excellent Free Software alternatives and very good reasons to adopt
them, chief among which is the very low cost of deployment and the
ability to audit the source code.

Outside the Council House the Occupy movement were singing songs, and
we stopped for a while. There were not as many people there as I had
hoped, certainly no where near as many as the first time we happened
upon a protest there. I considered sending the boys around handing
out raisins and water, but possibly that will be better received a
bit later, when they have been there a while.

I have mixed feelings about this movement, but I certainly appreciate
the animating spirit behind it. We have also decided to change our family web photograph policy a bit.

On the way down to Bedminster for the Art and Hardware we had a
climb, a nosh and met another pirate (only in Bristol?) who bade us
"Arrr...!"
He had a whopping great Skull and Crossbones flag, and I assume he
was on his way to raid the banking lanes.

The BV Studios event was brilliant, it was a
great feeling to be back around so much art, multiplied by the
technology display from http://bristol.hackspace.org.uk/ and again by
meeting up with some friends:
ElThommovideo

I asked a lot of the artists if I could photograph and blog their
work, so there are some photos below. If any of these are yours and
you want them re-labelled, a link added to another site, or taken
down, please don't hesitate to get in touch stuart at alternicity dot
com or @alternicity on twitter.

 An old friend from my own childhood, and an Arduino powered xylophone.

 Art from technology.

 A bird and a cage, in front of a painted panel. Unsure of Artist.

 CaesarX play with a music making Unicycle.

Unknown Creature Sculptures.

Microscopic Creature of the type that attacks bees, by Artist Alice Forward.

Conway's Game of Life. You can try this yourself

Boxing Master. There were several versions of him, as you can see. There is something practical to be learned from this. These, and the laughing fatman below are, I think by sculptor Gareth Pitt.

This dance was like tap dancing, only with many downward arm movements. Full on.

I'm going to include a few more pictures in this first draft blogpost, and they are going to be by awesome artist Phil Young of dendrophile.co.uk 

Oh alright a few more pics:

A Makerbot! You have no idea how badly we want one of these.
All in due time...
Also pictured above is some of the plastic objects made with it.

Cubic Topology, Unknown Artist.

Varnished Oils, by Molly Behagg.
That's me in the reflection though.

It really was excellent to see and interact with; the place was huge, and
after about 10 minutes trying to keep track of the boys, I decided to
let them wander off, and get involved with whatever took
their fancy. I wandered off myself. The pictures don't cover half of it!

The main corridor also reminded me of the rebel base on Hoth, which I
liked, and there is a large park nearby, although we didn't need
it today. I want to live nearer this part of the city now, and rent an art space here.

On the way back North, we stopped off and bought some books,
unusually for us. Here is this weeks haul:

And you know what?
It was a long day. More tomorrow, most likely. I have more to upload and relate, and we may even go back down there.