The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement has gained unstoppable momentum. And thanks to the burgeoning mobile app market, employees have high expectations for these tools. They want an attractive user experience tailored to their devices. In other words, companies need to invest in building apps, period.

During my two decades of working in enterprise IT, I’ve observed the client-server revolution, the internet explosion and the service-oriented architecture (SOA) boom.

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We’re team Jatrobot and we’ve build an App that uses social interaction to plant the seeds of tree that can be used for a zero emissions bio-fuel.

Jatrobot Use Case
Automating the production of Bio Diesel through social interaction.

Jatropha Curcas: The Holy Grail of Bio-fuels

Sustainability

• Successfully Tested as Diesel Fuel
• Smoke-free
• Grows almost anywhere
• Can stand long periods of drought
• Suitable for preventing soil erosion and shifting of sand dunes
• Jatropha trees are productive for up to 30-40 years.
• 2,200 trees can be planted per hectare (approx 1,000 per acre).
• 1 hectare should yield around 7 tonnes of seeds per year.
• The oil pressed from 4kg of seeds is needed to make 1 litre of biodiesel.

In the early 80’s I was fortunate enough getting invited to exhibit at the Edinburgh festival or participate in its Fringe events. At the time, not thinking extraordinary to be dinning with Joseph Beuys, Jean Michel Basquiat , Mary Boone, Richard Demarco and Robert Fraser in an evening.  Here and now after decades of my greater involvement with technology I am getting invited to a different kind of occasions,  equally fantastic with promises in store at the Mobile World Congress 2012.

This time round it is to the MWC a jamboree of techno geeks & business leaders descending on the Northern Spain Gothic City of Modernismo and Gaudi.  Barcelona cultural city like its highland sister ciudad Edinburgh has also grown accustomed to many fringe events dotted around outside the Fira where the main congress is being held.

A cursory scan of MWC keynote speakers reveals an illustrious line up of industry giants  such as Brian Dunn (Best Buy), John Donahoe (eBay), Bret Taylor (Facebook), Eric Schmidt (Google), Vikram Pandit (Citigroup),

Ralph de la Vega (AT&T), Vittorio Colao (Vodafone),

Santiago Fernández Valbuena (Telefonica), Li Yue (China Mobile), Peter Chou (HTC) and William Clay Ford (Ford) are a handful representing  a wide range of interests from banking to retails, motoring and manufacturing.

There will be myriads of round tables, dinner festivities,  an assortment of all nighter hacketons,  promising a packed calendar of  events and interesting people to cohort with,  like  swedishbeers  an  amazing beer fest spearheaded by numero uno TechnoKitten > Helen Keegan not to be missed.

I came across a new kind of paint application, while mentoring at Seedcamp this year.  Psykopaint from a new startup brand, headed up by mad captain Mathiu Gosselin of Psykosoft .  Quite an achievement, I thought, from pretty much a sole developer. It is a paint application for the technically and artistically challenged, chancing their hand as budding even as skilled artists!

Initially looking at the demo presentation, one gets an impression that it is a kind of Photoshop filter but playing around, it proves to be much more dimensional. It is an ideal tool for the talentless artist brought up under the sterile regimes of current art school systems, especially those who saw it fit to ditch drawing lessons for classes in conceptual theory giving way to the creation and appreciation of  pickled cows.

It is your chance to impress everyone by creating striking imagery in all manner of bygone artistic styles. There is the opportunity to entertain diverse styles from Impressionism, Expressionism, Abstraction to Cubism.  You become an experimental painter without having to ever lift an actual brush or having to throw buckets of colourful concoctions at a single canvas.  It is surgically clean even when the outcome ends up much like a chaotic Pollock’s.

Let lose your creative Dada spirit and trust in automatons to lead the way: chances are that, you  will end up pleasantly surprised at, well, your  “creation”.

John Wieners (US, 1934-2002) – Strictly Illegal Poems “Strictly Illegal” is a collection of previously uncollected works by the American lyric poet John Wieners (1934-2002) compiled by Patricia Hope Scanlan. Wieners lived for his poetry and in Strictly Illegal in a fascinating Introduction, Jeremy Reed talks of this ‘outlaw poet’ who was ‘acutely damaged, lyrically in touch with pop, habituated to drink and pills, fine-tuned to sourcing subjects that aren’t usually in poetry’s domain, gifted with innate style in his look and poetry, linking his work daily to whatever came up in his life and could be made better by writing it down, and with no thought of money or career.’ The book is perfectly complemented by art from the British ‘outlaw’ artists Gilbert and George with such sensitive and courageously tentative works of theirs drawn from 1970s and 1980s. Wieners is essentially a love poet, recording emotional catastrophe; he writes in the way Billie Holiday sings, broken, blue and often behind the beat. He riffs: Oh listen to my words for I am wise I am like a lily fruit blooming in the wilderness. I write the same words again, sitting here with Charlie Parker and his rhumba band. I am one with the music, my cigarette stays on the top of the table. I have decided to write better prose. No one understands me when I speak in poetry. It is not madness. This sound, this syndrome 12/22 I pace the same ground as my forefathers, Let this be jagged, let this be a new continent. It is. My fingers are determined by the laws of the universe. They are writing this. I have no power over what I say. I am ruled by La CucuRacha. Go yells the Bubus from under her bedroom door. No she also says. And if this is madness it is divine. The lyric poet Lee Harwood explains that it was ‘John Wieners’ first book The Hotel Wentley Poems (published in 1958) … where so many of us fell in love with his work. He created poems that avoided the artificial language of the Poetic, of formal poetry. He avoided the bombastic rhetoric, you find at times in Allen Ginsberg, with its sense of authority. What he gave us, in a clear and direct language, were poems that are deeply moving and filled with a human warmth.’ The book sets out to act as a resource as well as a collection. There is a good cross section of Wieners poems from the small American poetry magazines in which they first appeared, and in which they have lain neglected until now. Strictly Illegal also includes poems from Wieners’ journal, some letters, and a couple of poems in draft form, showing his working process. This book is a must for all Wieners aficionados and a perfect introduction for readers new to his work. Please come to the launch or contact Patricia Hope Scanlan for any further information about Strictly Illegal (Tel: 01243 55230)

Strictly Illegal
Poems by John Wieners
Art by Gilbert & George
Selected and Introduced by Jeremy Reed
Compiled by Patricia Hope Scanlan

Book is Launched Next Friday to get a free invite please email

Patricia at arteryeditions@yahoo.co.uk

Hercules Fisherman

Official artist at  ” The biggest networking event of the year” London 2010

Participating in this exhibition of life drawings and paintings at Candid Arts Gallery

A chance to see example works of his Body Electric pieces

executed by Sumo brushes worked with Chinese ink on rice paper

Hercules is currently planning on series of timebased installations mixing Art & Technology, Examples of his previous installation works included “Portico” on Hapenny bridge Dublin, ArtHouse – Dublin, Paloma7 -Barcelona employing  server based live video, audio and computer generated images.

He is also helping  on a fundraising event for Cancer Research Foundation on 19th June this Year  (full details and links will be posted on here soon )

Private view at Candid arts this Thursday 12 May 6.30 -9 pm

Candid Arts Trust, 3-5 Torrens Street, London EC1V 1NQ.       Tel +44(0) 20 7837 4237.

Angel Tube b4 Islington Design centre

Art is commodified for it is no longer about the work, it is sold as an idea or a concept in nuances of a market.

What it purports to  centrally is its potential for an investment, favorite trends and media exposure.  It is the marketing drive that matters more than the quality or content.

Works of art, not what artist do, doing is a menial work delegated to others, Weiwei  at the Tate Modern makes a statement not painting  a bunch of sunflowers  withering away but getting millions of ceramic sunflower seeds meticulously painted by an army of cheap labourers.

These are factory produced, formulaic concepts where like in Damian Hirst out pours, automatons are employed to sticks insects on emulations, spin colours or put dots on canvases enmasse. Marketed Gucci style, flogged by marketing execs, its value systematically massaged through auction houses and flushed by a network of speculative investors.  We may laugh these off as a sign of our time and continue to do so for a little more while.
Duchamp the erstwhile father of conceptualism last piece,  which he worked on in secret for twenty years, at the same time as he was going around telling everyone of the  futility to continue making arts, more worthwhile to play chess he insisted. Duchamps swan song melancholically returns to its roots origin. Étant donnés  centre piece reveals a “body electric” figure laying in a romantic landscape holding an illuminating light.