LCEA Alumni are graduates of the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts,
a post graduate research centre at Middlesex University in the UK.
Many alumni have set up their own new media businesses and consultancies.
Other alumni careers include graphic design, interactive media design,
new media research, game design, web site development and design,
animation, teaching, film making, audio design, journalism and various management
roles.
LCEA alumni have a good record for winning new media awards, including
BAFTAs, Milia, BIMA and others.
Edina's Blog
A Witch Stole My Kitchen Broom
Written by Edina Nasseri
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
I stumbled upon a very seasonal instructable from www.aranamuerta.com on how to create witch kitchen jars. The author uses everyday objects and ingredients to create these authentic looking objects. As if you’d just walked into a witches dungeon or lair. Not being a believer in the whole Halloween fiasco, I can see myself having these jars on my kitchen shelves just to scare off unwanted guests. God forbid I accidentally reach and grab the jar of Garden Gnome Heads rather than the jar of pickled onions! The website lists all the instructions step by step and although they seem quite a few of them, the end result I am sure will be well worth the effort.
The website is a treasure trove to those who like to build things from scratch. Or rather build scary things from scratch. I’ve come across instructions as to how to create a foam skull, mould of your hand, eye balls, winged demons, dragon skin, etc.
I don’t know what I would do if I were the director of flavour research and development at the International Flavours and Fragrances company. Perhaps as one of the biggest flavour companies in the West, I’d probably be tasting things! But right now, I’ll bet the real director, a Mark Dewis, is grinning ear to ear. Because he has created a million dollar machine called a Sepbox. According to him, there is only 5 in the whole world, a machine that can separate compounds according to their chemical affinity with certain solvents and resins.
The instrument fills the laboratory room from the floor to the ceiling and resembles a small building with steel tubing attached to it. It is basically, a high performance liquid chromatograph. Dewis keeps stocks of food samples that he feeds to his steel pet. For example, if food scientists suspect that there might be a molecule in orange peel that makes citrus taste particularly fresh, Dewis feeds extracts of peel to the Sepbox. And the output is hundreds of chemical compounds which are separated into groups, for further analysis. Later, and perhaps of this discovery, a new flavour of energy drink hits the market.
Taste research is no longer about asking housewives to munch on food morsels but it is about creating a taste experience. So say hello to the new and exciting world of the personally tailored mass produced food.
Being a huge Eagles fan, I was thrilled to hear that the group are to release their latest album ‘Long Road Out of Eden’ on the 30th October 2007. This will be their 7th studio album by the American rock band which formed in Los Angeles, California in the early 1970s.
Already having five number 1 hits and four number 1 albums, it’s obvious why they are among the most successful recording artists of that era. And at the end of the 20th century, their albums Eagles: Their Greatest Hits 1971–1975 and Hotel California ranked as one of the ten best selling albums as rated by the Recording Industry Association of America. How cool is that. I remember listening to Hotel California on repeat at home with my parents trying to get my air guitar riffs just perfect! According to the Rolling Stones magazine, the Hotel California album is rated as 37th in “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time” and the band is ranked 75th on the Rolling Stone’s (2004) list of 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.
There have been much talk of Lensbabies of late and I was thrilled to find out they had something (or everything) to do with photography. It may be weird but watching Most Haunted on this Halloween week special has made me think of the more macabre side of everything.
Basically, a Lensbaby is a type of simple camera lens which combines with bellows to create special effects on cameras which can accommodate interchangeable lenses. This is mainly restricted to the 35 mm or digital camera formats.
What is bizarre about the contraption is that the front can be manipulated off its axis to move the sharpest area of focus or sweet spot as it is called in the documentation. So you can create a sort of blurred of soft focus style to images especially for close up photography – even if what is to be blurred is the same distance as the unblurred object is to the camera. I’d like to say that you can create surreal looking images. There also appears to be some extreme spherical and colour deviations that occur around the sweet spot area. I guess that the Lensbaby effect is rather well suited to portraiture, some landscapes, and product photography.
The only thing though is that the Lenbaby lenses do not operate on automatic mode. This means that you have to work the camera the ‘old fashioned’ way using the manual mode. Check out the official site for more information: http://www.lensbabies.com/
I first came upon Joe Sacco’s book several years ago. My father had brought home some of his books (Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde to name a few) to review and catalogue them before displaying them in our bookshop, The Specialist Bookshop. Very simply put, I was completely amazed! I love comic books and I had only just discovered the wonders of the graphic novel. I do a little bit of sketching myself. I have even tried starting a comic book. As it is, I get enough inspiration from the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip panels that I love to read in the morning papers. But alas, the will to carry along a story left me. To be fair, my art seems to be reserved to a single page rather than a whole book. For the time being, I shall leave the graphic novels to the experts.
I was halfway over the moon to read that Joe Sacco will be in Seattle this Friday evening and Saturday afternoon. I didn’t manage to make it all the way over the moon as it occurred to me that, “…waitaminute…Seattle’s in the States…” He will be at the Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery celebrating the publication of the deluxe hardcover edition of ‘Palestine: The Special Edition’. What is so special about the book will be the inclusion of supplementary materials such as photographs, journal entries, sketches and more from his visit to the war torn region 15 years ago.
The event will be commemorated by two special events.
Friday, 26th October 2007 from 7:00pm - 9:00pm :: Fantagraphics will host an exhibition of Sacco’s original artwork from his book ‘Palestine’. Obviously, Sacco will be there to sign books too.Saturday, 27th October 2007 from 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm :: Joe Sacco will be discussing his approach to ‘comics journalism’. He covers conflicts from the Middle East to the Balkans. In addition to that, he will be touching on his pop culture and autobiographical works.
From what I hear, if you’re into Joe Sacco’s work (and you’re in Seattle then) then you’re in for a treat! I am sooo jealous as people who know say that Joe is a passionate, articulate and entertaining speaker.
Roger Arquer was born in 1975 in Barcelona. A year after graduating from his first degree in Design in ESBI, Barcelona, he moved to New York. There he worked as an industrial designer for about 4 years. He then moved to London where he did a Masters course in Design Products at the Royal College of Art. Seems like the man has been places! After the RCA, he set up a business in London.
Take one of his designs to catch mice in a ‘non-violent’ manner. He uses everyday household objects like clear drinking glasses, metal springs, paper clips, and a metal nut for this purpose. This "friendlier" mousetrap will probably not kill your rodent resident. But instead it will just provide an easy way for you to ‘shift’ the problem from being inside the house to one that is outside the house. Just wait until the rodents smell the cooking and get tired of foraging through the waist bins. The designer's intent is that you can re-use the objects that have been used to catch the mouse. Hmm, but I’d advice either washing it in Clorox or just buying yourself some new appliances!
I went to bed last night after everyone else did. It was strangely quiet and still. Earlier that day, the boiler had broken down and the cold coupled with everything else created a strange and eerie atmosphere. I had to sleep with my thick wool sweater on but stopped at wearing my beanie to bed. After all, the fashion police would be mortified if they were to ever see me like that. Stuffed to the brim with layer upon layer! I would have been more freaked out if I saw people peering at me (and grading me for my sleep clothes) while I slept…but that’s a separate issue.
Anyway, I lay my head down to sleep but sleep was far away. I was being kept on the edge of consciousness by this soft humming. I kept telling myself that the buzzing would mysteriously disappear but it OBVIOUSLY never did. After tossing and turning…debating with my self whether or not I should get up and investigate the origin of this buzz…I discovered that it was being emitted from my twin sisters DAB radio. I almost cried from the exhaustion and the ridiculousness of it all. I tried to unplug the cable from the power point but instead discovered that my darling twin had created a sorta mess of tangled wires and cables. Really, I was not getting into that right then and there! I think I must have fallen asleep through the buzz of noise anyway.
It was strange to then learn that San Francisco turned off their lights for an hour today. Perhaps they had a mechanical error with their breaker box but were too embarrassed to admit it. Covering up the blunder with an environmentally friendly tactic seemed the best way to save face! But giving them the benefit of the doubt, the main idea was to try and save 15% of the energy that would normally be used on an average Saturday night. San Francisco has also pledged to switch off non-essential lighting for an hour on The Golden Gate Bridge, The Bay Bridge, City Hall, Alcatraz and other parts of the city. Several restaurants will also host candlelight dinners that night. [I remember watching a film where a wife had prepared a candlelit dinner for her husband. When he returned from work and saw the table set and candles lit, he said, “…what’s all this?” The wife replied, “…I thought it would be romantic…” The husband said, “…Oh I thought you were trying to save electricity…”]
Still aching and throbbing. I used a euphamism to describe the pain to my sisters but will refrain from reproducing it here for the sake of the more delicate in constitution.
I was unpacking my shopping today when I dropped a can of soup of my toe! One thing Hollywood has taught me about such situations is to grab a piece of frozen meat and apply it to the affected area. Not being a meat eater myself, I grabbed the next best thing I had at hand. It was a 1.2 kg packet of frozen mixed vegetables. The cold didn’t really do any good. It froze my toe, is what it did. So hobbling about on a manky toe I started to check my emails.
I stumbled upon this Iraqi Canadian photographer called Farah Nosh. She graduated in 1998 from the University of British Columbia in Geography. Then in 2002, Farah Nosh undertook a diploma in photojournalism at the Western Academy of Photography in Victoria. Farah has worked as a freelance photographer in Iraq at the time when Saddam Hussein was still in power. It was during this time that her photographs appeared in New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, Marie Claire, The Globe & Mail, The National Post and The Toronto Star and Life Magazine. She has also photographed in Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, etc.
Iraq: As the Americans scuttle about searching for funding to help the many wounded veterans returning from the war/invasion, we sometimes may become blasé to the many more thousands in Iraq who have suffered equally horrific injuries. The difference is that the Iraqi’s don’t get to live out their one, two or three tours of duty in the warzone and then return to the relative comfort and security of another country. They have no way of receiving care and no way out. All of the sudden, my throbbing toe seems inconsequential.
"...I feel that the Iraq coverage has largely been disconnected from Iraqis...I moved around to several different neighbourhoods in Baghdad. I was becoming despondent at only seeing images of American soldiers returning from Iraq with brutal wounds. The Iraqi side -- which is much higher in number and mostly civilian -- was not being shown...I had read somewhere that for every American soldier killed or wounded there are 10-20 times the number of Iraqis...Something that amazed me about that trip was the amount of fear that I had built up in moving around and through different neighbourhoods. And yet in each of those homes, I was kissed by the women and children, fed, and welcomed with a hospitality that I had forgotten existed among Iraqis. It's the side of Iraq that the world has forgotten exists..."
grab the jar of Garden Gnome Heads rather than the jar of pickled onions! The website lists all the instructions step by step and although they seem quite a few of them, the end result I am sure will be well worth the effort.
I don’t know what I would do if I were the director of flavour research and development at the International Flavours and Fragrances company. Perhaps as one of the biggest flavour companies in the West, I’d probably be tasting things! But right now, I’ll bet the real director, a Mark Dewis, is grinning ear to ear. Because he has created a million dollar machine called a Sepbox. According to him, there is only 5 in the whole world, a machine that can separate compounds according to their chemical affinity with certain solvents and resins. 
Being a huge Eagles fan, I was thrilled to hear that the group are to release their latest album ‘Long Road Out of Eden’ on the 30th October 2007. This will be their 7th studio album by the American rock band which formed in Los Angeles, California in the early 1970s. 
There have been much talk of Lensbabies of late and I was thrilled to find out they had something (or everything) to do with photography. It may be weird but watching Most Haunted on this Halloween week special has made me think of the more macabre side of everything. 
I first came upon Joe Sacco’s book several years ago. My father had brought home some of his books (Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde to name a few) to review and catalogue them before displaying them in our bookshop, The Specialist Bookshop. Very simply put, I was completely amazed! I love comic books and I had only just discovered the wonders of the graphic novel. I do a little bit of sketching myself. I have even tried starting a comic book. As it is, I get enough inspiration from the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip panels that I love to read in the morning papers. But alas, the will to carry along a story left me. To be fair, my art seems to be reserved to a single page rather than a whole book. For the time being, I shall leave the graphic novels to the experts.
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Still aching and throbbing. I used a euphamism to describe the pain to my sisters but will refrain from reproducing it here for the sake of the more delicate in constitution.
