13 June 2003

MobileLifeEvent: brand overload, little content, sensory torture MobileLifeEvent, Earls Court, 13 July 2003: Shiny skull-faced young men and bored expogirls grinning desperately as they try to persuade you to put hand in pocket to buy a 3G/GPRS/new handset/ringtone, or to enter a competition, or just to take a free doggie bag of shitty brandware. Avoid eye-contact with the brands clawing for your attention and you can be in and out in 15 minutes. You try to ignore the sound of a dozen sound-systems mashing into each other (it's like being in an interrogator's white noise room with the volume up to 11) whilst you work out whether T-Mobile's T-Zones GPRS service is better than Vodafone's Live!. It might or might not be, you can't really tell, such is the sonic distraction. The only popular stands: Panasonic's Legends Penalty Shoot and Carphone Warehouse's car boot sale corner. Persuasion by sensory torture. As you leave, staggering through the other shell-shocked consumers slowly wheeling through the hall, you wonder whether you've just experienced an intense-but-safe consumer equivalent of being shell-shocked. Disney versus Nokia at Passchendaele. 8:06:20 PM     comments

ICA talk about copyright and HondaFischliWeiss 22 July 2003 if we remember correctly. (No link on the ICA site yet, so here's the book instead.) 7:05:03 PM     comments

Lo Res: Christopher Cook at Hirschl Contemporary Home of British art in the 80s, Cork Street is now looking tired, and tame. Hirschl Contemporary is showing Christopher Cook's graphite-in-oil paintings, which are better than most on the street though (apparently "the sparkle and bloom of the surfaces providing an unnerving and unrelenting mix of the exotic and the deadpan"). More Christopher Cook here. 6:48:41 PM     comments

COMICA at ICA: 27 June - 6 July 2003 Someone tell Warren Ellis. Includes the launch of the British branch of OuBaPo (Ouvoir de Bande Dessinee Potentielle). 6:40:05 PM     comments