After an amazing time at Kinetica, winning both the MAMA Award in the Music category and the overall Grand Prize with our song FRANKENSTEIN VALENTINE, we are finally emerging after a weekend of celebrations and want to get some thanks out there to all the people who made this possible.

First of all to everyone who came down and voted for us to win the overall prize. It means a lot to us that you have chosen NOH amongst so many hi-class contributions.

Second to the jury who voted us the winner of the Music Award. We are especially honoured to be selected by the amazing Imogen Heap, whose music we admire a lot.

To our whole band: The great performance and voices of Josephine Lloyd and Fiona Bevan, the on and off screen contributions of multitalented Philip Gordon, David Abra for additional lighting and technical wizardry, Paul Gavin for the equipment, Maria Almena for the outfits, Richard Stuart for his contribution to the music production, Susanna Sanroman for photo and camera work and Jan van den Bosch for story ideas and general feedback.

To Musion for letting us experiment with their amazing technology for so many years now and their ongoing support. Thanks to Ian and most of all Oliver who by now has become a vital part of many of our projects.

To Kinetica and especially Tony Langford for giving our and other unusual art a platform in London.
Thanks to the whole team that made the event possible.

To Musion and Adobe for the generous prizes.

Thanks for all the encouragement and well wishes.

Steff & Mike

NOH have been nominated for a MAMAs 2012 Music Award to be presented at Kinetica Art Fair – the UK’s biggest Fair for Art and Technology.

Their submission has been selected by the jury of the Music Award Grammy Award winner Imogen Heap, Tony Langford, Director of Kinetica, Musion’s Head of Music, Sanj Surati, Musion’s Director Ian O’Connell and Ben Davies, Director of Digital Arts at Rose Bruford College for Theatre and Performance.

Kinetica website

I’m just getting back from the technical talks at the Lowry where we will perform our next show in June. An amazing place. Like the Southbank centre in London but then with proper color.

I was seriously under dressed speaking at the press launch (as usual). People make a real effort to look stylish here but unlike in a lot of other places their behavior doesn’t change. Really friendly and welcoming.
It’s a very young and enthusiastic team that runs the Lowry. From the technicians on the floor right up to the top. Something you don’t expect from such an established institution. We are especially impressed with Jonathan the project manager of Digitfest who has very similar ideas. I don’t think he really knows what we are going to do but everyone seems happy to let us potter on, which is great.

They have given us the Quays, one of their beautiful theatres although we will unfortunately loose the two upper balconies completely and the sides on the third because of the holographic set up. To compensate we might bring the audience onto the stage.
There are still issues where to place the speakers in order to avoid vibrations that would effect the screens… Yeah that’s right, some serious subwoofer action this time. No seating either. We don’t put any classical or opera songs in, no continuous story lines, characters or anything else that might give the audience an excuse to think they watch a performance. Instead a dancer and a few hundred 3D glasses coming over from China next week. An honest multimedia concert raving it up all all the way to some sick electro punk anthems. Not exactly your usual Video Installation!
I had a talk with an editor who was asking if they should send their music, art or performance critic to watch the show
I guess there will be a few job vacancies soon. If artists are able to work in all fields simultaneously, critics will have to up their game as well.

Which reminds me: We made a great effort to involve students in this production (music and visuals) Kate from Salford University is helping us to organise an informal Q&A session after the show. It will hopefully be a networking opportunity for local creatives and students who are interested in cross disciplinary work. We would love to plant the first seeds for some new Manchester groups. Everyone welcome!

We got back from a series of lectures and workshops we gave at University College Falmouth.
Fantastic place. They have just built a state of the arts media and performance centre and Antti Saario, one of the senior lecturers, has some great ideas how to integrate the different departments. Very much along our lines.
We also used the opportunity to do an AV / Dance jam session with our good friends Kuldip and Jane while we were there and they have come up with some amazing moves for one of our new installations.

Falmouth is a beautiful city. The university is split. We have only been to the departments that are dotted around a big park outside the city. One student told me that the profs from the city campus threatened to leave if they have to move there. They have obviously never been to East London. If this was the ugly part I don’t want to see the nice one.
Everything there happens in slow motion. We got stuck on a bus for 20 minutes because a van blocked the road. Some people decided to walk, the rest just chilled out. When the driver finally came back a police man wiggled his finger at him. That was it. In London there would have been corpses.
I could get used to this.

Our preparations for Kinetica have been a very surreal experience for me as they started the same day that recent events in Egypt took off. I remember driving to Berlin with a couple of friends the night the wall came down. But this seems bigger.

I’ve been to Cairo but have no links or in depth knowledge of the history and culture. As I understand it this will be the first time in 5000 years of recorded history that this beautiful plot of land might experience freedom . (How free a western style democratic system actually is would be another topic) More surprisingly: they seem to have gotten to this point without any real leader. Enough people with the same ideas came together and didn’t back down. Will they manage to see it through? Will it spread to Algeria and even further?

I think people who live through such momentous changes are very lucky in spite of all the hardship that is going along with it. It brings life to your door steps and that’s the only place where most of us will bother to pick it up.

Which brings me back to Kinetica: It felt very odd to edit videos about the dread of middleclass routines in the UK with outbursts of anger and hope streaming continuously across my second monitor. It just seemed banal to make songs about the threat of cookery programs and academic art education; a search for meaning in an existence that doesn’t need to be spent on survival almost felt like a disadvantage.
There are thousands of Egyptians on Tahrir square who are shaping their own life in a way that I can never achieve with any number of songs or artworks. Still I won’t jump on the next plane to join them. I’m a doorstep man myself. I’ll keep watching on Youtube grateful that there is something alive out there.
Respect!

As winner of the MAMA Awards we are very excited to be the headliners of the Musion Holographic Stage in the main room at Kinetica Art Fair in London.
Live performances will be on Wednesday 2.2.2011 at 6pm, Thursday 3.2.2011 at 7pm and Saturday 5.2.2011 at 7pm.
3D screenings of our clip WorkEatSleep can be seen during different times of the day as well.

Tickets are at: http://www.kinetica-artfair.com

This time we will try our new Infrared Back Projection Cubes.
Building Mike’s genius foldable design took us quite a few days. Thanks to Philip’s help we managed to learn the basics of carpentry and while the prototype was rather shaky, the following boxes came out pretty decent. This will be the first time we use them on stage although we will probably only have time to set them up as tracking devices for our stage lighting.

About Kinetica Art Fair:
They usually have the most exciting art works you’ll find in the new technology / multimedia category. Defitnitely worth a visit.

Officially that sounds like this:

Kinetica Art Fair is produced by Kinetica Museum and is the first of its kind in the UK. It brings together galleries, art organisations and curatorial groups from around the world who focus on universal concepts and evolutionary processes though the convergence of kinetic, electronic, robotic, sound, light, time-based and multi-disciplinary new media art, science and technology.

Hope we’ll see you there

Drinking to an exciting year 2011!!! from our limited German edition NOH cups. We should probably have them in pink and blue: Grumpy baby boy, grumpy baby girl.

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Special thanks to Oliver from Musion who did an incredible job pulling it all together and the Musion and White Space tech crews.

After one hour trying to get a cab from the venue at Regent Street back East, Philip, Sue, and Bell helped dragging our gear back by bus. Epic journey and a fitting end of a great day.