The Skinny: Latest

Meet two Glasgow Creative Accelerator 'Founders'

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 12:36:24 +0100

Fifteen creative companies in Glasgow are currently taking part in the Glasgow Creative Accelerator, a mentorship programme to help creative businesses reach their full potential. We find out more from two of the participants

How the internet revolutionised communication for autistic people

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 14:50:00 +0100

The internet has been radical for creating safe online spaces for autistic people. As we increasingly rely on the internet during COVID-19, one writer explores what we can learn from online, neurodiverse communities

Wendy Liu on Abolish Silicon Valley, technology and capitalism

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Fri, 03 Apr 2020 13:00:00 +0100

Wendy Liu on the future of technology without capitalism, being a woman in a male-dominated industry and the pitfalls of corporate diversity

How the UK 'Porn Block' could damage sex education

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 12:25:00 +0100

As the British government pushes back enforcing age-verification porn legislation for the third time, we look at what this badly thought out "Porn Block" policy would entail and its potential to damage young people's sex education

Digital Locket: On Lock Screens & Memories

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Thu, 11 Jul 2019 16:30:00 +0100

One writer explores how her phone can act as a digital locket to hang onto vital connections and memories

Apply Yourself: On phones, apps and grief

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 12:00:00 +0100

Phones get a bad rap for harming our mental health, but one writer explores how apps and social media can be harnessed for good

How Slow Dating took over online dating

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 13:30:00 +0100

Are we moving too fast? One writer asks if ‘slow dating’ really is the new speed dating and whether it can absolve us of our online dating anxieties

How Rookie became the business model for a generation

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 14:30:00 +0000

The end of online teen mag, Rookie, felt like the end of the era of blogs. One writer reflects on how its closure impacts how she views monetising her own creative projects

4 Great Podcasts & YouTube Series

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 13:49:00 +0100

Need foodie inspiration, an audio hug, an intellectual jolt or some low-key language tuition? Here are four places to find just those things...

6 Essential Student Apps

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 10:21:00 +0100

Find inspiration, keep your health in check and save yourself from fumbling with a handful of pennies with our selection of excellent apps for your smartphone

The Criminal podcast & 5 more great crime podcasts

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 12:24:00 +0100

Our new monthly Pod People column, casting a closer eye over our favourite series, kicks off with Phoebe Judge's Criminal

Total Immersion: FuturePlay preview

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 16:00:00 +0100

Step into a virtual world with FuturePlay's immersive 3D gallery

How VR could be the future of theatre

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 16:41:00 +0100

Virtual reality is being hailed as the future of Hollywood, but might VR's more natural home be the stage?

The relationship between art and science

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Wed, 31 May 2017 15:41:08 +0100

Art and science can work to enhance each other. We hear from Schema47, a research group who bring both domains together, and a filmmaker working with NASA to make a space movie that's more science than fiction

A brief history of women in astronomy

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Wed, 03 May 2017 13:15:00 +0100

Like many fields of science, the number of female astronomers is depressingly small. Their impact, however, has been considerable. Transmission Podcast regular Beth Biller tells us about her experience as an astronomer and her female astronomy heroes

Leeds International Festival's inspiring Tech bill

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Thu, 06 Apr 2017 11:32:00 +0100

Yorkshire's cultural calendar gets a shake-up this month with the first ever Leeds International Festival, which boasts an impressive Tech strand. Curator Natasha Sayce-Zelem tells us about a diverse and cutting-edge programme

Share your innovative ideas with TEDxGlasgow

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 13:13:56 +0000

The deadline for the first TEDxGlasgow Award is nigh… Don’t miss out

Doing the Fringe for Free with Little Birdy

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 11:30:00 +0100

New membership scheme Little Birdy offers the chance of unlimited complimentary tickets to Fringe shows. We sent a writer to find out if it's as good as it sounds

Edinburgh Digital Entertainment Festival preview

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 13:30:00 +0100

Edinburgh has a new festival in town in the form of the Edinburgh Digital Entertainment Festival, and it's taking us into the brave new world of virtual reality

bluedot 2016: The Sounds of Science

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Fri, 15 Jul 2016 17:33:00 +0100

Science and music collide at Jodrell Bank Observatory this summer, as bluedot brings the goods to Cheshire

In Design: Young graphic design & animation studio

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Wed, 06 Jul 2016 14:00:00 +0100

In the first of a new series looking at great design in the North, we speak to Young, a graphic design studio focusing on animation.

Resident artist for CERN/FACT collab announced

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Fri, 17 Jun 2016 18:09:00 +0100

South Korean artist Yunchul Kim has been declared the winner of the COLLIDE International Award, a collaboration between CERN and Liverpool media arts centre FACT.

The Berlin-based artist's proposal beat a record 904 entries from 71 countries.

Now in its fifth year, COLLIDE is a major arts and science residency programme, which sees CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) collaborate with different international cultural organisations.

This year’s partnership with FACT gives the artist the opportunity to undertake a two-month residency at CERN, Geneva – spending time with a community of 14,000 scientists at the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, home of the Large Hadron Collider – and one month at FACT.

Kim’s work explores the artistic potential of fluid dynamics (the science of liquids and gases in motion). His winning project proposal, Cascade, will ‘look at the possibility of controlling the propagation of light through colloidal suspensions of photonic crystals’ – which roughly simplifies to ‘spreading light through crystals suspended in liquid’.

(Take a look at some of Kim’s work in the video below.)

Kim was chosen as the winner by a jury including Mike Stubbs, artistic director of FACT; Monica Bello, head of Arts@CERN, and University of Liverpool physicist Tara Shears.

“As scientists, we’re exploring what the world is made of,” said Shears at the announcement event on Wednesday. “Art is an exploration of the world around us too. It can open you up to exactly the same idea from a completely different direction.”

“The sculptural nature of Yunchul Kim’s work creates uncanny experiences, which at times seem beyond belief, and challenge our understanding of the world as both analytic and embodied,” the jury commented.

“[He] has an outstanding ability to explore the gap between the experiential and conceptual, and we are thrilled to see how he will embed these ideas in his residency at CERN and FACT.”

Honorable mentions went to Mexican conceptual artist Julieta Aranda and Athens-based British artist James Bride.

arts.cern

fact.co.uk

Cinema is dead. Long live Virtual Reality

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 13:48:00 +0100

Virtual Reality was all over this year's Sheffield Doc/Fest, but is it the future of visual storytelling?

Learning to code in 16 weeks at CodeClan

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 12:31:06 +0100

Don’t know your HTML5 from your Node.js? Think ‘VPN’ sounds like an American sports channel? Looking to change your career but despairing at the job prospects in this climate? Things aren’t as hopeless as they appear. There are 11,000 new jobs are created every year in Scotland’s booming tech industry – and something new in Edinburgh designed specifically to tackle the skills gap. And it’s open to anyone.

The country’s first digital skills academy, CodeClan, was launched in October 2015 with the express aim of equipping anyone and everyone with the tools and know-how to participate in this burgeoning marketplace. Scotland has always been at the forefront of science, technology and industry; access to cutting-edge learning like CodeClan means that pioneering legacy can be maintained. Since its launch late last year, the academy has seen 32 students graduate, with 70% of them being hired within five weeks of finishing their course. Average starting salary? £24,500.

And the fact these students have come from such varied backgrounds – translators, caterers, retailers, engineers, and others – proves that it hardly matters what you were doing before. The full-time course – just 16 weeks, an intensive, collaborative programme informed by the latest in teaching principles and techniques – is designed to retrain anyone by providing a grounding in the fundamental programming skills tech companies are looking for. Classes are run on a 5:1 instructor-to-student ratio, meaning that each individual student receives optimal attention and care throughout this fast-paced course.

CodeClan isn’t acting alone, either; both the Scottish Government (along with its educational award-accrediting body SQA, the Scottish Qualifications Authority) and ScotlandIS (the nation’s digital technologies trade body, a vocal advocate of the industry being key to Scotland’s economic survival) support the academy.

That’s the kind of seal of approval that might explain why 25 employers have already signed up to pledge hands-on involvement with the academy. And the list is growing, with more and more companies keen to provide more than just a job at the end of the road, but also guest speakers, site visits, and personal attendance at employer fairs. They even contribute to the ongoing moulding and remoulding of the curriculum itself, ensuring that the skills being trained are precisely those required by the industry.

CodeClan, along with the governmental bodies which support it, believes the country hosts untapped potential, with thousands of unfilled roles waiting to be claimed by talented programmers, coders and technicians. And after just 16 weeks at this growing academy, that could be you.

XpoNorth: How a solo developer won the 2015 Moray Game Jam

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 18:29:00 +0100

Application and software development student Corrie Green tells us how he conquered the Moray Game Jam single handed

Indie Games: The Complete Introduction to Indie Gaming

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Tue, 12 Apr 2016 15:37:00 +0100

Given the fledgling status of what’s considered the modern ‘indie game’, it’s perhaps little surprise that there’s hardly been an abundance of literature on them. Mike Diver’s coffee table intro to the world of ‘small-dev, big-idea’ gaming aims to plug that gap with a robust overview of a once-niche genre that’s now a healthy battleground between the likes of Sony and Microsoft.

As the title suggests, this is not an in-depth, exhaustive look behind the curtains, but more of a manageable two-hour chunk of primer that’ll help you learn your OlliOlli from your Spelunkyi. It’s also incredibly up to date at its time of release, incorporating many upcoming titles such as Cuphead, Below and No Man’s Sky. However, Indie Games feels very much like a companion piece for those who have travelled the road thus far, rather than anyone looking to start a new journey.

Though the ground it covers may be chronologically tight, taking its broader cue from 2006’s Xbox Live Arcade launch, Diver has done a grand job of digging deep into the period to unearth some treasures that may otherwise have passed many gamers by. So while obligatory nods are given to Braid, Fez, Limbo et al, there are plenty of smaller titles vying for attention here; Inkle Studio’s 80 Days, Alto’s Adventure by Snowman Studios and the gloomy hack‘n’slash adventure Eitr by Eneme Entertainment have all been investigated for Indie Games.

(Continues below)

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess – retooled and reviewed

Life, death and videogames: gaming as a coping tool

In fact, should you want it to, Indie Games could conceivably keep you in gaming recommendations for the next couple of years. However, it’s equally as useful as a handy, not to mention aesthetically attractive overview of the nebulous genre while making a fair stab at looking towards the future. Diver’s style walks a fine tightrope of explaining some of the nuances to casual gamers while never making those already familiar with the subject matter feel like they are wasting their time.

There are plenty of interview snippets threaded through the 100-plus glossy pages, from behemoths of the industry such as David Braben of Elite fame to new kids on the block such as Thomas Was Not Alone developer Mike Bithell. Most fizz by with a ‘cut to the chase’ ethos that ensures a wide range of views within a relatively short amount of pages.

For what it is, Indie Games seems to have little competition in sewing up a quite remarkable period of gaming. Even so, it does it with an easy panache that makes it welcoming enough for casual onlookers while giving veterans a little something to get their teeth into.

Out now via LOM Art publishing
@MikeDiver

FutureEverything 2016 review: Experiments in Art

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 11:15:00 +0100

FutureEverything 2016 offered new ways of thinking about the future and artistically minded experiments in data visualisation. Our writer went along to the conferences and festival and found a programme influenced by Ballard, community and consumerism.

FutureEverything is a festival of ideas. Drew Hemment, founder and creative director, opens this year’s conference explaining how the organisation uses art and design to drive new thinking.

This year, FutureEverything is focused on the fundamental issue of resources, with the theme Less and More continuing the festival’s 20-year legacy of challenging the status quo, provoking questions and pushing boundaries in art, design and technology.

By providing creative approaches to what may seem uncreative facets of technology and the digital environment, FutureEverything creates opportunities for the wider public to engage with concepts in a tangible way.

Smoke Signals by Ed Carter and David Cranmer, part of this year’s public programme, does just that.

The making of Smoke Signals

Data, as they say, is all around us. Every tweet or email we send adds to the mass that governments, businesses and organisations collect and collate in order to better understand how, and why, we connect with them. In 2014 FutureEverything launched an artist commission that would explore the community these data streams create for arts organisations. The commission presented Carter and Cranmer with an opportunity to take visualising data into a whole new realm.

As part of a year-long research and development project, FutureEverything has been working with seven leading British arts organisations to collect their email data in the hope of better understanding the value and impact of their networks. The artists’ resulting piece, Smoke Signals, uses smoke and sound to represent the assembled data, taking inspiration from cryptography, in particular the Polybius Square, an Ancient Greek cipher. Filling the darkened room at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, smoke is projected out of Arduino-controlled cannons in rings. With each puff of smoke, more data feeds into the room, and as soon as one smoke signal is expelled, the previous becomes disrupted, unsettling the flow of data.

In using data as a medium Carter and Cranmer have taken something that to many people is mundane and uninteresting, and turned it into a beautiful and tangible concept. Does it actually matter what the data is, for the end result? Maybe not. But the success of this piece is the artists’ use of digital technology and art to tell a broader story about the data streams that are part of our daily lives, and the networks that they underpin.

Gazelle Twin's dystopian vision

Elsewhere in the programme is another work looking at an aspect of our lives: day-to-day consumerism.

Commissioned by FutureEverything, Gazelle Twin, Chris Turner and Tash Tung present Kingdom Come, taking its name from JG Ballard’s novel of the same name and using the idea of the repetition of consumer life to create a 45-minute audio-visual battering. The trio explain in their Q&A session how, rather than jumping on the High-Rise Ballardian bandwagon, for them the author has always been a major inspiration, with thematic elements creeping into their work almost subconsciously.

Presented in six chapters, the piece is performed by two singers dressed in identical costumes. The video centres on a deserted shopping centre, which is presented as a symbol for society’s obsession with consumerism. Between panned shots of empty car parks and ascending escalators are videos of violence, crowd panic and YouTube fail clips. The switch between scenes of crowd hysteria and the empty guts of a shopping centre heightens the contrast between the two, while the images of riots and sale hysteria bear a striking resemblance to one another, adding to the sense of the uncanny.

Echoing Ballard’s words in Kingdom Come – ‘the suburbs dream of violence’ – Gazelle Twin, Chris Turner and Tash Tung have created a vision for the future where there is no community. Hyperconsumerism and commodity fetishism have taken control of daily life; we are reduced to tribalism and violence, and the shopping centre is the battleground.

Tools to tackle the future

In seeking to challenge the old saying ‘less is more,’ FutureEverything 2016 explores how four distinct things – life, the Earth, uncertainty and community – can provide alternative resources and assist us in navigating our impending futures.

Through presentations at the conference and commissions situated throughout the city, the festival is able to open up a platform for critical thinking.

At a time when art in schools is under threat and considered merely a hobby, FutureEverything offers something refreshing – a place where the meeting of art, design and technology drives the conversation, and where concepts and ideas are open to be challenged, discussed and built on.

FutureEverything 2016 ran 30 March-2 April 2016 in Manchester

futureeverything.org

FutureEverything Science and Art Festival

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Mon, 21 Mar 2016 09:53:00 +0000

In anticipation of the FutureEverything art and science festival in Manchester, we take a look at what to expect, in addition to discussing the elegance of good design, and, of course, the weather

3D-Printed Food: For NASA, the US Army and You

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Tue, 15 Mar 2016 14:00:00 +0000

3D Printed Food might sound like something from the future, but we're on the precipice of a food revolution.

In Search of The Uncanny Valley

hello@theskinny.co.uk (The Skinny) — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 12:00:00 +0000

We investigate one of the great challenges facing technological representations of the human form.