Yasmin Ali

Architecture featured as part of DAZED & CONFUSED magazine's first music & arts' day festival

This April, Jefferson Hack's celebrated trend magazine DAZED & CONFUSED hosted its first multidisciplinary arts day festival in East London. I was heartened to see Architecture amongst the topics of the day talks, with AA graduate and architect Magnus Larsson billed to speak on the topic of 'Architecture and Biomimicry'.

Other talks included a plea from the Buy this Satellite initiative whose agenda is to free communications technology for the masses in third world countries, who are currently living in a dark age in terms of telecomms. Information access as a basic human right formed the cornerstone of their argument.

Open Source projects continue from online relationships to physical implications for participatory planning and development. BTS cited US project Factor e Farm as an interested precedent for the extension of open source and wiki-style sharing of knowledge to land development applications.

These were a couple from many of the diversely-themed creative talks at DAZED Live, held on Saturday 9th April in Shoreditch. The day talks were sited at the Tramshed, a beautiful old industrial shell conversion in the heart of Hoxton. This also housed the ABSOLUT London interactive zine exhibition 'A Celebration of London Through Self-Publishing'.

The on-site exhibition featured a pop-up zine library plus an interactive visual test-bed for the latest in e-publishing, in collaboration with http://www.jotta.com/. This was set up insitu for monitoring real-time tweets via Twitter on an LCD screenfiltered across set festival themes of style, vision and arts using Twitter hash tags (#AbsolutLondonStyle etc.). The results were displayed on an interactive live electronic  'mind map' representing the latest in e-technology from http://www.midnight-toastie.co.uk/. This was justaposed with the pleasingly lo-fi fax-style 8-bit print output.

Look out for more coverage of Magnus Larsson's research to come.

With thanks to the staff at DAZED Live and Stephanie Knox of Margaret London agency.