Image by Thermalsatsuma
We had a really lovely time on Sunday at our 'work Christmas party', Home for Christmas. People came from Dublin, Shewsbury, rural Oxfordshire, London, Bradford, etc to take part and show their support for our project.
Both of our regular designers were there, selling specially-made prints and cards and chatting to everyone. Don't worry if you missed the party, you can now buy these on our new online shop!
Regular HC contributor, Sheffield artist Jan Hopkins brought special HC-branded 'conception kits' (knit your own egg and sperm – see our latest issue and buy them from our shop) a coin-operated scrooge quote machine, and her now-famous Arecibo pattern mitts. She also developed the experimental neural network A.S.H.L.I to help us with our research into Hack Circus themes...
We had a phone set up so you could listen in to her dreams, but in case you couldn't make it on the night, we downloaded them and will be blogging separately about A.S.H.L.I, later.
Vine by Neil Hopkins.
We launched the Life-themed issue on the night, and HC contributor Neil Hopkins had a glorious LED matrix Game Of Life running off a Raspberry Pi.
HC regular Sinead McDonald showed her specially-built "Santatron" – a darkly festive flashing-nosed Rudolf in a box developed in collaboration with Santa, who scans your face, measures your ELF particles, and prints out a legend revealing just how naughty or nice you've been this Christmas.
We had live music from the great talent of Paul Gillibrand for the quiz, and during the breaks. He worked hard to learn a list of tunes over the course of a very busy work week. What a star.
Image by Thermalsatsuma
HC regular Matt Westcott travelled up from Oxford to tell us about his recent adventure – syncing up an orchestra of Spectrums and performing a spectacular chunk of Mahler's First Symphony, complete with demo video. The challenge was laid down 30 years ago in the Spectrum manual... as a joke.
Sheffield artist Sharon Mossbeck spoke thoughtfully about her work – unpicking the conservatism of cross-stitch, and bringing glorious byzantine imagery and profound issues of mortality into this ancient art form. Get involved with Sharon's latest project, "Thread of Life".
Proprietor of the Sheffield magic shop, and Argentine Tango dancer Russell Hall, got us all manipulating pendulums using only the power of our minds, assisted by his equally wonderful partner. Here he is trying the ultimate psychic pendulum test, with a talented audience member.
Alex McLean, algorave legend, HC contributor and local live coding artist, treated us to a live coded music performance and spoke very interestingly about his research into visual coding patterns.
