For those of us living in a capitalist society, there is an inexorable link between our lives, our perceived happiness, and the bits of paper we exchange for goods and services. A banknote has no inherent value, it is merely a reference to a sum, held in our names, by the issuing authority – in the UK, the bank of England.

There is an imbalance of opportunity inherent in cash, the rich have access to more of the world than the poor. Many people are obsessed with money, the ‘creation’ and acquisition of wealth in-and-of itself. This is, of course, an illusion – the actual value of money is a flexible agreement within a society mediated by the shifting tides of the economy. When that agreement of trust is compromised the ramifications can be substantial. Witness the recent crash in world markets, leaving this country, and many more, with unimaginably large debts, created in our name to prop up ‘the banking system’.

I started a campaign of subtly defacing currency about two years ago. Using a custom ink-stamp and UV ink, I have been tagging all the money that passes through my hands. To date, that’s now well into the thousands of pounds. The stamp itself is invisible, until illuminated under a blacklight – commonly used in this country to check for counterfeit notes.

This work is really about how we use these pieces of paper as markers of our passage through time. We spend to live, and live to spend. Each note we hand over gets us a little closer to death…

Filed by shardcore at 3:36 pm under street, video
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My previous twitter robot inspects the way language is curated by a distinct group of individuals – the chatter of celebrity gossip mongers. This incarnation, @the_w0rd_0f_g0d mines an entirely different source.

I have used three corpora as source text for the messages, The King James Bible, The Qur’an and the works of L Ron Hubbard. The language of the first two are broadly similar, and produce plausible text when combined. The latter, by virtue of being primarily a self-help guide, rather than a set of explicit fables and scriptures, has a very different linguistic form, and can be easily spotted in the resulting tweets.

As with @the__truth, the results are hit and miss, however there are gems of linguistic beauty every now and then.

Filed by shardcore at 4:40 pm under generative text, words
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We live in an electronic age, where the microprocessor is ubiquitous. So pervasive is the use of integrated circuitry, that we have become indifferent to the phenomenal computational power surrounding us, and hence blithe to it’s disposability. In the late 60s when semiconductor technology was in its infancy, and the integrated circuit was still a novelty, a young scientist at Caltech, named Gordon Moore made the insight that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit was doubling every 18 months or so. This speculation became known as ‘Moore’s Law’, and has held up surprisingly well, with contemporary CPU chips containing millions upon millions of transistors, and increasing in computational power at an exponential rate.

With such growth comes inevitable redundancy – the state-of-the-art gadget you crave today will be left to gather dust in the back of a drawer in a couple of years time. It’s easy to lose sight of this rate of change, in fact, that we don’t just take it for granted, but actively expect smaller, faster, more feature-filled devices to replace the ones we found miraculous just a few months ago.

4-colour spray stencil on DEC Hi-Note Laptop

Which brings us to this piece – a portrait of Gordon Moore, from the 60s, about the time he first suggested his ‘law’. I have stencilled the portrait onto a 1995 DEC Hi-Note Laptop, which when released was a state-of-the-art device, retailing for £2360 + VAT – and now worth less than the price of a canvas.

I tried to estimate how many (now worthless) transistors this device contains:

• CPU – 486DX = approx 1 million
• Screen (800×600, colour) = 800×600x3= 1,440,000
• RAM (24MB) = 24×1024x1024×8 = 243,793,920
• Supporting chipset = approx 0.5M

This rough calculation suggests there are nearly 250 million transistors in this device alone. As you can see, the device has an ‘Intel inside’ sticker – After leaving Caltech, Gordon Moore went on to found the Intel Corporation, and now has an estimated personal worth of $3.7B …

Filed by shardcore at 10:33 am under 3d, mixed media, painting
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I have recently been working with the poet Michael James Parker, and film-maker Iain Gaffney, creating films of some of his poems.

Here is the latest, House Husband.

Filed by shardcore at 6:33 pm under video
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The internet is full of cat pictures, generally showing them as nonsense talking idiots. However, cats are not simply LOLing machines, I live with two cats who actively dislike each other.

Inspired by their daily fighting, I have chosen to paint some unLOL cats.

They are currently on display at The Tin Drum in Seven Dials Brighton, at the credit crunchtastic price of only £300 each. If you’re interested in purchasing one please email me directly.

“Mr. Frisky is alarmed by the sudden ringing of your iPhone.”

Silver Spray and Acrylic on Canvas 600mm x 600mm

“Mittens is displeased with your choice of economy cat food.”

Silver Spray and Acrylic on Canvas 600mm x 600mm

“Monty dislikes the neighbour’s new dog intensely.”

Silver Spray and Acrylic on Canvas 600mm x 600mm

Filed by shardcore at 11:51 am under exhibitions, for sale, painting
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