Our final sneak preview from the Knitflicks programme, this one’s a computer animation by Finnish filmmaker Laura Neuvonen (Anima Vitae)…

One of the speakers at this weekend’s Supersonic festival is Mark Pilkington, who edits Strange Attractor - the occult periodical and font of ‘exquisite high strangeness’. We’ve not actually laid our hands on a copy yet but it looks well good. Mark is also responsible for the Pestival event and various sound-making activities including a live score to Russian satire The New Babylon at ICA last month. Below is a short piece made by Julian House for a recent Strange Attractor event.

Another of our featured Flummoxed artists, Oliver Laric is based in Berlin and makes consistently interesting and often funny short films that pillage selectively from the web and veer all over the place in style and approach. The stills above are from 50 50, which cuts together fifty different youtube covers of 50 Cent, and (>’.')>=O____l_*__O=<('.'<), an emoticon animation in the style of ASCII porn. Other recent pieces include Webchat with Andy (a conversation with Andy Warhol via an Australian psychic), La Mano Izquierda (in which the whole world seems to revolve around Hugo Chavez’s hand) and a project called Songs Translated to Buildings. You can watch all of this on Oliver’s site, and some of it at Flummoxed tomorrow. Below is a little greenscreen film he made of himself dancing.

Here are some photos from our birthday bash on Saturday:

And a nice preview from the Metro…

In the run-up to Flummoxed, we’ll try and illuminate some of the things that will be going on that night…

The climax of the event will be provided by Scott Johnston (Film Ficciones) and Matthew Eaton (Micronormous), who you may remember collaborated on the Divine Edgar installation. This time around they’ve been delving into the work of composer Jacob Isaacson, who created a series of ‘Colortone Experiments’ from the 1950s onwards which attempted to transpose colours into musical form. (Isaacson was himself a synaesthetic.) For the first time in many years, Isaacon’s final work Lucent Harmonic Color will be performed in full at Flummoxed, with Eaton interpreting the score while Johnston provides a visual counterpoint. That’s about all they’ve told us at this stage, but it promises to be a unique finale.

Here’s a sneak preview of a collage which Dave Gaskarth (Cyrk) is working on for our birthday do; this will be a big paste-up affair in the back-room of the Rainbow, featuring various graphical highlights from the past half-decade. As you might know, Gas has been making 7inch look good pretty much from the start; programme covers, posters, brochures, websites, DVD menus, Tshirts, you name it. His perfectionism is a wonder to behold, and we salute him. (No more Oscar speeches after this week, we promise.)

ps:: The Cyrk website also has info on their Active Cancellation show for resonance.fm, which features Marcus Schmickler live on Sunday 29 June.

Though it’s a bit embarassing to be promoting this (honestly), you can if you choose blow an hour of your Wednesday evening this week hearing Ian Francis of 7 Inch Cinema talk about his favourite things at the Ikon gallery. I was pathetically chuffed to be invited to do this, being an inveterate list-maker and a big Desert Island Discs fan (especially now they’ve got rid of Sue Lawley). But once confronted with the long-awaited opportunity to bang on about stuff you like, it’s actually a bit of a headache whittling it down. I’ve gone for the slightly flippant/ random approach; and as always the David Shrigley postcard above my desk is a useful confidence-booster when preparing for public speaking…

A quick introduction to Jaygo Bloom, who is coming down for our birthday gig next Saturday. We first came across him at an event we organised in Glasgow, where he set up a little greenscreen playpen in the corner of a tent. A steady stream of kids and stormtroopers came to frolic in front of his camera with various props and costumes, and saw themselves beamed into various psychedelic netherworlds… It reminded me of visits to film museums as a kid when you lie on your belly in front of a fan wearing a cape and before you know it you’re flying over New York. Simple technology, but still strangely exciting. Anyway, rather than bloody karaoke we thought this would make for an excellent addition to proceedings at the Rainbow. Jaygo (that’s him in the middle, above) is based in Glasgow and has been responsible for all kinds of barmy a-v projects, like the intriguing Midi Maracas - see his retina-bleeding site or blog for more info. And if anyone out there has any particular bigscreen fantasies they want to enact, please feel free to bring along your own props and costumes.

One more birthday notice before the weekend — there’s a mini PR toolkit at the bottom of the event page, with a couple of tips on helping us spread the word about next Saturday’s event. We’d really like to make it a busy one, so if you’re able to stick up a poster or spam some friends it’d be much appreciated.

Just booked tickets for our birthday treat, a Tuesday afternoon jaunt to London to wave down the Telectroscope and then on to see Guy Maddin’s fantabulous new documentary My Winnipeg, narrated live by the man himself. Regular viewers will know that mention of Mr Maddin’s work can get us all of a-flutter, in particular his shorts The Heart of the World and The Eye Like a Strange Balloon - we even devoted an event to them once. We’re also very fond of his book From the Atelier Tovar, a collection of journal entries and film treatments full of over-heated prose and candid accounts of his creative, financial and libidinous tribulations. Anyway, BFI Southbank are hosting a full Maddin retrospective throughout July and My Winnipeg will be perambulating the UK over the summer.

In honour of our Knitflicks event at Compton Verney next month, here’s a little trailer (or animated flyer) by Kate Pemberton and Michael Johnston…

Kate (Endfile) and Mike (ZX Spectrum Orchestra) had already been talking about the affinities between knitting-machines and Sinclair Spectrums, so this was a chance to play with that a bit. It’s also a good opportunity to exploit Flickr’s new video option, which lets you upload ‘long photos’ (up to 90 seconds) at a resolution which youtube can only dream of.