WRITING

1000 Years 1000 Words Commissioned by the Royal Mail/Camberwell Press, 2000.  Words by Michael Benson Design by Trickett & Webb Awards: D&AD Silver, Art Directors of New York

'The book is like a crystal - with so many facets and refractions of light'
John Berger
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Jonathan Glancey savours a little millennium project that has the rest licked

This beautiful book showcases all 48 stamps of last year's millennium stamp programme; each is overlaid with specially commissioned poetry by the writer Michael Benson. To echo the theme, the pages are perforated, while the book is handbound to give an impression of an envelope wrapped around the text.

'The framing of the stamps and the typesetting are imaginative and finely executed while the texts spin like a top through the book, some funny, some rueful, other bordering on the incomprehensible. It doesn't matter, the effect as a whole speaks volumes. British art, design, wit and whimsy squeezed into a book no bigger than hymns ancient and modern. This tiny book sings a song of British creativity with far greater clarity than the dumb dome in Greenwich...'

Jonathan Glancey
Friday November 24, 2000
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Creative Review May 2000

1000 Years 1000 Words is a remarkable publication which commemorates the millennium and also celebrates the power and popularity of the postage stamp and the pleasure of high-quality skilled publications....1000 Years 1000 Words stands alone as a book of superb design and production. Michael Benson has written the words to go with the stamps making each page able to stand in its own right but also part of a larger narrative...In his introduction Lord Dearing, who was Chairman of the Post Office from 1980-1987, has written that this book' tells the story of genius'. Indeed it does...If you have to choose one commemorative item from the many that were produced for the millennium in 1999 then this book, without a doubt, is it.

Susan Hewer
RSA Journal 2000
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From Guardian Online
Wednesday January 19, 2000

A Thousand Years A Thousand Words
Extracts from a poem written to accompany the Royal Mail's Millennium Stamps. It was published by the Camberwell Press on 15 December 1999

"This is a tale about time
A tale that time alone can tell
Trouble is
You don't tell time
Time tells you
Tocktocking its tales
Making things old
Making things new
[...]
This millennium
This garlanded, pilloried thing
Waits
Tales all told
Slouched in night silence
Time ticktocks to dawn
O brave new world
This is the beginning
And this is the end."

By Michael Benson

Life's a Monkey London - Cochrane Theatre November 02 31 Oct to 9 Nov 02 Script by Michael benson and Ken McMullen

' An Interesting study of elusive science'

"Life's a Monkey works on excellent performances from its fine cast. It's a complex rambling script with flashes of delight ....There are good lines and characters in in, delivered with aplomb by the talent

Life's a Monkey credits three in the writing team: Michael Benson, director Ken McMullen, and adviser Terry James. The programme explains the dice-throwing method of selecting scenes, and the website has more information.... Asit is the play runs at 90 minutes, and the narrative jumps about from present to past to future. These gifted writers could deliver 60 minutes of taut drama out of this excellent script...There are fine special effects and gauze-projection which are technically excellent. Their content doesn't tell more that is necessary to the story .....They are well shot and composed, but like the 'actor' scene in the play, could better be used in a different play. It would be great to see this fine play in (for example) Edinburgh, or touring: the key to success could be technical simplicity and a 60-minute one-act cut. "

Peter Blake Commercial Art

Where many Pop artists critiqued their culture, Blake illustrated it. He produced colourful paintings, collage, sculptures and drawings that were contemporary but nice...He has maintained a similar style and strategy ever since and so his aesthetic has once again become acceptably fashionable. That appeal shines through in this smallish retrospective of Blake's commercial work from 1960 to the present which will be followed immediately in mid September buy an exhibition of his sculptural work. As well as assimilating elements of popular culture into his fine art work, Blake added to it directly through the quantity of posters, album, book and magazine covers he produced and which are on display here. Blake's most famous work, in any genre, is the cover of The Beatles 'Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, a winning, zeitgeist - capturing - and creating - collage of famous faces. The collage is Blake's medium par excellence. It has allowed him, throughout his career, to simply, and literally, stick his favourite elements from different periods together. The wizardly results are to be seen in works that range from early magazine covers to a recent Paul Weller album cover.

Extract from: Nick Hackworth,
'The business end of MR Pop Art'
The Evening Standard 20 August 2003

A huge jazzy smorgasbord of commercial art by Peter Blake- book and magazine illustrations; record sleeves for The Who, The Beatles and Paul Weller; posters; calendars and much else is on display...The gallery's walls and pillars are painted in bright primary colours. This is Peter Blake the commercial artist, lover of pop music, and self confessed populist ...who has spent his working life pointing out that art and commerce are inextricably linked...Blake the commercial populist has, since 1967 been haunted and perhaps even hobbled by the image he created for Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band...The little that remains from the original shoot is here in the gallery - two heads from that collage of famous faces that thronged the Fab Four. All the others have been lost, dispersed or sold...One of the most interesting aspects of this show is the chance it offers to see just how often Blake recreated crowd scenes using photographic collage.

Extract from Michael Glover,  
'Images that stand out in a crowd'
The Independent 21 August 2003

NEW MEDIA

Seeing Drawing An exploration of drawing website

'What we're doing is going beyond the programme designers' says Fariba Farshad 'We're giving artists and designers a multilayered means of expression, putting control of the programme completely in their hands for the first time'... Farshad had her own successful publishing business in Iran... She went first to Paris, to the Sorbonne and then to London to study gender education and specifically teaching computer studies to women. Then, at the London College of Fashion, she created the first internet fashion magazine.'
Simon Tait, The Times, 14 June 2004

Three years ago four art and design institutions began working together on the development of an electronic learning package on drawing.

The project they sent out was funded under the Higher Education Funding council's TLTP initiative and the partners were Falmouth College of Arts, Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication, the University of Ulster and The University of the Arts London, which in time became the lead partner. The work they have done together has focussed on the process of developing visual literacy in students through computer based technology. The result is a DVD called 'Seeing Drawing', which is now complete and is being intensively marketed in the UK and overseas.

The journey that led to the successful completion of 'Seeing Drawing' was complex and educational. However as the Head of the IT Research and Development Unit, Fariba Farshad, points out, it was worth it. 'I firmly believe that the product we developed is one of the best in the art and design area. However, for me there is something beyond the product no matter how outstanding it is. This is the fact that we built a remarkable team who have developed invaluable experience. What is unique about this product and the team that developed it, is that we needed to invent as we went along. Technology probably met us about one third of the way. But we had to solve problems and invent new approaches.' If the recent 'Joining the Dots' exhibition at The University of the Arts London Gallery marked the end of the project, the 'Seeing Drawing' shortlisting for a British Interactive Multimedia Award - along with Nick Park's 'Chicken Run' and the BBC's 'Walking with Dinosaurs' - marked the beginning of the marketing phase for what is by all accounts a most remarkable product.

More details

N Touch Online fashion magazine

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The first fashion magazine on the internet
Time Out
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"NTOUCH is a brilliant London College of Fashion ezine that looks as good as it reads as good as it navigates... The whole look and feel of NTOUCH is cool, calm and collected - and very hip indeed... One of the finest zines I've ever seen. This site is so slick it makes many other professional zines look like the online equivalent of a provincial parish magazine"
ZDNET UK
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"A web based fashion and style magazine site by students at the London College of Fashion - excellent stuff." - Davey's December 98 picks
The Independent
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"N-Touch, a true magazine for the Nineties... Trying the Net just once, as I have, will leave you wanting more, and the accessibility of N-touch for women, in a male dominated computer world, is refreshing. I want to be a Net babe!!"
The Daily Telegraph
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"N-touch, the first on-line fashion and style magazine on the Internet... N-Touch is the equivalent to a 20 page glossy..."
Fashion Weekly
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"Hard hitting and cutting edge, the London College of Fashion is definitely setting the pace for promotional style..."
Fashion Monitor
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"N-touch, the first on-line fashion and style magazine, has been launched by students on the BA (Hons) Fashion Promotion course at the London College of Fashion..."
The Times Higher Education Supplement
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"Absolutely fashionable: London College of Fashion students have launched a fashion magazine on the Internet."
The Observer Magazine
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"...fashion is under-represented on the Net...,there is not much to speak of. Still things are changing. Just launched, by students on the BA Fashion Promotion course at the London College of Fashion..."
.Net
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"N-touch is the fashion magazine from the London College of Fashion and is notable by the fact that it is the first fashion magazine available online..."
The Angel of Fashion Official Directory
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N-Touch - One of the world's first online Fashion & Style magazine. Produced by the journalists and stylists of the future: students on the B.A. Fashion Promotion course at the London College of Fashion.

CULTURAL BROKERAGE

Signatures of the Invisible

Outside dismal poplars were dropping their leaves on to roads named after dead physicists: Planck, Bohr, Maxwell. Inside scientists with the complexions of people who don't get enough daylight squidged along linoleum corridors in crepe-soled shoes ...On the surface of things, CERN isn't an obvious source of inspiration. But then nothing at CERN is to be taken at surface. Even its greatest assert (the Large Electron Positron) is buried deep underground...A conversation with a theoretical physicist is like having a pair fo jump leads clipped to your brain. Sparks of inspiration fly...Now, a dozen or so artists from all over Europe have been invited to spend their time at CERN to develop their own notations and responses to its scientific research. Signatures of the Invisible is the result...The power of the show lies in the ideas behind the artworks. Yes, there are lots of pleasing things to look at - little boxes of captured light to peer into, maps of lost time to pore over - but what makes such pieces more than passingly pleasing are the explanations that underpin them.

Paradoxically the pieces that are least visually interesting are the ones that are the most interesting. Richard Deacon's Detector 2000 lacks the wonderful curvilinear line, the sense that someone has been drawing in space, that characterises his best work. And yet the philosophies that inform this work - inspired by intriguing similarities between a Tibetan ghost trap and the physicists hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson - give a real sense of an artistic mind struggling to engage with an expanded set of concepts. There is a sense that this piece could well be part of something which when it has been worked through might have changed and developed the artist.'

Extract from - Rachel Campbell - Johnston, 'They blinded me with science'
The Times, Wednesday 21 March 2001

'Sin, oder nicht sein. Das ist die Frage - repeats a woman in a cadmium red dress standing in the dark as she swings a large luminous bulb in a circle.   The looping bulb at the end of an electrical cord whirs through the air leaving a circular trail of light...I am in Geneva watching a film of a woman   uttering those famous opening lines of Hamlet's soliloquy in German and hearing an artist an artist talk about science...The revolving light bulb symbolises those experiments at CERN in which subatomic particles are hurled around a 27KM long tunnel, colliding at the speed of light...Signatures of the Invisible project centres on the work of twelve European artists mingling wit scientists at CERN. As you might expect, the exhibits currently on show in Geneva, range from the oblique to the observational to the more fundamental'

Extract from 'Art plus physics? Sheer chemistry'
Lee Elliot Major,
The Guardian, Thursday 19 February 2002

AWARDS

2004
Addressing the Body within Blackboard
British Council Innovations Award Nominee

2002
Seeing Drawing
European software Award (Highly commended for its design and innovation)

Addressing the Body
Eurographics - Awarded The John Lansdown Prize

2001
Seeing Drawing
BAFTA nomination
BIMA nomination
Creativity 31, Award of Distinction

2000
Celebrating Creativity
Eurographics - Awarded The John Lansdown Prize

Creative HTML
BIMA (British Interactive Multimedia Award) Home Learning Award

Celebrating Creativity
BIMA (British Interactive Multimedia Award) Innovation Award

1999
1000 Years for 100 Worlds 2000
D&AD Silver Award