The souvenirs, designed and manufactured entirely in Scotland, aim to offer a lasting material legacy of both major events.

The following artists, designers and companies have made prototypes: Atelier and Marc Camille Chaimowicz with Begg Scotland and McRostie of Glasgow, Claire Duffy with Tunnock’s, Emlyn Firth and Angharad McLaren with Johnstons of Elgin, FOUND with Chemikal Underground, Katy West with Highland Stoneware and Rogano Oyster Bar, Neil McGuire and Marianne Anderson with Carlton Die Casting and Jewellery Prototyping Services.

The souvenirs will be developed for sale as a part of the cultural programme for the Commonwealth Games. They will be available to buy in Glasgow and across Scotland in 2014.

Scotland Can Make It! is commissioned as part of Scotland’s Cultural Programme for London 2012 and Glasgow 2014.

Left to Right: Neil McGuire, Emlyn Firth, Marianne Anderson, Fiona Hyslop, Kirsty Cunningham (Johnstons of Elgin), Lucy McEachen, Stewart Henderson (Chemikal Underground), Catriona Duffy. Photo: Neil Thomas Douglas.

Find out more:
Website | Facebook | Twitter

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Browse through our event bulletin to find more events.

Welcome to our turret. Where we spy on the world and make words and pictures.

We’ve been in situ for 3 years. We were previously locked away in our respective abodes with nowt but our own dull company to cheer us. Now sing hallelujah, we get to spend each and every long long hour together swilling about in the brotherly love of creative nirvana.

The wiring in the building pre dates the renaissance and the cold winter of last year froze the water in the toilet. We battled through in hats and scarves and Myles learned to type wearing gloves. We burnt Greg’s drawing board for warmth and severally depleted the whisky supplies.

Despite working mainly on the evil device that is the computer we like to surround ourselves with paints, pencils, pens and various drawing surfaces. This keeps the evil digital demons at bay and gives us something to do when the electricity has a ‘moment’

In truth tis a wondrous space offering, as it does, unparalled views of the upper middle class town of Stratford Upon Avon. If Shakespeare were alive today we’d have him locked in a cupboard writing short films.

Much love form our turret of creativity

The Brothers McLeod

Ps – Our surname is pronounced MacCloud for those not versed in Norse-Scottish history…

Find out more:
Website | YouTube | Tumblr | Twitter

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‘Where I Make’ invites readers behind the scenes of artists from many disciplines to share photographs and a little insight about where they create their masterpieces. See more from the series here.

It’s perhaps an overstated question, because books aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, and the likes of McSweeney’s have shown that publishing, literature and storytelling can benefit from thoughtful innovation. However, there’s no doubting that digital culture is taking over, and games are at the forefront. In terms of financial turnover, games are bigger than movies; they’re bigger than music; they’re bigger than books or art. Yet, at the same time, they’re often still considered to be nerd territory: a form of culture far away from the mainstream, to be feared and questioned.

Tom Chatfield is an arts writer, most notably for Prospect Magazine. He participated in two events in order to promote his book, Fun, Inc: Why Games are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business.

Chaired by play theorist Pat Kane, the first session asked many of the now-familiar questions about digital culture. Swathes of the conversation could easily have been subtitled: Video games: they’re not as good as going outside, are they? Despite this, Chatfield gave a good overview of gaming culture for the older audience in attendance, although he oddly concentrated his focus on the implications of World of Warcraft on sociological research and population modelling. Sure, participants’ activities in massively multiplayer online games can be measured and statistically modeled, but games have other things to tell us about who we are.

Like most people in my generation, games were my introduction to computers. I can readily remember when the term video games wasn’t a quaint anachronism. I stared in fascination at the Afterburner machine at my local swimming pool; was responsible for a series of horrific crash landings in Timex’s Flight Simulator on my ZX81; spent a year living in North Carolina coveting my neighbour’s NES. For my thirteenth birthday, I asked for a source code compiler, and for most of my teens I traded homemade computer games with my friends. We ran Spire Magazine, one of the first hypertext-based online magazines, which led to coverage in the Financial Times and in other places, which in turn led to my Internet career. Just as some kids learn to play the guitar and end up writing their own songs, I learned how to program. Code and games are arguably the new rock, for at least a subset of my generation; for me, Peter Molyneux and the Bitmap Brothers were every bit as cool as Kurt Cobain.

Games aren’t just about death, although there’s always been a heavy emphasis on bloodsport, which can be cathartic or unsettling depending on your point of view. Take The Secret of Monkey Island: released in 1990, this was part of an adventure series produced by LucasFilm. You can’t die, and there is no scoring; playing these games is about the experience itself, and the only thing you need to do to win is persevere. They crossed a line between movies, interactive fiction and game-playing, becoming ever more sophisticated. Portions of Monkey Island were written by Orson Scott Card, the science fiction author responsible for the classic novel Ender’s Game. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was based on an unproduced movie script, but easily made the transition to a more interactive format. As you progressed, your decisions shaped the kind of gameplay you experienced; if you were more orientated towards action, you could fight your way to the end. If, on the other hand, you were more interested in puzzles or character development, those were also available routes.

The Dig was in some ways the culmination of this genre; it was based on a story idea by Steven Spielberg, and took a psychological, atmospheric approach to weaving a story. Backgrounds were hand-painted, and characters were sparsely animated. Dialogue and plot took a front row seat.

Unfortunately, as the games industry evolved and consumers wanted bigger bangs and fancier graphics, LucasFilm started to focus more and more on flashy, fight-centric Star Wars titles. Their adventure games – undoubtedly classics, both of storytelling and gaming – were discontinued.

All, however, is not lost. The indie games movement only got a brief mention in Tom’s talk, but similarly to the indie film movement’s role in the wider industry, this has become the new home for quieter, more artistically expressive gaming ideas – for example, the breathtakingly beautiful Machinarium.

The second session, Where’s the Fun? took over the Spiegeltent for a discussion about what fun is, how it’s evolved over time, and whether we’re having more or less fun than we used to. Barry Miles discussed the fun he had in sixties London, in underground clubs with the likes of the Rolling Stones, and wondered if the corporate influence on the culture of fun is having a detrimental effect. Digital culture in general, both authors noted, is largely owned by large corporations.

This is actually changing – by technical design as well as through the rise of the indie movement. Just as the corporate managers aren’t the people actually playing or composing music, they’re also not the people genuinely innovating in digital culture. This is still the domain of hackers, who treat it as more of an art or a political endeavour than business. (The open source blogging platform WordPress makes this point succinctly in its motto: “Code is poetry.”) In fact, many people responsible for games, social networks and platforms are unsettled by the corporate influence, and are actively seeking to do something about it. The likes of OStatus are specifically designed to ensure that Facebook and its monolithic ilk will be less relevant in the future than they are today. Similarly, we are likely to see decentralized massively multiplayer games, where different parts of the game universe are crafted by completely separate artists, hackers and designers. The gaming world is evolving, and it is as artistic as it is lucrative.

It’s become obvious that there is a generation gap that affects understanding of digital culture, but it’s not insurmountable. Like most things, you have to experience it to really understand it: Facebook and Twitter, for example, is a terrifying idea to people who don’t actively participate. I’ll fully admit that war games like Call Of Duty scare me, but I know that if I played them, I’d grok their significance and purpose.

Just as rock and roll was a new, envelope pushing culture in the fifties, sixties and seventies, digital culture is remaking who we are in the 21st century. Games are an integral part of that, and are an artistic medium to embrace and explore rather than fear and question.

[Brochure a collaboration by Lyall Bruce & Johanna Basford]

On Sat 6th Feb 2010, Censta and members went on Dundee Popup, a tour round the city’s creative people and places.  Artists, designers, illustrators, film-makers all gathered for a day of behind the scenes studio tours at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Duncan of Jordanstone and WASPS, private artist talks with Martin Boyce and Daziel and Scullion, plus an exclusive preview of the soon to be opened McManus Gallery after a 4 year refurbishment.

Members were blogging, tweeting and documenting in stills each part of the day, so you can take the tour for yourself.

As well as a day for members, and the city’s creatives to meet and discuss their work and practice, Dundee Popup created some LTD edition artworks. Censta members  SooperDD and Johanna Basford worked together to produce the booklet detailing the day, and Superfly worked with artists from the site to create a poster gallery round the city. Read more about it here.

To top it all off, we had an evening of talks from members, followed by wine and some rather fine Central Station cakes, created by Nikki McWilliams.

To see some of the photographs from the day look here. Read the rest of the blog to find out more about the day, and click here to find reviews and thoughts by the members who joined us.

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What? A tour of the creative world of Dundee, Central Station style. Private talks, tours and presentations. As well as lots of members meeting & discussing.

Where? Dundee

When? 11am – 8pm Saturday February 6th

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[SuperFly poster by Jen Collins - part of a series]

11am:
Meet us at the Reception entrance of Duncan of Jordonson College of Art & Design. We’ll have a quick chat…and then the tour begins. Join us for some or all of it and come visit us at The Rep for a coffee stop.

11:30am options:
i) See the new exhibition at Cooper Gallery, Public Image, accompanied by a Curator talk & listen to sculptor student Julie Duffy talk about her practice

ii) Meet some graduates from DJCAD who’ll talk about how they’ve got themselves noticed since leaving

iii) Have a private tour of Dalziel + Scullion’s studio space

1pm options:
i) Go to Generator Projects for a private talk and tour

ii) Go to WASPS for a private studio tour

iii) Go to a screening of a film selected by Martin Boyce, with a live soundtrack by saxophonist Raymond MacDonald (please note there is a charge for this event & booking is necessary)

2pm options:
i) Get a rare private walkround of Realtime Worlds

ii) Have an exclusive peek inside the newly renovated McManus Galleries

3pm options:
i) Pop along to The Visual Research Centre

ii) Go to the DCA Print Studio for a private tour

3.45pm:
Hear an exclusive Martin Boyce talk about his No Reflections exhibition at the DCA

5pm options:
i) See the SuperFly Pop-up exhibition at the Hannah MacLure Centre

ii) Hear Yann Seznec talk about his Gelkies exhibition at the Hannah MacLure Centre

iii) Take a look at Handmade Heaven’s handmade wares at the Hannah MacLure Centre

6 – 8pm:
Join us for This is… Sit back and listen to a selection of our members giving quick-fire presentations about their work & practice. Then a chance to chat, mingle, drink and nibble

[Cupcakes by Nikki McWilliams]

Realtime Worlds the awards winning game studio makers of Crackdown invited a select few people from Central Station to visit their studio and have a tour.

Colin McDonald gave a great introduction to the studio and let us in on some interesting stats information about how a studio that size starts and runs down developments that last somewhere in the region of 4 years.

As you might imagine the studio in Dundee employs quite a few people, for their latest game APB, which should launch in 2010, they currently have about 200 full time staff working on the game, though the studio in total is about 300. These developers, designers, artists UI experts etc have mostly been sourced from Scotland but about 40% of them have been brought in from around the world as good people are hard to find Colin explained.

Colin then led us out of the board room, where he had given us the intro, and we passed banks of Xboxs, PS3s and a full Rock Band setup. First stop was the testing area, here there were banks of game testers driving, running and most definitely shooting their way around San Paro, the city from APB.

This room was quite amazing, not only did each member of the team have a couple of monitors in front of them, but on 2 of the walls there were 4 meter projected views of the game shown.  On the other walls large screens showing what I can only guess were game stats and information about exactly what was going on in the virtual world at that time.

We then moved up to the sound studio areas where apparently on some days you see the unfortunate site of some poor chickens being punched to record sound effects for the realistic sounds of fight scenes. Colin also explained that some lucky sound engineers, when the studio was working on Crackdown, went out on location around the world to record sound for the different gangs.

Onwards and upwards we made our way up a few flights of stairs to the area where it seemed everything else happened. At Realtime Worlds rather than the teams being split by discipline, everyone is mixed up so concept artists, designers, animators and developers all work in pod type areas of maybe about 15 people. These teams work closely so they are able to share ideas on the part of the project they are working on.

This is where our tour came to an end, I’d really like to thank Colin and the guys at Realtime Worlds for taking the time to let us in to their studio and show us around. As a big fan of Crackdown (the reason I got an Xbox!) it was great to see where the magic happened and to get some insight into their new game APB which does look fantastic.

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To find out what Dundee Popup was all about or to read more reviews & blogs  from the day, click here.