Led by Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj, the group’s work explores interactivity and confronts a media-saturated world in which popular culture rules, using performance, installation, video, mobile and online technologies to ask questions about the ideologies present in the information that surrounds us.

I’d Hide You (2012) commission from The Space, a BBC / Arts Council England initiative

Why we like it:
Blast Theory is innovative and has a strong track record of taking major artistic risks – in Kidnap (1998), for example two members of the public were kidnapped as part of a lottery and the resulting event was streamed online. They have tackled themes of violence, pornography and politics.

A Machine To See With (2010) commission from the Sundance Film Festival, 01 San Jose Biennial and the Banff New Media Institute

In Blast Theory’s film, A Machine To See With (2010) participants play the lead in a heist. Participants signed up online with their mobile phone numbers. On the day, they received an automated call giving them an address to go to. From there, a series of calls instructed participants through the city, they hid money inside public lavatories on the way, met up with a partner in crime and onwards to the bank, the tension rising. This seems like an utterly unique experience as it’s up to the individual participants to deal with the bank robbery and its aftermath.

Find out more:
Website | Vimeo | Flickr | Facebook | Twitter

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For more creative delights we’ve Spotted on the web take a look here.

Triple Canopy is dedicated to slowing down the Internet. This begins with their cleverly-designed interface which encourages prolonged, focused engagement.

Working collaboratively with writers, artists, researchers, designers, and developers, Triple Canopy facilitates projects that engage the Internet’s specific characteristics as a public forum with its own evolving practices of reading and viewing, and modes of interaction.

Why we like it:
With great articles like international art language and downloadable podcasts, it’s difficult not to spend all day on this site.

UN<SIMPLE downloadable podcast by Adriana Reines

Find out more:
Website | Tumblr | Facebook | Twitter

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For more creative delights we’ve Spotted on the web take a look here.

With a sense of serendipity, three events have aligned themselves recently suggesting an interesting connection between creativity, warfare, social networks and these supposedly widespread but ‘hidden’ parts of the terrorist internet. The first is a meeting that took place recently at the offices of the Scottish Government, between Wendy Wilkinson, deputy director of culture, and several people from the ‘creative industries’ (including illustrators, games designers and others), “to brainstorm/discuss how creativity can help in the study of terrorism and forensic science and in how the outcome or story from that is told.” 

The second is a lecture given yesterday, here at GSA, by Dr Mats Fridlund on ‘the terror of things’ (presumably alluding to the internet of things). Mats is interested in the design aspects of terrorism, from the distribution of bomb-making instructions through the ages, to the design of terror related paraphernalia.

The third is an upcoming seminar at Glasgow University, Thursday 22nd April, entitled ‘Influence through cyberspace‘ (which you can still book for) hosted by the ministry for defence and the Glasgow University innovation network. The invite blurb states;

“Success in modern conflicts is more than just the physical defeat of enemies; lasting success needs to win the “battle for hearts and minds” through influence and effect in the cognitive, rather than the physical, domain. This has traditionally been fought using personal interaction and broadcast media, but the increasingly ubiquitous nature of the online world as the communication medium of choice for many represents a new challenge and demands new thinking to be effective…”

Readers can drawn their own conclusions from these events, the hidden internet spaces they point towards, and the ways design, creativity and technology are being co-opted to various ends, but its also worth exploring the parallel efforts of anthropologists to avoid becoming part of a mechanism of control and paranoia.

Read more about Neil McGuire here.

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Hidden Spaces – a month of blogs by members about their hidden space – whether they be real, imagined, unbuilt, cut-off from the public, demolished, spiritually significant or politically sublimated. Read more from the series.