Went to see the Royal College Show on Wednesday which was largely excellent and in both the college buildings and a giant tent they'd constructed across the road in the park. Security wasn't up to the high sartorial standards of the Gagosian earlier in the week and was quite frankly casual at best. More like off duty coppers than Prada shop assistants. Lots of interesting things in product design (a stove top tandoor oven, multi-function door handles); car design (wooden structured car with low carbon footprint) and some decent painting and photography. Two things that stand out are Bianca Brunner's photos of a wooden structure in the forest which won some award that Tom Hunter adjudicated and Michiko Nitta's Extreme Green Guerillas Messaging which postulated using migrating RFID-tagged animals (birds and fish mostly) as a covert messaging system between Green Guerilla cells and also as an alternative to the postal service. Cost is detemined by speed (big fish are more expensive than slow small fish) and reliability (sardines are very cheap to use but very unreliable apparently).
