Blink are taking part in a consultation workshop tomorrow with a group of young carers from across Cumbria. We’ll be exploring the possibility of making digital artworks about caring, connectivity, managed woodland and personal experience. This is a collaboration between Folly, Art Locates Me, The Forestry Commission and Grizedale Park.I loved this work (sadly is no longer around) that transforms a tree into a 20 foot catapult by Dexter Dymoke called ‘Ambush’.

Anywhereblogs was an initiative for the whole of Manchester, one of the first public, citywide services of its kind in the world. Anywhereblogs enabled mobile phone users to discover and create the secret life of the places and events that mattered to them, while out and about around their city, using text messages and WAP on mobile phones to read the secret life of well known places and add their own feelings about somewhere in the city they cared about.

The Anywhereblogs WAP programming from 2005 onwards, and all of the SMS system, was built by Pete Bamford.

Pete built a system that worked first time and never once went wrong, and he also graciously and with good humour saved Anywhereblogs from several very public technical failures that he had no responsibility for.

Anywhereblogs was only a small part of the range of things that Pete was excited about and expert in, from electronics hacking to physical computing to programming to VJing, and he brought a joy and enthusiasm to them that made it seem crazy not to be as interested in everything as he was.

Pete died in October 2008 aged 29 after an operation on a serious condition he had had all his life.

The world is short enough of people with Pete’s combination of good humour, decency and skill, and he’ll be missed by everyone who knew him.

Peter Bamford 1979 - 2008

For about a year, from February 2007, we put up posters at bus stops in Manchester asking “Where were you happiest to arrive and why?” and inviting people to reply by text message, or read what someone else has written, again by text.

About 2000 people read messages, and 400 sent them in, and these are some of the most memorable:

picadilly is my best, because i found the love of my life there. Ten years strong. By jim of salford.

At ashton new road waiting for a bus to take me home from another one night stand!

getting the bus to the hospital in time to see my brother before he died he was only 19

The 375 terminus at Shiloh Road - it has to be Manchester’s loneliest bus terminus, with sweeping moorland views

rail replacement from stockport to sheffield the peaks are gorgeous today in the sunshine

[it takes a lot of good humour and some lovely scenery to write that about the rail replacement bus service!]

And finally, this fantastic piece of Zen philosophy for living:

Five Trees Forest is a pervasive game played with Nokia NFC enabled mobile phones.

The Five Trees Forest is an invisible world that is in exactly the same place as our world.

It has landmarks, like the Down the Back of the Settee Mines

characters like the Wise Sheep

and baddies, wicked witches like the Big Flip Flops witch.

The only creatures that can jump between our world and the Five Trees Forest are sprites, and when they are in our world, sprites like to live in mobile phones because the batteries keep them warm, and the radio waves make them giggle.

To pick up and drop off sprites from the Forest, humans just need to hold their phone up to the secret signs that mark places in the Five Trees Forest landscape, and their sprite will hop into or out of the phone.

Sprites talk to humans by sending messages that appear out of thin air (humans sometimes call them text messages), and ask magic questions like “If you were a ghost, who would you haunt and why?” in order to win treasure, and fight the wicked witches.

The answers to the magic questions from all the players appear on the map of the Forest, so that humans become part of the story and history of the Five Trees Forest wherever it appears.

The Five Trees Forest will be found first in a trial at the Media Centre in Huddersfield, then at Norton Sixth Form College in Sheffield as part of the Off the Shelf literature festival

Blink are working closley with long time creative collaborator Daniel Blackburn developing a system which is set to challenge conventional ways in which galleries and similar public venues make available extended translation materials to their audiences. Focussing on a unique multinodal outdoor Bluetooth installation for the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, BluLoci will allow mobile phone users to access free information about where they are and the artwork they are experiencing as they make their own way around the park. More soon.

illuminate was an sms audience development initiative designed for the Yorkshire-wide Illuminate Festival.

Illuminate sms sent out free text event updates and encouraged participants to text in reviews of events and respond to creative challenges over 12 months.