Open sorcery and a conceptual idea

This weekend saw the first Comm-Tech event which unfortunately I could not participate in due to double booking and child care issues. I'll find out how it went on Monday - hopefully the Ubuntu live CD's flew out and brought in £1 donations to cover their costs and the dozen or so computers and laptops we took down flew out at their knock down prices of £60 to £50 quids.

We are hoping to have two or three people joining us on a more than voluntary basis for six months under a government work placement scheme (though this seems to have been put on hold for the election which is really annoying!) and one of the roles I am keen to explore with them is getting a blog and a little social networking going for Comm-Tech.

Unfortunately I did not succeed in getting a recycling awareness leaflet ready in time after being defeated by the intricacies of "Scribus" for desktop publishing. I feel a little more inspired in that direction this morning, but with other commitments for my time - wanted to mention as an aide mémoire in my blog though that I must remember to emphasise the values of comm-tech in the closing page of such a thing and mention how we strive for maximum reuse and sometimes place items for artists or blogs.

Speaking of aide mémoire and artists - I felt inspired in one other way. Thinking of the crate of archaic RAM we have in the warehouse it occurred to me that an artist could really create something with that perhaps? It is perhaps a little trite and I am not sure how it would look as a work (needs an artist to do that part?) but the fact that all this stuff could hold memories would give you an obvious title and I liked the idea that it was memories to be and yet that would never be because the format of the stuff is unusable now - with enough dedication ROM chips could be added or boards used that carried them and these would actually HOLD memories - old programs and code no longer in use.

Anyway, I am going to email an artist who contacted us working on a sculpture and needing fifty odd old format tower alu. chassis. Eventually he went elsewhere when I told him we needed donations around a pound a pop to cover costs. But who knows, perhaps he can take that idea and run with it and we can see some unusual reuse of those memory sticks?