This weekend sees the start of the 43rd annual Brighton Arts Festival.

The weather is promising to behave, so grab your beach towel and picnic and head down to the best city in the UK to indulge in a spot of sunbathing with a difference.

This year’s planned events are the best yet, with Guest Artistic Director, Anish Kapoor kicking off the festivities along with Diamanda Galás, , Willkommen Collective, Walk the Plank, les ballet C de la B, Takács Quartet , Ivo Papasov.

The festival runs until the 24th May so get those tickets booked and your picnic packed to make sure you don’t miss out on what looks like it’s going to be a fantastic month of the Arts.

Location: PostList

 Looking into their crystal balls, many see a future of unlimited bandwidth in which mobile devices supplant the PC.  One of these prophets is Adam Greenfield. He sees a world of  "live feeds from massively distributed embedded sensor networks, extraordinarily complex real-time data visualizations, fully social augmented-reality overlays...and a whole lot of things that we haven't even begun to imagine.”  In his book, 'Everyware : The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing', he conceives of a a world where there are smart buildings, smart furniture, gestural interfaces.

 Divided into 81 theses, Greenfield paints a picture where computers are embedded into the enviroment, such that, as the title of the book implies, computers are everywhere and in everything, as it where. All very enlightening no doubt, but is this 'brave new world' a good thing? One wonders what Sir Thomas Moore,  who coined the term 'Utopia' would have made of it?
Location: PostList

In his recent much-vaunted book, 'The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It,' Jonathan Zittrain paints a frightening picture of the state of the net. One of the perils of which he is particularly scared is hacking. Interestingly, he advocates that our computers have two modes: red and green. In 'green' mode, the system is hermetically sealed and only approved programs can run, only safe traffic is sent and received, and safety is paramount. By contrast, in red mode, it's every man for himself. You can download and run any software you want, and, should you catch something nasty, there would be a 'restore' button that would wipe the offending lurgy and return you to your default settings. This idea has merit, for it gives you the choice whether want to into 'the big pool' or 'little pool', as the whim takes you.

Location: PostList

Thrift is desirable, necessary and fashionable. So says India Knight in her guide to economical modern living 'The Thrift Book: Live Well and Spend Less.' A child of the 80's, she loves consumption and yet she started finding herself irritated at the amount of plastic used in supermarket packaging. Little by little, she became greener and started doing her bit. If you're interested in living well, in saving money in these troubled financial times and in feeling like a useful member of the human race, this is the book for you. Only don't buy it. Borrow it from the library.

Location: PostList

It's fashionable in some quarters to declare advertising dead.

But reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. After all, people will always buy apples and the green grocer will always polish them. Perhaps it's better to divide advertising agencies into 'dinosaurs' and 'mammals'. The former became extinct (so one hypothesis would have it) because they couldn't adapt to their climate, whereas the latter laid low, adapted and survived.

True, traditional advertising looks moribund. Her traditional channels blocked, she has been bellowing in her swamp of late. But amid the undergrowth, the mammals are thriving, shunning traditional approaches and taking more unusual paths so as to grab people's attention.

Of the new landscape Tom Himpe, author of 'Advertising is Dead: Long Live Advertising,' says: '...agencies need to recruit people with a broad and open mindset,' for 'there are many old crocodiles out there.' He further recommends that in the age of two-way conversations with the consumer all brands should engage in guerilla warfare. By this he means, instead of one 'big bomb', it's wiser to invest in an array of smaller bombs, i.e. in smaller creative ideas.

He takes the view that  off-beat and truly original actions or initiatives should be the heart of a campaign. Rather than being the cherry on the cake, they should be the cake. All of which of course is music to Libertine' s ears. 

Location: PostList