Light Show at the Hayward Gallery is glittering brilliant, and although I am something of a coloured light fan (fairy lights are not just for Christmas) I think there was enough in there for anyone; colour experience spaces, a magic mirror interrogation box, a room full of spinning shadows, a massive fountain/waterfall/firework chandelier (that's one you're seeing in all the photos) and columns of warm golden filaments... and that's before you get to the really good things, like the enormous column of barbie-coloured interrogation transcripts and Olaf Elliasson's velvet black room full of strobe lights and what some breathless child in the room described as "real life slow motion water". Incredible stuff (not captured by any of the videos/photos/descriptions I just linked to). Exit via the gift shop, buy a Fluobar on the way out.

We also went to Kinetica Artfair, where highlights included a wearable boar skull and surgical steel kinetic sculpture, lego autonomous instruments, a wired-up typewriter piano room, an angel only visible in the periphery of vision, a mahogany death star, a wall of eyeballs, lightning dresses, suspended magnetic clocks and clouds, a bicycle horse kinetic paint machine and a driftwood wind-up bird. Photos to follow (which won't do it justice). Tim bought a synthesiser kit and I was only saved from buying a a pair of fully programmable LED message glasses by the fact that they only had the display pair left (and they didn't fit me).

There was a certain amount of crossover(?) between the two, although one was brushed up, canon and posh and the other very much the anarchic madhouse art fair wrap party, full of people apologising for things being broken or trying to make one last sale. Something of the same attempt to engage/break/flood/fool senses. My eyes and brain feel quite stretched, and I still can't figure out how some of the things I saw today worked.