On Thursday I went to VIVA VIVA an exhibition of Audio Visual PhD submissions. This was held in an exhibition hall called P3, which is in fact under the University of Westminster, London. The P3 venue is rather wonderful in itself being an underground hanger once used to test concrete for Brimingham’s Spaghetti Junction and the (English) Channel Tunnel.

More pics in the gallery

VIVA VIVA consists of nine multi-channel installations and thirteen films. At the time of writing there is information available on each exhibit here.

It is an absolutely huge amount of material to explore, especially when the written theses are available for reading as well.

I arrived at the exhibition at lunchtime and remained until nearly closing, 7 pm, and even then I felt I had only explored a tiny fragment of that which was available.

I took some pics which I’ve put in the gallery.

Writing with lightly coloured on a black screen seems to be all the rage. Various Mac applications offer this possibility now, Scrivener and MacJournal are the ones I use most which will do it. There’s an application called WriteRoom which seems to exist primarily to facilitate the writing of lightly coloured text on a black screen. Ulysses also does this and I’m sure there are more.

Full screen has been around for ages, but in the same way that an open document looked like a sheet of paper with the type on it, so did full screen. These apps I’ve mentioned are abandoning the idea of looking at a page on screen when in full screen mode, instead having lightly coloured text on black screen.

This return of lightly coloured text on black screen is at the same time retro and a look at the future. It is retro because it takes us back to pre-Mac days and it is looking to the future because it represents a movement away from using computers to create something that will be on a piece of paper.

There is now a large generation of people for whom lightly coloured text against a dark screen is how they first started typing anything, they did not start typing with a typewriter. For them this lightly coloured text against a dark screen thing might feel very natural.

When the Mac came along it was very much a black text on white screen device. It brought WYSIWYG to us all and for the most part was used for writing things to be printed out on paper. It was a very cool to get away from the light text/dark screen which let you know what you were actually writing but gave no idea as to how it was going to look.

When OS X came along it included Terminal application the icon of which in the dock is of a monitor, what we might have called a “Terminal” years ago, with black screen. The illustration has a cursor waiting for a command to be entered. I think this might have helped along this embracing of light text on dark screen.