A 48 foot-high steel ‘4’ is being constructed on the steps of the channel’s headquarters in Horseferry Road, London. The Big 4 will be unveiled by the Arts Minister Margaret Hodge at the official unveiling on Tuesday - 16th October at 11:15am.

The towering installation, designed by Freestate, in conjunction with award-winning engineers, Atelier One, will mirror the channel’s award-winning idents with steel bars forming the instantly recognisable ‘4’ logo only when viewed from a certain angle.

The work coincides with a major television series on public art and art in the built environment, the Big Art Project (www.channel4.com/bigart), which comes to Channel 4 screens in 2008. Four artists over the course of 12 months will customise the Big 4 starting with Nick Knight one of Britain's most innovative and influential photographers, Mark Titchner, shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2006 and celebrated Ghanaian sculptor El-Anatsui. The fourth artist will be the winner of a competition open to young arts graduates, run in conjunction with the Saatchi Gallery.

 

Pioneering filmmaker May Miles Thomas - long tracked on Netribution - whose microubudget One Life Stand was one of the first digital films has been awarded the Scottish Arts Council's Creative Scotland Award.

The £30,000 award, established to reward the achievements of Scotland's creative talent, will help May to realise The Devil's Plantation, an ambitious multi-media project tracing Glasgow's secret geometry. "It's about finding the magic in ordinary places, not grand monuments," says May, "It's a great opportunity for me to explore a different kind of storytelling." Using video, photography, graphics, sound design and animation, The Devil's Plantation will unravel the myths of Glasgow's prehistoric sites to discover ancient and occult patterns in the landscape. The project will be launched as a website in 2008.

"Glasgow we think of as this great industrial city but it is such an old city. This will look into the hidden secrets about its history, the hidden tracks that lie across it: it will be like a Da Vinci Code for Glaswegians," she told The Herald. "I have been looking at the idea of ley lines and have read accounts that the city is laid out along them in a geometric pattern. There is another idea that its layout reflects in some way the seasons of the moon. That idea stems from pre-Iron Age Glasgow, so I will be investigating all these ideas, how the city was built and re-built, and finding the extraordinary in the ordinary."

Artist Anders Weberg has created a 73 minute experimental video, made for - and only available on - peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing networks. The work was offered by the artist until one other user downloaded it, on 15th Sepetember, after which point he deleted the original file and all the materials used to create it. "There's no original" said the artist, pointing to the fact that the work now only exists as a digital copy, and possibly will be distributed no further if the downloadeder decides not to share it further. Alternatively the film could  be copied, and even changed, many times over.

 

Tate Modern is to hold the British premiere of one of the year's most explicit films -a hard-core sex anthology billed as art - because the gallery is exempt from classification rules governing cinemas. Destricted, an Anglo-American production, is a two-hour compilation of seven short films made by artists and independent film-makers who were commissioned to "explore the fine line where art and pornography intersect".

 

A Scottish exhibition of cartoons will kick off on April 7th with a day looking at the the work of French and Scottish cartoonists, including Netribution's 'artist in residence', Eric Dubois.

Dubois has been working on illustrating Carnal Cinema's back catologue of interviews for a planned anthology, and will be talking about his methodology and previewing new Carnal caricatures at the event organised by the Alliance Française de Glasgow and the Goethe-Institut Glasgow. The event will also feature Jane Weston  of the University of Bristol and  Zach Trenholm, caricaturist for the San Francisco Chronicle.