I spent the past week in Buenos Aires, speaking at the 19th Un-Convention event. I was part of a whole bunch of different panels – about live music, copyright, building local music scenes and the relationship between visual aesthetics and music.

Un-Convention formed the music part of a larger trade fair conference about the creative industries, including gaming, publishing, fashion, theatre, product design, television and so on.

An amazing experience – lots of new friends, great music, amazing food and wine, interesting sights… all the stuff you might expect from a visit to Argentina. The video captures the event really well (even if you don’t speak Spanish) – and it was put together while the event was taking place, edited and presented at the closing event on the last day. You can actually watch the video being produced in the video itself, which is a bit meta…

I took a fair few photos too.

It was great to hang out with the international Un-Convention crew as well: Martín from Colombia, Fabricio from Brazil, Fer from Argentina, Vijay from India, Ruth from the UK – all really good friends of mine… as well as some people I hadn’t worked with before, but who fitted right in.

Jon McClure from the band Reverend and the Makers joined us on our travels, and I got to meet Federico Novick who I’d been in contact with since 2007 when I interviewed him for New Music Strategies, but who I only really knew via email.

The event was a success by every conceivable measure. The above album was made over the three days of the conference – with artists performing in between the seminars. More people turned up to it than we probably expected, and people really seemed to love it. The CDs, t-shirts and posters that were made during the ‘factory’ part of the event were snapped up within minutes of their delivery.

We’ve also been asked back to do more already, which is a good sign… There are 23 regions in Argentina, and the man from the Ministry of Culture was keen to get something happening in every single one of them. We’re going to start with one in about six months time in Mar del Plata. That would be nice. And a good reminder that I really need to learn some Spanish…

Long trip though – and we only just made it out of Argentina before the Chilean ash cloud shut down all the airports.

And now I’ve come back to a massive pile of marking. As you do.

This man took an impression of my face.

Not something you do every day. As part of UnConvention Factory, there was an art project in which ten people’s faces were made into a sort of circuit board mural thing. Still not quite sure why, but it was very cool.

Weird experience, of course. My face was covered first with that stuff that dentists use to take impressions, and then with plaster. Only my nostrils remained uncovered. So I could breathe, obviously.

Here’s a picture of the finished product and a close-up of my bit.

As they set up the venue for Unconvention Factory, Saskia takes my photo – and I happen to catch it just as the flash blasts. Never done that before. Utter fluke.