Since 2003, artists Sam Ely and Lynn Harris have led Unrealised Projects, a collaborative series to which they invite artists, designers, curators, writers, performers and musicians to submit "unrecognised, unfinished and unfulfilled ideas". The sometimes irreverent, sometimes wistful submissions range from Per Hüttner's exhaustive, deadpan description of how he could recreate Gericault's Romantic masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa in the middle of the Mojave desert (complete with goofy Photoshop mockups), to Martin Clark's spare outline of an "Unrealised Exhibition", which reads only, "Phil Collins, Steve McQueen, Chris Evans, Dave Allen, Richard Wilson. Curated by Kate Bush".

February 10 marked the launch of Ely and Harris's fourth compendium of Unrealised Projects, a considered conclusion to a journey into material, alongside music and multimedia perfomance at Milton Keynes Gallery.

image courtesy Cecilie Gravesen, production still (2011)

Oh, we love this time of year...always have done.  Sure it might be cold, but it's bright and sunny and for the first time this year our art school kids are dusting off their trendiest jackets, cleaning their specs and being pushed out into the limelight by their tutors.  That's right - it's Interim Show time!  And if you want fine arts, go to Slade.  If you want innovation in design, go to the Royal College.  If you want photography, well actually you're in luck.

Opened this week, and on until Friday, London College of Communication host in their Upper Street Gallery the interim MA Photography.  For those in the know, this is the space for eminent photographers-in-training.

And what do you get for your (hypothetical) money?  The funniest, smartest and most eclectic experimental photography currently on show in London.  There's much which jumps off the walls and straight into your face but a lot more talent besides.  Take the triptych of portraits by exhibiting artist Lee Milne, for example.  These gentle black and white pictures of imagined and fabricated industrial machines show perfectly both the delicate skill and technique required by an artist to participate on the highest level as well as the gentle affection a photographer must have for his or her sitter.  These homemade, man-sized, mechanized contraptions are, essentially, useless - and that is their tragedy, but they are here represented as tender remainders of the technocratic revolution.  Really wonderful stuff.

MA Photography Interim Exhibition is at London College of Communications until Friday 11 February, 2011.

Because, for the second time in a year, Mat Collishaw has taken the taken a complex concept and distilled it to its most breathtakingly beautiful essence.  Earlier this year he constructed a facade, punctuated with windows upon which rapturous images of wild animals and exotic fauna were rear-projected (bear with me, it looked better than it sounds).  Exhibited at the BFI, the Young British Artist and former paramour of Tracey Emin, has moved onto one of the other great British institutions.

Magic Lantern is a zoetrope of momentous scale.  You know a zoetrope; a succession of images animate at the turn of a wheel with peephole slats.  Collishaw's though is of grand scope at the museum's highest point.  Luminescent to the point of heart-rending beauty, the work comes alive at dusk each evening, with hand-crafted fluttering moths shining like a beacon into the night.

I have stated in print before that I would find it nearly impossible to fall in love with, or to, a Mat Collishaw piece but I will, now, happily recant.  Like an artist with secure in his ability he is experimenting in form and concept.  A site-specific work, this piece is quite possibly the finest single new artwork that you will see this year.  A return to Gothic Romanticism, in one of my favourite places in the world.  Spend your day sitting in awe of the Raphael Cartoons on the ground floor and exit the museum at night with this in your wake, then be prepared to hand your soul over to magnificent, exquisite grace.  Up against the seasonal snow that we are having this winter, we've no defence...Simply resplendent.

Magic Lantern by Mat Collishaw will be visible in the V&A Cupola (from dusk) and the John Madejski Garden (between 10.00 - 17.45) until 27 March 2011.

images: Lantern Moth; Moth; Lantern; all Mat Collishaw.  Courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum.