As the title of this item suggests, London’s very own Other Art Fair, an alternative expo first staged last year, begins today. Taking place at the University Of Westminster’s Ambika P3 space on Marleybone Road, the exhibition will host (and attempt to sell off) over 1000 works by 100+ artists, with prices beginning at a fairly accessible £50.

Art fans have only till 13 May to browse and buy, so why not make sense of the melange by first taking a look at Dazed Digital’s illustrated guide to its top three recommended exhibitors.

Proceedings at this year’s London-located Bloc Weekend will now feature a DJ set by Arpanet, aka Drexciya/Dopplereffekt man Gerald Donal. He aligns with the superlative and already confirmed likes of Snoop Dogg, James Blake, Orbital, Flying Lotus, Nicolas Jaar and Battles at the electronic-centric event, whose extra attractions will now include the MS Stubnitz, once a deep sea fishing trawler and now a “moving platform for the sonic and visual arts”. Basically a vast, industrial party boat.

You can see Swiss sonic artist Urs Blaser discussing the ship below, and read up on its illustrious past on this page.

By now you may know that musician/visual artistAntony Hegarty (he of melancholic piano-pop act Anthony & The Johnsons) has been enlisted to curate this year’s Meltdown festival. Well, Hegarty has just announced an initial list of acts set to perform at the event, which is staged at the Southbank Centre between 1-12 Aug under the banner ‘Future Feminism’.

Alongside the diverse likes of Planningtorock, CocoRosie and Buffy Sainte Marie, the line-up thus far also features Soft Cell new-waver Marc Almond and cult singer-songwriters Diamanda Galas and Laurie Anderson, who represent the 1990s-era New York  scene in which Antony earned his own alt stripes.

These artists share the Meltdown roster with ex-Coil twosome, Stephen Thrower and Ossian Brown, who as Cyclobe will co-score four Derek Jarman shorts with David Tibet of experimental band Current 93′s new venture, Myninerest.

The festival will also feature a rare sighting of Elizabeth Fraser, who’ll play her first proper dates since her 1998 departure from the Cocteau Twins at the Royal Festival Hall on 6 and 7 Aug.

Says Antony of his choices: “I dreamed of assembling a constellation of courageous artists, all of whom have used their platforms as cultural producers to challenge us. They have exhibited a ferocity in their pursuit of beauty, and, falling like a guillotine behind it, justice”.

Further updates and ticketing info at meltdown.southbankcentre.co.uk

A quip-tastic comedy line-up comprising Dylan Moran, Alan Davies, Milton Jones and radio DJ Greg Burns has just been confirmed for the opening gala of the Scipmylo Festival, an east London comedy/theatre/music/arts extravaganza taking place from 27 Jul – 12 Aug.

Scipmylo’s second ever edition will this year happen at Hackney Marshes, thus boasting a strong vantage point from which to view the Stratford Olympic park. Ever the good sport, star stand-up Alan Davies discusses his preparations for the gala: “I’m up at 4am every today being funny in training for this show. The drug-testing is intrusive but it’s part of the life of a top athlete”.

The full 2012 programme is as yet unannounced, but to give you an idea of the calibre of the acts, the main attractions of last year’s event included Ed Byrne, Stephen K Amos, Andrew Maxwell and Tom Allen.

It’s reasonable to anticipate similar great things from Scipmylo 2012, so watch this space for updates.

Camden’s sprawling Crawl music festival has sketched the outline of its first ever Crawlternative Media Expo (or CAME, if you like), which will run parallel to the main event on 5-7 May.

Co-hosted by arts collectives Alternative Press, Poster Roast and Lexington Record Fair, the exhibition will feature instructional workshops and talks on zine-making, poster design and screen printing techniques by leading experts in the underground arts.

Due to be staged at Camden’s St Michaels Church from 1-8pm each day, the fair will also feature live musical interludes from Toy, Dutch Uncles, Sauna Youth and Evi Vine.

More details here.

Theatre Delicatessen – whose schtick is to stage experimental works at derelict London sites – have announced a new scheme to transform a disused office block into a pop-up Olympic pleasure garden.

The roving theatre troupe will curate ‘Summer Of Sport’ – a variety of athletics-inspired events and installations – at the BBC’s former Marleybone High Street premises. Beginning on 22 May, these include a subterranean staging of ‘Henry V’ in the building’s basement, plus performances from resident associates like designer Katherine Heath, theatre ensembles HalfCut and Lab Collective, and director Ali Baybutt.

There will also be screenings of standout moments from the London 2012 Games, with visitors invited to pack a picnic and observe the action from a ‘pop-up village green’.

More info here.

The Telegraph have compiled a comprehensive compilation of what are – in Telegraph editor John O’ Ceallaigh’s opinion, at least - the 100 best things to do in London in this Olympic year.

Somewhat of an LDN ‘bucket list’ for natives and tourists alike, the four-part guide spans the obvious (museum visits, cathedral climbs, market rummages) and the oft-overlooked (little-known concerts, workshops, tours and even the odd secret rooftop garden), coming complete with useful links and recommendations.

All in all it’s a worthy way to spend an idle afternoon, plotting busier afternoons yet to come. Read Part 1, which features links to the latter sections, here.

A new project by Nike has partnered a team of 11 East London-based artists with just as many prominent British athletes in order to create collaborative works based on what inspires said sportspeople. For example, pictured is part of graphic artist Matthew Bromley’s spin on the many motivations of Perri Shakes-Drayton, 400m hurdler and a member of Team GB at the London 2012 Olympics, no less. Tracksuit/trainers titan Nike is debuting the results of this and other arts-sports collaborations on site at the Shoreditch Boxpark, and will preview the free exhibition this Thursday from 6pm.

With Havana standing free beers for all in attendance, this could prove the perfect primer to the most springlike yet of the year’s First Thursdays.

You can invest interest in the Nike Free iD expo, which continues on until 4 May, here.

CREATE London, the annual excuse for multiple arts events and cultural partnerships to manifest themselves throughout the city, has just announced 12 commissions for its Summer 2012 season.

As well as hosting big names (Jeremy Deller and his large-scale, interractive ‘Sacrilege’ installation, David Bailey’a ‘East End Exhibition), CREATE also acts as a platform for community engagement in the arts. A horde of hip-hop, grime and R&B musicians – not least Ms Dynamite, Devlin and Skepta – will perform with the BBC Symphony Orchestra as part of ‘Urban Classics’, playing free to ticketed crowds outside Waltham Forest Town Hall on 5 Jul. Tickets for that available here.

Keeping Londoners’ interests in mind, CREATE has also collaborated with design firm Something & Son to build The Barking Bathhouse – a health and beauty spa in Barking town centre as well as plotting street carnivals in cahoots with Hackney Council, and organising a series of public art projects as part of a partnership with Frieze.

There’s lots going on theatre-wise too, with CREATE confirming cooperatives with You Me Bum Bum Train and Theatre Royal Stratford East.

You’ll find info on all commissions here.

So it’s up with the anchor, and all aboard Artangel’s Roi Des Belges aka ‘A Room For London’, the tugboat-come-residential-art-installation moored atop the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, for a reading of Orson Welles’ ‘Heart Of Darkness’ screenplay. The Roi Des Belges is the very same vessel that is believed to have carried ‘Heart Of Darkness’ novellist Joseph Conrad up the Congo River in 1889, making this the most apt of all the events Artangel have staged in the space.

Presented by A Room For London’s co-designer Fiona Banner and with ‘Coriolanus’ actor Brian Cox as narrator, a full reading of the as-yet unmade script will be live-streamed to large screens in the Southbank’s Purcell Rooms, and also broadcast on aroomforlondon.co.uk.

Full details of the recital, which takes place on 31 Mar, are here.

During a residency at Artangel’s ‘boat-hotel on a roof’ installation ‘A Room For London’, Talking Heads man David Byrne found space and time to create an audio montage of sounds he recorded at various London locations. The result is ‘Get It Away’, a ‘soundwork’ set to a beat to suit the city’s natural tempo, as gauged by Byrne at 122.86 bpm.

He says: “I went out during the day and recorded sounds that I thought might be useful and evocative. It turned out that most of the sounds – even the church organ in Southwark Cathedral – seemed to converge around a common rhythm. It’s a bit too good to be true – that every large city should have it’s own rhythm, but here it is. I let the sounds dictate the groove, the tempo, and then I simply played along”.

And you needn’t wait to sample said sounds – my pick of which is a vendor selling strawberries at Borough Market – because here’s ‘Get It Away’, now:

David Byrne: Get It Away from Artangel on Vimeo.

There are plenty of art fairs about to fulfill our creative needs, but what of contemporary graphic art in particular…? Who’s catering to that niche? Pick Me Up, the collective currently running its annual fair and exhibition at London’s Somerset House, that’s who.

Unlike many art fairs, Pick Me Up won’t be just happening over a weekend, but will present its range of prints to suit any pocket (prices begin at £10) over an eleven day period. That being the case, there’s ample chance to peruse the fair and even participate in one or several of a number of events and workshops running parallel to the main event, which takes place from today until 1 Apr.

Full details here, plus a full list of those showing at the fair is here.

The Cure, Florence And The Machine, Bombay Bicycle Club and Noah & The Whale are amongst a septet of acts to have donated special single releases to the Secret 7″ project, a charitable arts initiative aiming to raise funds for Teenage Cancer Trust.

But there’s more to this than just limited edition record releases. Organisers of the scheme have also invited a host of international artists – not least David Shrigley – to each design a sleeve around one of the featured tracks. There are 700 odd designs in total, so each physical record has its own sleeve, which will then be exhibited at the Idea Generation Gallery in Shoreditch, east London between 18-22 Apr, before each unique record – sleeve and vinyl – is sold on Record Store Day (21 Apr).

The ‘secret’ part is that the designers of and music inside each sleeve won’t be specified, leaving it to the customer to guess which tracks may have inspired which artworks. Brilliant.

Details at www.secret-7.com

And why not listen to The Cure’s ‘Secret 7-inch’ contribution, a twentieth anniversary re-release of their sublime 1992 single ‘Friday I’m In Love’:

If your appetite for the ouevre of a certain Spanish cubist master wasn’t quite sated by the Tate Britain’s major current expo ‘Picasso And Modern British Art’, you most likely won’t wish to miss Sin Fin Cinema’s season of Picasso-related film that’s set to take place at various London picturehouses this Spring and Summer.

Exploring Picasso’s work and artistic legacy through an array of documentaries, short films and experimental videos, ‘Going Back To Reality: Portraying Pablo Picasso On The Canvas In Motion’ will do just as its header indicates. Or, as its accompanying info states, it will ”provide a unique opportunity to find out more about Picasso’s life and working process: his youth spent years living in Barcelona and Paris, the friends who surrounded him and the artists that inspired him”.

Following its first outing at Tate Britain earlier this month, the season will move on to the Barbican, Ciné Lumiere and Instituto Cervantes for screenings throughout April, May and June.

Find full details on specific showings here.

Having first taken up a pencil five years ago, Billy Connolly has launched his debut sketch series ‘Born On A Rainy Day’.

The concept of the exhibition, which opened in London at the Halcyon Gallery last week, began on a drab day in Montreal, when Connolly began putting ideas to paper in a Canadian hotel room. With the show set to tour nationwide galleries, prints of selected works are now available from the Castle Galleries art store. And here’s Big Yin’s pleasantly unpretentious take on his art work, as brought to us by The Huffington Post:

Mercury Prize victor Antony Hegarty (of melancholic music group Antony & The Johnsons) is to take curatorship of Meltdown’s alternative arts and performance showcase this year, following in the footsteps of the likes of Jarvis Cocker, Patti Smith, David Bowie and Ray Davies.

Hegarty, also a visual artist, will oversee 12 days’ worth of  live music, performance and discussions centring on issues, views  and values that are important to him.

He says of his plans for the event: “I want to create a kind of paradise. I want to walk through the forest and see and hear the hardcore beauty and strength in art and music that makes sense to me”.

More Meltdown details as and when they surface at meltdown.southbankcentre.co.uk

To mark his first solo retrospective ‘Joy In People’, which is on now at the Hayward Gallery, artist Jeremy Deller has collaborated with busker Chuck on a double A-side single. The partnership was struck after Deller noticed Chuck playing guitar on the South Bank, and invited him for a studio session in West London.

Featuring Chuck’s covers of Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ and Harry Belafonte’s ‘Island In The Sun’, the record was produced by Deller, who also photographed Chuck for its cover artwork.

Free previews and strictly limited and hand-signed copies of the single are available via its issuers, The Vinyl Factory.

The Independent also has this video detailing how the collaboration came about.

In an era of such austerity, this may be the perfect event for those who prefer to take artistic works home, rather than leaving them to languish on a gallery wall. Open to all buyers of limited or unlimited means, The Affordable Art Fair, which sets up at its Battersea Park site as of tomorrow (15 Mar) until 18 Mar, offers pieces from any figure under £4,000, and a spectrum of sculpture, painting and photography from over 120 contributing galleries.

Entry to the Fair costs £12 during the week, and £15 at the weekend. It can be made a touch more reasonable, however, via advance booking.

A cluster of shops situated on W1′s main thoroughfare are to participate in the third installment of RIBA London‘s  Regent Street Windows Project, which sees fifteen retailers team with a number of architects to design installations for their street-side windows.

For instance, alt-outfitters Banana Republic have collaborated with both Ushida Findlay Architects and Visitor Studio to “create a fluid form that captures a frozen moment in time” (pictured). This effect is achieved using multiple “small plastic safari animal toys cast in clear resin”, and which will link rather neatly to BR’s forthcoming ‘Safari’ collection.

Ferrari, Reiss and Moss Bros are also amongst the retailers involved in this year’s ‘Play’-themed project, which will be free to view for pedestrians and passers-by from 16 Apr to 6 May.

Annie Walker, MD of the Regent Street Association, comments on the venture: “The RIBA Regent Street Window Project is such a great idea; fun for the architects and for the retailers.  It certainly increases footfall adding another dimension to shopping.  Now in its third year, the project has become an annual event in the Regent Street calendar”.

You can see CGI mock-ups of 2012′s displays here.

Whether you like, loathe or are entirely indifferent to Damien Hirst, plans just announced by the ‘For The Love Of God’ artist to display over 2,000 of his standout creations, plus picks from his personal collection, in an expansive new gallery space… well, they’re difficult to disregard.

Hirst states that the hi-tech, high-security annexe, which is set for completion in 2014, will occupy a number of terraced buildings along Newport Street in Vauxhall; the plan being to knock through walls on the upper and lower floors to create larger display areas. He explains: “It’s about as big as the Whitechapel – six galleries, a café and a shop – and it’s a place to show my collection of contemporary art. It feels bad having it all in crates”.

Pieces by the likes of Frances Bacon, Banksy, Jeff Koons and Sarah Lucas will be exhibited beside Hirst’s own work. The Guardian has much, much more on Hirst’s current artistic activity in this article.