Tim Cornwell: A week of booze for Sex Idiot Bryony begins with vodka and a jigsaw fight

IN HER 2010 one-woman Fringe show, Sex Idiot, Bryony Kimmings picked up three and four-star reviews when she took audiences through a no-holds-barred tour of her lovers and sexual encounters.

Mind you, there wasn't much in the way of rose-tinted nostalgia - the show was inspired by contracting chlamydia. Frank, confident, and sometimes "uncomfortably loopy", said the critics.

Kimmings is getting drunk all this week in the name of art, and blogging about it.

Her "alchohol experiment", 7 Day Drunk, may have the makings of a Britart installation or a degree show stunt - shades of Tracey Emin, surely - but it's all in the cause of her 2011 Fringe outing.

"This is a theatre project exploring the historical, social, political and ethical links between mind-enhancing drugs and creative practice," says her website, 7daydrunk.tumblr.com.

"In this case the artist is working with alcohol and creativity."

Kimmings is being followed by five cameras in a live-in space assisted, apparently, by a crew that includes a psychologist, a clinical neuroscientist and a sociologist, as well as two producers and make-up and costume artists.

"I have been at a steady tipsy all day today. From 10-6pm. Thats about 250ml of vodka spread over this time," she records, on just the second day of her blog, after a first day sober to "set the baseline".

"On the last two days we have decided to ramp up the Blood Alcohol Level slightly… exciting… but slightly daunting… but it seems that excess has its place in what I am trying to discover. These days won't be so scientific."

Photographs from the first day, which appear to feature Kimmings and friends, include the aftermath of a "jigsaw fight", with pieces strewn across the table.

TED set on Edinburgh

"Long hair pinned up and a pint of Guinness at her elbow", is how one admiring review described singer Jo Hamilton. The daughter of a Jamaican mother and a Kenyan father, she was raised in the Highlands before going on to live in Turkey, UAE, Kuwait, Sri Lanka and Cambodia. She is now based in Birmingham, and appears in Edinburgh next month playing an "air piano".

Air piano playing might sound like something you'd do after a jigsaw fight, but in this case it refers to an infrared musical interface which allows you to play computerised instruments simply by moving your hands in the air.

Hamilton is in Edinburgh as part of the TEDGlobal 2011 conference, which runs from 11 to 15 July. TED stands for "Technology, Entertainment and Design" and at these gatherings speakers are given 18 minutes to present "ideas worth spreading". Launched in California in 1984, when the first TED featured a presentation of the newly released Macintosh computer, speakers since have ranged from Bill Clinton to Julian Assange.

TEDGlobal, the international TED gathering, is in Edinburgh for the first time this year.This year's programme on "The Stuff of Life" ranges from Yves Rossy, the Swiss man who recently flew over the Grand Canyon with his personal jetpack, to journalist Misha Glenny, chemists, geneticists, performers, and Rory Stewart MP. A coup for the city and the EICC, and one to watch … except for most of us it will be a web-only affair: a TEDGlobal 2011 pass costs $6,000 (3,658).

Meow moves on up

"When I first saw Meow Meow in a tent at midnight at the Edinburgh Fringe, she astounded me," says theatre boss and Fringe comedy impresario Nica Burns, an enthusiastic champion of Edinburgh as the place where stars are made. Burns is presenting Meow Meow, a cabaret favourite, for three nights at the Apollo in London. "She is the most extraordinary performer with an incredible voice that can sing anything, a real comedic talent and that rarest of qualities: charisma," says the invite.