Blurted Ideas For Book

Blurted idea number 1

Minibus coincidence. a man possibly, some sort of official, is being showen  around number of locations say in Austria?,  Holland?, Poundland in England?, the last point before he departs he sees a red door in a building. He gets on the minibus, to the airport. He departs will stop maybe something happens on the aeroplane?. He arrives in China gets in a minibus.  He gets out of the minibus, he sees the same building in the same red door, story hinges on this point. He thinks about it the same building in 2 different locations the differences and similarities. It turns out he's in a recreation in China of the place he departed. Minibus was a Chinese re-creation of Ford transit?  some other type of minibus ? But with the Chinese name. Maybe not any point with that.

Story could  then show, the 2 locations from his memory with overlaps  drawn on transparent pages. Same device can be used for other  coincidences.

Blurted idea number 2

Coincidences mesh flow-through structure of book eeriness is doubted by narrator? Possibly a character doubting  any supernatural element. Proof is required of unidentified cosmic coincidence force? , unidentified force in general, maybe. Proof is given at or near conclusion of book in the form the fake book compartment housing  Book inside book. This internal book will, confirm   eeriness  if opened out the right stage. Book will curse viewer if opened at the wrong stage.

 Not sure how to do this. perhaps there will be  2 dreams, maybe towards the beginning  or somewhere else in the book. If you were to open the book inside the book at the wrong stage you would confirm dream number 1 the book inside the book would inform you of this.  if you have however open the book at the right stage then dream number 2 would be confirmed.

Or maybe it would just be a case of the dream coming true or not coming true, or the reader being cursed with the dream happening to them  as per the type of events witnessed in the narrative. The uncanny could leave the book and enter into the real world of the viewer.

A Selection from Selections from the Works of Fourier....

This is Charles Fourier's thoughts on the arrangement of labour I really like the lists that he writes like this one and very much this one. I also hope that I would be able to prove my "integrity and ability" but worry I might not.....

IN THE CIVILIZED MECHANISM we find everywhere composite unhappiness instead of composite charm. Let us judge of it by the case of labour. It is, says the Scripture very justly, a punishment of man: Adam and his issue are condemned to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. That, already, is an affliction; but this labour, this ungrateful labour upon which depends the earning of our miserable bread, we cannot even get it! A labourer lacks the labour upon which his maintenance depends- he asks in vain for a tribulation! He suffers a second, that of obtaining work at times whose fruit is his master's and not his, or of being employed in duties to which he is entirely unaccustomed . . . I The civilized labourer suffers a third affliction through the maladies with which he Is generally stricken by the excess oflabour demanded by his master . . . He suffers a fifth affliction, that of being despised and treated as a beggar because he lacks those necessaries which he consents to purchase by the anguish of repugnant labour. He suffers, finally, a sixth affliction, in that he will obtain neither advancement nor sufficient wages, and that to the vexation of present suffering is added the perspective of future suffering, and of being sent to the gallows should he demand that labour which he may lack tomorrow . . . labour, nevertheless, forms the delight of various creatures, such as beavers, bees, wasps, ants, which are entirely at liberty to prefer inertia: but God has provided them with a social mechanism which attracts to industry, and causes happiness to be found in industry. Why should he not have accorded us the same favour as these animals? What a difference between their industrial condition and ours! A Russian, an Algerian, work from fear of the lash or the bastinado; an Englishman, a Frenchman, from fear of the famine which stalks close to his poor household; the Greeks and the Romans, whose freedom has been vaunted to us, worked as slaves, and from fear of punishment, like the negroes in the colonies today. Associative labour, in order to exert a strong attraction upon people, will have to differ in every particular from the repulsive conditions which render it so odious in the existing state of things. It is necessary, in order that it become attractive, that associative labour fulfil the following seven conditions:

• That every labourer be a partner, remunerated by dividends and not by wages

• That every one, man, woman, or child, be remunerated in proportion to the three faculties, capital, labour, and talent.

• That the industrial sessions be varied about eight times a day, it being impossible to sustain enthusiasm longer than an hour and a half or two hours in the exercise of agricultural or manufacturing labour.

• That they be carried on by bands of friends, united spontaneously, interested and stimulated by very active rivalries.

• That the workshops and husbandry offer the labourer the allurements of elegance and cleanliness.

• That the division of labour be carried to the last degree, so that each sex and age may devote itself to duties that are suited to it.

• That in this distribution, each one, man, woman, or child, be In full enjoyment of the right to labour or the right to engage in such branch of labour as they may please to select, provided they give proof of integrity and ability.

• Finally, that, in this new order, people possess a guarantee of well-being, of a minimum sufficient for the present and the future, and that this guarantee free them from all uneasiness concerning themselves and their families . . .

I n order to attain happiness, it is necessary to introduce it into the labours which engage the greater part of our lives. Life is a long torment to one who pursues occupations without attraction. - 

http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/fourier.html


This brought to mind things Ken Robinson  said.

I AM NOT HERE TO WRITE, BUT TO BE MAD!

Robert Walser's handwriting

Lists of texts as untill this point

In both my research journal and my online blog I have acquired and attributed images and text from these sources;

'Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline' Daniel Rosenberg, Anthony Grafton


'Dreamers' 'Ted Hughes


'Slaughterhouse Five' Kurt Vonnegut


'Design as Art' Bruno Munari


'Who is There? Open the Door!' Bruno Munari


'Air Made Visible; A Visual Reader on Bruno Munari' Claude Lichtenstein, Alfredo Haberli


'The Circus In The Mist' Bruno Munari


'Underwater' Chester Brown


'The Analytical Language of John Wilkins' Jorge Luis Borges


'HERE' Richard McGuire


'A Manifesto for Performative Research' Brad Haseman


'On Illustration' Andrzej Klimowski


'Leviathan' Peter Blegvad

The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge

WITHIN WHICH  animals are divided into:

• those that belong to the Emperor, 
• embalmed ones, 
• those that are trained, 
• suckling pigs, 
• mermaids, 
• fabulous ones, 
• stray dogs, 
• those included in the present classification, 
• those that tremble as if they were mad, 
• innumerable ones, 
• those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, 
• others, 
• those that have just broken a flower vase, 
• those that from a long way off look like flies.

From The Analytical Language of John Wilkins by Jorge Luis Borges

Charity

I donated this image and others to be projected on the outside of the Design Museum as per the wishes of this odd competition. It is a picture of what I know and feel of Christmas as of December the 1st. Maybe that's why its got two S's or maybe that's because I can't spell.

They didn't want it!

ANYWAY I have started reading Bruno Munari's book 'Design as Art'/ The book begins with the idea that most art historically was "commercial" art. : "art for art's sake" is a modern invention that doesn't match history. So from this Design is the art of our time ( Well that time the book was first published in 1966 ) this idea comes and that's where I'm at.

Here is some quotes;


'For years and years architects and designers all over the world have been designing thousands of chairs, upright chairs and armchairs, all different and all the fruit of infinite inventiveness. I have even designed two or three myself. But it seems that the problem has not yet been altogether solved, because architects and designers all over the world are still going on designing chairs, just as if all their efforts up till now had been wrong.'

'In one shop I see a brass boot, size 25 (approx.). ‘I’ll have a pair of those,’ I say. ‘We have only one, sir.’ ‘What can I do with one boot?’ ‘It is not a boot to wear on the foot, sir. It is a boot to keep umbrellas in,’ the assistant explains, smiling patiently as one would at a madman. I am greatly embarrassed by this gaffe, and leave the shop at once, nearly tripping over a marble cat decorated with floral reliefs and serving as a doorstop. I am beginning to learn.' 'These are certainly not objects produced by designers, for designers do not have such raging imaginations. They confine themselves to making candlesticks that look like candlesticks'

And finally...........


NOSTRADAMO 4) Bruno Munari PROJECTIONS WITH POLARIZED LIGHT 


'In the Home of the Future people will be able to keep a small box containing hundreds of ‘pictures’ for projection.'

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death

In the book Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut there is a race of time-travelling aliens called the Tralfamadorians. They produce books that are laid out 'in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy Pilgrim the books protagonist compares the clumps to telegrams;


'Exactly,' said the voice. 'They are telegrams?' 'There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you're right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message - describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seem all at one time.'

 Bruno Munari - libri illeggibili MN 1 (illegible book)

For the Tralfamadorians "All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."

Deborah Levy Workshop

In our workshop with Deborah Levy we discussed concealment and then carried out an exercise with which we supplemented ETC for the what is concealed in the text.  

This is an example 

“She writes a poem – my mother says I'm the jewel in her crown but I've made her tired with all her ETC. and now she walks with a stick". 

The Text I did this with didn't really work here is the original without ETC's I might use it later as a staring point for a narrative .  

In another activity in groups we worked through Dreamers by Ted Hughes We were then asked separably to come up with five words in response to the text. from this point we where asked  To generate images relating to the the poem via these five words . 


These are my five words;

• EUROPE
• Mongolian Curtains 
• Lilith 
• Coal
• Ghosts

These are the images I generated 

Mongolian Curtains

I produced this image very quickly with just the literal idea of the curtains over this landscape. I removed the word curtains from the base of the image because the whole image looked to much like a crude euphemism recalled from my youth. Once noticed its hard to get rid of a euphemism but I still like this image. I enjoy the power of the name of a place with the historical, cultural and political connotations attached to it in contrast with this almost abstract double laired Fog landscape with a central translucent form announced by curtains? Oh dear.

Lilith

This began by accident when I was photocopying my ghost images. As this was the ghost of Assia I decided to show her mirror side as she was described in the poem; The Lilth! Bad photo copying is a bad trick I think the original before I edited it may be more successful, because it was served up with less thought put into its composition. With its wrongness it becomes more agreeable. .( Its inside my Journal )

Ghost

To the right is the ghost of Assia she was to have black hair but after reflecting on the many her's and Silvia's I produced I began to think that it was not so important to distinguish them too much from one another. This idea and the comments of the others in the group became the starting point for the text I have included below the timeless silvia/assia ghosts. Deborah Levy went through the the text a few times until it reached the point as it is included in this post. I would like to take this work further and work out a way to incorporate the text and images. I think the next stage may be to remove the biographical details entirely, disconnect it from the poem. It could be just the unnamed writer and the struggle for the mute trapped girls to survive the publication process.

 THE WRITER 

In 1998 Ted Hughes published a book of poetry called Birthday Letters within which there is a poem he had written about two women who had died, one in 1963 and the other six years later. They had both killed themselves. In the poem the two women meet one another. Later in 1998 at the point of publication, with these words written down perpetuating outwards, the two women became one.

DREAMERS 

A blond American women of German heritage. A Dark German Russian women of Jewish heritage. They meet. The Blond American women looks into black ringed grey eyes of the visitor. This is what she sees:

• Erotic Europe 
• A black forest wolf. 
• A witch's daughter. 
• The power of disaster and endings. 
• From all this she feels an attraction, a sort of guilt and perhaps envy. 

The poem had been designed, the writer had trapped these women. Mute and unable to reply, now beautiful and youthful, they are ghosts locked into a perpetual meeting. But then the poem is published; dissolving into the sea of words they begin to fade inside this written device. In order to protect one another they merge their consciousness, hidden from the publisher the reader and even the writer.

Hypnotic and with uneasy tension they have become one!

NOSTRADAMO 3) Alan Partridge

Alan Partridge is a fictional character, his predictions for the future of TV ring very true.

• Arm Wrestling With Chas & Dave
• Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank
• Inner-City Sumo 
• Cooking in Prison
• Monkey Tennis

NOSTRADAMO 2) Fourier

Fourier predicted that the ideal world he would help to create would last 80,000 years, 8,000 of them in an era of Perfect Harmony in which:

• Androgynous plants would copulate 
• Six moons would orbit the earth
• The North Pole would be milder than the Mediterranean
• The seas would lose their salt and become oceans of lemonade
• The world would contain 37 million poets equal to Homer, 37 million mathematicians equal to Newton and 37 million dramatists equal to Molière, although "these are approximate estimates"
• Every woman would have four lovers or husbands simultaneously

http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture21a.html

NOSTRADAMO 1) The Year of the Sex Olympics

Visionary stuff from the writer of Quatermass, Nigel Kneale and its got Leonard Rossiter in it whcih is good.

Notes / thoughts on recent guest lectures Charles Esher

Charles Eshers summary of the triumph of capital co-opting the avant-garde was really good, big story and he told it well. Maybe that's why the aesthetics around activism are so unattractive; it's a device to deter assimilation by the mainstream! Activism's paranoia makes for misplaced dreadlocks and lazy posters. I don't understand why people need to become curators or why people need people to curate ( that's the same for allot of things for everybody surely?) that shouldn't stop me from enjoying his work but there does seem to be allot of reasserting the curators role within creative practice.

I liked the video piece he started with - the building in Beirut exploding and imploding forward / reverse.I have lost my notes with the name of the work and artist. when I find them again I will insert it here. I knew of the Picasso traveling to Ramalla. A friend of a friend wrote this about stealing the painting which I think is a wonderful response to such a expedition. There be the the curator! the facilitator of the response to the response to the response intended or otherwise? 

He also made the point along the lines of ;

Creativity should not be taken as a universal positive. A good example is the "Thinking outside the box" culture driving us towards a situation where the more creative banking has become the more dangerous it becomes.

I  think It went like this but I'm not sure because I lost my notes.

COINCIDENCE

I have recently been thinking about how I could play with the idea of coincidence as a naritive tool. I'm interested in the way events big historical and small everyday can interrelate, how we understand this and how this effects the way we read the world.

Here are some odd questions to move the idea somewhere;

• Do we emulate or repeat one another? If so how is this manifested?  
• Can everything that we do be seen to be related ? 
• Does Inheritance and empowerment run through geographical locations?  
• Is it mimicry that people will dance for weeks on end until they drop, or are they just staving ? What   world do we live if we decide it was just mimicry?
• Does historical weight with its crunch points operate like the chance meeting of old friends?  . 
• Was the landlady Cleopatra cat in her previous life? and was the tenant Cleopatra?
• Is it strange than the son of George Bush who is also called George Bush was doing the same job as his dad 8 years later?
• Is nepotism supernatural? what happen if we take it to be supernatural, what world do we live in then?

 These are some definition of coincidence as it is understood;

• A chance occurrence of events remarkable either for being simultaneous or for apparently being connected 
• Remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection 
• A Correspondence in nature or in time of occurrence. 

Sweetheart Come

In my other research journal I have some bits and pieces where I have been playing with repeating word forms. Here a women is dealing with her grief by writing the same two words over and over again. In my exercises  I am pushing the meaning that I can read out of the words by hand writing them in repetition.

Once you know the background to how these pages were created the word forms can't loose there meaning despite repetition. Or maybe not, even if Herzensschatzi komm is not understood and you know nothing of the backstory the image created by these repeated marks would still communicate despair.

This is the story. It's very sad;
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/08/sweetheart-come.html

Andrew Lanyon Workshops

Last Tuesday and today I have attended workshops run by Andrew Lanyon.

Andrew Lanyon has produced and produces very well made, fascinating books as well as some slightly shoddy but charming films.

His books utilises the aesthetic of the past but not in that faux-Victorian way that some contemporary illustration can feel to me. Sometimes when visual artists use such imagery it can perform a type of surface disconnect, this isn't good. Andrew Lanyon work doesn't do that, the books have the feel of an authentic evolving world, idiosyncraticly built of 1930's 40's 50's magazines and technical books. This is still his world from the time he grew up in and forms the framework of the things he makes. There's a huge depth to this world of structure and stories real, imagined or hinted at. This all works through a kind of processed rationalised madness that authenticates the world / makes it work.

He had a great deal to say of his perspective on how to produce work and thoughts about bookmaking including;

 'A book is viewed at the same distance from which it was made' 

Which I really liked so I noted it down, and now put it on here.

Bruno Munari - Who is There? Open the Door!

  

Books to be read in a way that’s not rigidly predetermined but as if the book was one continuous sheet as wide as a page but as long as all the pages set one below the other. 

      

Bruno Munari - The Circus In The Mist

With Bruno Munari's circus in the mist you can read back and fourth within the book. You are situated in the mist and the forms become visible through tracing paper and circles through the pages. There’s a lot of room for the reader to build their own narrative especially in the way I first encountered the book in it's original Italian ( I cannot read Italian). Although even with the English translation once you have read through and understood the text there is a great deal of room for interpretation and play.



The book was designed for children and the possibility’s of the book as a play thing work well, encouraging an exploration of the functionally though touch and experience of the structure and the texture and weight of the pages. 

The rational design thing that Bruno Munari brings to these books works so well because its counterbalanced with the absurd. This aids the books functionally to serve a purpose and gives these books objects he creates a life and illusion.

Listening to Images

Yesterday we had a listening to images workshop. In the workshop we created a series of three drawings that we then cut into smaller panels. Eventually we worked text into the image narratives created by the sequencing of these panels.

We where given the task of writing three narratives from three different perspectives. The result I used on the finshed sequence was a combination of all three but all in capitals.

I NEED TO THINK OF AN ALTERNATIVE TO HANDWRITING IN CAPITALS WHEN ATTEMPTING TO ATTACH IMPORTANCE TO TEXT. If you do this in type it just looks like you want to emulate the act of shouting.

These are the narratives I worked out for the workshop;

Dialogue only 

Hey don't ignore us!
Whaa?
We have seen things!
You will Connect, we will explain!
The sea and the sky has become alive In terrible rapture!
Woosh!
Arrr!
Where are you from?
FROM THE FUTURE!
The sky is in wonderful passive control the sea does not merge with it!
Civilisation is confirmed
Will I be ok?
Yes she is there to protect and guide you
Unfortunately they are there also.
No matter come now!

Third person narrative 

They came from the never never
To look for the chosen one
To tell him of the future world
He did not want to listen
But he had to listen
The terrible event was beginning
The beast
Water began to rise fast!
The chosen one was in danger
to the other world they must take him
It stands!
"Come now " they said
She was waiting for him
But unfortunately so were they...

One word per image. 


Broke the rules a bit 

The spectors appear
To the one
The future world
Not want to know
Had to know
Flood
Fear
Flood
Afraid
They knew
The future
All that is
He must come
She is there
And Them

First person monologue 


From the perspective of the spectors as a group conscience 

All in a days work you see
To find him
Tell him about all that
Make him understand
About the event
The sea and the sky becoming one big conscious thingy
It's name was andrew, we thought oh yes
Quite an event!
We from the future
The world of the sentient
Where all is calm
Went back and saved him
So he could meet her
And inevitably, them also

The finished result of the workshop...

A Manifesto for Performative Research

Today we where reminded to look at this; 

A Manifesto for Performative Research by Brad Haseman

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/3999/1/3999_1.pdf

The essay sets out some of the key concepts behind the Wednesday lectures and the emergence of what it calls the 'Performative researcher' I like this essay because it is a clear and concise text which allows you to access its central concepts and idea in an unambiguous straight forward way. It has allot of combative language about 'New strategies' and 'Methods that have to be invented' in the face of "The traditional paradigms of research" in which "Established qualitative researchers are anxious about the performance turn, keen to establish orthodoxies" It sounds like a bloody war, and if so I think I'm unwittingly on the good progressive side, although the word progressive is never used. Because everyone uses it now. For everything. 

 "Most commonly, performative researchers progress their studies by employing variations of: reflective practice,participant, observation, performance ethnography, ethnodrama, biographical/autobiographical/narrative inquiry"

This would be the most natural way to work. I am aiming to work like this IN FACT this here is me trying to work like this / that.

This NEXT is a section of the essay in which I'm working out how it works for me. This is a diagrammatic depiction of one of the ways I deal with a text like this. It is also just something I have done because I want to see what the words look like highlighted. Is this nonnumeric diagrammatic data, qualitative research? Or a visual exploration of digital symbolic data, performative research?  Or neither, just daft.

     Does not fit right

     Sort of fits

     Fits

"The second characteristic of practice-led researchers lies in their insistence

that research outputs and claims to knowing must be made through the

symbolic language and forms of their practice.>1 They have little interest in

trying to translate the findings and understandings of practice into the

numbers (quantitative) and words (qualitative) preferred by traditional

research paradigms>2.  This means, for example, that the practice-led novelist

asserts the primacy of the novel;>3 for the 3-D interaction designer it is the

computer code and the experience of playing the game; for the composer it is

the music, and for the choreographer it is the dance. This insistence on

reporting research through the outcomes and material forms of practice

challenges traditional ways of representing knowledge claims.>4 It also means

that people who wish to evaluate the research outcomes also need to

experience them in direct (co-presence) or indirect (asynchronous, recorded)

form.">5

1 I would not insist but would be happy if something like this followed from the way I worked

2 I would love to be able to translate my creative practice in this way if needs be. I probably won't.

3 I would assert the primacy of the image, text and it's container?

4 My predisposition for reporting research through outcomes and the material forms of my practice may   challenge orthodoxies in the context of this essay but for me this is not intentional.

5 So this is the recorded form? a sort of narrative inquiry?

 THIS BLOG IS A RECORDED FORM / A SORT OF NARRATIVE INQUIRY 

Creative Writing Workshop

ORIGINAL

Original extract of script that was used as starting point

Theme music playing light changing colour to indicate the passage of time, camel stoically standing guard Mouse from stage left enters skipping skips past camel who is still standing guard ignoring the mouse.

MOUSE Hello?

Camel says nothing stares forward
MOUSE Hello? Hello?
CAMEL Pause Yes.
MOUSE OH A CAMEL!
CAMEL And you a mouse? No more no less.. please do not disturb me.
MOUSE You are not disturbed! You will love me! Everyone loves me!
CAMEL You are incorrect.... I have nothing to say to a mouse, I do not “love” you.

Mouse does weird dance looks at camel camel looks back unmoved. 
MOUSE Oh! Anyway, I haven't seen a Camel round here for years! No not for years! Are you on official business? no doubt?
CAMEL I am on official business from the executive and do not wish to be disturbed, please go away...
MOUSE Yes OK where?
CAMEL Flustered well doesn't matter! do not care!
MOUSE To the mountain?
CAMEL Sarcastic yes to the mountain, the mountains are beautiful, everyone loves the mountains you should go there.
MOUSE Yes! Yes! my camel friend and you shall come with me!

Mouse takes hold of camel’s lead rope and walks off with it, singing same song as before “tra la la lee”, camel goes along, letting the mouse feel heroic.

ANTONYMIC TRANSLATION

Translated text with inverted meanings. Where possible.

Unattributed atonal noise is internalised, darkness is staying the same tone to distract from the stillness of space, Goldfish is nervously floating unprotected. Cat exits into the audience crawling right up to Goldfish who floating unprotected pays all of his attention to the Cat.

CAT Goodbye!

Goldfish thinks about everything darts eyes everywhere

CAT Goodbye! Goodbye!

Goldfish Quickly No.

CAT I am already aware that you are a goldfish.

Goldfish And you not a cat! Lots less and lots more. Do alert me!

CAT You are alerted! You will not hate me. No one hates me.

Goldfish You are correct, I don't have any reason to keep quiet around a Cat, but I do hate you.

Cat does accomplished walk and looks away from goldfish, goldfish also looks away from cat and is very moved by the situation.

CAT I understand! And on a different subject, I have seen another Goldfish directly over-there very recently! I was sure you would be on an unofficial pleasure trip, but I do have my doubts.

Goldfish I am on a Unofficial pleasure trip to the lowest rank and I do fear being alerted! COME HERE!

CAT No, negative, don't you want me over there?

Goldfish Composed certainly it does matter where you go, I am passive.

CAT Away from the sea?

Goldfish Sincerely Not away from the sea, the sea is not ugly, no one hates the sea, you shouldn't go away from somewhere.

CAT NO! NO! You are my goldfish nemesis and you will not go away without me!

Cat lets go of Goldfish's listless string and dances at that spot without need of it.Cat is screaming a different atonal noise than will be heard in future times “SNAAAAAAAA” 

Goldfish stops dead, Unwilling to let the Cat become a villain. 

SUBJECTIVITY 

First person narration, from the perspective of an object or character within the original narration. This is the events from the perspective of the bucket that appears later in the script HERE.

It hasn't rained round here for ages. The air feels heavy with moisture, but it never rains!
Hmm interesting, why is the mouse thing talking to the one who is called camel? Quite Interesting......
Camels can hold much much more water in there humps than I could ever hope to hold! I always find this depressing.....
 ...This camel has no humps. It must be one of those hump-less camels, that is a camel who has no humps and doesn't really look like a camel. For me that's a camel in name only, but what do I know? I'm only a bucket!
 ...Hmm they are still talking. I wonder what they are saying to each other?

(Long pause)

It hasn't rained round here for ages, maybe for days.

Oh their heading this way!

 HAIKU 

Camel stoically. 


Mouse skips damp path towards night. 


Enjoy yourself fool!

HERE

This is Richard McGuire's comic strip Here, published originally in RAW Vol 2 #1.








I became aware of this strip about a year ago after spotting it in a anthology of comics that I was flicking through in a shop. Here is a depiction of happenings in one place back and forth through thousands of years of time. Here was so exciting because it demonstrated to me what can be possible with a pictorial depiction of time in a way that I had half imagined and hoped  might of been done / could be done.
Within a rigid frame system Here opens itself up to mutable readings by installing cut-out frames that offer windows to the same place at different times. I like the way it emphasises the massiveness of the place in Here by throwing the reader through the events and snapshots of events that take place. The sub-plot of the man growing old and dying seems incidental to the physicality of the location fixed in every frame. The whole feel of the strip serves to reinforces that absoluteness of the universe in comparison to our briefness; A 'Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing' sort of thing. This is something that all good culture can and should do, to some extent. Possibly.
Anyway the here in Here is the star of the strip 
Interestingly according to the Wikipedia  Chris Ware wrote an essay about Here for the magazine Comic Arts so I should try and find that and see what he said. Chris Ware's work sometimes makes me think of George Perec's Life a users manual especially here. I got a bit drowned by detail in Life a users manual and unfortunately couldn't made it to the end.
This here is a film adaptation of Here;

For me this film although charming and worth watching doesn't really have the multidimensional and open quality of the original.. This is partly because it acts more as a interpretation of the original and partly because moving image is not an open enough format / doesn't lend itself to alternative ways of viewing time. Maybe that's because moving image is a developed interpretation of time so creatively you are locked into the set parameters of the medium?

The fact that film is limited is great! A Hierarchy of cultural produce is of course wrong and mad but unfortunately I sometimes develop, like a cold, a pyramidal system  in my head that I have to try and ignore. Quite often moving image and film sits on the top. Limitations help put nonsensical ideas like this into perspective and limitation are the framework in which different strands of creative activity weave together to create a richer reflection of the whole. 

Not pointy and solid like the pyramid but soft and lumpy like an old coat.      

HOWEVER..... Just to indulge: if there was this great pyramid then music would be the sea or sky, or both. It would definitely have to be gas or liquid, not solid.

 TIME HAVE TIME NOT? 

  

Kin-Dza-Dza

 'Calender' Saul Steinberg, 1970

TIME TRAVELS

Michael Craig-Martin Lecture

Michael Craig-Martin had a chat with the curator of a Tate St Ives exhibition of abstract painting today for our MA Arts guest lecture. He came across as likeable often ending answers to questions by saying something like 'that's just the way I am'. 

By coincidence I was introduced to his piece An Oak Tree in my first lectures at art college, probably in an attempt to broaden minds or something or something. Anyway, further than my knowledge of that work and his subsequent big object drawing things, I didn't really know what, why or how he did what he did.

One Michael Craig-Martin work  that I would sometimes encounter, depending on my route to work, was his mural for the Woolwich DLR station. The mobile phone in the mural would catch my attention. I  would think about how the model of phone pre-dated the station, opened in 2009, by quite a few years. 

Here is the mural from the station. The phone is tucked away a bit at the back near the pink football.

Here is the phone as you would see it coming up the stairs.

I knew the DLR part of the station had opened in 2009 because I remembered it opening; I remembered my friend travelling on the the extension to see what it was like. Exciting friend. ANYWAY This is a wrong phone! A displacement phone!

It was in fact as revealed in the talk I attended not a result of some sort of conspiratorial element but as the result of Michael Craig-Martin love of templates. He reuses all his templates for objects from the moment they were created onwards, the templates remain the same. He said his templates once created become timeless in there re-usage but to me in light of my relationship with the mural in Woolwich they appear more like time travellers.