Behold The Salt

is the name of a song I just listened to. What else is new since I wrote? Well, I completed a commission, composing music for a spoken word / poetry stage show. The writers were a group of young men, who have experienced mental health issues. They were also paid for the work they did and mentored by an excellent group of writers, some of whom have had similar experiences. The show was here in Leicester at the Y Theatre and went down a storm. It was quite a journey for all involved. Will post a linky dink when the documentation is webbed.

November was a strange month. My mother's 60th birthday, my graduation, a gig in London, a funeral and a friend's wedding (also in London) all fell within the space of a week. Rites of Passage R- Us and then some. I came close to forcibly Christening a child, just for the sake of completeness, but didn't have the courage. 

The weather nips, I hibernate much of the time twixt gigs, huddled beneath a duvet or around my heater. I write beats by night and try to read. I am not a good reader. for some reason it takes a lot of effort. I zipped through a book on Evolution and Theology in a couple of day. Ubik has been hanging around - need to get on top of that as it's a library one. I have also started reading the diary of a Jewish woman called Etty Hillesum who died in Auschwitz  in 1943 aged 29. But the Holocaust is just the dark background against which her very personal voyage of spiritual discovery shines. A remarkable woman by all accounts.

I think it takes a certain type of person to be a good diarist. I'm pretty certain I am not such an one. Perhaps as a  new years resolution I may try to write more often, and shorter blog entries. Yes. Resolve David! Discipline is needed.

My uncle is over from Ireland. Which is very pleasant, but has precipitated a kind of cold war between his small elderly dog Doolittle and our small youthful cat Lulu. Maybe war is too strong a word. Lulu fled for the security of underneath my mum's bed at the mere sound of Dooly's collar tinkling through the front door. The little feline has since emerged tentatively on seems relatively comfortable. They even met briefly today. there was no barking. Dooly's cat chasing days are long over. The difficult bit is assuring Lulu that this is the case. Pet diplomacy is, I think an undervalued art.

Red Run

My homage to Muybridge. Big up Eadweard. The Age of NuRave salutes you.

End of MA, start of Autumn.

My Masters' course came to the usual academic anticlimactic ending.  You pour all your sweat and stress into a few sheets of A4 and then, it just sort of fizzles out. This, said the Creative Technologies MA was a good experience, broadening my artistic and technical horizons, introducing me to new ways of working and thinking. Over the past year I have made some very nice friends too. 

I have uploaded a video documenting the exhibition TIC TOC which comprised the bulk of my final Major Project. It consists of a four channel video installation, a piece played on a larger screen and a sound work played through a transistor radio. Central to the work is the notion of time. 

Explored in different forms are looped and edited time, natural and man-made time divisions and time as an element in technology and music. Makeshift useless video 'clocks' comprised of edits, loops and (sometimes absurd), repeated actions were created. In one video a cello is repeatedly tapped in time with a metronome. In another a piece of paper falls from a tree once every second. The interplay between images and sound was central to the work, exploiting the natural ability of the mind to make connections between disparate audio / visual elements (as well as between the onscreen images and the real 'readymade' objects that were displayed beneath.

In Red Run a rotating disc shows a galloping horse and rider which seem to be animated by a  red strobe light. Persistence of vision makes the horse seem to alternate between galloping forwards and backwards. This was shown upon a large screen. 

Between the two video installations a radio plays an endless collage of '1, 2 ,3, 4's, count-ins from my itunes library, severed from their respective songs. The combination of this sound with the ticking of the four screens creates a darkly hypnotic effect.

I have no idea what to 'do' next. Various musical projects are draining more money than they bring in. But I'm happy, autumn is on the way and my warm coat awaits.

What about Higher, Further, Higher education? How much longer can  hide I from the real world?  How long is the proverbial  piece of string?

machine intelligence and human idiocy.

Time on this blog is "slowing down". This means, according to Ray Kurzweil, that the distance between salient events (read "blog posts"), is increasing. It happens to us as we grow older. In the womb things move pretty fast. new cells, new organs etc. As child things slow down a bit, but still change quick- getting a lot bigger, learning how to use a knife and fork (though not for milk), learning language and other stuff. Then adolescence. Ahem. Teens phn. Twenties zhmmmm. And now...

Discussing the phrase "To Butle" at length with people who do. ie. Butlers. And getting excited about Terry Wogan implying, albeit strongly, that he won't be doing Eurovision anymore. It's getting pretty slow. Apparently something similar happened at the beginning of the Universe. The time slowdown thing. Not the (drunken?) Eurovision debacle. (Not even the Woagester was around back then).

Time spend on trains is weird. There were only two ways the journey from Birmingham to Derby was going to end.

a. me throwing overpriced water over that man's face and saying something unrepeatable (and certainly unbutlerish).

b. remaining silent and chewing my own face off.

seriously. ask me and I'll tell you. I mean, who, in the real world asks a pretty girl on a train to "tell me three things about yourself"? calls himself a "life coach" (not to mention "scientist"), and harps on about happiness not coming from expensive cars or a nice house but from (hand on chest) here. Please (writer munches on cheek tissue). And that stuff about everyone dressing so generically (himself sporting River Island offscourings) and how she looks so unique. One would have supposed that when she tactfully says she's traveling to meet her boyfriend it would have been game over. But no, he keeps digging. Let one or other of us die ( I thought). Or both. Just to be safe ( I also thought). Actually, what the heck, nuke the whole train and we'll call it quits.

Please forgive the cynical tone of this blog. It does generally take a lot to get me this riled. But hey.

It's kind of comforting to think soon we may well all be downloaded onto the futuristic equivalent of a PC. (the digital sort. Not the Plod). In fact it might be genetic computer. Or even a quantum computer, which could theoretically solve in a billionth of a second a problem so massively intractable it would a digital computer the size of the physical universe (made up of as many tiny computers as there are neutrons, electrons and protons, each computing trillions of calcualtions per second) about thirty billion years. The only snag is someone has to be there to observe the answer, or it won't have happened. Playing a quantum computer at chess would be interesting as it would only decide whether to be white or black after the game had finished. Hey, if I could play like that, maybe even I'd win. But then, my consciousness would be in this computer anyway so. Gah. Don't quite understand what I'm... Or as David Moser said,

Quantum particles are the dreams that stuff is made of

Night night.

New 8

It strikes me I haven't written here for ages. I've not exactly been inactive, but probably not been doing as much as I should. Christmas= OK. Cooked birds and the Now Legendary Avuncular curry. Saw the New Year in with a kind of Hootennay and played Old Lang Syne (waves) on Stylophone.

Now back to uni and not much has changed. Working on a web site that makes no sense. Slightly apprehensive about a module called Advanced Computational Intelligence. mustn't have those machines taking over, eh. Most of them are at my house.

Had a dream where Derren Brown was putting me through wierd legal proceedings- vivid, and slightly unpleasant- then I was carrying a double bass around and recording drums on a train.

Git an exam in wednesay which I may well fail. Still I console myself with the fact that I haven't done one for over a decade. Plus there only 351 days to go till 2009.

holodeck, hello 'duck

my excuse for not bloggin' for ages is I've simply been feeling rotten. Headaches, bodyaches, explosive spotty nose, chest producing an endless panoply of green gunk blah blah. In other words- I've been better. The fact I seem to have passed it on to a fair number of people comes as scant comfort. It seems to have lasted ages- at least a week.

Christmas hol(ogram)s loom- with loads of school work to be done. A group presentation this week questioning why Lenticulars and holograms have only broken into "serious" artistic usage to a limited extent. To illustrate a point I shall be playing the brilliant Flashback on my recently purchased megadrive. Flashback is one of my favorite games ever on any console (Platform). It's like a mixture of Total Recall, Blade Runner and Running Man with a bit of Aliens thrown in. If that sounds too good to be true... it is. Too good. And it's true.

Made my first holograms proper last week. The subject matter was rather pedestrian- a few coins and a Yale key. Still it works quite well, and opens the door for more experimental stuff.

Since working in the realm of autostereoscopics a number of folks have asked me when we will be seeing those midair holographic intercoms popularised by starwars. My answer- I don't know. There are some fairly basic physical limitations with the nature of lightwhich prevent it. and the fact that powerful lasers have a tendency to fry stuff. Including eyeballs. There are a number of experiments being done- saw something interesting on youtube which involved mirrors spinning at immense speed. in fact by the magic of copying and pasting I can show you the very same video.

here.




there's still a fair bit of work to be done, but hopefully we'll be throwing virtual objects around a la minority report soon, in our lifetime anyhow... What about the wag who says- "they did it in star wars, why not now?" To him I say, that was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away...

drizzle and drivel

It's not a Thursday. Not even a Wednesday. The weather's gloomy and wet. Still, at least it's not pleasant and sunny.

I'm behind with work. Need motivation in capsule form.

Did some retail therapy(?) to cheer myself up. Purhased a SegaMegadrive 2 (I now own three). And a Philips 7 in 1 electric grooming kit. Watch out anyone who knows me in real life. I'm gonna Create My Own Look. Yeah. that's what it says I can do on the box. Or I might just shave my head, buy a gun and nail dead pigeons to my floorboards.

On reflection it was not my most successful bout of retail therapy(?).