Wednesday 23 September 2009

`Dangerous Saracen Magic...`

...a quote from William of Malmesbury, an ancient English historian and monk, refering to the new and alien Eastern counting system that introduced the Zero. In early Christian philosophical values, if God was the infinite, the everything; then nothing, insinuating the absence of God must be the Devil. The introduction of this foreign ,sinister and dangerous abscence, was indeed the work of Satan himself.

No Chair ?


Chair

On the Increase.
Size update 133 cms


Well, suspend your disbelief and it sort of works. Covers in a crochet mist, more than excludeing from the picture. Peculiar how uninteresting these images are. Sort of nowhere in their developement of invisibility.
`Nothing will become of nothing.` As King Lear said. Well, Ihope so...
Lastly, `The less anything is the less we know it: how invisible, unintelligible a thing is nothing.`
Thank you John Donne.

Tuesday 22 September 2009

Future Sailors?

A game of lights and crosses on the ceiling.

Dolly Parton said (We love Dolly...) ` If you want to see a rainbow, you gotta put with the rain.`
Prisms Dolly, are the antithesis to your pretty little idiom. ( Smug.) I have a faceted hanging drop shape in my window. Putting aside the inverted snobbery of it being hippy tatt, I love the tiny oblongs of the spectrum that visit my studio on sunny days. I want hundreds of them in a giant hexagonal glass room, and mirrors on the floor to reflect the purest natural joy of little flying coloured lights surrounding you. Ah, infinite science bliss.
Still reading The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, I have come to the troubled genius A.A. Michelson. Investigating the existance of aether, the stuff between the stars, he and his partner experimented with lights and mirrors to determine the exact speed of light using an invention called the interferometer. Love that word.
The chapter begins with this quote.
`There are no land marks in space; one portion of space is exactly like every other portion, so that we cannot tell where we are. We are as it were on an unruffelled sea, without stars , compass, surroundings, wind or tide, and we cannot tell in which direction we are going. We have no log which we can cast out to take a dead reconning by; we may compute our rate of motion with respect to the neighbouring bodies, but we do not know how these bodies are moving in space.`
James Clerk Maxwell, Matter and Motion ,1920
Science states now, that there is no ether, no empty space or unfilled vacuum. The Space of our universe is filled with the cosmic microwave background at the least. Has that made any difference to anything? Future sailors is a Mighty Boosh lyric

Monday 21 September 2009

Further Evidence of Event Horizons


Its been a long gap in blog entries. Although the crochet masses have been multiplying, I have been a bit short on inspiration.
I have been accepted as a fellow associate of a group of artists called Fibre Art Wales`. I am honored to be member number thirteen, which is a fine number.
`Journeys`, opens at the Rhonda Heritage park on Saturday 26th September and will show work from the members of Fibre Art Wales including my piece `Event Horizon`. I am chuffed to bits! This is how I left the installation today, but I need to edit the DVD and tape down the black wires that are visible.
The piece investigates the identity of the singular, when challenged with infinite repitition and multiplication.

Saturday 12 September 2009

Thoughts of Diverse Bignesses




`The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments`, by George Johnson is, as Roger Penrose says on the front cover,`Delightful succinct and elegant`. Its easy to read, illuminating and explaining aspects of popular science knowledge , making comprehension really complete. Scientific history , the stories surrouding discoveries you thought you understood, made as plain day. Or, that is, the light that informs our eyes, that we have named day.
Having one of those moments of anthropic principle epiphany, it occurs to me that the sun is the supplier of all the light, and therefore the colour in our lives. Without light there is no colour. ( Sounds obvious, but as I said I was having one of those moments).
Too much light - no colour as well. Our eyes are designed (or have evolved, carefull now !), to digest specific conditions, so we can observe what happens to sun light when it`s refracted off solid matter. (Well, the sun could be doing what it does with or without our eyes, but with relevence to discussing colour...) This helps inform our very existance. One of our treasured senses.
The nature of colour in light is explained simply and beautifully in the Newton chapter.
We appear to have a world tailor made for human existance.The fact that humans exist at all at this time , in a infinite universe of infinite possibilities, and infinite invisibilities. I wonder what Newton would have thought of Dark Matter. Standing on the shoulders of giants.


I

Thursday 10 September 2009

Tuesday 8 September 2009

`On Floating Bodies`.

Geometric
Photographic


Dramatic

When not at home, the things that remain constant, even at a distance, are essential
to maintaining an emotional equalibrium . Earths moon is a cliche sited in so many instances, and so many cultures, it has universal meaning. This full moon was no exeption. The moon was, on this night a shining thing of polished beauty. Perfect in design , shrouded with mathematical coincidences, ( thinking about how the moon and sun are the same size during solar eclipses), the cleanest and most accessible of all our assumed deities. Paramour to the silent masses ,calender for all time. I suppose the moon allows us to sense your place in space time without the insecurities enforced on us by linear time.
Taking pictures of the moon bemuses me. I spent more time clicking away, with various results, than I did taking time to look. Quality time to be still is a rare thing. Taking pictures of that kind of moment is quite a futile thing really, in some respects.