People And Places

A lovely evening and great performance last night in Congleton Library for the People and Places event. We arrived early and set up well in advance. Here's a pre-show selfie by Fall in Green:

I performed Robot and Christmas Smells, right at the start of the show:

And joined in to accompany a few others, with an ensemble for Johnny B. Goode (great fun!) and, Mike Drew AKA Mick Dick of the Forrest Dick Band for Liverpool Lullaby.

Andy Stubbs was as big a star performer as any.

There were a mix of songs, poems, acts; with John Lindley, Mike, Cherie and ourselves performing original material, which is always a joy. All participant in order:

Mark Sheeky, David Tuffin, Dave Boothroyd, Mick Lomas, Chris Godber, Bryan Hurst, Jane Harland, Glyn Roberts. Second half Andy Stubbs, Cherie Pingel-Tuffin, Fall in Green, Phil Poyser, John Lindley & The Poachers, Phil Williams, Mick Dick (The Forrest Dick Band 'light').

We arrived home beyond 11pm. Today has mostly been spent doing admin and filing of this event, and other things. The time consuming work of life orderly.

We, the Snow Business 'Electric Sprout Foundation', are in the Crewe Chronicle this week too, a great write-up. In visual art news, there will be some sort of public consultation into the Crewe Market Shed's mural. Installation work on this may take place next spring.

Packing for Neorenaissance, Tablet Sketches

A very busy day packing, mirror plating, checking and wrapping the 30+ artworks for the Neorenaissance exhibition. Three works needed special attention and one really needs reframing because the mirror plates are about 40mm away from the wall. My solution was to use long screws and cut, drill and paint some wooden segments to fit behind them.

I also missed a painting! This was obscured in my 3D plan because of the angle of the view, the shape of it blended in with the floor, so now, The Death of Man will be in the exhibition. This distressed me because everything has long been prepared and the final list, all of the printing, poems etc. were sent to the museum weeks ago, so this last minute error was a panic moment, but at least there more than a week to go.

The last step is to make a box/crate for the Octopus Lighthouse painting. For my complex works, ones with delicate frames, I prefer to make custom packing, a simple crate of a wooden backing board, and wooden blocks to hold it. Then a lid with foam which can be screwed down. This really helps when transporting work. It's amazing to think that this painting took just 3 days to paint, but the preparation took longer, and the frame took even longer, and now the crate. Overall I started this one on February 23rd 2012, and finished 19th December (so actually 11 months overall), but later, in 2014, I made a new panel for it with some cubic zirconia and gold. People often ask how long a painting takes. You could say this one has taken 9 years so far.

Other works here will include 31st Century Crucifixion, the biggest painting on show, and Penalties, which was highlighted on the BBC website back in 2007 when it appeared in the Lowry.

Finally, I assembled the sculptures and printed material. The Octopus case will take a few days yet.

After that I made a few more changes to Prometheus, and some experiments with my graphics tablet.

I love it. I think I'll be using this a lot for future graphic art, but real media, oil paint in particular, will always by my first love. Pen and ink still has much more expressive power.

Of Wasps

A slow day, woke late after a night of stomach pain.

I looked at the Neorenaissance plans and made a test USB stick for the speaker I've bought for the sound/ceramic exhibit. The aim is to leave this on 100% of the time for the 8 weeks, which seems to work, the speaker seems to play and loop automatically, so I've made a 20 minute loop. I wondered if the extended silence would auto-shutoff the speaker, but it doesn't. The volume seems to be rather loud, perhaps it's boosted. I massively reduced the source wav, but it seemed to have hardly any effect on the playback volume.

I've felt distracted, tired, cold, slow, all day. I'm preoccupied with ideas for new music manipulations. As I make my own audio software, I can do to audio what the Vasulkas did with video and make up my own manipulations. I have a few ideas but I'm unsure if I should code them just yet. Next on the cards for me is a re-recording of Burn of God with real guitars, but that will take a couple of weeks, and this festive season seems to be too busy and too crowded.

I also made the basic graphics for more lyric videos, for Nightfood, and at 4pm or so I decoded to record these which involved dressing up as per the artwork of that album. The first track, The Dream of Wasps had a strange deep buzzing on the audio. This was on my mic, and the separate camera recording so it must have been a sound in the room itself, which is very strange. Perhaps it was something paranormal, an attack of the very wasps in the song.

Wall Plans, Balmain, Prometheus, Installation Speaker

Most of the wall plans are complete now. I'm starting to slow down and relax, as at the end of any project. After 30 minutes of this I started to draw up a list. One thing to do is photograph/scan my last few paintings, this will take a day. Graphics are in for the London show, so I've promoted that a little. I really need to make a video or two for it, at least to talk about some of the paintings, which is tricky when I don't have any of them.

I also have a mind to update Prometheus, adding the modulator processing that I added to Argus a few weeks ago. Argus has the English built in; the strings are typed into the code. In Prometheus, all text is in an external file. This makes translation a lot easier, but it struck me that I'll probably never translate Prometheus, and it certainly makes editing the program more awkward. Every message, error, icon, is a number so it takes time to work out what they say. I have half a mind to change the code to include text. I'm wondering if this has a memory dimension. The text should take up the same space, of course, but it would probably move from dynamic to stack memory - would that cause problems?

A new speaker arrived from Amazon for my Nantwich exhibition, a Sonkir 3W Speaker. It is USB or Li-ion battery powered, and can play from 3.5mm jack plug, or USB stick, or microSD card, or bluetooth, so a master of all things (most speakers limit to one thing or another). This is ideal for art sound installations; it can be left plugged in at low power and the audio will loop forever, and they are small and cheap. I can also connect it to my Microkorg and use it as a temporary speaker. The sound quality is good enough for a 6cm speaker.

The book with it was Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols; a romp of opinion and hyperbole which, of course, never fails to entertain, though not necessarily enlighten. Reading it makes me want to write a philosophy book in a week, but I feel I'd need to include a smidgen of reason, or a few references.

Macc Lounge, Wave-Field

A long day in the Macc Art Lounge today, a very cold and quiet day, with 10-20 visitors or so, which is a typical Thursday. Spoke to a few people and the artists. The creative output and choices were in hanging some new abstract paintings. Almost all of the paintings in the shop are abstract or landscape, this is what sells in a commercial setting like this. People are broadly looking for decoration of the right quality and price, the artist, and the investment in the art itself, is a secondary factor.

Returned home and went to the first evening of Wave-Field, some musical see-saws in the Lyceum Square. These are fun, they are simply see-saws which light up when used and play sounds. It appears to have been thought up as a clever idea, with no artistic value or comment; the creator is (apparently) an architect with little interest in art itself. This is interesting in a field where hyperbole and all sorts of nonsense is written about art. Of course, this writing is important. No writing about the artistic content does not mean the art is meaningless.

There are many things Wave-Field could be about in an artistic sense; the saws, in a row, made me think of digital sound waveforms, and this was reinforced by the strange electronic sounds. The installation is sold as an interactive social experience for strangers or friends, but well, every and any see-saw is that. It made me think that a plain see-saw could have been called an art installation a few hundred years ago. Ultimately though, any creation always reflects the personality and emotions of the creator (or group of creators, a group can have a personality and emotion); so even the coldest and most technical construction can be touching and 'be art'.

This is a strange creation. It's steel and plastic and LED lights; as steely as something from a 90s Star-Trek series, or a Paul Verhoeven film. The sounds are curious digital squalks and squelches like a robot's belchy intestinal sounds. The writing speaks of social interaction, but it feels strangely alien, something like Marvin the robot (he wasn't an android) from the BBC Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Perhaps, Wave-Field is about alienation, a seeking to connect with humanity in a digital world. Perhaps the see-saws are bones or nerves of hope.

There is probably an element of this being the result of a new type of art that is not there to satisfy the artist, or to touch an individual, but crafted for a strange amalgam of public service, practical entertainment, spectacle. Perhaps this process is the alienating force, but Wave-Field is not a warm beast, it's a buckled, silvery conduit for communication, a clonky, imperfect, social medium.