Thursday 27 December 2007
8 seconds
sunset at margaret river, must be too much wine....
i think summer is lovely in Australia...i think daylight savings does weird things to me.
Thursday 13 December 2007
Nowhere Places Unknown Spaces
I believe in sychronicity - a butterfly lands on a flower
and a tree fall down in Alaska sort of stuff.
I was in Berlin 2 months ago and showed my 2004 kolari film,
created from Finnish traffic cameras -
someone said that Dariusz Kowalski had made similar films.
He had -This made me laugh a lot a lot...
Its good to hear from you Wilkie, have a restful end of year...
Monday 10 December 2007
8 weeks and beyond
Saturday 3 November 2007
Halloween Window
Passing a house in Suffolk (Eastern UK) on 31st October and recorded the Halloween decoration.
Young children dressed up as zombies, witches and characters from horror movies appeared on every street corner, going to parties accompanied by their parents who were wearing everyday clothes.
Tonight at home at 7.00pm I will light a bonfire in my back garden and set fire to an old chair - this is my ritual to celebrate Halloween.
This weekend is very noisy with fireworks exploding all night long celebrating Guy Fawkes Gunpowder plot. Adults repeating their childhood rituals whilst my cat Rupert gets frightened from the noise and hides under the bed.
Monday 22 October 2007
Dan Dare - timezones
My grandfather was a fine metal engraver and he worked for most of his life in a workshop in the city, I never traced where - maybe it was that building, who knows. I walked down the canal path on Sunday and took this picture - it was a dark frightening place with inky black water disappearing into hellish circular canal wells - I returned to my car feeling as if I had been in a dream.
I remembered my last visit to the science museum, where I recorded an old piece of machinary with my Canon Ion Still Video Camera,colour re-processed it through my Acorn Pineapple Colour Digitiser, calling it Dan Dare after my boyhood cartoon hero from the Eagle Comic.
Monday 8 October 2007
Sunday 30 September 2007
Atlantis
The small islands in the distance are remains of a lost continent - maybe...
....submerged knowledge concealing ancient mysteries to be solved -
Dilemma of rings
Thursday 27 September 2007
Untitled Directions
The (un) helpful screen title to this mapping masterpiece is -
Unnamed road
So this will go into my archive of lost
error messages in a directory called:
Pete's sad data.
Sunday 23 September 2007
High - low
A late afternoon art experience in Tate Modern was interrupted by (fire)alarm, and we created the art of queuing tutored by the museum guard. The art of queuing after a football match at Wembley, tutored by the police.
Wednesday 12 September 2007
Night Closure
Monday 10 September 2007
Stone Magic
magician on a beach
at Lyme Regis on
Saturday.
A selection of stones for
the artist performer magician
to do the balancing act.
I really like the site this guy
located - standing on top of
millions of resting stones in a
wooden hoop ;0)
The final result is impressive
but watching the magician
achieving
equilibrium.................is better
Tuesday 4 September 2007
Between Worlds
Friday 31 August 2007
Getai Galore
in 8 hours time, i may be off to catch another "getai" (translated as song-stage), a makeshift street cabaret of song and raunchy jokes that takes place every 7th lunar month. its a Chinese belief that in this lunar month, the gate of hell will open and spirits are allowed to roam the mortal world. to appease these wandering spirits, prayers and offerings are made at temples and homes while traditional opera would be staged. in the mid 20th century, the tradition opera gave way to more contemporary song and dance numbers with gawdy cabaret costumes. the first role seats will be deliberately left empty - 'reserved for the invisible brothers'.
they would be performed in local dialects like hokkien and it's quite popular with the blue-collar folks. in the heyday, performers will be invited as far as Taiwan and Malaysia, even singers from other races will to make a buck or two by dishing out a few hokkien numbers. performers will move quickly from location to location, as they are paid by performance. each performer may be paid $200-$400 for his/her 5 song routine at every "tai" (stage/location). a hardworking performer may pack in some 8-10 "tai"s in a night.
however in recent decade, with the advent of the loss of use of dialects, these performance have been staged in lesser numbers and the crowds dwindled to tens rather than the hundreds that used to flock to catch them.
Thursday 16 August 2007
8 days....previously
it was Singapore's National Day on 9 August.
this was the meal i'd in office with some of my colleagues then. we'd returned from the mass celebrations in the podium downstairs and decided to order in the ubiquitous fried chicken.
only did i realise the matching colour scheme that my national flag has in common with the packaging. while we aint quite there as a fast food nation, i once remarked that there are more McDonalds outlets in my housing estate than what you get from one end of New Oxford Str to Marble Arch in Central London.
Thursday 9 August 2007
Multi- tasking Craft
All day today I have been using a computer to word process a guidebook about Virtual Learning Environments.
At times like this, I ‘multi-task’, because when repetitive tasks are being accomplished, new thoughts magically materialise to distract or entertain.
My new thought was - What value do we place today on past experiences and skill sets?
My example was - In art and design terms, there are many? pre – digital ‘revolution’ professionals / artists, still using cine film and chemical photography who are experimenting and developing their use of the medium in new ways.
My second level thoughts / questions were: Are there still new?? – techniques, creative outcomes waiting to be found in pre – digital media?
Lost opportunities…
I think that hand based skills are disappearing in some parts of the world, due to computer based methods..... so we should develop strategies to develop the interface between past experiences and skills with new media.
New task - try writing a letter on a plain white piece of paper with an ink pen… I can't do this anymore
Sunday 5 August 2007
Birds
This morning around 11am, I recorded and uploaded this soft toy composition on the grass from my new phone to Flickr, just to test its capability. The birds were selected from a bigger collection for their different body, beak, wing and feet sizes.
Their names as indicated on their labels are:
Squeeze Me, Russko. Happy Horse and Super Drug.
I have had many ideas about using the birds as an art installation or as an animated cartoon strip.
Interestingly these sort of toys have a short lived existence as childrens toys and their body parts bear little or no resemblance to real birds.
Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species and organising them into systems of classification. I think there are possibilities for an art project here.
Thursday 2 August 2007
The Curse of Connectivity
UK Time 22.18
Well this post takes a journey from my new mobile phone, (received today) - to trying to use infrared, bluetooth and email to extract visual data from my old mobile phone to my new one and then on to my laptop. This should have been eeeasy but...
However I did eventually dig into my old mobile phone database and extract an important (to me) screensaver I used for ages.... its a section from a political poster recorded on a wall in Amsterdam , but makes me smile everytime I see it - a 21st century ideological dustbin
Bubbling epoxy
in 8 hours time, i wish the floor will stop bubbling. i have no idea what's happening to this epoxy coat...kept having pockets of bubbles appearing. the renovation contractor had to rework the floor cos the problem surfaced 2 weeks ago but till today the problem persisted. when punctured, blackish liquid oozes out. perhaps there'd been a problem with the cement flooring underneath or the paint itself.
yes in 8 hours time, i wish i'd have a clue what else i could do. so that i can then plan on when to finish off the rest of the apartment, fix up the furniture, install my 42" plasma tv and move in. maybe its a crazy Singaporean thing where 'ownership' of a roof over our heads are regarded to be extremely important particularly after marriage. a sense of pride and security i guess but at a cost. a cost that sometimes hurt my pockets dearly.
so yah i guess i won't be watching programmes on my plasma in the next 8 hours.....
Tuesday 31 July 2007
Fake a dream
Monday 30 July 2007
Monday Moon
In 8 hours time, i'd be playing badminton with a couple of my colleagues but i've to be careful not to overdo it. my right knee has been acting up again and its impeding on my training for 2.4 and 10 km runs.
No dinner plans as the game will end late and there's much to do since i've yet finished with the tagging of the documenta works on my flickr page. maybe i'll call it documenta:documented....4 more locations to go. I hope i'll be able to get local art teachers to view the works and use them in their lessons (IP issues...err hiaks!).
my nanotank on my office desk too needs a change of water and i've yet had the time to change the filtering medium. the inhabitants seemed ok still but the plants have started to turn my tank into a jungle, creating so much shade that the bottom feeders seem to feed under 'moonlight'.
Sunday 29 July 2007
Birmingham Poster
Thursday 26 July 2007
Everything WJW Did
image in Flickr that references my fathers visit to Heidelberg. Edit - 3.8.07
v
v
Flickr Link
in 8 hours time
i will write about my next 8 hours. exactly 8 hours cos its the time difference between the 2 furthest points where Peter and I are at so far (Singapore is +8 GMT).
i will be tagging the documenta photos that i'd taken over the weekend on my flickr page before i go to bed while my wife will be catching her late night tv.
i will also have seen how the renovations for my apartment is coming along. the work has gone on for far too long and the contractor will be getting hell from me.
the travelling time will be about an hour from where i work to the apartment and i have to get used to commuting the distance.