Waiting for the winter

In the beginning of November there was a slight sign of the winter in southern Finland, but only one week. In November and December waiting for the winter and in January still waiting. Warm, gray, dark, raining, ground mud all over, rivers flooding... where is my winter?

Shoe Tree Dreamers

Apparently a shoe tree starts with one dreamer throwing their shoes onto a branch - I have driven past these local trees in Birmingham many times and today decided to take a few camera shots at 12.15pm.

The trees look quite sad, and against the backdrop of the residential tower block windows, the shoes made me think about peoples lives.

Why do people do this?
Here is another account of shoe tree mythology

Resolutions

Wishing everyone a happy new year, always an interesting time due to resolutions made (and broken)...

To - be good, be better, give up, begin, stop, start, try harder...

The scanned drawing above is a homemade Christmas Card that was never sent, so seems appropriate to post it into blogspace.

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.

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...

8 weeks and beyond

got caught up with Facebook recently, entertaining myself by browsing through it, searching for long-lost friends and adding new ones to the growing list. of cos there's the oh-so-many invitations and tools on there that keeps you perpetually "networked". Still i don't think I'm good at keeping myself updated with what's happening with ppl i know, maybe that's why The Wife ticks me off for neglecting my mates...(geez even with this blog sorry pete, martti, daniela)...perhaps until the novelty wears off...till then let's see if you guys are there on facebook.

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.

Dan Dare - timezones

In Birmingham City Centre there is a small area designated for development nearby the 'so called' Jewellery Quarter. There was a Science Museum and all that is left now is the building in the picture.

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.

Mirrors

Autumn lakes call to look deeper, to gaze at indefinite images, to wonder ways of seeing

Atlantis

This is a half submerged sea walk - a swimming pool in the sea - children swim off camera view to the right - you can just see the concentric shape in the darker sea colour of the submerged concrete man- made walkway.

The small islands in the distance are remains of a lost continent - maybe...






....submerged knowledge concealing ancient mysteries to be solved -

Dilemma of rings

In Dublin I was told that the more foam rings the better Guinness. After that my life didn't taste so good without rings.

Untitled Directions

Sometimes my satelite navigation system gets confused. Unexpected new roads make it slide into strange white zones. In this shot its on a white road with pink dash marks - a post-digital conceptual blur..

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.

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.

Night Closure

Night Closure

To close the night?

as well as the heavens in the sky...

How long for.....I wondered as I drove along the motorway.

Thinking WOW perpetual daylight

Who would notice the difference?

Not the mobile phone users

Stone Magic

A stone balancing
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

Between Worlds

Monday Night 8.00am

A lost world, populated by lost

souls waiting for the last plane to fly

away from a small island to a metropolis.

Both are preoccupied in alternative worlds -

mp3 player and book. My presence in this

non-space is marked by a snapshot of

their 'worlds within worlds'.

I seem to be invisible and this image has

been manipulated, but the neck tattoo is

real.

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.

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.

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

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.