Evolution

Over the weekend I volunteered for Lumen's annual festival of sound and vision, Evolution. My part wasn't much, just ticking people off the guest list and going on sandwich runs, but it was interesting to be involved anyway.

I didn't get to see as much as I would have liked but I quite liked some of what I saw/heard. One of the free events was a 16mm film installation by Jennifer West; the Nirvana Alchemy film. West experiments with affecting film in any number of ways, using alchemical processes, in this case sopping it with bleach, dousing it with mud and splashing it with Pennyroyal tea. Not hard to see how the name came about, if you know anything about the 90's grunge music scene. Anyway, the concept of physically altering a film intrigued me.



The lady who coordinated the volunteers also organises Moor Music Festival, and is looking for people to help with that too. Could be something to do over the summer.

The Gum Thief Animation

Promotion for the Douglas Coupland book. Cool beans.

Kara Walker

I am supposed to be collecting images of book covers relevant to the one I made as part of my live brief, but as usual I am ignoring pressing tasks in favour of idle googling* and link-skipping.

...Kara Walker unveiled a daring reinvention of image-making in which she incorporated the genteel eighteenth-century medium of cut-paper silhouettes into her paintings. Since that time, she has created a poignant body of works that addresses the very heart of human experience, notions of racial supremacy, and historical accuracy. This exhibition presents a comprehensive grouping of the artist’s work to date, featuring more than 200 paintings, drawings, collages, shadow-puppetry, light projections, and video animations that offer an extended contemplation on the nature of figurative representation and narrative in contemporary art. (copied from a site, must put into own words..)





*Does this require a capital letter now it practically a standard verb? It isn't customary to do that when writing 'quixotic' after all.



Reflecting on today's blogging spree: I always seem to blog the most at the start of the week. This is when I am granted time free of my dreary part-time job, so is in turn when I become re-inspired. This routine clearly needs to be shaken up.

Lartigue

Eleanor might frown when she realises I have stolen from her blog, but I didn't know anything about Jacques Henri Lartigue (photographer, 1984-1986) before I read her post, and now I do and I like him, so surely not to mention him would just be silly.

The photographs he took as a child, which was around the turn of the last century, display the wonderfully uncomplicated joy one only feels when so young and unaffected. I am currently reading 'Interpretation of a Murder', by Jed Rubenfeld, who begins the story with an observation of the adult choice between happiness and meaning, which has a certain miserable truth.

Memory

At a party the other night, Will and I had an interesting conversation about memory. After concluding that memories only exist due to the moment in question having being re-called once or more, and that the more times you do this the stronger the memory will become, we decided to do an experiment. By picking a vision, idea, smell or multi-sensory moment, and purposely remembering it frequently, would this image remain with us in perfect definition for the rest of our lives? We decided to choose the image of Mr Starrs wearing Hannah's handbag. Well, I haven't forgotten it yet..

New Bond Covers

Penguin have re-published the Ian Fleming classics, probably as a result of the renewed interest in 007. Although I'm not a fan of Bond, and the constant objectification of women irritates me, the new cover designs make a nice set. The paint is an refreshing medium, and I rather like the fact that there has not been an effort to make them look uber-contemporary. See them all, over at the Penguin Blog.

Films in the Trees

The students have swamped Hyde Park, the general public are obsessively frying themselves and my factor 50 is out. It is summer of course.

On Friday's warm summer eve, I followed fellow Viscommer Liz Ainge's guerilla video van around Hyde Park. She had organised this in conjunction with Look and Listen, who run an AV night regularly in Leeds, fostering the art of the VJ. It was a good show and I do like to support other people doing arty business. Some of my friends had their work projected, which was inspirited by being taken outside.



Matt took some pictures, so I will nab one or two to put on here when I get hold of him. I decided not to take my camera because so many others did and it starts to get silly when everybody is snapping away.