Out of Chaos

Ive been busy, trying out this and that train of thought , going in different directions, its an organic process ,going with the flow of ideas that emerge from activity to activity... seemingly chaotic too. Time with Context project is passing quickly ,already into the third week. I continue to think about the relationship between particular words , Other/Mother Proactive /Provocative Erotic/Eratic Warrior/Worrier.

News of another Neolithic site next to Stonehenge has refocused my earlier ideas of incorporating Semacode into the landscape of the south west . I have a deep affection for Avebury , to walk around the stones is to connect with the past and the land. Connections of time andplace ... I was born and grew up very close to Hardians Wall, the ditch or vallum of the wallextended into the playing fields ofmy school. We walked along and played on the wall it was part of ourdaily lives and not part of amuseum. Places like Avebury ,Uffington and Westbury still feel like places where the Place, Past and Present can co-exist .

The images I have uploaded are of codes placed in Avebury and Bath, either as darkened or charred grass,or as chalk . I have also worked on the idea of creating a 3D coded structure, and have created what a 3D code might look like in situ.

At this point in time I am not particularly thinking about the content of the information contained within the code in these images . Although increasingly I do like the idea of making a statement that is universal and simple such as "Please Help" embedded into the landscape.

Re: generating

So this is my first post to the residency blog, and is admittedly a little overdue - I've only today got internet access in the studio, and have otherwise been working remotely, on and offline, but never seeming to be able to do both at the same time... It's been going well, if flying by already. Since meeting the others involved in the residency, and having a few visits to Taunton, my ideas for the work that I will be producing are definitely taking shape. I've particularly noticed the scale of regeneration and development taking place in the town at the moment. A good thing overall, I'm sure, but I still always have questions about the reach and resilience of much economic and commercial development (as I've seen in many towns and cities in which I've lived and worked over the years). Shopping centres, café bars and new build homes (often of the luxury/boxy apartment type) are all very well, but I wonder if they are the best and most integrated way of enriching the lives of individuals and communities, and whether they are (environmentally and socially) sustainable? Will architects' and developers' dreams of the future end up being nightmares of the past (like much urban planning of the 1960s and 1980s)? And led as they are, by commercial, municipal and social impulses, what might they be overlooking?

It is some of these questions that my project for the Context residency seeks to address. What of the spiritual health of Taunton? What of peoples' hopes and fears beyond the material provisions being constructed for them? What of art? Of dissent? Of the living past and of the imagining of different possible futures?

My intention is to bring some of these questions into discussion. Not to necessarily provide answers, but to hear peoples' thoughts about them, their wishes and their regrets. As an artist in residence, I hope to use my powers to activate some of these, to dance out the good and the bad, to engage people with processes of regeneration and to hopefully make them laugh a little too. What shape will this take? I'm planning to talk to all sorts of people in Taunton over the next week or two, and use some of the material I get from them to make a participatory performance intrevention in the town centre, which'll be documented for the exhibition. I'm also hoping to make a separate performance for video camera, at another site (or two) in the town centre. Both should be quite fun and'll be public pretty soon, so watch this space...!

The Joy of Semacode radio
scan this code and you will be taken to a The Self Divided

Some work I create which pre dates my interest in Semacode (Wishbones) Casting bones series

So today , I look at the codes of the words other and mother

I am thinking about the pixelated Stained glass window of Koln Cathedral by Gerhard Richter, I am thinking about this work for a number of reasons, one being that I produce a code that is pixelated and makes me think of the work of German Artist A R Penk and also of the pixelated work of Richter and his paintings of 1974 Richters exploration of colour and pattern seems like a very German preoccupation that goes back to Bauhaus to Goethe. I end up with this

"Between thought and expression lies life time " Lou Reed , Some Kinda Love... The space between words between ERATIC and EROTIC between Mother and Other .

I am working with words and code , I am working with words because I consider them as a code, how we use them where we place them ,who understands a particular sequence of words.

There is something about words and their connection to the past, how they are rooted in our childhood , past down to us . And I am thinking about the words I dont use , the words which were alien to me , a foreign language, I heard the words but did not understand.

Its relatively easy to generate a code via a QR code generator via the internet to produce a 2 dimensional image paper. That feels like belonging to the technological process... to be outside the technological progress/process is to be outside of society. Smart people Have smart phones.

I wonder what if code can be incorporated into a 3D structure ,something architectural and create these . I see them as totems or rather I see through this process something beyond the structure of a formal written language. Which are not concerned with particular words and their meanings but about more about object relationships and working with the same objects to form differing relationships.

So the work of Sculpture David Smith emerges from somewhere .

Semacodes

So this is my first blog and I am writing when I have writers block. Writers block... for me, is like being able to talk and not speak. I can talk of this and I can talk of that but I can not talk of the other . The other in this case is my work which investigates the uses and applications of semacode. Perhaps one reason why I find it hard to write of my own practice is that the creative process keeps changing , so it feel like a commentary on something emerging and evolving. Certainly I know that I am attracted in part to semacode is because I am Dyslexic. Being Dyslexic means I struggle with words and the story goes that "In the beginning was the word" so its been a struggle with something pretty important. Through practice and the use of technology one learns to be less cumbersome and more confident . So why am I exploring Semacodes ? The thought of being able to take a word or sequence of words to express something (or nothing) and turn it into a visual image is very interesting . A thought ,a word, an expression, transformed into a computer generated image , that looks like a mandala, re constructed as a woven piece of material ,the word now embedded into the rhythm of silence.