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Showing posts from December, 2015

Moth in the flame

A lovely video made on exactly no pence by Simon Love for my song

The tooth

His Whole Tooth I felt the fiver rustle between thumb and forefinger As I padded into your bedroom Preparing to make the switch A note would be easy to slide across the sheet Want a smooth operation  if this to be my last tooth-based transaction I could picture the paper under the pillow You always were a good sleeper Mum is out with the girls So I’m standing in for the stand in tooth fairy Swaying in the shadows The bathroom light is on of course I wait to see if you are going to stir Then I slide my hand underneath Below the soft rock I crawled from under Your head rests on a rock for a pillow As you dive into you dreams Deep inside an octopuses garden You are sleeping like a wreck On bottom bunk submerged in inky darkness. But I can’t find the tooth My hand scuttles like a skittish crustacean Fleeing a divers torch light Then there it is glinting The jewel stashed in a hole in the reef I slide the note along the silky sa

Big Data

“In a way, I think the world is becoming more like the stock market,” Spivack says. “You can now measure theories about everything and make predictions about what needs to be done when resources are running low. If every device in a factory is reporting its state all the time, including when failures happen, you can use machine learning to look at all the devices that are connected, and at what their state was before and during failure events to learn to determine the early signs of failure.” This reminds me of a clock-maker's apprentice sitting eternally still having being told to monitor a clock pendulum for signs of anomalies. What concerns me about this is that we are transfixed by data and remain stuck in a post-rationalised realm. Will we move too far away from the idea that perhaps our control over events is not as black and white as we would like to believe? Will we forget that we can chose to evolve to a higher and more empathetic state? Perhaps forgetting is a g

Auto-destructive thoughts about nothing

The Void Gustav Metzger uses the process of auto -destructive art to confront the machine based parameters of progress. That is to say as we become more adept technologically the more we define ourselves in mechanistic terms. This is analogous to the detournement of the Situationists who turned the language of the Spectacle back on itself. Metzger uses a machine aesthetic and methodology to manifest the problem of our mechanistic self-image. He also wishes to circumvent the ego driven idea of the artist producing stuff, which is perhaps a replication of themselves. The idea that ego is at the centre of Art production can be ascribed to a fusing of the rise of the Romantic idea of the artist together with the rise of celebrity , which grew out of the mechanical reproduction. In my own practice I believe I am attempting to make work, which only I could have made yet at the same time with no component of Ego. My recent paintings for instance were produced with no reasoned decisions

Ultrasound

twinkle twinkle little bat I know what an ultrasound is scoffs my Mother -  the nurse - on the phone  Trying to sound not completely unoffended My mind scrabbles to think when it might have been invented But then just stops wondering It’s like sonar for tummies The mysteries of the stomach revealed Ghostly apparitions brought forth By medical medium Harnessing electronic apparatus Now-a-days ectoplasm is applied post-fact A ritual of remembrance Of times when it was easier to fake it You see Yesterday my surprisingly long-legged son Had lain on the vinyl, paper-towel covered couch I had, initially sat at a distance On the chair in the corner of the consulting room Then coming to my senses Moved to the chair by his side The operator/ advanced radiographer/ specialist examiner Asks him to pop undone his surprisingly long school trousers The jell is applied The transducer slides across the surface of his upset tummy Signals are beamed

Upon Writing a Poem

There is the having decided to write it at this moment of it The having decided to not put off writing it of it The rolodex moment of it The stepping off the edge of it The letting it rise and writhe then curl and twirl around me of it The flattening out on papyrus of it The not skewing it of it The setting it down as soon as it appears of it The difference between now and then of it The knowing what I meant then of it The escaping fate of it The deciding this is it of it The trusting my gut of it The this is it of it The riding on the back of a hound of it The longing for that time then of it The wanting to bring that back of it The carefully feeling under a blanket for it of it The attempt not to disturb it of it The need to have done it of it The desire to have done with it of it. The madness of it The let it off the leash for a while of it The was Walt Whitman really gay