CosmiKnot

The university lecturer adjusted his seat and turned towards the student who remained surprisingly engaged, “Now I am going to try and explain in as clear a terms as possible what I believe is troubling the western world. One sentence in and already a number of finger posts have sprung up like magic seedlings at the reverberations of my mumbling. Troubling? Western? World? Do I mean what is troubling me? Not exactly because I can behave as I chose. So then what do I mean? This dis-equilibrium, which manifests as a perpetual state of having to correct our coordinates. You may have read enough of Guy de Bord to think, “Hold on that is exactly where we are at”. I mean “exactly”. His thesis was that the spectacle replaces the first hand experience. The trouble here is that some people are fast to call this post modernism according to Baudrillard. (Thus turning it into a symbol. This is what the quest for knowledge and truth does.) So the over emphasis upon the visual is one asp...

The Art Raffle is almost upon us and I wanted to record all the items available as prizes. I should also mention that a fantastic tombola has been made for the event by Iain McCallum's friend Mark David Gray. It is a thing of beauty and will, no doubt, spur us on to instigate more and more Art raffles for Kids Co. So if you come to Paper Dress this Saturday you will see two bands - Simon Love and The Olde Romantics PLUS Mikey Georgeson and the Civilised Scene - all free! the Raffle (tickets probably about £3-5) contains the following Art Works : Action Painting Action Man – Elemental Epiphany 2014 Acrylic on Canvas Melissa Alley – Empress – Body Colour on Paper 2014 Eddie Argos  - Annotated book of Lyrics 2014 Jackie Clark – Drawing untitled 2014 Sarah Doyle – Biopic Marilyn Triptych – body colour on paper 2014 Emma Edmondson – I Never Promised You A Rose Garden – Mixed Media Tinsel Edwards – Big Fish Eats Little Fish – Signed Print 2014 Mikey...

I was looking for the route to my son's football match at the weekend. it's on the way to Brighton as it turns out and I'm hoping that the soil will be well drained as they haven't had a match since Christmas. The other team South Downs Athletic or something play at Hurstpier Point and I wanted to make sure I would find the right turning so I clicked street view on google maps. Low and behold the turning was actually a motorway bridge. A motorway bridge! yes and you could walk over it in cyberspace. Think of all the bridges you've passed under speeding on your way to something important. Now you can go back and investigate what you missed. This gif animation I made as a result of my rising sense of digital wonder has the satisfying element of time passing during an experience that is clearly outside of time's classification zones. There is also the giddy sense that the digital world, which is an extension of the fixed point perspective of the Renaissance and th...

I have a long standing love of the Hayward Gallery which to my mind stands on the cusp of the art establishment (despite showing much of the Art's Council collection) on a windswept crag called the Southbank. It's a good size for a satisfying show and Martin Creed has made a really good fist of this task. I informed a colleague where I was going and we both chuckled at the idea that one reviewer found "Joy" within the exhibition. I mean martin Creed is not a joyful artist is he? Wrong. The show has the effect of instantaneously imparting the knowledge that Martin Creed has been joyous all along. His familiar themes are there - the minimalist repetition and the cod-systematic distillation but Creed has adeptly placed them in an edifying context. Sol le Wit was never this charming I thought as I watched a beautiful oriental woman take a crap on a pristine white floor whilst a gallery attendant gently tickled the ivories in a resolutely ascending and descending scale. In...