CosmiKnot

Yesterday I called my mum using Alexa to talk her through making a loaf of bread using the sourdough starter my dad had collected from our doorstep. This, I thought, is truly the embodiment of how technology can bring people together. This is like an advert for Amazon’s devices I mused, imagining a TV commercial with emotive quirky piano music finishing with my dad popping up behind my mum at the end saying its very tasty as I call them after a long walk with my two sons. Part of me thought yes this is everything you rail against. I mean the way in which the consumer Spectacle represents life as a series of symbolic images. But then another part of me felt why should technology be seen as such a corrupting influence when invention and creative problem solving are part of the human experience? Would I care if anyone knew where I was or what my favourite google search was if I wasn’t born into a culture of Big Data duality? By this I mean that Technology has gradually shaped our sense o...

The Denet boys and their robot toys Come across like the bullied class swot Smelling of soured milk of human kindness Now exacting their revenge By dispelling that which cannot be removed There is no essence they say There is only coding There is only processing of symbolic data Everything else is a delusion Dawkins is almost right about memes About how they have reconstructed the mind to be more comfy In preparation for their imminent arrival But he has lost sight of his own locked in syndrome The poisoned chalice if you like The question: Do you want to be vastly more intelligent? Able to process symbolic data like you wouldn’t believe? You do? Well great let’s get started Just give me all that other stuff  All that unnecessary baggage and go ahead Leave all that stuff right here at the portal to the brain Step right up Brain world we’ll call it Your intuitive sense that you feel meaning in the cosmos Just dump that here and go ahea...

Yesterday I took myself off to panic buy some layout paper in order to experiment with Andy Warhol’s inkblot drawing technique. It was a more homely version of the screen prints that made him famous. Having now tried it I can report that the best results come from the technique’s mechanistic detachment from what you are actually drawing. This is actually what good drawing does anyway in the sense that the drawer is removed from the linguistic concept of the subject. Anyway, I didn’t intend to talk about that, but these things have a way of entangling their way into the subject. The event always decides the subject no matter how much we post rationalise our intentions. So quite by chance I made my way to Ryman’s (a shop I habitually use for self-soothing) where the layout pads were an inordinate £9.99 but still they seemed good and I couldn't be bothered to walk to Smith’s. When I went to pay I remember that the shop does not allow contactless payment and patted my pockets as I br...

Ode to Fibromyalgia That creeping cosmic dread That dim half-remembered presence That shadowy mysterious woman That delicious agony The sumptuous pain You came in through the kitchen side door So softly that I didn’t hear the latch And then as I stood washing the doing up You stood there gently breathing down my neck Until you spread yourself down my right arm Slowly emanating the stain of a warm buzz Through my entire total human organism Before I knew you were back in my life Keeping me up at night Going all hours like a bride groom’s speech But still I told myself It was me not you It wasn’t the old you I knew This was another thing, a normal one Tearing me a new one slowly but surely Until I realise my head is out of my firmament And you have returned In your best Goyaesque black dress A veil floating over your face But it’s you alright Come to take be back but first We dance a gentle merry jig around the room Still it’s no...

Secretarial Skills It/they/you has/have made us Turned us into PAs  We are our own secretaries Our own worst enemies We file/sort/place/deliver/post Order/arrange/display Our intentions to patiently/methodically Revert back to the original/memorial Neat and tidy four cards We file/distil life away Into corresponding sets/categories To leave no trace Of the original act To consume our own tales And then rate them on a spreadsheet To line up all the right angles To leave all stones unturned And arranged correctly In the appropriate cabinets We are the secretaries of our own downfall And we don’t like having our bottoms pinched

It rings a bell the campanologists are competing Although at this stage I don't know this Their sonority has yet to reach my timpanis membrane As I negotiate the mini roundabout on foot At the heart valve of the village Having sat the last hundred yards in silence After rebuking my wife For almost taking a wrong turning. It's all about the particulars see. You are to be found around the back of the Sussex Oak And suddenly the bells clang into focus The air is jubilant and expectant. Although I sense this is a rehearsal It isn't for the campanologists. Life is not a rehearsal they chime. Each pull is a meaningful yank (hear a clang across the pond) on the placenta of heaven's womb One false move and blood will rain. but until then here is a medley of events From the radiant to the apocalyptic Through the funereal via the every-day come hither cycle of the Sunday service. We sit supping our pints in a session And you roll an ex-smoker a fat one tha...

This artwork questions the idea of art as a form of interrogation of habitual patterns.  Art is not a mode of questioning. To make it so is to rob it of its status as otherworldly form within the worldliness of things. You wouldn’t greet an indigenous culture with hello and thanks for your role as questioning my habitual patterns of living. It may have that effect on you but to introduce the culture within this hierarchical framework is literally madness. I’m not sure art has a role or a message. This is how it frees us from the hegemony of habitual patterns and traumas of thingness accelerated by digital cultures effective dissemination of pure functionality. Digital culture can be used effectively e.g. showing patterns of bowling deliveries in a test match but its rather less wholesome when defining identity. Unclasping from linguistic meaning is what art does best. This functions by leaving a vestige of the linguistic striation and offering a simultaneous nomadic freedom from...