CosmiKnot

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I am very pleased to once again be creating an exhibition for the Blakefest celebration of William Blake’s three-year sojourn by the sea in the village of Felpham. This year the art will be online so I thought it would be wholly appropriate to explore the really real world of the virtual. I’m thinking that our recent intense collective experience of lag is key to this virtual realm. The virtual is in the half second lag between action and consciously deciding to act discovered by Benjamin Libet’s experiments in formative interval of perception. The virtual is in the undetected region before we sense we’ve been heard, discovered in zoom meetings.  Lagging the secular turf we enter a region of suspended analysis. Google translate can wait for us to find heaven in a wild flower.  As Blake’s love of sweet Felpham demonstrates the virtual is a realm of contingent situated activities outside the sweep of the human command radar. In the virtual the radar perceives itself we...

Where has the potential for change gone? How does a body perform its way out of a definitional framework that is not only responsible for its very “construction” but seems to prescript every possible signifying and countersignifying move from a repertoire of possible permutations on a limited set of predetermined terms? (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual) Cameron Poole has created digital assemblages from his engagement with the episode’s of  Stockholm  Syndrome as I released them over the first half of this year. They replay the films as simple shimmering tapestries and enliven my own understanding. Cameron’s collages act as lobby cards for those who feel emboldened enough to dive into the film’s vortex of lockdown to catch hold of a recurring form and resurface in non-bifurcated euphoritopia. https://youtu.be/OETBtcQCz8E

I’m glowing from my mid-June sea-swim God is in his cubby hole storage space A place usually concealed by slatted chubb-lock doors, which today he has flung open wide like his man spread,  as he sits performing a one-person show for the couple standing before him for all eternity. You are invited to partake in a round. This much I gather from the spread of score cards, balls and anti-bac spray with a motley selection of diecast putters  leaning invitingly against a laminate top catering table. The putting green shimmers with holy portent. Its eighteen solar systems each undulating around their dead suns, sucking soft dimpled moons into a comforting abyss. Announcing their demise with an edifying clonk, a down the drain rattle of an ending. A pastel draped couple stand ready Moon scythes in hand before God, discussing something beyond my perception. In this vacuum of Summer I feel my chest fill with an infinite optimism inf...

Tank Tracks Flinty chalk path Hard under foot Hard under my feet My painful feet Follow it South to the brow of the wheat field Shimmering in the surprisingly chilly breeze On this cosmically hot day A day so hot it feels portentous Why have you never bothered to come here before? You’re too late to see the Churchill tank I know you’ve taken this path Past the leaving path-blockers (a theory you’re developing) And down into the history of military training exercises But you’re too late What do you mean? Look I’m on top of it? It’s here it says so on the map And here too on my smart phone. Churchill tank So you look for further directions Scrolling down on the downs You find an article in the West Sussex County Times Explaining how this treasured landmark Becoming increasingly overgrown Disappearing back into the landscape Rusting into the ground Providing a direct route to the real people Who sacrificed everything Who gave ...

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...