orange and teal…

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

from Transformers 2...

from Transformers 2...

A friend sent me this. I had noticed this kind of thing happening, but had, rather quaintly, put it down to something to do with ‘film stock’, or the use of digital video…

Beyond what Todd Miro says, what occurs to me is that this is yet another example of ‘virtualisation’… Before the advent of digital technology, filmmakers were forced to ‘push’ against the media they were working in… as artists in other media had to wrestle with the limitations of oil paint (here is an example of virtualization in this area), violins, typewriters etc… As the digital tsunami washes over ever more of our cultural world, there are no longer any limits except those imposed by the artist. On one side this could be seen as freedom; on the other, it could, as in this example, open the floodgates to homogenizing ‘fashion’…

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the invisible gorilla…

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010
the invisible gorilla © Daniel Simons

the invisible gorilla © Daniel Simons

I have just read an article about a famous experiment (that you can try for yourself here…) in which a large number of people focusing on counting ball passes on a video are completely unaware of someone in a gorilla suit walking on screen, beating its chest to camera, then walking off. This counter-intuitive result is used to show how blind we can be to what we’re not paying attention to…

This issue of attention is interesting enough, but something else occurred to me (actually, this occurs to me quite a lot *grin*): that human vision is nothing like a series of images caught on film or video – in which each frame is recorded with every detail that the camera is capable of recording. This analogy may seem an obvious one to make, but it is wholly false. We have the illusion that we are seeing a complete picture, but in fact what we see is much more analogous to the way in which we parse a sentence – a sequence of words that, together, when processed by our brain, conjure up a complete meaning. Let’s not go into what the exact equivalent of ‘words’ might be in what we are seeing – what is seems to me interesting is that we similarly construct the ‘meaning’ of what we’re seeing by assembling it from a few large pieces – and the pieces that we choose to build our ‘visual sentence’ from are determined by what we’re paying attention to. Thus, because we’re not paying attention to it, the gorilla simply is not one of the ‘pieces’ and so forms no part of what we ’see’…

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coming up for air…

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

sitting on my new garden seat...

sitting on my new garden seat...

ok, anyone visiting this blog may well have noticed that I have recently disappeared without a trace. Some of this was due to the pressures of organizing my midsummer party – an annual event – and one upon which the sun shone :O) – In Scotland this is not something that can be counted on. The reason I host this is because the life of a writer can be very solitary and I have many friends that I love dearly but rarely see. Some indeed came from far afield – including Joanne who I have seen only once since we shared various mind-numbing university lectures in extremely abstruse mathematics. There are not enough of these events that, momentarily, provide a node where many people’s lives meet…

After that I went camping in the Lake District with some friends. This too is an annual occurrence – though, normally, we go off into the wilds of north-west Scotland – which wildness perhaps better suits my temperament…

Before all this madness began, I was having some difficulties with my ancient historical novel. I had started writing it, but it simply wasn’t ‘energizing’ me… I pulled my head free of it and surveyed the ‘view’… and discovered that I was doing it all wrong! I simply wasn’t being ambitious enough. I know, I know… look what a mess ambition got me in last time *grin* So, I’ve worked out what I need to do to my historical book to make it challenging enough for me and, hopefully, worthy of my readers’ attention… This said, I have put it aside for a while because I am working on another book. It came to me suddenly and I have vanished down a rabbit hole pursuing it ever since. It looks like being a cross between fantasy and sci-fi and is pleasingly bizarre and very strange – just how I like it! *wide grin* I am going to try and write this one quickly… but no promises…

I intend to resume a more regular pace of blogging… but, again, no promises…

Meanwhile, here is a link (it begins on page 12) to an article to which I contributed some muddled thoughts. It’s about Google’s ongoing attempt to put the world’s books online. Overall, this is a goal I tend to feel good about, but I am not at all sure that the way Google is doing it is a good way – indeed, I am a tad suspicious of Google’s motives… This said, I don’t really understand the issues well enough – for some reason, I just have not wanted to engage with them – not sure why, but there it is…

One final thing, I would very much like to put as many of these blog posts up in Portuguese… Though in matters concerning Portuguese editions I am prepared to muddle along in my rather dodgy Portuguese, I really couldn’t face trying to ‘translate’ a blog of this length. If there is anyone out there (or a number of people out there) who might like to do this for me, I would be very grateful…

oh, and I am going to FINALLY get round to responding to a number of comments that were left hanging…

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puncturing our reality…

Friday, April 30th, 2010
Eyjafjallajökul erupting ©2010 Marco Fulle

Eyjafjallajökul erupting ©2010 Marco Fulle

It occurs to me that the recent eruption of (the delightfully difficult to pronounce) Eyjafjallajökul volcano was one of those rare events where the virtual reality that is human culture – and in which most of us live almost all of the time – was punctured. For a moment we broke the surface of virtuality and, coming up into ‘reality’, we all looked at each other puzzled, and confused – not really believing that this far away – almost mythical – event, could possibly be causing ‘real’ effects on our lives… Of course, almost immediately we sank back under, the surface closing over our heads, as we focused on close ups of people stranded, queueing, being cheated by hotels, turning ‘disaster’ into triumph by suddenly finding we could get joy out of helping each other out – or in taking the opportunity of unexpectedly extending our holidays… You’ve got to love us, human beings – at least, we can love ourselves – I’m not sure that the other inhabitants of this planet are likely to love us much…

Everything is back to business as usual. No lessons learned. Let’s hope that the next time our virtuality is punctured, it’s by something that we can as easily forget…

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heads of Ife…

Friday, April 16th, 2010
an Ife bronze head © 2010 British Museum

an Ife bronze head © 2010 British Museum


African mask...

African mask...

Responding to Rem’s request, here is an image of one of the heads of Ife currently in a show at the British Museum. For anyone who’s read the Stone Dance, it will be obvious why these would appeal to me. Exquisite works of art, these could easily be the pattern for the masks of the Masters. What is rather darkly amusing is that, when they were discovered, it was decided that these sculptures, as well as the more famous ones from Benin, could not possibly have been made by Africans – the heads were, after all, not only made of metal, but artistically at least as accomplished as anything made by the Greeks or Romans. The usual litany of fanciful attributions were made to explain their origins: a lost tribe of Israel, some wandering Roman army, some Greeks merchants who had gone astray, alien visitation yada yada yada… All of this because it didn’t conform with the cosy, racist ideology of the West about what African art was – something more like the second image. Of course, ironically, it was examples of African art like the latter image that inspired people like Picasso to overthrow classicism… A similar hysterical analysis was applied to the ruins of Great Zimbabwe – even though they CLEARLY resembled in form the houses of the local people – which form was entirely determined by their culture and way of life. Though I am reasonably well read when it comes to world history, I was in my 30s before I discovered that Africa had had any urban culture at all. This could be down to some failing on my part. But I suspect it had more to do with a conspiracy of silence that has insisted on portraying Africans as savages in straw skirts, living in mud huts and dining on missionaries… Pah!!!

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