Spring
Judy Chicago: Revelations @Serpentine North
Judy Chicago: Revelations @Serpentine North
The Building of the Tower of Babel
Jo Spence: Libido Uprising @V&A London
Robert Delaunay
Rhubarb
Raj Rewal: Exhibition complex New Delhi
Arlington Bluebell walk
Igshaan Adams: Desire Lines
Le Corbusier: Chandigarh Masterplan
Winter
Tara Donovan: Untitled (Mylar)
Holly Hendry: Sottobosco
Olaf Brzeski: Dream Spontaneous Combustion
Jean-Luc Moulène: Plongement 4
Matthew Ronay: Brontes, Steropes & Arges
Jean-Luc Moulène: Méduse
When Forms Come Alive @Hayward Gallery. Matthew Ronay's aesthetic ecosystems, Holly Hendry's Brutalism v Supersized industrial lichens and the sensation of being miniaturised by Tara Donovan's Untitled (Mylar).
2023
Halloween moon
Uyra: Terra Pelada (Naked Earth) | RE-SISTERS @Barbican Autumn 2023
Autumn pruning
Hiroshi Sugimoto @Hayward Gallery Autumn 2023
Fern Shaffer | RE-SISTERS @Barbican Autumn 2023
West Lodge
Industrial estate walk
Painting The Town | Carrie Mae Weems @Barbican Summer 2023
Hilma AF Klint & Piet Mondrian @Tate Modern Summer 2023
Maria Bartuszova: Materiality & tactility @Tate Modern Spring 2023
Winter
Andy Doig neon sculptures on Madeira Drive in Brighton. The intensity of the light from the 3 x 10 metre spaced neon sculptures remains the same when viewed end on and makes for an interesting space compressing composition, like it's popped into existence from another dimension.
Cuckfield Park
Reverse Image Making using Stable Diffusion Text-Image AI
Stalker
Scenes from Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker as described to Stable Diffusion text-image AI.
Essex & Kent Coast
Textures and landscapes: The imagery Stable Diffusion generated is based on descriptions of photographs taken along the Essex and Kent Coast at Walton-on-the-Naze, Warden Point and Dungeness. In Essex the muddy cliffs streaked with red oxide, dunes and bright orange sand. It’s a Martian landscape reminiscent of Thomas Jerome’s home world in The Man Who Fell To Earth. In Kent, more mud as well as the flatness, horizontality and architecture at Dungeness. Stable Diffusion has combined, amplified and realised some of those qualities.
Essex & Kent Coast
Iterations with ‘in the style of Edward Hopper’ and ‘in the style of Giorgio de Chirico’ added at the end because the light in the first set of images hinted at that.
Enjoying an idle Christmas moment experimenting with inputting song titles to Stable Diffusion.
I picked the album ‘R Plus Seven’ by the American Musician Oneohtrix Point Never. The record sounds like it was created by an AI, half remembered pop from a distant future or parallel universe. It has opaque song titles. I chose ‘Chrome Country’ for its shortness, opposing, ambiguous and visual qualities. In Stable Diffusion it becomes terrifically volatile, throwing the algorithm into a right old state. The results are mysterious and specific. Whatever or wherever Chrome Country is, there is history and a narrative. It is an American, predominantly rural landscape full of American tropes, kludged together with copyrighted material from the internet, haunted by Google Chrome (which it probably wouldn’t have been so much in 2013 when the record was first released). Harley-Davidson’s, a chrome plated Bruce Springsteen playing guitar on the prairie, frontier territory, the West, Westworld, wild cybernetic chrome horses with wheels, indigenous people, rust belt territory, farm machinery, futuristic sculptures in the middle of nowhere, several bicycles and possibly a bike repair shop called ‘Chrome Countttry’ in a remote town, an unknown language, misspellings, weird typefaces and so it goes on down the rabbit wormhole.
Another Oneohtrix Point Never track 'Terminator Lake.'
The Rise of the Machines. Cyberdyne Systems T1000 birthing pools
James Webb 1st Anniversary Launch Banquet
RSVP
Yes I will be attending.
No special dietary requirements
I will make my own way there…somehow?
Kindest regards
KR-3
Just finished re-reading 'Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said’ by Philip K. Dick for the third time perhaps? Interesting. In the book a drug called KR-3, with its reality, spatial and time distorting properties, drags the protagonist Jason Taverner into a nightmare world in which he loses both fame and fortune although he isn't the one that has taken the drug? Also, the side effects of KR-3 aren't that great but who exactly has taken it and what is their agenda? When I first read it in the early 80's I considered it a proper MF, it still is. Its influence has resonated through literature, TV and Hollywood since it was first published in 1974.
Summer
Narcissus by Erwin Eisch. Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection and drowned in a pool
Cigarette box designed by Gabriel Argy-Rousseau
'Kohlrabi' designed by René Roubíček
Rascal with golden tears by Carolein Smit
Aimee Lax explorations of the Anthropocene
Aimee Lax explorations of the Anthropocene
Woolbeding Garden. Heatherwick Studios Glasshouse
The house is Tudor, although the only thing that remains of it is the interior (not sure how much of that still exists?) and the chimneys. The facade was replaced in around 1800 and is Georgian. The gardens didn't exist before the 1970's, the formal gardens, mock ruined chapel and folly all date from the 70's. Simon Sainsbury and his partner Stewart Grimshaw are behind the vision for the garden in collaboration with various garden designers over the years. Stewart Grimshaw discussed creating a lasting legacy for the garden with Thomas Heatherwick based on planting that would have been found on the silk route, an under-represented areas of horticulture in the UK and that is how the idea for the kinetic glasshouse came into being, at the end of the meandering silk route garden. The glass blades/petals open and close to maintain the correct climate for the sub-tropical planting inside. The visit was a fantastically unreal experience, the artifice of the garden, the sci-fi industrial glasshouse.
Woolbeding Garden. Heatherwick Studios Glasshouse
Woolbeding Garden. William Pye goblet water Sculpture
Tate Britain. Cornelia Parker 'Cold Dark Matter'
Tate Britain. Cornelia Parker 'War Room'
Serpentine Pavilion 2022 Black Chapel by Theaster Gates
Views of the Barbican Estate from the pedestrian high-walk
Spring
The Barbican London. Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-1965
Portrait of Lawrence Alloway dressed as a Bride by Sylva Sleigh 1950. A letter to Sleigh coyly evokes the playful spirit of the paintings creation. 'I did my best to look like a C16th picture, I tremble to think if I succeeded or not.'
Tate Modern. Surrealism Beyond Borders
I hadn't come across Spanish artist Remedios Varo's work before. Reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch with fiery lava/water erupting from a Max Ernstian cave. Third scene form a triptych, the female protagonists could be characters from a Disney animation.
Marcel Jean: Surrealist Wardrobe
Asger Jorn: Untitled
Salvador Dalí: Lobster Telephone
Tate Modern. Marcel Duchamp: Fountain
Paid a visit to one of the classics. A 1964 replica of the 1917 original, if that makes sense.
The Barbican London. Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-1965
Geometric harmonies: Victor Passmore
The Barbican London. Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-1965
In the mid-1950s Turnbull made a series of relief sculptures that evoke a landscape that has been subject to bombardment - or perhaps, a long buried archaeological site or a surreal children's playground. All of them are as though seen from the air, reflecting Turnbull's wartime experience as a pilot for the Royal Air Force.
Syrian born US based artist and architect Mohamad Hafez. Fabrica Gallery. Brighton Festival 2022. The accompanying film in which he talks about his work was really nice. Interesting things going on with scale, a personal item like an earring becomes a chandelier or a decorative tray on the wall of a devastated interior.
Marilyn Stafford: A Life in Photography. Brighton Museum.
Louise Bourgeois 'The Woven Child'. Hayward Gallery.
'Tiresias' by Cassils. Tiresias, a man in Greek mythology who was transformed in to a woman for seven years. Fashioning Masculinities at the V&A.
Grayson Perry Brexit vases. For/against. V&A.
The Package
Sorting out the recycling and was diverted by the idea of always judge an album by the package it came in? No.2 From HARDWAX in Berlin nails it with Morten B. Wandlung 002, a 12" of noisy grayscale droning techno. It's a match every time then? This is closely followed by No.6 the gauzy exposed grills of percussionist Eli Keszler's album Icons. The cluster of Italian stamps on No.4, sent from record label Silentes (Rod Modell & Marit Wolters album COCOON), shows Pio La Torre and his driver Rosario Di Salvo who were shot by the Mafia in a hail of bullets near the Communist Party's headquarters in Palermo in 1982.
Kitchen / Garden
Initial studies for long-form digital film achieved with limited means. Exploring how framing, editing and coincidence can inseparably bind image and sound together in unexpected ways.
In lockdown the most significant thing to pass through/over the garden was an aeroplane on a crystal clear early spring evening in 2021 set against a graduated orange blue sky, a line of absolute crispness scattered to a distorted trail that I stood looking at for several minutes, taking it apart as it fell apart, experienced through the iPhone.
Exploring the energy and kinetics of a superbrand
A recent bizarre/boring late night conversation with a friend discussing brands and economics lead to this series of digitally generated collages and animations. Pick one of the two superbrands and explore its energy and kinetics: Wave interference / propagation / stasis / flux / erode / degrade. Fractal & indeterminate scales: Petri dish bacterial colonies / jewels / planets. What is interesting is the resultant strangeness, density and complexity of the imagery considering they originated from a limited palette of inputs i.e. geometries, colours etc.
