fluorescent grey...

polyphony

So what about music, they ask, didn't you once Do that, in one of your former incarnations? Was that not you I once saw play on the same cruise ship on the same night as both Boney M and The Sweet? Did not handsome men with the insignia of The Evil Bunny embroidered on their jackets in threads of gold once fawn and fetch and carry for you in The Same Hotel That Paul Daniels Stayed In though not at the same time? Did you not once play a gig for £2 and a slice of pizza (mouldy)?  Do I not recall you teaching the tin whistle to convicted serial killers in Hull Prison? Did you not fritter away your youth on airport floors and dirty pillows and the sound of people counting up to two in dusty and windowless rooms? How could you walk away from such glamour?  And what did it leave you with?
 

Well yes, my friends, it is all true, every word of it, and now you know why you won't find a formal c.v. for me anywhere online.

But the music, once it gets in you, never gets out again, knocking your electrons forevermore like some kind of spiritual herpes that you can express, but never get rid of. And for me, it's the polyphony that's the thing, not that tedious static Western stratified hierarchical pyramid where there's a place for everything and everything in its place but an older, fatter polyphany of a glorious textility where everybody has a voice and everybody talks to each other and the story is woven together out of life being lived. Clearly it is African diaspora musicians I have to thank for bringing about this marvellous structural thinking-change, and thankful I am, even if I make a poor show in the expression...

See, you take the top line and you stick it behind the bass line and everything in the mids wandering in and out wherever they need to go and then you get the whole damn thing and put it behind the backline altogether.

And you take the high and the thin and the bright and the linear and you let it slip under the deep and the dark and the fat and the white noises and thunder and silence so the dark can do its own shining. Whatever's in front, let it sit in behind sometimes, or off to one side.
So you let each of the voices tell its own story and each voice talk to one another. And it's you, who listens, who joins in, who will make of this the big story which is all the stories, according to your focus, according to your lights.

Dark Matters

Please come to my show! Pictures made to be seen in the dark. Things you can't see, don't often see, things you might not want to look at all of the time: monsters, memories, movement, myths, moths, maths, molecules, microbes, mites, Maggie. With stunning collaborations by the slime mould Physarum polycephalum.

It's at Gallery 3, Art’s Complex, St.Margaret’s House, 151 London Road, Edinburgh, EH7 6AE. Map here , if you're coming by car there's a confusing car park: 

 Booze 'n' schmooze night is 3rd February, 6.00 - 9.30 pm, and the exhibition is open every day after that until the12th February from 10.00 am - 6.00 pm.

thinking again...

ow ow immunoglobulin E

So here's this poor geezer getting savagely attacked by proteins.

The hard thing here was, having got hold of that delicious celtic knotwork of the Der p protein, not to carry on in a similar vein to make a grand schematic of how the protein interacts with everything else, using similar kinds of information. (If you want to see someone do that, and do it very beautifully, look at the great David S. Goodsell's work.) But my brief is to make pictures of how I understand or might go about reaching an understanding, rather than what I understand or might be able to understand. If I take a line out of the messy confusion of Everything, I come to some conclusions, how do I then assimilate that back into my messy conception of Everything? I want to dig into the process of this, you see, rather than presenting a product.

 And the problem is, not how you make pictures of stuff you do understand - that's just ordinary work, has a beginning middle and end and you know when you've done it -  but how you make representations which give proper acknowledgement of what you don't fully understand or know about or feel you have a poor or incomplete grasp of. Which is where all the fun is.

Well hooray for the linguistic gymnastics of paint. Here, for instance, I can use these little fluorescent dots (activity) to suggest active sites on the molecule (activity) and the itchy experience of allergy (activity). And that's the sort of thing people get very easily, without even having to think they've thought about it.

dust mite, allergen, mast cell

What do you reckon, do you think someone might feel they just have to buy this to put up in their living room because it matches their curtains?

sneeze sneeze dust mite

Here we are then, a pretty confection of eosinophils and basophils and dead skin cells artfully rendered in the finest quality watercolours on archival paper for your viewing delight. Didn't ruin it, did I?

I'm working up to a picture of Everything in the world, starting with an allergic reaction to Mr. Dermatophagoides pteronyssimus and keeping him at the centre of it. Why start there? Well it's as good a place as any. That's the bright Idea for today, anyway, though the Plan is actually to go only as far as apoptosis. But what hope for a person with a gluttonous and undisciplined researching style who starts off looking at changes in cell morphology caused by reactions to cysteine and somehow ends up looking at fascinating instructional videos about two-handed Fair Isle knitting?

Hee hee dust mite

 

There. That's my day's work. Isn't he lovely.  Wanted a record of this for posteriority because I'm going to have to hide him now and that might ruin him altogether.

I must say I got fond of this gadgie the more I drew him. He performs a useful service in my life in dealing with my terrible incontinence of dead skin cells. Yes, I am allergic to dust mite faeces, but that is my problem, and down to having an immune system that thinks it is the military junta of a tin-pot dictatorship, and whose general performance is played out as 'bad cop, ineffectual cop' .  And, when  it gets bored of persecuting mildly infective agents it is prone to savage in-fighting and creating unnecessary factions which lead to the immobilisation of infrastructure and ends with tying up everything in red tape, leaving genuine antagonists free to slip through scot-free.  (Sneeze a lot, inflame the mucous membranes, get a cold. Not the dust mite's fault!)

Above is under UV light, below the same under daylight. Hee hee.

Buttons for Heaven's goonie

 

Today's project was some friends for the lonely sun in the shape of emission spectra of sodium, mercury, lithium and hydrogen. (Clockwise from the one with the single yellow stripe.)

A bugger to paint, these; the fluorescent paint is the most unforgiving medium and the 1mm thick black lines are prone to wander if the breathing isn't absolutely focused. Internal police have been whinging all day:

"Why don't you just do it in photoshop or something? Take you an hour!"

"Well, um, compression of time into picture ... wanna leave gestural detritits... thingyness... by taking time I open up possibilities for weaving into understanding rather than chasing bits of knowledge.. oh for gods sake this is what I do and so by extension do you so you'd better get used to it and shut up and let me get on with it."

Internal police aren't happy, but it is their job to be unhappy.

Also a bugger to photograph, the camera doesn't know what to do about the ultraviolets. This picture is much nicer in the flesh, but I suppose you'll have to take my word for it.

A goonie is what they call a night-dress around these parts, and if you're thinking of moving here you had best make sure yours is made of thermal fleece or merino wool or at the very least winceyette.

Heaven's night-cloths and all that

Another prototype, another 'dark matter' painting. Boldly going into the final front ear etc. which is a place, let me tell you, I do not like one bit. I mean, I do like it, in a way, but only as long as it stays there and I stay here and don't have to think about it too much.

It's horrid, cold, inhospitable, full of vacuums and deterministic behaviour and infinity and other monstrous stuff. Folding dimensions and huge things moving at impossibly slow speeds or doing all that sickening hurtling. Tiny specks floating forever in solitary confinement in fuck all.  A place where it is possible to imagine a stuff that isn't a stuff and isn't nothing either that wanders around gobbling up everything, including things that aren't there. Ugghh. (Unless Sun Ra did actually make it out there, in which case everything's ok.)

But, you know, I don't think there's any harm in taking the head out of the sand every now and then, just for a while.  So anyway I got all interested in the Harvard spectral classification system and thought it would be a fine idea to start thinking about this by turning the Sun's absorption spectrum into a circle.

A worrying moment for me; as I said before it is my firm rule that I don't do Data. Not my department mate. I can look at it if I want, but my own findings have to be published in the form of analogy, allegory, rhyming, chiming, responding, wondering, mix-up, mashup, whatever happens next; and always in in-the-world dirty mudpie handandheartandhead fabrications. Thinking with Things is my business and everything else is just a hobby. That's the rule. However this activity made necessary the use of a ruler and sums (well, divide by 2) which is, in my book, measuring and maths and therefore Data.  I have grave misgivings about this, fearing the start of a slippery slope which might suddenly lurch into a freefall of Fourier transforms and C++ programming.

Not really a problem, as it turns out, plenty of scope for playing fast and loose with the intensity and brightness of colour, especially if you're messing about with fluorescent paints. Which is something that I may attempt to make more factually accurate in the future.  What's really fun is the slippage between light intensity and the intensity of coloured paint, which is where all the phenomenological hoodoo is for a painter. Its as if stuff itself transmits its own energy in addition to the light it reflects. A sort of Ki of inanimate matter. (Is it me? Is it it? Yes and no, it's in the field of relationships between you and it and everything else, yada yada yada.)

Here's the same thing with a blacklight.