blog

i have just received the following piece of code in an email. having an interest in poetry, history and code this shone out as a pithy and beautifully concise script:

while (history){
    history = true;
}

i’ve finally finished my essay ’swindon orbital’, which has taken 4 months to complete. for me it’s a major piece of work and  i’m happy with it, with some reservations (which i think is healthy). i’ll keep this short post because the essay itself is what’s worth reading. if you’ve not heard about it before and would like to know more, start off here. if you want to plunge straight in, you’ll find the essay itself here.

if you do read it, please come back here and add your feedback. i’d like to know what you think.

today is the 23rd of april: st george’s day, the patron saint of england. the hard, historical facts of the day and the figure himself may well be a little flimsy, but it is a good opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with one of this country’s leading artists & visionaries: william blake.

it is usually the famous two verses from his poetic work ‘jerusalem’ that are quoted on occasions like this:

and did these feet in ancient times,
walk upon england’s mountains green?
and was the holy lamb of god,
on england’s pleasant pastures seen?

etc. i love jerusalem, made it my business to memorise those two fabulous verses years ago, but we are all well acquainted with them already, i think st. georges day is an excellent opportunity to have a look at some of his less well-known pieces.

Read the rest of this entry »

the peter greenaway film ‘the draughtman’s contract‘ depicts the tale of an artist commissioned to produce drawings of a country estate. to aid him in this task the artist, a mr. neville, uses a tool known as ‘alberti’s perspectival window’:

scene from 'the draughtman's contract': courtesy of flickr user *bene*

Read the rest of this entry »

there are very few cultural universals: symbols, rules and artifacts shared by all civilisations. but some do exist and none so prevalent as the right angle. in the west we owe our knowledge of the right angle to the ancient egyptians, but importantly a number of civilisations discovered or invented the right angle entirely independently of each other: in the indus river valley, the region surrounding the yellow river in present-day china and what we now know of as mexico and peru, as well as various primitive clans. a knowledge of the right angle allowed these various and isolated peoples to develop other important structures such as the square, the cube and the grid; all of which made absolutely key contributions to their continued development.

modernist building taken with fish eye lens: courtesy of flickr user bikini sleepshirt

how did this happen?

Read the rest of this entry »

last weekend i attended barcamplondon6. generally i like to cover a historical topic at barcamp and i planned to talk about william blake, having spent much of the preceding week reading his biography. i didn’t get enough time to prepare anything though and so had to go back to one of my old presentations as back-up. i let the attendees choose which they’d prefer and they opted for ‘the history of the right angle’, a session i first gave at barcampbrighton3.

masonic symbol showing calipers and set square; courtesy of flickr user tim ellis

i’ve been planning on blogging about this topic for some time and dusting off the old presentation has given me the impetus to do so. the slide format i used won’t transfer well onto the ‘net so i’m going to rewrite it a series of blogposts, starting with this one.

continued here…

for the last two months i have been working on my essay documenting the walk i took around swindon at christmas. it’s taken a very long time to complete, two months in all, but early last week i handed it over to james burt, a friend and fellow writer, for editing and proofing. james says he expects to have it back with me in a couple of days time, at which point i plan to integrate his suggestions, tidy it all up and publish it, as a pdf.

after which… i’m not sure yet. it turned into a much larger project than i expected it to - nearly the length of an undergraduate dissertation - so i feel as though i should do more with it than just stick on the website, although i’m not entirely sure what yet.

suggestions welcome!

i’ve blogged before about the idea of ‘walking’ sculpture: a kind of part-static, part-dynamic mix of elements, where a sculpture made out of modular parts can be assembled, dismantled and reassembled in different ways, like lego. or k’nex:

i got talking to designer & artist thomas forsyth about it a few weeks ago. he had previously shown me his aleatoric geometry stuff - a set of homemade connectable wooden items that could be assembled into an infinite variety of different forms - and it struck me that it would be great material for creating walking sculpture with, and that thomas himself might well be someone worth collaborating with.

Read the rest of this entry »

last weekend i visited arundel with e and her parents. arundel is a lovely little market town on a hill in west sussex, home to the duke of norfolk and a well-preserved norman castle since 1068. today it has a beautifully twee little town centre:

amongst other shops in this photograph one can see a butcher, a grocer’s shop and a bookshop. i was enjoying my stroll around these expensive, specialists stores - admiring the cheeses on offer in the grocer’s window - when it struck me that the only sense in which this place was any more ‘real’ than some virtual version of it - one recreated in second life, say - was that it was a physical location. the england i grew up in and know is all about suburbs, supermarkets, fast food shops, television, blue collar jobs, computer games, motorways, petrol stations, nhs hospitals, prefabricated school buildings, etc, etc. the chocolate box, pastoral & staunchly tory view of england that arundel suggests is just a tourist backdrop. a pretty one, sure, but as unrealistic a backdrop as any scene i’ve seen at the movies or in some computer generated environment.

today is the 3rd of march, 2009, meaning the date is 3.3.9, being square root day (3 x 3 = 9); a facetious geek holiday. i’ve got work today so i can’t ‘celebrate’ it properly but i’ll make sure i have a good square meal tonight and raise my glass to that universal cultural symbol: the square.

take a look around you: they’re everywhere, rectangles, cubes and squares, in every ancient and modern culture all around the world and throughout history; ‘really important. take a few minutes today to show your appreciation for this fundamental cultural symbol.

here’s to the square!