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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.

once completed, friend and fellow writer james burt suggested it should be published in actual book and promoted in swindon, so i did. details of its promotion - including a bbc radio interview and a newspaper article - can be found here. if you’d like to purchase a printed version of the book contact me directly here (copies cost £5), and if you’d just like to download the pdf, you can find it 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.

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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*

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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?

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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…