odd number

On Thursday 31st September I saw an exhibition of Cildo Meireles at the Tate Modern. He is a conceptual artist from Rio de Janeiro who is very direct and engaging in ideas and materials.

Information

Meireles spread ideas, statements and the art itself through use of existing mechanisms, such as banknotes, recycled coke bottles and the classified pages of newspapers. The choice of the system itself carries meaning (”Yankees go home!” on the bottles). The world around becomes the space for the art to work in.

Babel (2001) is a tower of radios. Each one is a different model, tuned to different frequencies. Instead of being an overwhelming wall of noise, the many fuse into a single experience - you have to lean close to hear individual voices. It exposes a broad range of the electromagnetic radio spectrum, to be heard as a single thing.

In Eureka/Blindhotland (1970-5) there are many spheres, which you are encouraged to pick up. Each is a different weight, from 500 grams to 1500 grams, but all are visually identical.

Glovetrotter (1991) is also composed of spheres, but this time each is a different type. A steel mesh has been draped over all, concealing their identity, but not the scale.

Measuring space

The first room is full of precise works on graph paper, where repeated, systematically joined points create clearly defined volumes. This moves on to proposals/instructions for conceptual works, also drawn on graph paper, many of which concern different forms of measurement. For example, a work is proposed where Meireles will canoe around the North Pole, becoming a day younger on each circumnavigation. Maps feature heavily, fundamentally being the lines which delineate borders between countries.

Fontes (1992/2008) is a brightly lit room full of tape measures hung from the ceiling, creating a forest in which visitors can lose themselves. There are spiral paths through the measures, which can be walked through - but becoming progressively narrower towards the middle of the room, and then imperceptible. Having followed the spiral, you are disorientated, and wanting to leave, it is very difficult to tell if you are pushing through the tapes in a straight line. When out, you are confronted with walls packed with clocks - each of which has a non-uniform distribution of time, with the 12,3,6 and 9 placed at varying points around the dial.

I installed RjDj on my iphone yesterday. It takes sound from the environment you’re in, using the samples both as the ingredients of a musical composition, and to influence it.

Some notes:

• It’s not long before you’re singing along to yourself. This can’t be much fun for anyone listening (I remember when walkmen were fairly new, and my sister singing along in the car without being able to hear herself)
• Walking past railings is a useful way of generating rhythmic noise
• Walking around, previously intrusive noises such as car hoots, children wailing and people shouting become welcome material.
• This causes a new detachment from reality - it becomes much easier to hear it all in a state of detachment, as a rich tapestry
• I wonder how long it will be before this, or other reality-altering devices, end up with people shaping the reality around them in order to make a more interesting experience. We will end in a narrative that would suit The Dice Man
• You’re recommended to listen with headphones, presumably to prevent unpleasant feedback loops. But it adds a whole new element to driving if plugged into the stereo. Years ago (early 90’s) I imagined a musical device that would take the motions and actions of driving as the trigger. RjDj seems to do the job.
• It brings a whole new dimension to watching X-Factor
• The newfound ability to listen to environmental sounds in an unjudgemental manner continues, at least for a while, into Genuine Unamended Reality

A few simple rules applied to a matrix of points creates conditions of fraying. It’s surprising when making something so apparently simple how many differing factors can be brought in. For example, it could add something to increase the frequency of detachment as the number of unactive particles decreases.

I was looking the wrong way when a runner brushed past me at the Tate Britain in Martin Creed’s Work No 850. The waiting is part of the piece - there is calm interrupted by the burst of activity. Many viewers would arrive in the space knowing that the running is going to happen, but with only the vaguest idea as to the direction, speed or frequency. So the actual happening is a surprise, despite knowledge of the facts.

I thought they would run along a line, but instead the runner navigates through the clumps of slow-moving people.

A crowd moving is a good example of self-organisation. Every single person in a crowd has a destination in mind, but each has to cooperate with the whole in order to reach their goal. Craig Reynolds analysed the movement of flocks, herds and schools in Boids, identifying three behaviours between each boid and its immediately local neighbours: separation, alignment and cohesion. Adherence to these simple rules ends up with the complex patterns you get in shoals of fish.

People reading their text messages while walking in a crowd ask for others to adapt to their absence from the game. And while it’s very wrong to cycle at high speed through a pedestrian precinct, it’s exhilarating to predict where the gaps are going to be, then make your choice, adjusting if necessary.

Walking to the cloakroom adjacent to the main gallery, you occasionally see one of the athletes walking on their way back to the start line, looking flushed but concentrated. I’m not sure if that counts as part of the work. Does it start and stop within the gallery? Are we allowed to look at them as subjects of an art piece, or have they become part of the crowd again?

The runner in the photo was a precursor to Work No 850, spotted over three years ago.

“Journey to the Surface of the Earth” presents small rectangles of the planet carefully reconstructed in the gallery. The sites are chosen through random methods, such as blindfolded visitors finding them on a giant map of the world.

Sixteen points on Earth is a rudimentary equivalent, with apologies to the Boyle Family.

Last week’s New Scientist features an article by geologist Donald Prothero showing how evolution shows much more of a gradual progression than is popularly known. Especially striking is the way the “hammer and anvil” part of our ear has formed.

Mammals are descended from synapsids, which developed parallel to reptiles from the same ancestor. Part of a reptile’s jaw functions as its ear - it transmits sound to the middle ear. The fossil record shows the migration of this part of the lower jaw, as it retreats and shrinks, to become part of our hearing apparatus.

Beginning with (x+y) at the bottom of the page, expanding to (x+y)^5.

What happens when an immovable force meets an irresistible object?

A friend sent me the programme for a piece of music, with the thought that I would be interested in its beat cycle. I haven’t heard the music yet, but wondered what it would look like. It is “subdivided 9-7-6-5-4-3-2-3-4-5-6-6-5-4-3-2-3-4-5-6-7-9, with contrasting sections based on a cycle of 2x(12×4+6)”. This is what a quick bit of Flash coding makes of it:

The piece is Terry Riley’s “The Cusp of Magic” (he has a rather shocking website). The notes go on to say that 108 is considered a sacred number in India, on which prayer beads are based.

There, that was a harmlessly factual, if obscure, beginning to this blog. I’m not even sure what it means, beyond the fact that I wanted to see what something looked like! Perhaps prayer beads make for an auspicious start to the journey.