Moving

This blog is moving - to Wordpress. I have copied all my posts over to their new home, and will make some changes to the layout over the next few weeks.

My previous blog posts will stay here, but any future posts will be on the new site.

If you are reading this through a feed, please take a moment to re-direct the feed to the new address.

Thanks!

Tagged!

I've been tagged by Caterin! Tag suggests school playgrounds, and little girls running round screaming, chanting rhymes like:

what's the time? five to nine
hang your knickers on the line
now its nearly half past ten
time to take them off again

Not that I'd associate Cat with such behaviour, of course.

Anyway, the rules of this tag game -

(1) Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
(2) People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
(3) At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
(4) Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

So here's my eight ......

My favourite SL motto, which I saw on somebody's profile - "we're all here because we're not all there"

Speaking of playgrounds - Iko_Iko (the Dixie Cups version) is always playing somewhere in my head

Actually I entered SL mainly to show my FL photos, but it hasn't quite worked out like that

Like many others, I owe an awful lot to Natalia, for her friendship, encouragement and invaluable advice when I first landed in SL.

My SL gallery is in the wonderful and prestigious Cetus District, built and run by the excellent Xander Ruttan and Tricia Aferdita. Xander doesn't have a blog, but you can always get down there and tell him how good it is.

I do have an alt, but she never tells me anything.

Anything by Laura Nyro

None of your business

So, who to tag next? I seem to be running out of people, they've all been tagged already. There's Otenth, although goodness knows what the good people of Caledon would make of these goings-on. And, as the rules don't exclude non-SL blogs, Stephanie, who posts beautiful pictures, and knows far more about philosophy than I ever will.

Synchronicity

In my last post I included a quotation from the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Looking him up on Wikipedia (what would I do without it?), I came across The Book of Disquiet, a series of lyrical and melancholy observations from the perspective of one of Pessoa's alternate selves, Bernardo Soares – an obscure, philosophically inclined office clerk in 1920’s Lisbon – which was compiled from Pessoa’s papers after his death. The book is discussed on The Blog of Disquiet, in commentaries on individual passages in the book, contributed by several writers, which is now on my daily feed list. I have a theory, based only on my own experience, that the random acquisition of books, based on pure chance, or certainly nothing more than oblique hints, is often very fruitful. So at lunchtime last Friday (incidentally, the anniversary of Pessoa’s death) I went down the road to Dillon’s bookshop (the original one in Gower Street which is actually now part of the Waterstone’s chain, but will always be Dillon’s to me) and picked up a copy of The Book of Disquiet, which I have been reading ever since. I bought the translation by Margaret Jull Costa, whose name I recognised from her translations of other Portuguese and Spanish writers, but there is another translation by Richard Zenith, in which the text appears to be differently organised. Maybe I shall have to get both.

Anyway, on the train into London this morning, I read a beautiful passage on the age-old philosophical problem of recognising the existence of souls other than one’s own. The narrator (Soares) reflects on the death of a passing acquaintance, the tobacconist’s assistant:

I suppose no-one truly admits the existence of another person. One might concede that the other person is alive and feels and thinks like oneself, but there will always be an element of difference, a perceptible discrepancy, that one cannot quite put one's finger on.
..............
On certain days, at certain times, with an awareness wafted to me on some unknown breeze, revealed to me by the opening of some secret door, I am suddenly conscious that the grocer on the corner is a spiritual being, that his assistant at the door, bending down over a sack of potatoes, truly is a soul capable of suffering.

Yesterday, when they told me that the assistant in the tobacconist's had committed suicide, I couldn't believe it. Poor lad, so he existed too!

The train was delayed, and when I reached Liverpool Street Underground station the platform was closed through overcrowding. As it was a bright sunny morning, I decided to walk through the City to Moorgate, to catch the Northern Line from there. The street was thick with crowds of commuters emerging from the station, and it was a while before I reached the entrance. At the moment when I got to the stairs down into the tube station, a woman leaning on crutches was slowly and painfully making her way up the steps towards me. I paused to wait for her (I didn’t really have much choice). At the top she stopped for breath, and smiled.

Seeing is Believing - Part 3

I have been thinking more about the exhibitions I visited the other day, at the Photographer's Gallery. The introduction to Antoine d'Agata's show included a quotation from the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa:

what we see is not made up of what we are seeing but rather from what we are

which is quite possibly true, but a strange thought nonetheless. Looking at pictures like these, the idea that we are looking at ourselves, or rather images that we can only interpret through our own experience, is disturbing. It's also relevant to Fred Ressler's interpretation of his shadow pictures, in the Seeing is Believing exhibition. After commenting on this work in my first post on this subject, it was a pleasant surprise to get a response from the photographer himself.



I know very little about Pessoa - I first encountered his work in a dreamlike album by Bévinda of songs based on his poems. According to sources quoted in Wikipedia, he wrote under a large number of heteronyms (72!) , each possessing

distinct temperaments, philosophies, appearances and writing styles

This statue sits outside one of the cafés he frequented (although not one I visited when I was in Lisbon, otherwise I would have a better picture to show you).

Seeing is Believing - Part 2

The Photographers' Gallery is oddly laid out, with separate entrances to its two gallery spaces, and there are usually two exhibitions opening at the same time. So after looking at the Seeing is Believing show I described in my previous post, I went round to the café to look at Insomnia, an installation by the French photographer Antoine d'Agata. I'm not sure the café area is the ideal location; although a warning of "sexually explicit" images is displayed, it's something of an understatement. The wall is covered with a montage of several hundred framed pictures, mostly in a grainy, dark black and white, of night scenes, sex acts, desolate streets, and (incongruously?) a dead roe deer. Interestingly, in the video interview showing in the entrance, d'Agata is standing in front of the wall, with the deer image centre screen. The overall effect is haunting and disturbing, and sometimes threatening. Even the very ordinary apartment building below is mysterious - in the light of the many images surrounding it, I couldn't help wondering what is going on behind these blank darkened windows.

Many of d'Agata's pictures can be seen in his Magnum portfolio.

pictures © Antoine d'Agata/ Magnum Photos. No infringement intended.

Seeing is Believing - Part 1

This is the title of a current show at the Photographers' Gallery in London, which I visited yesterday. I was more interested in the contemporary work in this exhibition than in the worthy archive of "psychic investigation" pictures, which wasn't really very well presented. It was interesting to compare the amateurish fakery of these pictures (ghostly shapes and floating tables) with the conscious manipulation of photographic technique to create "paranormal" effects in the modern pictures.


I particularly liked the work of Fred Ressler, who takes pictures of shadows falling on the walls of his house that show ghostly blurred faces, like this one, which apparently has an uncanny resemblance to a friend of the artist. I don't quite go along with his views on these images:

I see these images as projections from my unconscious corroborated by having them projected to me. I started seeing these photos as something beyond what any artist could do. The way the background complimented [sic] the foreground to form a unity with a group mind..... These beings are not under control as in art. They are not bound to function as in nature.

Really? Another one, called "Dylan", I and another visitor both thought could actually be an image of the great Bob, so perhaps there's something to it. Anyway, the pictures are very impressive. If the artist's ideas give him a rationale for making excellent images, who am I to argue?

Metamorphosis

My friend Bacon Rolls has a show at the SL Museum of Contemporary Art, which is well worth seeing. Here is the introduction I wrote for the show.

The challenge of creating SL art from RL originals is not simply a matter of uploading images to hang in virtual galleries. The uploaded pictures filling so many SL galleries are in truth no more than copies – they are not the real thing. Bacon Rolls has created a bridge between “real” and “virtual” art, with bold, large-scale works which are both original to SL and explicitly based on the forms of his RL work, by translating his RL paintings into SL sculptures, and back again. This exhibition demonstrates the stages of this translation process in a series of images and sculptures that display consistency and variety.

Bacon’s RL paintings of land- and seascapes form both the inspiration and the raw material for his SL work. He translates the textures of his RL paintings into SL sculpties, abstracting their qualities of form and colour, and providing their surface appearance. Greens and blues predominate, evoking the colours of the original paintings. Bacon combines the pictures with their SL sculptie counterparts to create strikingly beautiful images that break out of the flat space that confined them in RL – echoing the work of RL artists such as Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg in exploring the relationship between two and three dimensions. This being Second Life, they can also defy gravity.

Bacon carries the process of translation further, downloading snapshot images of his Second Life creations, modifying them and then loading them back into Second Life for display as two-dimensional pictures which are clearly related to the RL landscapes they are derived from and yet have their own identity as abstract representations of the SL landscape.