Art
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Marking Time: Longplayer
Yesterday, I went to visit Longplayer, Jem Finer‘s thousand-year composition, for the eleventh anniversary of its first note, played on New Years Day, 1999. Longplayer is currently controlled (performed?) from Trinity Buoy Wharf in London’s simultaneously desolate and overbuilt Docklands, covered in newly built flats and offices, with hardly a human in sight. Jem started…
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B/E at the Biennale
As a scientist, I am used to my work being read by my peers, and I’ve made it into the occasional magazine or newspaper article, and even the odd TV and radio slot. But last week I travelled to Venice’s Architecture Biennale for the culmination of the first phase of the Architectural Association’s Beyond Entropy art/science project…
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Counterculture RIPs
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Two crucial figures from outside the mainstream of American culture have died. Tuli Kupferberg (1923-2010) has been hanging around, writing about and stirring up trouble in New York’s Greenwich Village since the 1950s as a writer, poet, occasional political activist and rock ‘n’ roller. First in the late 60s and early 70s and occasionally thereafter,…
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Building a time machine in the Dorset woods
A few weeks ago I wrote about my visit to Geneva as part of the Beyond Entropy art/architecture/science collaboration sponsored by the Architecture Association. We continued our work last weekend in the Dorset woods visiting the AA’s Hooke Park site, a 350-acre forest with a bit more space for workshops than their Bedford Square buildings in…
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Beyond Entropy II
I’ve been in Geneva now for a couple of days. We spent yesterday visiting CERN, trying to inspire the artists, architects and scientists alike (I’ve collaborated with people here, but I’ve never visited before). A mockup of a section of the CERN tunnels. More pictures here. You can also check out Peter Coles’ blog for…
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Beyond Entropy
I’m in Geneva for a few days as part of a project called “Beyond Entropy: When Entropy Becomes Form“, sponsored by the Architectural Association back in London, the brainchild of Stefano Rabolli Pansera and others at the AA. It brings together eight trios of architects, artists and scientists to produce works to be shown at…
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Crash: Homage to JG Ballard
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I went to see the new show at London’s Gagosian Gallery, Crash: An Homage to JG Ballard. It assembles work from mostly well-known artists with some connection to the recently-deceased Ballard or his themes. So there are the obligatory car crashes from Warhol, referencing the eponynmous Crash, probably Ballard’s best-known novel. Indeed, works about cars…
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Bayes and Blake at Bunhill
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One of my holiday treks this year was across town to visit Bunhill Fields, final resting place of two of my favorite Londoners: William Blake and Thomas Bayes. Blake is of course one of the most famous poets in the English language, but most people know him only from short poems like The Tiger [sic]…
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Physics vs Poetry
When I’m traveling I try to read the New Yorker — a transatlantic flight usually gets me through most of an issue. I was even more interested than usual when I picked up the issue at Heathrow and found the front-cover blurb, “Physics vs Poetry: New fiction by Ian McEwan”. McEwan is thought of as…
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Tying Myself in Knots
I’ll be appearing this Thursday, September 3, at the newly-reopened Whitechapel Gallery‘s Study Studio as part of “Knot Night“, hosted by sculptor Richard Wentworth. Richard has produced a box (or vitrine, if you want to be all art-world about it) called “A Confiscation of String” for the Gallery, and so a few of us have…
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