Imber is a village on Salisbury plain, requisitioned by the Army during WW2 for street-fighting exercises and never handed back to the displaced inhabitants. After much negotiation and some mine-sweeping, the Army recently gave Artangel permission for a one-night performance there, with music by Giya Kancheli. There’s lots of detail on the Artangel site, including an interview with Kancheli. I’ve no idea how I managed to miss this. There’s a review on the Independent site, which makes a point about context:

The fact is, we weren’t focusing on the real tragedy - unmentioned in the advance publicity - which lies three thousand miles away. Though they don’t hail from it, Rustavi [Georgia's famous choir] take their name from a now-derelict Georgian industrial city, which is one of the most desolate places I’ve seen. Thousands of people live there, but hardly any have jobs. And the monastery of David Garreja ["whose ancient frescos had not prevented the Soviet army from using it for target practice"] - just south of Rustavi - is still sublime. But it would take more than a fleet of buses to ferry an audience out there.

Incidentally, according to Frieze magazine, Kancheli is now based in Antwerp, because of his fondness for the cakes there.

The weather today turned briefly to snowish sleet, then rain, then just as I came home, this…

Sitting outside at The Approach with a pint of Prospect ale, enjoying the lingering Indian summer. Just visited the Wilkinson Gallery, which is exhibiting David Batchelor’s The Found Monochromes Of London 1-80 (1999-2003):

…the culmination of four years’ work during which time Batchelor photographed over 100 simple white rectangles found in the streets.

Presented as a slideshow, it’s very cool. The found rectangles form the centre of each picture, with a background of urban London spilling around the edges of this blank focus. The series has a lingering Entrances To Hell kind of effect after leaving the gallery, changing the world’s story, in a small way, for a little while.

We suggest that the nonarbitrariness both of synaesthesia and of metaphor (and their directionality) arise because of constraints imposed by evolution and by neural hardware (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001a). For example, you say loud shirt but you rarely say red sound; you say sharp taste but rarely bitter touch.
S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard, The Phenomenology of Synaesthesia, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 10, No. 8, 2003

If the Eameses had applied their fabrication skills to the design brief of the Citroen 2CV, during a serious fuel shortage, they might have ended up with something like Joost Conijn’s beautiful (the photo doesn’t do it justice) wood-burning, plywood Hout Auto (Wood Car), currently exhibited at the NICC space of the Koninklijk Museum voor Shone Kunsten Antwerpen. An accompanying video documents the car’s rambling journey through the mountain passes and pot-holed backroads of central Europe, avoiding major routes. According to the NICC website:

The artist travels towards the unknown. The main plan is to make a film about the unexpected incited by the wood car. In order to keep the motor running, Conijn travels through woods, independent of petrol, leaving cultivated roads behind. Crossing little villages, people guide him to local saw-mills and offer him some food and spare wood.

Matt’s been working on some glanceware (independently of what we’re doing here). At the moment it’s a simple way of seeing very basic presence information about a group of friends, whcih sits in the taskbar of your screen. He believes, if I understand correctly, that peripherally-attended presence is the seed on which can grow the pearl of complex social interaction. I’m interested to see where this leads: I think he’s following a similar train of thought to the audible presence cues in Hubbub, although personally I prefer the idea of audio cues, as they don’t require screen-based attention for them to be peripherally available.

On the Eurostar on the way back from Antwerp. I love it: I have no idea how their economy really works, but the city feels almost empty of people, yet somehow accomodates not just the Antwerp Six and their successors, but some of most lovely restaurants, bars and design shops I’ve ever seen. Oh and of course the art. They’ve somehow jumped straight past the service and information economies to some impossible present where all this is somehow self-supporting and profoundly civilised.