Fuddland

Another find in amongst all my old junk.

Cat-sitting back at my Mum’s for the weekend, I’ve been left a couple of boxes of my old things to sort through — mostly verifying that it is indeed okay to recycle all those computer magazines from 1984. In amongst everything, I came across a reminder of a pastime I’d forgotten I had: pointless computer art.

The masterpieces were rendered on my trusty Spectrum 48K, and to avoid the dreaded colour clash, everything was done in monochrome. I’d begin by sketching an image onto some graph paper, then wherever the lines passed through a square — corresponding to one pixel on the screen — I’d fill in that square, turning the nicely analogue image into its “digital” equivalent.

Next I’d load up The Artist II and set to work. Taking each 8-by-8 block of pixels in turn, I’d zoom in on that area, and click on those pixels that formed part of the image. The fact that the zoom was a binary-friendly 8-by-8 rather than 10-by-10 meant that I’d had to re-draw all the block boundaries on the graph paper. Eventually, and all in one sitting, I’d reach the final block and had the completed image. And then what did I do? I turned off the computer and went and did something else instead. No saving. Definitely no printing. An utterly pointless, painstaking activity.

Here we have the only remaining artifact of this hobby, the pre-visualisation [ooh get me] of a comic book character called Halo Jones. You can see along the top that this paper was previously used to design a font, and there are also faint marks elsewhere which suggest it was used to draw a different picture before that; I seem to remember being particularly proud of a dragon that I did, so perhaps it was that one.

It seems that my harmless hobby wasn’t all that popular with my siblings, as revealed by the unmistakable scrawl of my sister near the edge of the paper.

Aah, happy days…

Here are a few snaps of the Raw Materials exhibition currently on display in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern.

Being an “aural collage” — strategically-placed speakers belt out various spoken texts — it’s quite hard to capture its essence visually, so you’re going to have to either try and visit it yourselves or make do with the virtual version if the following blurb doesn’t make your eyes roll right out of their sockets with its unashamed pretentiousness:

Language has always played a central role in Bruce Nauman’s work, providing him with a means of examining how human beings exist in the world, how they communicate or fail to communicate. For Raw Materials, he has selected 22 spoken texts taken from existing works to create an aural collage in the Turbine Hall. Removed from their original context, the individual texts and voices become almost abstract elements, taking on new meanings as they are rearranged as part of a single work.

Raw Materials also draws on Nauman’s fascination with space, and the ways it can alter our behaviours and self-awareness. The Turbine Hall has been organised so that visitors encounter “bands of sound” that run in strips across its width. No other physical changes have been made to the space. Sound becomes a sculptural material in itself, one that orchestrates and measures its surroundings.

The Turbine Hall is filled with voices, some clearly audible, others indistinct, which merge with new, “found” sound from the voices of the visitors. In Raw Materials, Nauman has transformed this cavernous space into a metaphor for the world, echoing to the endless sounds of jokes, poems, pleas, greetings, statements and propositions.

a brief mention of picasso in a recent entry in the updates blog led me on an internet click-path that reminded me of one of my favourite paintings, duchamp’s ‘nude descending a staircase (no. 2)’:

is it cubist? futurist? i don’t care, i just like it. wish i could find a large resolution image though — and to see the real thing would be amazing. i knew i should have stopped off in philadelphia on my travels a couple of years ago.