books
I recently read Viv Albertine’s memoir Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.
It is a frank account of the challenges of a creative life including her attempt to return to music after the breakup of the Slits in the early 80s; her subsequent career in film and tv; and a period of time spent focussing on starting a family and raising a child.
Brick, William Hall, with introductory essay by Dan Cruickshank, ISBN: 9780714868813
Brick is book of photographs of buildings made from bricks. It is one of a series of architecture books produced by Phaidon that focus on a specific material (Wood and Concrete are others in the series). The book is much more interesting than if sounds. It features amazing buildings of from Cathedrals to Industrial chimneys from around the world including some that are hundreds of years old.
The video below gives a glimpse inside the book.
An untitled sculpture of mine made of laser cut plywood in the catalogue for the RHA's 186th Annual Exhibition.
Clever cover design by David Pearson for George Orwell's 1984
via Creative Review
This is a new version of a booklet first produced in 2006. The booklet has been redesigned and some changes made to the content.
Each of these word loops takes a pair of words with opposite meanings as its starting point. A thesaurus was used to find a synonym for one of these words and then to find a synonym for that synonym and so on. Each new word suggested by thesaurus involves a slight slippage of meaning. These slippages accumulate resulting in a complete inversion of the original meaning. This process is repeated using the second word from the pair until the loop has been completed.
If you would like to receive a complimentary copy please send me your address: niall(at)nialldebuitlear.com
I've been looking at the work of Keith Arnatt recently. He began as a conceptual artist who used photography as tool - he's famous for the piece where he wore a sign saying "I'm a real artist" and a series of images where he appears to be sinking into the ground.
Later he reinvented himself as a photographer working on various series including photos of notes his wife left for him around the house and a series of photos of objects found on the dump (one of which is pictured above).
I'm a Real Photographer: Photographs by Keith Arnatt
This quote from James Gleick's book Chaos: Making a New Science
Clouds are not spheres, Mandelbrot is fond of saying, Mountains are not cones. Lightning does not travel in straight lines. the new geometry mirrors a universe that is rough not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. it is a geometry of the pitted, pocked, and broken up, the twisted, tangled, and intertwined. The understanding of nature's complexity awaiting a suspicion that the complexity was not just random, not just accident. It required a faith that the interesting feature of lightning was not its direction, but rather the distribution of zigs and zags. Mandelbrot's work made a claim about the world, and the claim was that such odd shapes carry meaning. The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the key to the essence of a thing.
These illustrations by D'Arcy Wenworth Thompson show the shapes made by drops of ink in water (left) and the tentacles of a jellyfish (right).
They are taken from a book called Chaos: The Amazing Science of the Unpredicatable by James Gleick and originally appeared in Wentorth Thompson's book On Growth and Form 
I've been reading Terry Winters: Paintings, Drawings, Prints 1994-2004
The photographs were taken by Harold Edgerton at night with an extremely fast a shutter speed and a special 10 feet long lens which was set up in a bunker 7 miles away. These 3 pictures show the first 3 milliseconds of an atomic bomb detonation. The bomb was at the top of a steel gantry anchored to the desert floor.
Ì have just finished reading a book about randomness called The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
One of the interesting facts in the book is that people are not capable of making up a sequence of numbers that pass mathematical tests for randomness. For certain mathematical calculations strings of random numbers are required. In 1947 scientists at the RAND corporation created a system using electronic noise to generate random numbers. They did not succeed in generating a string of numbers that was entirely free of regularities but did produce results which were random enough to be useful. The numbers were published in 1955 as A Million Random Digits
I looked up the RAND book on Amazon and found a strange user review :
This is surely the most depressing book I have ever read. I am an amateur historian, who has spent many years analysing history and watching it repeat itself... or at least that is what I thought. After reading this book it is obvious that what I perceived to be recurring patterns, were if fact just random events being repeated randomly.
As a result, I no longer read history with the same enthusiasm. On the bright side, this book is a wonderful testament to man's ability to think the unthinkable. It also questions my sanity that I tried to read it in the first place!
Here is another from Amazon:
I took a class in statistics in college. I used this book to help me select random phone numbers for a poll I was conducting for my class project. (The most popular household cleanser in the greater Siouxland area is Bon Ami, by the way.) One of those phone calls was answered by the woman who is now my wife. We've been happily married for ten years! Thank you, RAND.
Below are three graphs from Mlodinow's books which I also found interesting:
They show an example of 'normal distibution'. To explain this idea Mlodinow writes about an experiment in which 300 students were each asked to guess heads or tails in a series of ten coin tosses. When these results are presented in a graph they form a bell-shaped curve centred on 5 correct guesses. The curve drops to about two thirds of its maximum height between 3 and 4 correct guesses and between 6 and 7 correct guesses and tapers off in a bell shape with 0 and 10 correct guesses having the lowest heights. This type of curve is know as 'normal distribution'.
The graphs below chart the number in rows of pascal's triangle - a chart which can be used to show the number of possible combinations of given set of elements eg the number of ways 100 people can be seated at 10 tables.
I picked up a copy of Arpeggio by Nina Canell today. Its a beautiful book designed by Robin Watkins. http://www.canellwatkins.org
There's a booklet with today's Guardian called "How to write fiction". There's a article by Kate Pullinger addressing on of the most common (and most annoying) questions asked of artists and writers.
Writers are often asked the question, "Where do you get your ideas from?" as though there is a special place where you can buy them: Asda for chick-lit, perhaps, Waitrose for literary fiction. But, even though this question gets asked a lot, most writers find it difficult to supply a decent answer. The truth is that ideas are all around us, in the people you meet, in the things you read and see and hear and experience, in your own childhood and family, in the wilder reaches of your imagination.
The complete article is here
Matt Packer, the curator of the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, was interviewed about the Bookish exhibition for the RTÉ Lyric FM Arts Show. It can be listened to online here.
The coverage of Bookish starts at 13 mins 56 second into the show.
The exhibition "Bookish: When Books Become Art" at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery at UCC in Cork opened last night. My favourite piece in the show is John Latham's film which shows every page of the Enclyopedia Brittanica at high speed. The text has a strange, rythmic pulsing quality that appears animated and images flash up intermittently.
I also particularly enjoyed the sculpture by Jonathan Callan which is similar to the one pictured below:
My own contribution to the show consists of three wooden tables with objects that were found between the pages of books in the UCC library. The work also includes a video which presents a letter written in 1979 and a song by Joan Baez the handwritten lyrics to which I found in a book.
Below are some excerpts from a letter I found in a library book at UCC while working on The Found Bookmark Project for a group show at the Lewis Glucksman gallery. The letter is dated 1979 and a note has been added by another student which is dated 1983.
2 mount pleasant, gardiners hill, Cork
3rd December 1979
Dear Mr Quigg,
I am prompted to write this letter because, once more, the encyclopaedia of philosophy has been vandalized. This encyclopaedia as, no doubt, you are aware, is housed in the reference library and is constantly in use by staff and students. Not only has volume 7 been missing for some years, but today I also noticed and reported that a huge portion of volume 4 has also been cut out by some "wanton". Because I have constantly reported the fact that vloume 7 is missing to no avail, I have now little confidence that the missing portions of volume 4 will be replaced in the immediate future, which is why I have decided to write to you...
...As it now stands it is notoriously easy not only to rob books and journals but also to steal other people's belongings from the library. It would seem ro me to be totally unfair, and somewhat naive to expect students to leave bags and coats outside the library area, or in the case of the reference where they are not in the owner's view, where there is no one to attend to thse belongings. Many people, including myself, have had our possesions taken from these areas. In the case of the science library that area for coats and bags is inadaquate and one's coat is often knocked off and trampled upon...
...I trust that my complaints and suggestions will not go unheeded,
yours sincerely,
Anne O' Neill (M.A, Student)
April 1983
This Anne O'Neill person sure knows how to complain!
Jimmy Lynch (1st year student)
Here is a preview of some of a new version of my Found Bookmark Project which I am working on for an exhibition called Bookish at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery in Cork. I searched the library at the University and collected a lot of material that had been left behind between the pages of books. I found some interesting stuff including a letter dated 1979 with a note added by another library user in 1983. The letter is a complaint about vandalism of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy and library security in general.
Here are some scans of objects:
A Laser cut book by Olafur Eliasson commissioned by MOMA.
Each page represents a 2cm cross section of Eliasson's actual house.
I'm currently reading Will Self's first novel My Idea of Fun
Here is an interesting interview of interview of Amis by Self. In the article Will Self makes a couple of references to the book he is writing at the time which is My Idea of Fun
