Saturday 23 December 2006

Transferability

Being a percussionist is a contemplation of transferability of skills. Knowledge exchange occurs within one's own body. Practicing konnakol I deal with all the same issues I might deal with when using any external instrument but somehow, because the materials are simplified and pared down until only the tongue and breath is left, it seems close to the heart of musical structure. From here it is a simple(r) process to coordinate the strengths, sensitivities and contortions involved in particular instruments.

For a percussionist concentration on the simplest of structures leads to an infinite variety of sound making technologies and tendency towards cultural pluralism. But even for a percussionist it always seems to come back ultimately to the experience of the embodied voice. This is the root. All other technologies are emulations and amplifications of aspects of this source.

It seems more useful to me to work at the level of the soil than the leaf. I feel more soul in a berimbau than in a santoor, in a harpsichord than a pianoforte, in a midi controller than a sequencer window. Increasing technological sophistication demands more effort to collaborate with the conceptions and designs of many others, to reconnect the present means with the core purpose.

Is there a music that resides in an ideal, Platonic realm that is variously, imperfectly realized through different technologies? is this a description of the relationship between thought and language? What happens when the link between word and heart is weak or severed?

Once a movement or architecture is grasped in the heart (by heart?) it can find expression by whatever channel is most appropriate and available. It is important to get close to the insight, the experience, the breath, to the stuff of the body. This is to deal with the basis of the mind - it's primitive animality in the slime of the amygdala, it's neocortical strategies and aspirations.

This fact is more or less explicitly stated in many musical traditions. In Carnatic percussion it is clear that the human voice is central, followed by the drum, the mridangam. From these all the other instruments flow, each with its own character and sophisticated technical demands - ghatam, khanjira, moorsing, tavil, etc.

And memorization is important. Something learned by heart becomes embedded and embodied. It finds myriad expressions in an infinity of changing contexts. The same information written down leaves the body empty, makes it into simply a mechanical playback device.

The technology of the piano, or the computer is a form of writing, like a painting-by-numbers kit. The player need not perceive any truth, before expressing it.

Thursday 21 December 2006

Dopey & Grumpy


A couple of people expressed an interest in the Tagore-Einstein conversation I referred to in my talk at HP on Monday. So here are a few links:

http://www.mukto-mona.com/Articles/einstein_tagore.htm
http://www.schoolofwisdom.com/tagore-einstein.html

Part of the conversation is reprinted in Einstein Lived Here, by Professor Abraham Pais (Oxford University Press, 1994) in Chapter 9, "The Indian Connection: Tagore and Gandhi."

and a fuller version can also be found in the Kenyon Review of Spring 2001

Neuronal Plasticity


What actually happens when I learn?
Repetition is like the burning in of a brand.
The hand that slaps taalam on my knee rubs away some fibres of cloth at each matra.
By repetition and concentration I immerse myself in a bath of information. I open my pores to absorb as much as possible into my mind. What is it that absorbs? And what is absorbed?
The textures of skin and muscle and bone change like weeds in a mountain stream. Their stiffness is smoothed and guided by the strength of the flow.
The conscious effort to remember a squence of sounds marshalls references and allusions. I use tricks and references to systematise and discern patterns in what at first seems random. Part of me wants to resist the extraneous thoughts in order to be true to the given information. But perhaps those extraneous thoughts help to tether it in a web. Otherwise it disappears into meaningless free space. Do I invent the pattern or discover it? Either way gradually I forget the external resonances, correspondences and connections and eventually the new pattern just becomes part of me. It gets tied into my fabric.

For instance yesterday I was struggling to remember the order 'Ta Di Thom Nam' forwards and backwards at different speeds. Which is aspirated and which is not? Nam reminds me of the bengali word for the english 'name'. Thom sounds almost exactly like an english boy's name. But is it exactly the same sound? Or is the 'm' more nasal. And there are so many ways to think about the hand choreography. Remember to start from the little finger. But that's actually the second clap so in fact it's as though the index finger is the main beat. Is it the fingers that beat or the palm which beats while the correct finger is raised away from striking?

Like this, thoughts crowd in while I try to repeat the sequence without mistakes. Some more related, others seemingly completely random. Each mistake creates a flurry and a twinge of despair. Anger and upset on top of this despair become layers on a wart obstructing the stream and becoming ever more annoying until I feel like giving up. But if I observe it calmly without giving it importance, soon it disappears. The patience to start again is the key thing. And then each repetion is like water on a stone. And the flow gathers its own joyous momentum. Eventually I am grooved. Today's lesson already made yesterday's feel like subconscious, automatic action.

Practicing 'kitakitatake' in the auto after my lesson is a series of revelations. There's a rolling movement like a breaking wave from the back of the tongue to the front, along the palate. How close the 't' is to an 'r'. I wonder fleetingly about the huge variety of 't', 'r' and 'd' sounds in South Indian languages. I can choose how hard to press the toungue against the palate. This is partly determined by the speed of the movement and it's fluidity. Where does the fluidity come? Partly from analysing the movement very slowly in order to clarify its constituents, partly from a synthesis, attending to it as a whole.

The tongue is a fluid muscle, hardening and softening in its different parts, curling, flicking, blocking and tapping with amazing flexibility. And then, in the noisiest bits of traffic when I was not worried about being overheard I put my voice into it and was amazed again by the weight of the breath that gives the tounge heft and weight, gives it a current to swim in. The konnakol patterns gradually reveal themselves as intricate choreographies of weight and sound.

Where does this realization reside? Is it in the tongue, whose nerves must be painstakingly reconfigured? In the breath which drives everything? In the heart which directs.

Patterns of muscle fibre must be changing somewhere in my body, the flesh coming under the control of conscious design. The combing out of knots in streams of electricity. The knotting of neural nets.

After the lesson today I walked from 15th to 18th cross to the Kottakkal Arya Vaidya Sala. The doctor told me he suspected arthritis in my knee. That was a shock. My mum's becoming virtually immobilised by it. It's quite scary. I feel angry that my body will not do the things it used to find easy. I've haven't sat easily cross-legged for months now, ever since feeling that click in my knee. Arthritis can be triggered by a sudden trauma apparently, as well as being gradually degenerative.

What is the use of learning? I wonder which body I am trying to pack with knowledge. This decaying one? Or is there something alse which also grows, apart from this body? Beyond this tongue and fingers which will soon become cold and stiff, is there another material to carefully tune and compose?

Wednesday 20 December 2006

Konnakol

I've decided to look a little more closely at konnakol, the South Indian spoken rhythm performance. It pulls together many of the themes running through this Diffraction placement.

Firstly it is an examination of a pedagogic methodology, not from the outside but as an active participant. I'm interested in what learning is. One aim is to very consciously observe the experience of my own learning. I will also be assessing the similarities and differences between this method of learning and other models, ancient and modern. Some references, guiding stars, and conceptual yardsticks will be Ivan Illich, The guru-sisya parampara, S.N. Goenka, and the (soon to be unveiled) School of Everything.

Konnakol is a language with a strictly defined grammer and syntax, and yet it is completely abstract. In fact it is an abstraction based on the sound of the drums, which themselves are an abstract of the complete musical experience, which is one aspect of the whole drama.

Konnakol is without utility. And it does not mean anything. It is a sophisticated way of speaking without referring to anything. It's beaty is almost purely mathematical. I wonder if in this respect it is like the flow of logic inside a computer?

Konnakol neatly problematises perhaps the central theme of my time here. That is, the place of technology in an emergent economy. What is the relationship of music and technology? What is the relation of technology and music to the body? What answers can be found which are indigenous, time-tested, and perhaps unacknowledged before modern, alien methods are imported? These seem to be very important questions, in India generally and at HP Labs specifically.

In Anlo-Ewe cultural understanding, a drum is a super projection of the human voice. In this view, the role and power of the drum in play embodies the Sub-Saharan concept of combining natural forces of the universe in forming the supernaturals. In the composition of this conscious experience, human force is combined with other natural forces - skin of animal, hollowed solid tree-trunk, etc. - as a medium for arousing the attention and reaction of mankind. In a variety of tonal properties - pitch, timbre, intensity, and intricate rhythms - the drum and the drummer, in mutual cooperation, create patterns of consciousness that give a moment of inspiration to those they touch.

http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/~ladzekpo/Drums.html

Konnakol is also not a million miles from things I know a little about already. Just as coming to Bangalore from England is a little like coming home - as I said in my first entry in this journal - so coming to konnokal is a liitle like delving further into the roots of a language I'm slightly familiar with. Th process is a movement from the margins to the centre. I began to study North Indian drumming almost twenty years ago as part of an attempt to move closer to a centre. I'd started playing drums by accident (they fell out of the sky and landed on me while I was asleep in bed, but that's another story). Soon I found I was playing with a samba band in Manchester and realizing that to take my playing any further would require a deeper engagement with Brazilian culture. I chose to delve into my own heart rather than someone else's and began tabla lessons.

Now, in South India, it seems to make sense to learn something about Carnatic music and I'm finding that it appears to subtend the North Indian tradition. I feel like I'm uncovering strata in an arcaeological dig. Carnatic percussion grows out of a very ancient Dravidian culture. It's elements of this tradition which have developed in the North and absorbed a lot of mughal influence and the two traditions have mutated independently over hundreds of years. It's useful and fascinating to find the archetypal core.

One thing I've always wondered at is the strongly monophonic tradition of tabla drumming. There are two drums but they are conceived as having one voice and it has a highly sophisticated solo repertoire. Or, as an accompanist, the tabla player has typically had a strictly metronomic role. Even when drummers play together they trade figures or play in unison. I've never seen the kind of polyphonic, polyrhythmic percussion one finds in say Japanese, Arabic or African classical forms. It's a compositional dream of mine to find a way of growing this kind of polyphony - inspired by sub-Saharan cross rhythm and Balinese Gamelan - in the rich soil of Indian percussion. It's taken twenty years of study so far, but now I think an important piece of the jigsaw has appeared. I can begin to see a glimmer of the development of the virtuosic, solo form out of the archetypal shamanic/folk drumming which seems to me to be the energizing core.

It has to do with ways of conceptualising and organizing the context, community, or network of voices. In short, the tabla functions in a strongly hierarchical context in which one or other partner is subservient to the other. Either the tabla keeps theka as a basis for the expressions of a melody instrument, or else the melody plays a continuous ostinato as a basis for the tabla player's rhythmic display. By contrast in the South Indian tradition the basic pulse and the metrical structure are kept not only audibly by other percussionists in an ensemble but also very visibly with hand gestures, which are often also made by almost every member of the audience. This means that the drums can be much freer to explore the time within a communaly held structure.

These two kinds of organizational system lead to quite different kinds of development.

Anyway today I learned the clap pattern for Adi Taalam:

Eight beats, consisting of:
Clap, little finger, ring, middle, Clap, back of hand, clap, back of hand

And the syllables
Ta Di Thom Nam Nam Thom Di Ta

to be spoken in single, double and quadruple time against the hand pattern.

It was my first lesson wiy Mr. T.A. S. Mani who runs the Karnataka College of Production.

I first came across the KCP about fifteen years ago in a second hand record store in Oxford Road, Manchester. I bought a record on spec, knowing nothing about the band. It was Sankirna by the amazing Turkish drummer Okay Temiz with his band Oriental Wind and the Karnataka College of Percussion. I'd never heard anything like it before and in fact haven't heard it for a long time since because it's on vinyl and it's been a very long time since I've had a servicable record player. That record is one of the reasons I've been wanting to get one.

Anyway the KCP proved quite a job to track down. I found an address omewhere on the internet and then, a few days ago, after an ayurvedic massage in Malleshwaram went for a wander to see if I could track down the street. It took me a morning but eventually I found the place. I introduced myself to Mr. Mani who was very warm and friendly. I also met his wife Ramamani, a wonderfully soulful singer, and a couple of students. A girl from Dublin is living in the room upstairs for a few months and has recently started singing lessons. While I was there Christian arrived, a German musician who has been studying mridangam for the last ten years. Clearly Mr Mani has a lot of foreign students and his teaching style will be correspondingly slanted. We discussed what I wanted to learn and how long I had. Today we started on Konnakol. I'll let you know how I progress...

Tuesday 19 December 2006

Co-evolution


Where is the sensor in a lift door that warns it of an obstruction?
Just now, someone ran up to the lift at the last moment and waved his hand between the doors to stop them closing. His gesture was decisive and yet slightly unsure. Would it work? It was a communication - not between man and machine, but between one man and lots of others, since the lift was not made by a lone inventor, but by many people who decided together what kind of gesture should stop the doors from closing. And in so doing privileged and reinforced a certain kind of gesture amongst the kind of people who travel in this kind of lift.

So this sensor, is it an infra-red beam? Where is it in the doors? Top? Middle? Bottom? Are there many? What if they miss a finger or belt? I guess there's a whole industry to work all this out and implement it. How much does it cost?. What would it cost to walk?

The human body and 'objects-to-climb' evolved together. One did not design the other. All natural systems are co-responsive. One thing fits into the gaps of the other. Even wilful manipulations conform to pre-existing laws. Can this will stray too far? Can it become over-zealous in it's designs? What about an evolutionary design? Perhaps this is what Siddharth at Srishti means by emergent design. I should talk to him. What does this do to the arguments of Richard Dawkins and the Bible belt bashers about Intelligent Design and the existence of God?

Not only action but perception itself must also be entwined and co-dependant. This point is made most persuasively in David Abram's landmark article, David Abram, "The Perceptual Implications of Gaia" first published in 1985 in The Ecologist, 15, no. 3.

Sunday 17 December 2006

Stone cutters

Three stone cutters were asked about their jobs.

The first said he was paid to cut stones.

The second replied that he used special techniques
to shape stones in an exceptional way,
and proceeded to demonstrate his skills.

The third stone cutter just smiled and said,
"I build cathedrals."


I wonder which of these was the artist, and which was the designer?

Art or Design?




I felt something clarifying during Ashoke Chatterjee's speech at Srishti's Graduation Ceremony last night.
I've always had an ambivalent, not to say cynical, attitude to 'design', as opposed to 'art'. To my mind design has been about branding, commodification, market forces, the creation of desire, the commodification of pleasure. Art has been about a free, agenda-less space of exploration and and non-alignment. That's why I've thought of Business and Art as being a binary opposition. I've wanted to challenge the orthodoxies of contemporary capitalism, expose the ideologies that masquerade as givens.

India teaches so many lessons in so many, often unexpected, dimensions. I knew I was coming here to learn something and to grow. I also I wanted to be sharply critical of globalization, middle class spread, and 'India Inc.' Now I'm beginning to see that the ideologies that need to be dropped are my own. It's my own ignorance that needs addressing, not that of others. I new nothing about the Eames Report, commissioned by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1958. And I was completely ignorant of the meaning of design in India, at least as institutionalised in the National Institute of Design, confusing it with my garbled disgruntlement at the advertising and marketing saturation of the urban west. Ashoke Chatterjee made design sound like revolutionary work.

Here, in the world's largest democracy, waste and want are in sharp relief. Whatever issues Europe is grappling with - multiculturalism, terrorism, secession, urban/rural divide, food production, ecology, intellectual property, education, healthcare - they all seem writ larger and more urgent here in India. Would I call myself an artist or a designer if I took Agenda 21 as a manifesto. http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/documents/agenda21/english/agenda21toc.htm
And who would care anyway?

I've grown up as an immigrant in the West and have always felt to some extent uncomfortable there. A little brown boy dressed up against the cold in a smart, ill-fitting suit. The steady sun does what the violent wind cannot, and now I'm starting to feel my real body again. I'm an Indian and proud of it. That means embracing my colonial history and the wild diversity of this place. There are so many things that I disagree with, that I'm horrified by, that I'm dismayed by. But nevertheless somehow there seems to be a deep commitment to truth here. I feel a responsibility to do whatever I can to express that truth in the face of the bigotry and narrow-mindedness that is also rife. I need to engage in the debate. This debate is more live here than I've ever experienced it in the insulated west.

There, I took refuge in my role as an artist against the overwhelming materialism, complacency and individualism of popular culture. Art was a firewall against the deluge of spam in my mental space. Here that role seems flaccid, irrelevant, and even decadent. The free space of enquiry is just as precious here, surrounded as it is by poverty and distress but it is not self-sufficient. it demands commerce with it's environment. In the third world ethical engagement is unavoidable. And the transcendental quality that artistic work affords is here available everywhere in living spiritual practices. They need neither apology, disguise, or material justification. So what's the point of being an artist?

And what about design? During Ashoke Chatterjee's lucid discourse it became clear that Design might simply be what I'd always thought Art might hope to be - engaged, ethically grounded, socially relevant, responsible, practical, fun. Design might be concerned with the creation of deep beauty, not the self indulgence, frippery and ornamentation that I've become resigned to in the art scene of the west.

That's not to say that there isn't a tradition of 'community art', 'social realism', or 'socially engaged practice' in the the UK. I've had my brushes with those. In fact just before coming to India I was fortunate enough to have dinner with Jeremy Deller, one of those who are most intelligently weaving economics and social dynamics into the art market. And I've also been closely involved in setting up the new MA course in Arts & Ecology at (the now seemingly doomed) Dartington College of Arts http://marcus-brown.blog.co.uk/2006/12/08/a_decision_made~1415183/. But somehow, notwithstanding miner's strikes, inner city depravation, social stratification, Jamie Oliver, and freak tornados in Kensal Green, the canvas just seems so much tinier than it is here in Asia. And perhaps, after all, I feel a blood bond. The biggest issue of the last hundred years - perhaps overshadowing even the Holocaust - is the still hardly acknowledged reality of British Imperialism.

Here's Poonam Bir Kasturi, one of the Srishti faculty I keep hearing of but with whom I've yet to have a conversation.
http://www.playnspeak.com/The_India_Report_Revisited.PDF

Here's Niti Bhan on the relevance for designers of the recent Stern Report on the Economics of Climate Change
http://www.nitibhan.com/perspective/2006/12/my_final_talk_t.html

Here's Ashoke Chatterjee:
http://www.playnspeak.com/DESIGN_FOR_DEVELOPMENT.PDF

And here are some excerpts from the Eames Report itself which Ashoke Chaterjee referred to. The full report, which led to the foundation of the National Institute of Design, is here http://www.nid.edu/aboutus_eamesreport.htm

'The change India is undergoing is a change in kind not a change of degree. The medium that is producing this change is communication; not some influence of the West on the East. The phenomenon of communication is something that affects a world not a country.

The advanced complexities of communication were perhaps felt first in Europe, then West to America which was a fertile traditionless field. They then moved East and West gathering momentum and striking India with terrific impact – an impact that was made more violent because of India's own complex of isolation, barriers of language, deep-rooted tradition.

The decisions that are made in a tradition-oriented society are apt to be unconscious decisions – in that each situation or action automatically calls for a specified reaction. Behaviour patterns are pre-programmed, pre-set. It is in this climate that handicrafts flourish – changes take place by degrees – there are moments of violence but the security is in the status quo. The nature of a communication-oriented society is different by kind – not by degree.

All decisions must be conscious decisions evaluating changing factors. In order to even approach the quality and values of a traditional society, a conscious effort must be made to relate every factor that might possibly have an effect.

Security here lies in change and conscious selection and correction in relation to evolving needs. India stands to face the change with three great advantages :

First: She has a tradition and a philosophy familiar with the meaning of creative destruction.

Second: She need not make all the mistakes others have made in the transition.

Third: Her immediate problems are well defined : FOOD, SHELTER, DISTRIBUTION, POPULATION.

This last stated advantage is a great one. Such ever-present statements of need should block or counteract any self-conscious urge to be original. They should put consciousness of quality – selection of first things first – (investigation into what are the first things) on the basis of survival not caprice.'

The report goes on to extol the qualities of the lota, qualities which seem to me to add up to beauty.



Later on is this passage:

'Buckminster Fuller, a man of great perspective, gave this problem to a group of students – Design a package of services and effects which will be the most essential to salvage from a city about to be destroyed – the program was of course limited – but it was not an exercise in civil defence. It was a careful study of relative values – what do you take with you when the house burns down ?'

Here in India, and in the context of this placement at Hewlett-Packard, I'm consciously confronting myself with the question 'what am a professing to do?'. Everything about this country only amplifies this question. What is my true profession? Am I part of a problem or of a solution? I wonder what kind of art I should hang on the walls of my burning house...

Wednesday 13 December 2006

Modelling Complexity

Have been learning about Schilling's theorem and population dynamics today.
Here's some impenetrable (to me) notation which I like the look of.
http://www.rose-hulman.edu/mathjournal/archives/2006/vol7-n2/paper1/v7n2-1pd.pdf

It's in relation to cellular automata.
Thinking about networks and communities, diversity, similarity and collaboration.

Avatars and Singularities

Here's something suggested by Shekhar as a very useful resource in thinking about global consciousness. http://www.avatarepc.com/index.html
The essence of it, from what I understood of our conversation this morning, seems to be about really 'feeling'. I hadn't heard of Harry Palmer before. I shall go and mug up. On the other hand Shekhar hadn't heard of Ray Kurzweil who's idea of the singularity seems very relevant to the thinking happening here at HP. http://sss.stanford.edu/
Shekhar thought I should just talk about the notion of the singularity in my talk on Monday, it's so relevant to HP Labs ethos. I'm not sure I have the balls to teach a bunch of mathematicians and engineers about exponential curves though...
Here's a bit of classic Ray I think is worth repeating:

"An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense 'intuitive linear' view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the twenty first century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The 'returns,' such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity — technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light."

"To describe these changes further, within a quarter century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses, “experience beaming,” and vastly enhanced human intelligence. The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the technological evolutionary process it spawned. But all of this is just the precursor to the Singularity. Nonbiological intelligence will have access to its own design and will be able to improve itself in an increasingly rapid redesign cycle. We’ll get to a point where technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it. That will mark the Singularity."

Tuesday 12 December 2006

Success and Failure

One of the most significant ideas I've heard in the last few weeks came from a conversation with Rama who sits in the next cubicle to me. I'd watched a demo of the printcast technology which HP has now licensed out and which is changing the way local government happens in this hugest of democracies. I was asking her about the process of identifying new projects to work on in the field of education.

I have no idea how one comes up with new ideas and asked whether she started by looking for the failures in current practice. On the contrary, Rama said she preferred to find what was really working and think of ways to scale it up. This has stayed with me and continued to be a useful conceptual tool. It's a brilliant encapsulation of the creative method. Suddenly I can see the point of technology. It's the means by which we actively participate in our evolution.

Beginner's Mind

This morning the toughened, bidi smoking, sun-blackened rickshaw driver cracked into a beaming grin and starting waving inanely. I thought he was a dangerous nutcase until I peered out and saw the busload of chattering and gesticulating schoolkids fizzing in their schoolbus next to us at the traffic lights.

Everyone here seems to love children. People are willing to immediately drop the persona of public reserve in order to relate to a child. On the tube in London, or on the Clapham omnibus I used to notice an initial avoidance and uncomfortable embarassment before people would respond to my son's insistent attention seeking. Here no one pays any attention to me or Barley but goes straight for Oshin. There's none of that politeness and deference to parents. Here children belong to everyone.

Oshin's always been a particularly cute kid but he gets a lot more attention here than he ever did in Europe. Wherever we go people are winking at him, pinching his cheeks, giving him things, dancing with him and all but pulling him off us. And children are much more welcome in all sorts of contexts here than in the west. From rock concerts to dinner parties, cinemas to building sites, kids are just around as part of the fabric of society rather than tucked up in bed or locked in nurseries.

This is the country, after all, in which children are worshipped. Or, to be more precise, god is worshipped as a child. At this time of year in the west we remember the infant Jesus, but the mischievous Krishna, on the contrary, seems to be up to his tricks all the time.

And there's a corollary devotion to education. A four-year-old playmate of Oshin's who had come to visit us, had to pack up his toys and go home at 6pm to do his writing homework. And not just any old writing, but cursive script, his mother told us.

There are a number of reasons I'm so interested in language at the moment - HP's focus on it, a couple of recent publishing projects, the linguistic diversity of India, living in a foreign country, my cross-cultural marriage. But a really important inspiration is watching my son as he discovers language.

So this morning it occurred to me that it would be interesting to approach this whole art-making thing from the perspective of a child. I remember quite vividly learning to draw the Bengali alphabet It was drawing then, rather than writing. Over the last couple of days since looking at the GKB <>, I've been thinking of the Tamil script. I wanted to treat it in the way I used the crop circle patterns for my Portsmouth Cathedral book for Art and Sacred Places <>. Layering and superimposing the letters on one another. One of the original ideas for the 'Basket of Fish' was to make some kind of animation in which sharp words and letters would coalesce and then blend again into an ocean of noise. Perhaps that might work with Tamil letters, particularly given their rotundity.

This kind of technique might also make a lovely children's book, revelling in the sumptuous gestures of the script. There could also be a sound associated with each letter. And there could be an interactive element whereby consonants could be paired with their vowel modifier signs. Numbers could be used to specify note lengths. And perhaps pitch could be manipulated in some way too. Could a digital tuner be used to read the note input via a microphone and then generate an appropriate audio sample?

Eventually, with a text to speech module, this could develop into a songwriting machine, or a generator of Bob Cobbingesque poetry <>.

It might even be (oh horror!) educational. But of course the first requirement is fun. I'm not sure it's possible to learn anything if it isn't fun. So this could be a kind of hybrid etch-a-sketch<>, Stylophone<>, Roland TR808<>, HAL<>, tamagotchi<>.

The tamagotchi bit would be if it could talk back. Like the entity Yashas installed at Srishti for the interim semester show. Now THAT provoked a lot of thoughts. What kind of conversation can one have with a machine? Of course this is a question at least as old as the Turing Test. But what kind of answer do we get if we think of the conversation as being a musical one as much as linguistic. Could one collaborate with a machine? Jam together? A generative compositional tool , like Eno's 'koan'<>, that responds to subtle cues - say Heart Rate Variability<>?

In light of Shekhar's thinking about the human internet - if we could reliably converse with a machine might we be in a better position to share our strengths, rather than competing with one another. If as Ray Kurzweil opines, we're heading for the singularity whether we like it or not, why not make it a convivial merger? Surely robots can read Illich<>?

Performance Notation

Paper sensitive to pressure and movement begins to look like cloth.
And a moving scroll begins to look like a roll of fabric.

Could designs be drawn on this that would sound like music?
Or could pre-printed fabrics be used as scores?
Or could a musical performance be recorded as a visual trace?

Can paper reify the field in which the theremin works?

The pen simply records the intentions of the finger.
Which itself is simply the point of the body.
Which is simply the manifestation of the mind.

Writing is remembering the one-pointed concentration of consciousness.

Drawing is direct communication, through a wormhole, in an instant.

Music is drawing in time.

Evolution

Talking with Shekhar a question arose about evolutionary models of growth or progress. Survival of the fittest or collaboration/symbiosis? I remember reading about evolutionary models of neurological organization somewhere. Where? Also was it Arnab Chatterjee (now at Shell) with whom I had a conversation about evolutionary chemistry? Ah no. I've just remembered it was with a fellow sitter on a long car journey home from a vipassana course. He described a Darwinian method of doing organic chemistry in order to isolate enzymes for use in bio-fuels. Can't remember the details now, or even the guy's name. This is when I need the internet to be on the tip of my tongue with perfect memory and instantaneous retrieval.

On networks, resonance, living internet:
Conference at Indian Institute for Science - Computational Insights into Biological Systems http://www.serc.iisc.ernet.in/~cibs06/
One of the participants, Dr Upinder Bhalla's might be interesting brain to pick:
http://www.ncbs.res.in/upinder/research.html

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Another idea arising out of talking with Shekhar
Talk Show/Voice/Con-versation/mantra
a work for the anechoic chamber at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Connected with CAT, this iteration could involve speaking continuously for ten days.
What is the function of mantra?
With whom does one collaborate?
Singing to the devas.

Wonder if it would have any connection with a collaborative piece I'm developing with fellow artist/mediatator Raksha Patel for the Hayward Gallery? It's called 'Peace'. What is that moment like when the voice in your head finally falls silent?
What would the internet be like with no content?

Sunday 10 December 2006

Pure Intention

Watching Sivamani at the Bangalore Hubba in Palace Grounds I realized that music - perhaps particularly percussion - displays clarity of thought. His phrases are so crisp and forthright. Particularly as contrasted with some of the other performances which were flabby and unconvinced, and therefore unconvincing. Music in general seems to be the abstraction of pure intention. Percussion seems to abstract this even further, fractionating out the sentimentality of melody.

Is music the engine under the bonnet of language?

Brave New World

I just stumbled upon something I wrote years ago. Before I was as internet and communications savvy as I am now. Reminds me of a hypertext poetry project I was so excited by at that time. Now it's part of my mundane experience.

Mark up

One day we will have the confidence
to look at the world
and see it through each other’s eyes.
Behind every object will be chanting ghosts
in the echoing caves of libraries.
Behind every reflection
the shadows thrown by countless suns.
Offset colours will drift
in parallax around each thing
and at a nudge and a swing
we will move from opinion to opinion.
We will be planets orbiting like clouds,
disappearing in the instant of perception.
A donkey’s tail twitching
beneath the prick of the moment’s attention.
One day we will be called
to dance with distant friends,
leaping in the faith
that grounds will condense
at every footfall.
There will be no loss in loneliness
when your face is in every touch.
One day from this dry land
we will crawl into another sea
And our bodies will be transparent
to wave after wave.

Friday 8 December 2006

barcode music and new writing

One of the technologies they're exploring here is 2D bar graphs printed along the bottom of a page of text (like US tax forms and Driver's Licenses, and Japanese Visas)
Might it be possible to store a small sound file which could be printed along with a graphic score or conventional notation? I've often been trying to learn a piece of music by reading it, and thought it would be useful to be able to hear how it should sound too. This would be especially useful for Indian music which is famously impossible to notate.

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Here's an interesting new way of writing a book. It's intended to be more of a conversation than a monologue. In Chapter 7 he really gets into his stride. Talks about the nature of writing itself.

Writing and Talking

Am focussing in gradually on something interesting. It's emerging as a core concern out of all sorts of seemingly disparate elements. Basically it's something to do with writing and talking.

Got skype set up last night and managed to link up with some friends involved in some really interesting social sculpture - although I'm pretty sure thay wouldn't call it that. It's in an early design phase now so not in the public domain but I think it will be hard to miss once it is. Charles Leadbeater's thinking is key. And the idea of the network is central to it, which has already been in my thoughts because of the work with dialogue and conversation I've been doing. But talking with one of the group in particular highlighted the connection with language and writing that seems important. Check out sebastian mary's blog here http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/

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Been tooling around the HP Labs intranet looking at various white papers, research seminars, and presentations. Eg, one on 'Machine Readability and Security of Paper Documents'. It's about the connections and transpositions between the computer screen and the piece of paper.

Made me think of this morning's shenanigans as I finally managed to open a bank account. At last I had all the documents I needed. My PIO card, a photograph, and a piece of paper from Airtel with my Indian address on it. Then I needed to go across the road to get photocopies. (They didn't have a photocopier in the bank.) And it turned out that their printer was broken so they couldn't issue me with a passbook. There was also a huge scrum as other people fought for balance enquiries and statements from a single information point who couldn't print anything out. The queuing practice consisted of either a highly ordered numbered ticket system at the cashiers' windows, or else a sharp-elbowed free-for-all at the general enquiries counter. A poor beleaguered clerk did her best to field the chits, cheques and challans that were constantly shoved uner her nose. I stood over her in an encouraging manner to make sure she dealt with my form on one if its turns of the wheel of samsara around the bank, when it came back for another life to her desk. And it was lucky that I did because I was able to correct a data entry mistake as she went from handwritten form to computer database. This is exactly the kind of situation HP Labs is working to solve by trying to obviate the time consuming process of copying out a handwritten form into the computer.

I followed my documents around the whole building, from one official to another, trying to charm and cajole it over the jumps. It worked eventually - only took about three hours and I still have to go back on Monday for my passbook... Hope they manage to fix their printer over the weekend.

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Ok here's an example of a paragraph I'm struggling to understand as I try to absorb this culture. It's the kind of jargon that people here speak fluently, but which I am struggling to unpack.

'We are also developing tools for effective delivery of application and
infrastructure management services. Research in this area focuses on service and
service infrastructure, modeling techniques and languages, application
discovery, access control, ITSM and service oriented architectures (SOA).'

It's a question of referents perhaps. I need concrete examples of things I've experienced when I read a noun. Of course specific examples are precisely not the point of this way of talking. When a word like 'service' is used in this context it's precisely not a particular service which is meant but the widest possible range of services. The problem is that I'm not even sure what the range of services might be. Presumably it has very little to do with the kind of service waiters or car mechanics do. Although I suppose it might. I can just about understand it in the sense of 'goods and services', ie, anything a business does which is not an actual object. Say teaching perhaps, or a performance, to draw from my own experience. But then what is a 'service infrastructure'? And how does it relate to the kind of service which might manage an infrastructure? And what's the difference between an infrastructure and an architecture?

I'm oscillating between awe at the fluency and power of this language which seems to make sense to so many people, shame that I'm too dim to understand what they're talking about although it's obviously important, and anger that people can blithely spout such gobbledygook which might obscure or even wilfully conceal real ethical problems.

Is there a simple way of saying this? Or is this as simple as it can be to catch the complexity.

------------------------------

Anti Tech

I worry that I might be an anti-technologist. That I might be here under false pretences. I feel suspicious of my own fascination with gadgets. And slightly relieved that it's a fascination I seem to be growing out of as I enter my forties - in the same way as the raging fires of my adolescent sexuality are dimming and allowing my senses to adjust to subtler glows. It's not a loss but a gain. Or perhaps that's just the dessicated ascetic in me speaking out of some weirdly distorted view of the middle way.

A fact is that I used to go everywhere with a Palm V, writing notes in Graffiti. Now I'm happy to flick through notebooks of random jottings and sketches, in colours and spacings and moods of handwriting that reflect much more than the mere words can.

I wanted to write on the rickshaw this morning but it was too jerky. I've become thankful for the five-minute traffic lights, even if they mean sitting in the sunlit swirl of incense from the exhausts of a hundred vehicles. I've now filled up a notebook that was a departure from my usual moleskine. Its a wire-o bound book which has enough space inside the hoops of its spine to hold a biro. It's the perfect combination of pen and paper, constantly to hand. Now I'm starting on a new moleskine which means I'll have to carry a separate pen. This is always a problem. Loose pens mean the danger of ink. So now, in the search for the simplest solution I'm thinking of going back to a pencil. My old Palm V isn't even in the running. I coveted an iPod for months before I got one thinking it might be good solution for carrying notes. Somehow I've always come back round to the always accessible, rapidly scannable, universally applicable, infinitely responsive, maintenance free, rugged, cheap, pen and paper. Of course my phonebook is in my phone and I can live without my entire database until I can open up my laptop, so my notebook is just simple enough. Fifteen years ago I used to carry around a fat filofax.

I'm thinking of all this now in the context of simplicity and with a spirit of awe for the beautiful solutions to basic needs which have been developed in India over thousands of years. This is a place where an old way of doing things is not dropped just because something new and supposedly better comes along. People do not scrap fridges and cars and computers just because a new model is out. On the other hand this place has an amazing capacity to absorb new people, new cultures, new philosophies and new technologies and make them seem completely natural. Which layer of this country is the real India? The jungles, plains and mountains? the tribal? the Dravidian? the Aryan? the Mughal? the British? the American?

John Maeda talks about stuff being as simple as possible and as complex as it needs to be.

I need to get to the bottom of this to work out what I'm doing in a company committed to technological solutions to India's problems.

Thursday 7 December 2006

Here's Ellie Epp, the Canadian film maker and philosopher on writing a journal
http://www.sfu.ca/~elfreda/work%26days/work%26days.html
Chomping at the bit I've placed in my own mouth. I'm the rider and the horse here. So where shall we go? Feels like it's time to hoik the ideas out of the ether into a material form. Also time to really engage in conversation with others in the lab.
Yesterday's conference call with Warren, Kenton and Clare has stirred up some thoughts, clarified some things, and injected some energy. I haven't introduced them to you before - partly because I'm trying, as far as possible, to keep specific others out of this public display of my thoughts. But they are my main contacts/managers/advisors on this placement. Warren is from HP Labs, India, although he's currently in Beijing setting up a Lab there. Kenton is from HP Labs, Bristol and has run a number of these collaborative placements there. And Clare is the Project Manager based at Watershed Media Centre in Bristol.

Communication is emerging as the key issue. It became clear that I need to make a precise and transparent plan of action. (The TLA is not POA but SOW.) Chendana asked me for an SOW yesterday and I thought I was pretty quick on the uptake, though the fact that she should think I knew what on earth she was talking about is interesting. A month or two ago I felt an idiot when I had to ask in a meeting what a BPO was. http://www.sourcingmag.com/content/what_is_outsourcing.asp
TLA's seem to be more numerous in Bangalore than nano-particulate airborne pollutants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-letter_abbreviation
I'm thinking of making some alphabet soup. Or maybe alphabet jilipi would be nice.
Anyway here's a good description of an SOW. I'm realizing what a touching departure it is from standard business practice for me to write my own statement. My hosts/bosses(?) are prepared to be very open about what my purpose might be.
While feeling like I really must get on with my work at HP I've been running around all morning sorting out doctors and medicines for my wife who has not been well for the last few days. Meanwhile I've been getting frustrated with other people who seem not to do much except a brilliant impression of Harry Enfield's 'Ooh! You don't want to do that' character.

Started me off on a train of thought to do with how, in all sorts of harboured resentments and actual arguments, whether domestic or foreign, it's so difficult to see things from the other party's point of view. And yet everyone behaves as sensibly as they can. Even the liar and the thief and are simply acting in the best way they can under the circumstances as they see them. There is simply no point in trying to force my point of view since I will simply be fitted into the other's worldview in whatever distorted way, and then reacted to accordingly.

Much more constructive would be for me to just try to understand their viewpoint. And this exercise can become fascinating in itself. It's so difficult when I am being attacked of course, but then that's also when I have the most to gain by trying to understand. Someone who seems slothful, demanding and critical to me now may in fact feel that that they are at last having the well-earned rest they looked forward to, and worked so hard for.

How to convince someone to do something they don't want to? Do I actually have the best strategy? Perhaps I'm not seeing the whole picture. Or I may even be proved right in hindsight, but what good is that? Clearly the only person I can really control - and that far from satisfactorily - is myself. So then what is my relationship to others?

The keyword that struck me this morning in the auto-rickshaw ride to the office
was 'service'. Strangely I'd been teaching others about it but never quite got it myself. One of the interesting pivotal points in the Srishti Interim Semester workshop was the moment when, having coaxed the students to come up with an idea that was really heartfelt and personally meaningful, I asked them to give it away. A background idea to this process was the series of workshops I'd done fifteen years ago at Dartington with Chris Crickmay. They were collaborative sculptiral installations. A group of people working together by individually entering a space to change it in some way - adding, removing or rearranging objects - and then leaving it for the next person. Just last October I was invited by Alan Boldon to make a piece along the same lines for the Gallery at Dartington during the Desire Lines Conference. It was a dialogue between five artists, who took turns to make an intervention into the gallery space. In each case, the previous artist’s work was available as material to be removed, manipulated, destroyed or added to. It became unclear to the viewer who had the idea, whose work was whose - and did it really matter?


I kept emphasizing, for the Srishti students that art might be not simply a means of self-expression, but an offering in the spirit of service. That it might recognize it's context rather than impose itself.

Perhaps I should try to practice what I preach.

Suddenly my job here at HP Labs seems much clearer if I think of it in terms of service. How can I help people? Yesterday's conference call focussed me onto this question of the mutual benefit in a collaborative relationship. As long as I am comfortable and free how can I direct my energies into the project of understanding and furthering intersubjective goals. And how to do this without going completely soggy and abandoning any internal compass or critical perspective?

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Have just been doing some research into the history of Hewlett-Packard. http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/timeline/index.html
It's a good apple pie story of a couple of down home California boys who made good. Apropos of what I've just been saying in the last paragraph here's a slice of Dave Packard's home baked wisdom, typed up in 1958 in preparation for the company's second annual management convention. It's called 'eleven simple rules'. Here, in short, are the headings:

1. Think first of the other fellow.
2. Build up the other person’s sense
of importance.
3. Respect the other person’s
personality rights.
4. Give sincere appreciation.
5. Eliminate the negative.
6. Avoid openly trying to reform people.
7. Try to understand the other person.
8. Check first impressions.
9. Take care with the little details.
10. Develop genuine interest in people.
11. Keep it up.

Wednesday 6 December 2006

Have been looking at the Tamil alphabet today, in which the Gesture Keyboard has been developed.
The curliness of it is striking. Forests of mellifluous tendrils everywhere.
Tamil was originally written on palm leaves. As a result, the letters are made up mainly of curved strokes so as not to rip the leaves.

I'm wondering now not only about the gestures and dances recorded in a notation but also the attitudes. What do I write on and what do I obliterate even now?

Dialogue and Disruption

A significant factor in the appeal of Bohm's vision was the promise that Dialogue could increase and enrich corporate activity – in part through the exploration and questioning of ‘inherent, predetermined purposes and goals’ (Bohm et. al. 1991). There was a clear parallel here with Argyris and Schön’s work on double-loop learning, but interestingly one of his associates has subsequently suggested that their view was too optimistic: ‘dialogue is very subversive’ (Factor 1994).
No organization wants to be subverted. No organization exists to be dissolved. An organization is, by definition a conservative institution. If you didn't want to conserve something, why would you organize? Even if an organization runs into serious trouble - if, perhaps, its market or reason for existence vanishes - there remains a tremendous resistance to change. (And, by the way, our larger culture is also an organization.) I suggest that the most one can hope for is a change in the more superficial elements which would naturally occur as an organization co-opts … some of dialogue's ethic of inquiry. And maybe that is all that is required to accomplish its aims. But any deeper change, any change that might threaten the very meaning and therefore the existence of the organization or its power relations would tend to be rejected - perhaps subtly and tacitly - because such vulnerability would not only be threatening to those within the group, but almost certainly to those who perceive from without - perhaps from higher up the corporate ladder - what this subgrouping of their organization is getting up to. (Factor 1994)
The presentation of clear guidelines, the publication of actual dialogues, and Bohm’s social and spiritual concern struck a chord. It led to the his work being used by a number of key writers especially around organizational development e.g. Senge (1990), to the formation of groups to engage in ‘Bohmian dialogue’ (and a thriving web community), and a Dialogue Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His particular innovation was to link Dialogue into a view of ‘reality’ as involving ‘unbroken wholeness in flowing movement’.


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Connections…

Ashok Sukumaran was one of the people Gordon Knox spoke enthusiastically about at the Diffraction conference in Liverpool when I was initially researching this HP labs residency. http://www.diffraction.org.uk/
Ashok has been artist-in-residence at Sun Microsystems in the last few months.
http://research.sun.com/spotlight/2006/2006-0102-artist_in_residence.html

It also turns out that we’ve been tag teaching over the last few weeks. We’ve been running a module together although we haven’t actually met yet. I kicked off the Srishti interim semester with the workshop on ‘conversation’ partly with the intention of opening up a space in which Ashok would be able to work. His proposal was to use cellphone technology in some way. Just before I went to Delhi for a few days my students were in the early stages of a creative explosion. A week of sensitization, trust-building and prising opening of collaborative possibilities had seemed to fire them up. I wonder what they did with that energy in the subsequent week? I’m back from Delhi now and about to find out. Ashok is finishing up today, then I take over and there’ll be a final presentation on December 2nd.

I’ve also just this morning been invited to take part in an art/cartography project at InIVA in London which it seems Ashok might be a part of. Hopefully this afternoon we’ll actually get to connect in person…



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Asking "Why?" at Sun Microsystems Laboratories:
A Conversation with Director, Glenn Edens

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/edens_qa.html

Q
You are quoted as saying that you can run a research lab, but you can't manage one. What did you mean by that?

A
A research lab attracts a different personality than a pure product group. And pure academic research and big science attract an even different personality type. So, we're kind of in the middle. My joke about this -- and I get a lot of grief over it, but I still think it's a good metaphor -- is that product organizations are mostly staffed with engineers. And engineers are mostly nerds, who ask: "How are we going to get this done? How does this work? How can we make it better?" How, how, how.

A research lab tends to consist of hippies, and hippies just ask why. Why, why, why. Why do I have to do it this way? Why should I do that? Why do I need to fill out this form? Why do I have to -- anything. Everything is a question. There is nothing that happens here without an argument. But that's part of our robust culture, and it's the "why" versus the "how". The reason I get in trouble with that analogy is, of course, there are very good engineers in the labs, and there are very good hippies in the product groups.

When managing a set of independent people, you can't tell them what to do. There are only three areas that I directly affect: First, I have some control over the people we hire. Second, I can present questions we ask, bringing in customers, suggesting something to discuss in Sun's Executive Management Group. And third, I can decide what to fund. But that's about it. That's why I say that you can run Sun Labs, but you can't manage it.


-------------------------------------------


Spent a very interesting day wrapping up and drawing together the Srishti Interim Semester project. A revisitation of the energy of dialogue, with a very warm welcome back from the students.
An afternoon seminar on Kabir from Shabnam, with Tara Kini and – of all people – David Clarke, my old tutor at Dartington, now Head of Music at Newcastle University. We had some deep chats about Music and Consciousness, which might lead to me contributing something to a publication of his.
An afternoon with pirate market radio station ‘Yellabella’
Then wandering the streets between power cuts to documenting the lanterns lit for neighbourliness.
The wrap party…

And the night before was in Hypnos having a very well lubricated meeting with Rebecca Gould and Kate Sparshatt. Ended up laying a monster egg with a Kolkata residency and a new piece of poetic invention curled up inside it.

That was after spending the day at Srishti introducing Bec and Kate to Geeta (sparky!), and also meeting with Ashok at last, and discovering the magical collaboration that has happened accidently on purpose between us. (that’s a lovely phrase isn’t it? ‘accidently-on-purpose’)
The foundation-laying and trust-building that was done early on in the process allowing the growth of some subtle, elegant and really moving blossoms. There were sweets from an anonymous donor, a festive atmosphere on the streets with space-filling music and conversation emanating from shops all around, and constant, quiet lanterns fluttering outside homes in dark residential streets.
----------------------------------------

A day spent re-grouping. Catching up at last with correspondence and picking up threads of thought. One of which I think everyone will soon hear lots about. A big problem with my pluralistic, diverse practice is how to use my energy strategically. How to combat fragmentation and distraction. I’m always looking for the most simple, elegant organizing principle. It’s nice when things converge. I’m glad to be yoking together my work at HP labs and my work at Srishti through this notion of conversation. Now I’m seeing another connection happening with a bunch of very interesting young social entrepreneurs from the UK. The world will be hearing a lot more from them soon I feel. In the meantime, here’s a link to one of the people they are strongly influenced by. Charles Leadbeater has some interesting ideas on social networks and collaborative thinking. I’d like to tease out the connections with interdisciplinarity and dialogue. http://www.wethinkthebook.net/book/home.aspx

I’m reminded of a dialogue between John Allen and Anthony Blake hosted my friend Chili Hawes at the October Gallery (last October as it happens).

Language is more intelligent than people and never came out of grunts. It is the magic that evolved humanity. Language's alien power shows us that more actions exist in heaven and earth than people and things. It is our worst enemy and our best friend, a parasite and a medicine, an enigma that baffles perhaps because it comes from elsewhere.

Could any of this be true?

This led me to an interesting article on The Politics of Conversation at http://www.duversity.org/library.htm.

Here’s a bit from towards the end of a video conversation on the Social Dreaming Matrix
between Gordon Lawrence and Anthony Blake http://www.duversity.org/Gordon.htm

Blake : Let’s get to organizations. How is it possible to ask a question, which is bound to be loaded with a point of view or ideology, out of which is to come some kind of information? How is this registered by people, the people you are involved in? Is it a matter of making them feel better? Is it a matter of them affecting the decisions they make? Is it a matter of how they communicate together and form a group? Can I get you to ask better questions?

Lawrence : I think one way of answering you is why does one do consultancy and it seems to me that what one is doing consultancy for is to be engaged in revelation. That’s a rather grand word but is opposed to salvation where you solve that problem for them. So if you hold onto the idea of revelation—finding and expanding and so on and so forth—the evidence is that everybody in an organization dreams and once you listen to these dreams, then you begin to see what is really going on. So dreams of violence will mirror actual violence in the workplace and so on and so…
When I worked in Shell, it always used to amuse me. I used to think there’s 3,000 people work here, suppose they dream five, that’s 15,000 dreams coming into this building every day and they just disappear.

Blake : They don’t quite disappear of course . . . I think it is very powerful to acknowledge the dream and give it voice in the social conscious state. This is something—a very radical step to make which is going to affect how people are together.

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Just been looking through Stanza’s journal at http://www.dshed.net/studio/residencies/clarkbursary/archive/stanza/proposal.php
In his very first entry he talks about the ‘painting-by-numbers’ that can happen on technology led projects. Presented with bits of kit by excited engineers eager to see multicoloured sparks an artist can feel like an entertainer. ‘Here you are! Show us what you can do with this!’ I felt a bit like that at the Srishti student party the other day when I was handed a guitar with insistent expectation and everyone sat around desperate to be impressed.
After all, what am I asking for when I consume the art of others? Am I asking to be transported? And what obligation does the artist have?

I’ve been holding myself away from the nitty-gritty of the technology for as long as possible, wanting to understand the dynamics of all technologies, rather than the specificities of one or two. But then I’m led into the thickets of a question about all art. What is the value off abstraction, of conceptualization, of the permanently floating query? Is art not an exploration through things which are accessible to others, and are thus communicative? Are technologies not just the media, without which there is no art? It’s precisely my commitment to interdisciplinarity which is leading me to this question. If the work hovers above and between various practices and definitions where, if ever, does it come to ground?

But also the need I’m beginning to feel more acutely, for solitary space. How can the communicative media of art be created except out of emptiness? It is emptiness which spins to form a thread. It is silence which gathers round to make a sound. It is space which presses into service a form.

I’m reminded of this Martin Heidegger thought I heard recently from Andrew Brewerton (Principal of Dartington College of Arts):

The jug is a thing as a vessel – it can hold something. To be sure, this container has to be made. But its being made by the potter in no way constitutes what is peculiar and proper to the jug insofar as it is [in its capacity as] a jug. The jug is not a vessel because it was made; rather, the jug had to be made because it is this holding vessel.

The making, it is true, lets the jug come into its own. But that which in the jug’s nature is its own is never brought about by its making. Now released from the making process, the self-supporting jug has to gather itself for the task of containing. In the process of its making, of course the jug must first show its outward appearance to the maker. But what shows itself here, the aspect (the eidos, the idea), characterises the jug solely in the respect in which the vessel stands over against the maker as something to be made….

…We become aware of the vessel’s holding nature when we fill the jug. The jug’s base and sides obviously take on the task of holding. But not so fast! When we fill the jug with wine, do we pour the wine into the sides and base? At most, we pour the wine between the sides and over the base. Sides and base are, to be sure, what is impermeable in the vessel. But what is impermeable is not yet what does the holding. When we fill the jug, the pouring that fills it flows into the empty jug. The emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as a holding vessel….

…but if the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter who forms sides and base on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No – he shapes the void. For it, in it, and out of it, he forms the clay into the form. From start to finish the potter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings it forth as the container in the shape of a containing vessel. The jug’s void determines all the handling in the process of making the vessel. The vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds.

Martin Heidegger, ‘Das Ding’ (1950), lecture given at the Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Kunste, June 6th, 1950, translated by Albert Hofstadter, ‘The Thing’, in Poetry, Language, Thought (Harper & Row, Harper Colophon Edition, New York, 1971), pp. 168-9


I suppose having spent the last month in pretty full-on activity and focusing so strongly on conversation I’m starting to feel the burden of so much information. Started reading John Maeda’s book on the ten laws of simplicity last night. The first Law is ‘Reduce’.

We are so surrounded by the stuff of life that it seems silly to pick out a medium to make art out of. Today I’ve been looking at the international banking system. I want to open an account here so I can pay my rent. My landlords would like to keep the payments shaded from the sun so the international transfer hasn’t quite worked as smoothly as it might. It all takes time. My options are opened a little because I bought a PIO card before leaving the UK. A ‘Person of Indian Origin’ card to slip alongside by British Passport. That in itself brought revelations. I don’t think I’d ever seen my Indian passport – didn’t know I even had one - but my father dug out my ID as a fourteen year old a few months ago and I presented it at the Indian High Commission in Aldwych. Now, through a contortion of nation states, I can own anything I want in India except a farm. Actually that’s what I’d really like.

Anyway ricocheting around offshore banking websites, taxation arrangements, wealth management advisors and Indian economic protocols propels me right back into a centre of my research – the flow of global capital. I am part of the phenomenon I am seeking to understand.

There’s a tension in me though. I’m aware that an expectant crowd is arrayed around me looking to be entertained by my artistic use of the new technologies being invented at HP labs. In my heart though the technology seems so trivial. The other day, for instance, in a discussion around Cathy Lane’s work on sound in the Srishti Interim Semester workshops, I heard about a new kind of paper being developed at HP on which you can draw sounds. I can immediately think of a thousand applications. Graphic scores for instance, and the connection between music and notation that I’ve discussed a bit with John Hartley. I’m also hatching a plan to do something at a Neolithic rock art site in Karnataka which has been rediscovered lately to have a strong acoustic dimension.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/3520384.stm
http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/Ant/078/Ant0780038.htm

This would be a nice place to do the recording of his ‘Pebble Music’ that Mat Martin has asked me to make. Here, by the way, is Jeff Cloke’s version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-yGHCNbn28
This new kind of paper might also be an interesting way of examining all sorts of relationships between, language, sound and mark-making which is a major constellation in my thinking at the moment. But somehow the actual stuff seems so much less exciting than the idea. Maybe I’m not really an artist. Or perhaps I’m really a conceptual artist rather than a craftsman. It used to be called poetry I guess.

Is it called programming now? http://www.interdisciplines.org/defispublicationweb/papers/4

Actually something’s just occurred to me about how my version of Pebble Music might be made. I want to get away from the performance of the score in the manner of a nineteenth century chamber musician. I’d also like to hint at the hugeness and slowness of the rock formations. I’ve been thinking of writing onto the rocks themselves and perhaps recording the sound of that but now I’m wondering if I could use tripod mounted long durations of video with ambient sound which is only structured in accordance with the score at the editing stage. It would become a sound portrait of the site.
I wonder how Shakespeare would work there?

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
Crooked elipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.


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Hello. Welcome to the first instalment of what will be a regular series over the next few months. This is where I’ll explore some of the ideas and experiences constellating around my placement at HP Labs in Bangalore.
I want to use this writing process not just as a way of documenting my activities, but also as an integral part of the work.

I have been invited here as an artist, and yet I have no specific brief. How I define my engagement with this context has been largely left for me determine. I’m not required to make anything. There is no specific project on which I am particularly required. I am not instrumental, but just an incidental person. http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/ArtistPlacementGroup/

So what am I being paid for? What is my work? What is my role as an artist? This is one of the questions I want to ask here. And I suspect it may turn out that this questioning is in fact the answer. I could approach this in the way a classical scientist designs an experiment. My null hypothesis, then, is ‘I am useless’.

Or perhaps context is all the work. My job is simply to interrogate the context.

Shall We Dance?
A conversation can be like a tango around an invisible point of balance, a push and pull around a tacit centre of gravity. In the circling and the dynamic unbalancing is the meaning of the dance. My work here, as I see it, is partly to take part in this conversation, to participate in the play between some key agencies. The first of the players in this particular dance was the Arts Council of England. I can’t remember now exactly where I came across the invitation but somehow I heard that placements were being offered in unusual international contexts. I heard that one of these was in Bangalore and I was immediately interested. Why?

First of all, it was the opportunity to live in India for some time. For many years the idea has been condensing that I need to find a way of really examining in depth my fascination with India. This interest is not arbitrary or accidental but clearly traceable in my personal history. I was born in Calcutta and brought to London as a young baby. I grew up as an immigrant always with one foot in each country. I spoke Bengali with my parents and in the extensive Bengali social network of London. I learned to use a knife and fork at school dinners and learned about England in the playground and through the cathode ray tube. I never really examined my Indian-ness. It was just a fact of my life, of which I was sometimes vaguely embarrassed, sometimes acutely ashamed. I tried to be British for half of my life. Then in my early twenties I realized that this British part of me was in denial. I felt I had an immense amount to learn about my heritage which was of vital importance if I was to make sense of certain strange lacunae in my own life and the cultural life around me.

Then I began to engage more consciously with Indian culture, but always, it seemed, at a slight remove. The idea gradually formed that in some way I needed to really deeply participate in this significant place. Over the years my interest in Indian arts and philosophies has been cultivated. I’ve studied as much as I can in Britain, attempting to integrate the various influences and elements that converge in me. I’ve gradually formulated a plan to spend an extended period of time living and studying in India, not just as a tourist or as a family member, but in some directed, professional way. When this opportunity to work with Hewlett-Packard in Bangalore presented itself it seemed like a perfect next step. I’d briefly visited Bangalore a year or so ago just out of curiosity. On my way to a three month residency with an arts organization in Burma in 2004 http://www.artstreammyanmar.net/cultural/nica/nica.htm, I’d decided to stop off in Bangalore for a couple of weeks.

As a Director of Arts Catalyst, the London based science-art agency, I’d been hearing a lot about a school of art, design and technology in Bangalore. Arts Catalyst had a burgeoning partnership with the school and, coincidentally, an old friend of mine was also now working there. I’d first met her about ten years ago when I was working as a composer with the dance company Attakalari, which was then based in Kerala. A group of dancers and musicians travelled from England to Kerala to make a new piece. She was a core member of the Indian production team. Now, years later, she was working at this art school in Bangalore.

And I had other friends who had also somehow ended up in this city. A San Franciscan Jain musical entrepreneur, who was experimenting with reversing the diaspora, offered to put me up in his new, furnitureless apartment. Another artist I hadn’t seen for eight years who was now living in Paris turned up in Bangalore. Clearly this was a place of connections, and not just silicon ones. And, through the connections I already had, I met a diverse, dynamic and cosmopolitan crowd in a city surfing on the frothing edge of a surging sub-continental wave.

It felt like India was accelerating into rapid and radical change. I’d been going to Calcutta fairly regularly for many years, and mainly into the warm, if slightly suffocating, embrace of an adoring family. From visit to visit I noticed changes, the disappearance of human rickshaws, the coming of electricity, telephones, televisions. But now - either because of my own circumstances or new perspective, or wider social factors - the pace was dizzying. The more I studied India the more interesting it became.

A view of India from the perspective of a major American multinational company was a fascinating prospect. Much of my work over the last ten years or so has focussed on ancient Indian knowledge. In piecing together my own fragmented history, and in trying to uncover universal principles, I have been drawn towards classical Indian music, Theravada Buddhism, ancient rural organization, dead poets. The view of the mystic east from Britain is obviously to be imbibed cautiously, highly inflected as it is with guilt, awe and hostility. But the India I could glean from my parents was a society frozen as it had been when they left it in the 1960’s and tinged now with the sepia of nostalgia. I was quite aware of the dangers in my practice in which Indian ideas and practices were often foregrounded. The chance to be confronted with the reality of modern India was a promising challenge.

So the fact that the Arts Council was offering to support a period of research work in India was immediately attractive. Arts funding in England is a curious beast. Patronage of individual artists is the new way forward but there are also specific drives around particular issues. The kind of concerns I’ve been talking about so far, to do with my homeland, emigration and cultural identity, would fit very well into another part of the funding system.

The decibel scheme http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/aboutus/project_detail.php?rid=0&sid=&browse=recent&id=79 which has been running for the last few years looks to foster the work of culturally diverse artists in England. And there is debate within meeting rooms, studios and conferences about the merits of ghettoization or positive action. Personally I’m happy to have a chimaeric practice. I’ll make the most of whatever opportunities are available without compromising my own deep principles. And, in the course of that, my own attention is inevitably drawn by public concerns and policies. It’s a dialogue with emergent properties. So this opportunity to live and work in India was exciting for many reasons other than the immediately apparent.

The reasons can be mapped on a spectrum which connects personal and political concerns. For example, having, at the age of 41, never had a proper job, I’m fascinated by the lives of people who work in offices, for big firms. What do they do all day? What’s it like to be part of a big team, in a big industry, for perhaps years on end? What’s it like to leave your work behind in the evenings and at weekends?

In my first few days here I’ve stepped into the intimate choreography of contracts and legal agreements. By temperament I incline towards a preference for Open Source and for a very light grip of ownership. But now I am confronted by the mindset of a multinational company in the business of inventing and patenting. I am becoming aware of the extent to which the field of Intellectual Property Rights is an increasingly important frontier.
So personal experiences merge into larger question about the power of institutions compared to individuals and about the movements of global capital. Very quickly they lead into ethical and ecological considerations.

And what is the best way to explore these questions from within the object of enquiry? I’m hoping this log of my developing thoughts may be one way.

Re: the creative thinker as simply witness in an industrial context, and the necessity of being ‘incidental’, I have been revisiting Stuart Brisley’s Peterlee Project http://www.metamute.org/en/The-Incidental-Collection-Stuart-Brisleys-Peterlee-Project/

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I came to HP labs in September to have initial meetings, look at contracts and sort out domestic arrangements. I then returned to England.

In the last month or so there I’ve just completed a collaborative project which has resulted in the publication of a book of dialogues called ‘8 Artists Try Not to Talk about Art’.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Eight-Artists-Trying-Talk-About/dp/0955406005/sr=11-1/qid=1166688250/ref=sr_11_1/202-4065536-3548660
http://www.scannerdot.com/sca_001.html
I’ve also been involved in kicking off an MA course in Art & Ecology at Dartington College of Arts http://www.dartington.ac.uk/downloads/ma/MAArtsAndEcology.pdf
Interdisciplinarity is a key feature of it. The course is a meeting place for disparate approaches. It is in the conversation that the work happens. A symposium running closely alongside the MA http://www.desirelines.org.uk/ and in close conversation with the RSA http://www.rsa.org.uk/ had a large element of Open Space Technology http://www.openspaceworld.org/


These experiences over the last few weeks intertwined with my experiences on my first visit to HP labs. I was struck by the interdisciplinarity of the lab. Here there were not only the hunched solderers and savants that I expected, but also social scientists, and a huge assortment of alert people with an expansive view of their practice.

In this context I need to narrow my focus without closing down too many options. I need to find a way of framing questions which allows me to listen rather than pre-empts the answers.

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There is an interest in language in the lab. I read somewhere about HP’s strategic thinking including the linguistic landscape of India. It’s multiplicity of languages and its sharply heterogenous literacy.
Also pen interfaces are interesting. And the Gestural Keyboard, a new way of interfacing with the computer.

To explore language and communication conversation seems a useful research tool.
Perhaps the clearest job description is given by Jean-François Lyotard as ‘incredulity toward grand narratives.’http://www.stephenbatchelor.org/online%20articles/buddhism%20postmodernity.htm
But although I see critical thinking as central to my practice, I prefer to enter the exchange with a collaborative attitude rather than a confrontational one. How far can hectoring and polemic get me? The first point of damage, after all, is myself. And then it’s my relationships. Better to foster critical thinking within friendship. So much more difficult though.

Here’s a quote I saw today in the Times of India, from J. K. Rowling. ‘It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to your enemies, but even more to stand up to your friends.’

So how to even begin to consider the subject of corporate social responsibility? ‘… or CSR (increasingly used as an abbreviation for corporate sustainability and responsibility). CSR has evolved from a rallying cry of business critics to a fashionable concern among corporate executives eager to demonstrate that high-mindedness can co-exist with the pursuit of profit.’ http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13849
http://www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=52

Some of the current work at HP Labs is connecting up The Karnataka State Government and the United Nations Development Programme http://www.undp.org.in/ in a rural education project which has already involved the Indian Space Research Organization with its telecom satellite network. Clearly a lot of collaborative effort is going into this project. And yet there is no clear commercial benefit to anyone. It’s not something that HP sees as central to its business. So why do it? I have to think through my notions of the world of business. Perhaps ethical grounding can make good business sense. http://www.indiapartnershipforum.org/social_partner.htm presents some interesting case studies which suggest that might be the case. And once again the name of Narayanan Murthy comes up. I keep hearing about him.

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I was just doing some research on Fortune 500 companies to see where HP is. Came across ‘How I Work: Bill Gates’ http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/30/news/newsmakers/gates_howiwork_fortune/index.htm It’s an on-going series apparently. Fascinating to get some insight into the cult of productivity. And also notice my own participation in it. I remember as a child reading little potted biographies of great men, and occasionally great women. In the old days it would have been lives of the saints. There’s something necessary about biography.

Passed a billboard on Airport Road the other day on work-life balance. A see-saw with a man on one side and a woman and her child on the other. All gleaming and glowing in the smooth light of ad-land. With a bit of added exoticism because the woman was in a sari. I should take more pictures. It would be nice to post them here. Anyway, I’m thinking of the contemporary religion of efficiency. Modern moksha is to be a crorepati. (I must say, between Amitabh Bacchan and Chris Tarrant I know which is the lesser of two devils).

I have a slightly guilty fascination - which isn’t purely ironic - with the self-help, self-management, secrets-of-the-CEO’s movement. I wouldn’t say Alan Sugar is a role model but I do have Stephen R. Covey on my bookshelf and a key attraction for me to come to HP is just to see how things are done by clean, efficient, systematic people. Not that the art world is solely populated by crusty’s and floating bohemians of course. In the end, searching for difference, I find how similar things are.

The thing that really tickled me about the ‘How I Work’ series is the Hardware and Software rundown next to Bill Gates’ story. Reminded me of the drumming magazines or studio musician magazines that give diagrams and equipment lists. The height of nerdiness I suppose. But the thing is, I actually find it interesting. It’s the nitty-gritty, the human detail. It would be interesting also to talk about the quality of light, the ambient sounds, the physical sensations. Might be fun to try to map all that with employees at HP.

I guess I’m groping for a connection between the tiny details of moment-by-moment experience and the cataclysmic, global events of impersonal institutions, markets, geographies and biospheres.

Well that’s probably enough rambling from me for now.
I am honing in on a specific plan to focus my research. I have a couple of very particular projects in mind – to do with language, writing and music and relating to something called Printcast and a thing called the Gestural Keyboard. But more on those later. The largest question remains: What is the work of an artist in this workplace?
But in asking that I’m already defining my role as an asker of questions, a problematizer. My hunch is that that’s a key part of being an artist but I don’t think that’s all of it.

Some of my work can’t be framed in the form of a question. Certainly I’m curious, but it’s more of a listening attitude than a questioning one. I’m curious to know what it feels like to be immersed in the world of work and business. I’m curious to know what the issues are in this world, what drives people. I’m curious to learn about the history and economics of this world. I’m curious to know what all the fuss is about these tiger economies and dancing elephants of Asia. I’m curious to look out on the world from the other side, to transcend a parochial European perspective. I’m keen to just observe with as little interference or judgement as possible.

As I immerse myself however, certain questions arise. They dissolve away again in the continued observation and give rise to subtler constituents. But for now here are some pretty basic ones.

What does Hewlett Packard do exactly?
Why does Hewlett Packard want to be in India?
What does it say about itself?
What engagement with ethics is here?
What is it like to be an employee?
What kind of technologies/products/services are being developed here?
How might I use or contribute to them?
What new toys can I play with?
What is the history of the Multinational Corporation?
Can it really be traced back to the East India Company?

These questions might sound a little shrill but actually I just want to initiate a conversation. Then I’m looking forward to something emerging between the participants in this conversation which is not wholly determined by anyone. The participants so far are myself, HP Labs and Srishti College of Art, Design and Technology. Gradually the institutions are opening up to reveal the petals of individual employees and faculty members. As the conversation begins none of us can predict where it will go. This itself is fascinating.

One of the first actions I want to propose is to concretize this conversational process. So I want to set up a series of dialogues with key people. These will be filmed, transcribed and otherwise notated as a first stage in opening up the field. Here’s a mini workshop I’ve designed which I’ll run at Srishti as a special project leading up to their graduation day. I’m hoping it might be a good way for me to make a direct connection between Srishti and HP labs. It may also result in an exhibition of some sort.
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Conversation is thinking in its natural state.
Thinking is the conversation within us.
Words began in human beings
in the process 
of transforming
gregariousness into co-operation.
Malvina Reynolds

Introduction
This short course will explore ways of initiating, performing and documenting co-operative thinking.

Art/science is a mode of practice which has grown rapidly in the last few years - but what is it? Other forms of practice in which artists engage with practices outside the art world, for instance in businesses, prisons or hospitals, are also increasingly common. These can be one-off projects, residencies or a central, abiding preoccupation. But what are the underlying dynamics of this negotiation of relationship?

A key stage in the generation of new ideas, and in the engagement with new situations, is the conversation. We will consider conversation, in its widest sense, not as a merely linguistic phenomenon but as a dynamic spiral of feedback, and as a foundational practice in science, art and politics. In this short course we will focus primarily not on the content of collaborative or interdisciplinary practice, but on its form.

We will also consider conversation as a strategic device for the solution of seemingly intractable problems and as a practical way of generating new ideas. Students will gain insight into methods of working in preparation for future projects in collaborative or socially engaged art. To this end we will examine the legacy of conversation, or the trace it leaves behind. How do the effects of conversations extend beyond the initial space and moment of participation? And then how do these traces, after-images or reverberations become the raw material of subsequent work? We will consider various methods of documentation and recording, from the reporter’s shorthand to musical notation, from oral recounting to video editing, from drawing to desk-top publishing.

Structure
1. The workshops will begin with a presentation of various ideas about the nature of conversation through film, music, texts and performance. Some starting points might be: Ingmar Bergman’s film ‘The Hour of the Wolf’ on solitude and company
An overview of artist’s residencies as settings for conversations
A recently published book of collected interviews ‘8 Artists try not to Talk about Art’
physicist David Bohm’s ideas on ‘dialogue’
Joseph Beuys’ practice of Social Sculpture
Theravada Buddhist dialectics
physical and theatrical games to expose the structure of conversation.
Transcript from meeting of Rabindranath Tagore and Albert Einstein
Exercises in deep listening

2. This introduction will be followed by an invitation to participants to identify people with whom to initiate a conversation, and to set up brief interviews. These will be recorded by some means to be determined in advance.

3. The third stage will constitute the bulk of the time and will consist of the transcription and interpretation of the recorded materials. The final outcome could be in the form of a musical score, a moving image work or a book.