Finding an emergent order: Talk
Tollesbury Creative Group, The Centre, Congregational Church, Tollesbury, Essex CM9. 2.30pm Saturday 21 July 2007

At the beginning of the talk my computer portable drive would not let me access my image files.

Thrown out of my prepared comfort zone I had brought along some real pictures as back up for just such an occurrance I talked about these instead.

Visual materials:
"Leaving the comfort zone: for Sarah, (Sallie), Whitmarsh", 2007, watercolour and pencil on paper ;
"Paddle", 2007, watercolour on paper ;
"Distributed Network: (you're gonna have to leave me when you go)", 2006,
"A Sea of Tea and Rice", 2007, digital print, acrylic paint on polyester fabric.
"Falling", 2007, watercolour and pencil on paper and acrylic paint on polyester.
What I had wanted to show -
Story of a painting 1: "Yet to go"-"Emotional Baggage, Technicolour Dreamboat"-"A Different World"
Story of a painting 2: "Falling"

Summary of main topics:

Order and Chaos in every work. Looking inward, using myself, family history, using co-incidence, eg. meeting Pamela twice in one week, after never having known her previously. If you look deeply enough at chaos or randomness, you can find a discernable order, pattern or form from which you can create a foothold.

Emergence: "In philosophy, systems theory and the sciences, emergence refers to the way complex systems and patterns, such as those that form a hurricane, arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Like intelligence in the field of AI, or agents in distributed artificial intelligence, emergence is central to the physics of complex systems and yet very controversial."

"Emergent structures are patterns not created by a single event or rule. Nothing commands the system to form a pattern. Instead, the interaction of each part with its immediate surroundings causes a complex chain of processes leading to some order. One might conclude that emergent structures are more than the sum of their parts because the emergent order will not arise if the various parts are simply coexisting; the interaction of these parts is central. Emergent structures can be found in many natural phenomena, from the physical to the biological domain. For example, the shape of weather phenomena such as hurricanes are emergent structures."

The World Wide Web is a perfect example."The World Wide Web (WWW) is a popular example of a decentralized system exhibiting emergent properties. There is no central organization rationing the number of links, yet the number of links pointing to each page follows a power law in which a few pages are linked to many times and most pages are seldom linked to. A related property of the network of links in the world wide web is that almost any pair of pages can be connected to each other through a relatively short chain of links. Although relatively well known now, this property was initially unexpected in an unregulated network. It is shared with many other types of networks called small-world networks." 1

Discussion. Q: What happens when the technology breaks down? A: We talk to each other again.

Studying Art at Corsham, leaving in 1980: Deciding to make Abstract pictures. Seminal influence of Kasimir Malevich and the Black Square; what I took this picture to mean. Anti Bourgeoise, anti art, anti financial value, the rise of the collective voice, (The Borg in "Star Trek" is an extreme example of the Collective), Socialism, the Russian Revolution. Marcel Duchamp's "Urinal", choosing an everyday object to be a work of art; Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot", "End Game", the Death of God, the Death of the Author. Over time this way has become unworkable for me.

Now: I try to reflect the glory of the world.

Early Memories, triggered by visual stimuli, like cherry blossom in the spring; extreme beauty, transcience. Colours, forms, the stellated dodecahedron.

COFFEE BREAK

Falling. Passed everyone a post card of "Falling" and described its creative process. How I took loads and loads of photos in the spring of the Kwazan cherry blosoms in our road and then chose one picture and drew from it in a relaxed carefree way, after completing a series of watercolour winter landscapes with horizons in. I lost the horizon in this work and so I stopped being self conscious of what I didn't know, I enjoyed the open structure of the branches and their verging on the abstract. I saw a dress in it and traced this shape and redrew it onto a similar piece of paper.

After starting to plan a workshop on Art and Maths for ICT week at the local primary school a memory of how I coped with maths when I was at primary school was triggered. I made a stellated dodecahedron. I found an image of one and added it to the picture. It was dark grey or black, but I liked it so I kept it black - what connotation does that have as opposed to white? or yellow.....?

Communication is life.
Questions from the attendees.

Re-working a picture after having shown it. Putting it in the attic and not looking at it for several years to achieve objectivity. eg. Beryl Cook.

Having pictures around your space while you are letting them rest, and waiting for the knowledge of how to complete them.

The pretentions of Fine Art, the snobbery attached to Oil Painting as a technique. The rules constraining watercolour, and the combining of white goache. Mixing media, Crossing media boundaries. How to dispose of oil paints and their solvents in an ecologically friendly way. (Is burying glass jars containing waste oil paint and thinners the only way?)

The workshop in October: Bring a textile, possibly with a repeat pattern on.

Using a projector and PhotoBooth on the laptop to enlarge the significant object for tracing/drawing.

Thinking about combining symbolic objects to form narrative.

"Beauty results when you have resolved the form": Brice Marden

"Learn from the work": Joel Fisher

Working flat on the floor if physical constraints allow.

Cut slits in the fabric, expand it, paint inside the gaps so that this whole world opens up and stretches.

1 Emergence. (2007, July 14). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 08:39, July 22, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Emergence&oldid=144570133

2Photo of Termite Cathedral was taken by w:User:Yewenyi[1] Photo taken and supplied by Brian Voon Yee Yap. Cathedral Termite Mounds in the Northern Territory.