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Hey Rachel,

Sorry I have been a bit distant of late. Our big CNZ Completion Report is due on Monday. So I have been rushing around trying to do that all week. We finally got it sent off yesterday, and I felt a great relief to see it sailing away into the postbox. One gets tired of talking in CNZ speak for too long, I was sick of 'fostering artistic communities'...............

Anyhoo, back to the show!! I'm excited. I think 'Continous Memory' is a great title, because it suggests the concept of time working in unexpected ways, and particularly the idea of the past never truely being past but always impinging on the present. I had a quick look on Wikipaedia for 'continuous memory' and it had a little blurb which said that it indicated that 'the calculator can preserve its memory contents at all times'. It highlights the impact and force of the past on the everyday.

I also find the visual trope of the calculator very appealing. Aesthetically, it is a great shape and pleasingly square. Your work so far has always been a little Pop, and I think retro seventies calculators definitely work with that.

Building the lift/black bag box in the middle of the space shouldn't be a problem. We will just need to source a lot of plain black bags from somewhere, and also some poles to form the opposing sides. I'm not quite sure what you mean about the 'head side of the box' is that on the liftspace? And do you still want to use this space for the performance? What do you think about having the performance on opening night?

I'm not very familiar with Stephen Hawkins texts, apart from the obvious Brief History of Time, so can't offer much advice on that one, although I shall endeavour to do some research. With Barbara, I find the idea of using some of her old texts very appealing, before she built up to her current 1 book a second momentum.

This is quite long, I'll write more in a bit!
Tom xxxx

some thoughts

some thinking and thoughts after reading some Hannah Arendt literature and criticism:

'In other words, if we are onlt the same in being different, if we have access to ourselves only through others within the public space of appearing, then the more we encounter difference as Arendt describes it, the more we have ourselves.'

lots of interesting stuff in relation to Arendt's interest in time (which i think is useful to bring to the fore in your work), this is quite long sorry, but interesting:

'The first thing to be noticed is that not only the future - 'the wave of the future' - but also the past is seen as a force, and not, as in nearly all our metaphors, as a burden man has to shoulder and of whose dead weight the loving can or even must get rid in their march into the future. In the words of Faulkner, 'the past is never dead, it is nor even past.' This past, moreover, reaching all the way back into the origin, does not pull back but presses forwards, and it is, contrary to what one would expect, the future which drives us back into the past. Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a continuum, a flow of uninterrupted succession; it is broken in the middle, at the point where 'he' stands; and 'his' standpoint is not the present as we usually understand itbut rather a gap in time which 'his' constand fighting, 'his' making a stand against past and future, keep in existence.'

hope you are well xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

details

Here's some things I'm thinking about, tied in with the comments you've made. Bits and pieces of it are from stuff I had written down about Hallways of Lives...........

- absence and presence
- a speaker without an audience, and resulting importance of the documentation of these events
- Medium - I feel it is really important for your work to use a wide variety of materials and mediums, this is in keeping with the depth and breadth of the issues you seek to tackle
- 'Considering these things, this is what I am left with: it is the work's job to be uncertain of its own existence.' - Anna Sanderson. I don't feel your works you proclaim themselves too loudly; their timidity is their strongest attribute.
- Text. This is really important in your practice. Let's explore the potential of text and image (being a personal interest of mine). Let's use some poetry. Let's see how words can shape the objects which come out of this.
- The personal and the general. I would like to see the show blur the boundary between personal interest and general interest. It would be interesting to see if you could inject parts of yourself into the show, very subtlely, but let them be almost completely overridden by the pop parts of it.
- Time. This is key. Your work seems to vacillate between an obsession with time and a disregard for conventional linear timelines. Let's focus down on this and dig out what you want to say. Is time a controlling factor? Or is it something that can be manipulated usefully? I would love to see the performances deal with this.
- Speaking of performances, let's do a reading, a performance and an artist/curator Q and A session. Let's do them all.

That's what I've been thinking about................let me know what you think!

blog blog blog

Hi Rachel!

Here's our new blog! It is all very exciting. just finished work yesterday, so this afternoon am going to brainstorm some ideas for the show. will post them up in a bit........
talk soon.