recreational crystallography

“Nervous System creates experimental jewelry, combining nontraditional materials like silicone rubber and stainless steel with rapid prototyping methods. We find inspiration in complex patterns generated by computation and nature.”

I’m particularly taken by their radiolaria series of pieces:

They also offer up the algorithm that they use to create patterns as an applet to be played with, or for creating custom jewelery.

They remind me of the patterns made by the Festival Pattern Group for the 1951 Festival of Britain, on display at the Wellcome Collection last year. From the drawings made by x-ray crystallographers, the group created beautiful fabrics, wallpapers, ceramics and more. This amazing machine lace is based upon beryl crystals:

I remember that one of the lace companies was called Witchcraft Laces, which I reckon is a great name. I like the process of these patterns being hand drawn by scientists, adapted by designers, then machine fashioned.

tell tale heart

whilst searching for things to do with pacemakers for my rhythmic perception project i came across streetanatomy.com

immense! with such blog titles as ‘greys anatomy: 150 years at the top’ and the weekly delight of ‘anatomical fashion friday’, a new favourite.

i was about to email in, in a kind of ‘check out my tattoo!’ way. then i realised i’m already on there

also

yes please

galvani

>feathers<

the shipping forcast

“Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:
Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.
Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,
Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Helène
Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay
That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes. “
(Seamus Heaney)

GIN

Gordon’s makes us drunk – Gilbert & George 1972

Tatty Devine collaboration with Gilbert & George

“A Churchill martini involves shaking 6 parts of gin, straining into a cocktail glass, looking at the bottle of vermouth, and serving with an olive garnish.”

I personally prefer it with a twist.

oh the dreadful wind and the rain

i’ve been slightly infatuated with nico muhly since reading an guardian article about him in october, on a sunday spent almost entirely in the cellar at work. i like his music and attitude towards food. also, he (and that article) are mostly responsible for my renewed interest in folk tales.

‘We lived in the woods in Vermont. There was this sharply banked pond, too steep to be mowed, so my father used to go to an unlit garage and get this big old scarey-arsed scythe to chop down the grass: my dad was the grim reaper! A sex murderer killed a little girl and buried her nearby, where my mother collects wild leeks. She pointed out the spot when I was up there in the summer. How witchy is that? I was thinking, “Mom, if you scrape the skin off leeks that grew on that little girl’s grave and brew up a tisane for me to drink, it’s, like, over between us, it’s a total wrap!”‘

amazing. so, on his album ‘mothertongue’ tracks 8, 9 and 10 are entitled ‘the only tune’ – a version of a folk song about two sisters. one pushes the other into the river to drown, and her bones and hair are later pulled out by a fisherman who makes a fiddle from them. the ‘only tune’ the fiddle will play is the drowned sister’s story. i knew the story already, vaguely, and my mother directed me to ‘cruel sister’ by pentangle, and then i found myself a tom waits version too. sometimes there is a love interest, sometimes there isn’t. always the bones and yellow hair are fished out and used to make some kind of instrument, harp or fiddle, which then recounts the poor girl’s tale.

which got me thinking about the mutiple versions of folk tales and how they could be collected and compared. i’ve read andrew langs’s coloured fairy books, brothers grim, hans christian anderson, and have had plently of bedtime stories really, so the repeated themes and motifs already sat in my mind. but this is how i discovered Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification.

basically, folk tales are sorted by type. for example, one of my favourite types, ‘love like salt’, is 923 (clever acts and words). ‘the singing bone’ is the closest folk tale to the ‘two sisters’ song i can think of, where the bone of someone murdered is hollowed into a flute and sings it’s sorry tale, that’s type 780 (the truth comes to light).

there’s an unrelated but lovely drawing on a piece of whale ivory at the children’s museum down the road.

in other news i am going to see the tiger lillies ’sinderella – the twisted tale of a christmas crackwhore’ at the southbank on saturday night and that’s about as festive as i plan to get, aside from eating clementines. i’d had enough of the pogues being sung by the patrons of the karaoke establishment by december the 2nd. cheers.

miss smilla’s feeling for snow (in progress)

“…then with only a tiny lapse of concentration one might feel oneself transported to Upernavik or Holsteinsborg or Qaanaaq. But out of the darkness, like the bow of a ship, loom the walls of Vestre Prison; we are in Copenhagen”

interim show

inter.IMI

ongoing work

going on in the well gallery at lcc

4-7th of november

opening night and drinks on the 4th at 6pm

come!

the wolves of willoughby chase

‘Oh what is it? Where are we?’ she exclaimed before she could stop herself.

‘No need to alarm yourself, miss,’ said her companion, looking unavailingly out of the black square of window. ‘Wolves on the line, most likely – they often have trouble of that kind hereabouts.’

“Ordinary Icelanders are no more responsible for the risk-seeking businessmen who happen to hold our passport than the people of north London are responsible for the destructive behaviour of the talented Amy Winehouse,” said Icelandic professor Eirikur Bergmann Einarsson in the Guardian.