Writing, like anything else, is a craft. So, let us pick a craft at random, oooh, blacksmithing.

Not being a blacksmith or even a trainee blacksmith I, unsurprisingly, know very little about blacksmithing. However, Wikipedia knows a fair bit, so let’s take some time to learn something about it:

“A blacksmith is a person who creates objects from iron or steel by forging the metal; i.e., by using tools to hammer, bend, cut, and otherwise shape it in its non-liquid form.”

Hmm, sounds complicated, and I bet you couldn’t do it without practising for a good year or so first. Maybe you could turn out a rudimentary weapon, like a big club, if you were to just pick up the tools now and go for it, but no-one would be interested in buying it, because it would be a truly terrible club. And really, no-one would give a toss that you’d even bothered to try, apart from the blacksmith whose tools you would have ruined in your ridiculous and haughty attempt to perform a job you know nothing about.
So, in a dashing Socratic application of logic I will now ask you why, if writing is also a craft, people think they can be masters of it without putting in any time or effort?

This simple answer is because they are fools.

The biggest expression of this foolishness used to be in the “slogan” (I don’t want to grace it with the title “proverb” or “maxim”) that “everyone has a novel in them”. But not any more. National Novel Writing Month, or as it prefers to be called NaNoWriMo – an appropriate abbreviation considering that its raison d’être is to dissuade people from wasting time by writing things properly – is, in its own words:

“A fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30. Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved. You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing”

Hmm. A lot of crap. A good thing? Let’s get all Socratic again and apply the NaNoWriMo ethos to say, cooking. Ok, so this is a literal seat-of-your-pants approach to cooking called Cooking Properly Is So Stupid, or CokPISS for short…

“The goal of CokPISS is to prepare a meal in under one minute. Valuing nothing that any decent chef would deem worthwhile, participants are encouraged to just chuck as much food as they can find in a container and then microwave it all for a minute. You will develop dysentery and produce a lot of crap afterwards, but that’s a good thing.”

Now, I’ve never had dysentery, but I hardly think it’s a good thing. And if you disagree, try telling that to the Members of the Human Rights Defenders and Promoters network who travelled to Burma (Myanmar) in June 2008 to try to stop an outbreak of the disease in the towns of Labutta and Bogalay.

All in all, crap is bad. So why does NaNoWriMo encourage its production?

It seems to me that NaNoWriMo is a product of the times we live in and a reflection of our waning insistence on quality. From the “I want it now” attitude that emanated from fast food to the instant success stories of X-Factor , via blogging, the proliferation of information on the internet and even Strictly Come Dancing’s insinuations that a skill can be mastered in weeks, we are being led a merry dance by institutions who wish to convince us that we not only have the aptitude to be, but deserve to be instant stars.
Shirley Dent, Communications Director for the Institute of Ideas and a Guardian columnist, takes this notion a step further: “What we are dealing with here is…a cultural milieu that promotes a childish, indulgent idea of self-expression, where it doesn’t matter what it is you are saying, or if you have any talent at all as a writer, as long as you are expressing yourself. This has less to do with personality foibles and more to do with what society values about literature and culture.”

Dent goes on to call NaNoWriMo “the hideous aesthetic spawn of cultural relativism and a culture of self-esteem, where criticism is frowned upon,” and in doing so she strikes upon one of the same themes as the NaNoWriMo advocate Jeff Printy, aka Dr Wicked.
Wicked, creator of the internet writing tool “Write or Die,” claims that: “Writing Does Not Have To Be Hard [sic],” although punctuating a sentence correctly apparently is. “The creature inside you that makes it hard is not the Creator, it is the Critic, holding you back and telling you it’s not good enough.”

The Creator and the Critic, eh? Tell us more Wicked.

“If you had the apparatus to look inside the head of any creative person you would find twin beasts; we will call these the Creator and the Critic. The problem occurs when the Creator sits down to create; the Critic cannot differentiate between the process and the product and therefore begins to make loud comments about how horrible this creation is and how it could be so much better.”
Towards this end Wicked created the aforementioned “Write or Die”, which unfortunately doesn’t quite follow through on its promise of annihilating its users. Instead the repressed geniuses log on to the webpage, set either a word count or a time limit and a way of being punished whenever his or her prodigious talent pauses for breath.

Yet Jean Hannah Edelstein, a freelance journalist who writes for Bad Idea magazine, disagrees with Wicked’s distaste for the Critic: “I think that the best writers are the most mature ones in that they are able to look at their own work with a criticial eye, accept outside criticism, and regard their work as a job rather than some kind of ethereal calling.”

Something that can actually make you die is smoking, which the prize-winning novelist James Kelman has acknowledged in his work on numerous occasions. Furthermore, according to Kelman: “As with writing, smoking can be an enjoyable solitary pursuit.”
It is the value of the “solitary” aspect of writing that seems to have gone astray among the NaNoWriMo-philes of this world, as Wicked concedes: “Ask just about anyone who is participating about their favourite aspect of NaNoWriMo and they will say the community, the people that they meet through the forums and the write-ins.”

Yet it is the idea of writing as a primarily solitary act that needs to be brought back to the fore, as Dent recognises: “With writing, there is great confusion - it has come to be seen as expression rather than art, and that anyone and everyone can do it.
“We have devalued what literature is by not arguing for the very best literature, and for the excellence of some literature in comparison with the rest.”

Yet for the Wickeds of this world literature is a mass event that everyone can take part in: “I think everyone dreams of becoming an Author [sic] because it is the one thing that every literate person is capable of doing.”
But what might Socrates have said to this? “Are all numerate persons capable of expounding on discrete mathematics? Are all swimmers capable of swimming in the Olympics? Are all cars capable of competing on the Formula One circuit simply because they have four wheels?”

As Edelstein comments: “We all have a book in us to the extent that we all have a life story which could ostensibly be written down, but very few people have the capability to write a book that is actually of interest to anyone besides them and possibly their mother (although it could be that she is just trying to be nice).

“This only becomes a problem when people become fixated upon the possibility of getting published because they perceive it to be the only way in which their hobby will be validated. Sometimes you may have to concede that you are not meant to be a famous writer but rather someone who writes for his or her own personal pleasure.”

Tragically, the number of NaNoWriMo participants has increased year-on-year since its inception in 1999, and there’s a good chance that way more than the101,510 people who entered in 2007 are fixated upon dragging the good name of the novel further through the gutter before they desist.

There are two reasons, it seems to me, that the Turner Prize has remained a notable institution for so long. One is that pointing out that the work isn’t very good makes for boring copy. It smacks of the tabloid oversimplification that recherché readers of the respected papers are bound to hate. It’s also bloody obvious.

A much deeper problem is that it’s hard to genuinely slate a piece of art without opening a can of worms. Are you really going to claim that you have the objective standard by which art can be judged? You can say you don’t like it, or that there are better examples, but would you really be prepared to say that a given piece was totally fucking meaningless? My visit to the Turner Prize Exhibition left me inclined to give it a go…

Going to Tate Britain at the weekend blessed me with the opportunity to observe plenty of visitors (screaming children expressed an understandable viewpoint), and as a result I was privy to much conversation. Not once did I hear anyone articulate anything that approached understanding, delight, emotional displacement or pleasure.

A notice board at the end of the exhibition which solicited the punters views confirmed a failure to engage with the works. People were mainly moved to draw cocks with the drawing pins or relate bawdy versions of nursery rhymes. You might think of that as creative reaction to the psychological whirlwind of the previous hour, I think it’s more likely to be indicative of people bored out of their minds and with nothing pertaining to the exhibition to say.

I feel that I have the right to claim that if the works of the Turner Prize had emotion to impart, pearls of wisdom to espouse, or polemic to orate then they roundly failed to deliver their payload to the three-wheeled pram-pushing masses.

But what of the experts, who are judge, jury and short-lister of the Turner Prize? Perhaps they are able to fathom some deep and complex meaning in these works, which eludes us mere mortals.

Certainly Goshka Macuga’s piece might lead us to believe we needed a higher expertise in art. Her work is about the relationship of the wives of artists Paul Nash and architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, famous in their field perhaps, but not names that come up around the dinner table. Not in my house anyway. Fortunately the blurb tells you what the installation is about, because if it didn’t it’s pretty clear we’d need a large team of forensic art experts to find it out. I didn’t hear anyone saying “Oh look, isn’t that Paul Nash’s wife? Do you know, I’ve always pondered her relationship with Ludwig Mies van der Roche’s other half.”

Anyway, it’s my strong suspicion is that what ever degree of prior knowledge you had her sculptures constructed form the steel and glass fittings normally used as banisters in public spaces never quite aspired to the sublime, or even the awful. They might perhaps teeter on the insipid.

Cathy Wilkes’ arrangement of female mannequins, supermarket checkouts and dirty bowls of baby food do come together to indicate some kind of meaning. I don’t think I deserve a prize for guessing that her thrust (although she probably doesn’t approve of inherently male gesture of thrusting) may have something to do with feminity. For this reason this work stands out as the winner for me – not because it’s great, just because it has some kind of meaning that I was able to discern. And for that reason I’d like to exclude it from the criticism that follows.

My feeling is that all of the works excepting the mannequins fail a test that I thought up during the extreme boredom of Mark Leckey’s video. The idea of this test came to me by way of the post-modernist essay generator. It’s a website that automatically generates essays by stringing together randomly ordered catch phrases and buzz words from post-modernist thought. The results are convincing in the sense that they are very hard to tell apart from some genuine academic papers. I think it’s fair to say that if an essay cannot be told apart from a randomly generated one can only be of any value by coincidence, and a very unlikely coincidence at that.

So, the Turner Prize equivalent: as a thought experiment imagine having a computer spit out a random plot for video art – or a random selection of ‘found objects’ randomly arranged for a sculpture, and see if you can tell the difference between what you imagined work and the work being your evaluating. What I’m trying to get at is the idea that you might expect a piece of art to convey some more meaning than any random arrangement of matter. Or for it to be aesthetically pleasing, but that’s pretty much not a concern when it comes to the Turner Prize.

I think it’s fair to say that it would be hard to pick out a video of tuk-tuk drivers doing nothing (Runa Islam’s submission) from “coal miners learning French” or “oranges rolling down the stairs” (my random inventions). The tuk-tuk drivers may have significance and meaning, but even when I try really hard, I can see very much. Actually this piece may have been slightly less than random – think back to the 1997 Turner Prize winner “Forzen Policemen”. An hour long video of, you guessed it, policemen doing nothing.

Take another piece of Islam’s – a single continuous shot (I think) of somekind of workshop space. Whatever, frankly.

Perhaps a soporific and interminable video of man making inscrutable points about cartoon cats (Mark Leckey)? What about a black and white epic about the growth cycle of sorghum in China, with subtitles in binary (plot randomly generated by me)? Whatever.

What about a video of someone smashing porcelain cups? What about someone chasing a fictional greased weasel round a fetid bathroom? Can you guess which one is a real submission?

So I don’t quite want to say that these (putative) works are totally fucking meaningless. I want to say that they are about as meaningful as any other randomly chosen arrangement of matter.

Who cares? – well, it’s not the holocaust obviously – but when I think of the number of people who are excited to be challenged by difficult, avant-garde films, or have a passion for, frankly, inaccessible music, it does seem like a shame there is no equivalent to engage our questing minds on the visual art front. Or perhaps there is, but it certainly seems that the lime-light is hogged by bullshit.

But the Southbank is the city’s concession to holiday makers. It might be extruded in brutal concrete, but the skate boarders, buskers, and arts institutions and their enormous bars all open their arms to the tribe of the camera and baseball cap.

All this passed through my mind as I stood on the balcony of the National Theatre, watching Addictive TV project their creative output onto the side of the building. It’s an annual event, held every summer, and it works pretty well.

When you’re already in the landscape of the tourist, with all its artifice and showmanship, having a televisual experience on a screen the size of a house is somehow appropriate. I was half expecting the Millennium wheel to roll of down the Thames and blocks of flats to synchronise their lighting with the party’s pulse.

On at least two occasions the video exactly reflected what was actually taking place. While watching a group of people pass an oversized wrap of coke around with complete nonchalance a coke snorting scene from Pulp Fiction was chopped and cut in time with the music. We cheered on a guy who clambered on to a roof underneath the screen with his pants around his ankles, only to be confronted moments later with grainy footage of football streakers.

As the evening progressed the media types seemed to melt away, and to my surprise they were replaced with the kind of people who have three festival wrist bands as tokens of their summer achievements. Passing spliffs, trampling through the wheat that was incongruously planted on the roof and drinking cans of beer. I don’t know why I didn’t expect there to be a “party” contingent, its just that it’s a bit too, well, authentic, for this kind event.

The night did have the feel of a promotional event, which I suppose it was in a sense for Addictive TV, and certainly was for the films and equipment manufactures whose footage and names made their way into the show. At the same time there was a definite twist of anarchy and a festival mentality, we even asked for “one more” at the end. It had that subcultural edge that comes whenever there are long haired young people taking drugs.

Perhaps these kids were hooked on Addictive TV, as well as the Friday night coke-athon. Perhaps that’s the worst pun ever. Either way, I enjoyed myself.

You certainly won’t be paying for services on the web – email, search or storage – and we all know how cheap illegal downloading is. Even if you want to stay legal there are plenty of zero price options through the open source (free) software movement.

Musicians may be going hungry and the software industry reeling, but I’m concerned about what it means for me.

The price of sending an email is the reason that the global inbox is wedged full of spam. If an email cost even as much as a glass of water from the tap in your kitchen spam would cease to be viable, but because it costs close to nothing to send a million emails to find one potential penis extender spammers are able to do exactly that. I might add as a corollary an invitation to a thought experiment – how much less time would you spend writing and reading pointless emails if you had to spend a bit of money on each? If Benjamin Franklin’s time-money equivalence holds then might free email not be a false economy?

Email might be the most notorious abuse of zero cost communication, but there are plenty of others. Technorati (the blog search engine) indexes 112 million blogs, that’s one for every four English speakers. I’m not convinced that every one of the 1.6 million posts that it records every day is a valuable addition to the body of human knowledge. And Twitter – how can I say this more eloquently than its name does? – is hardly going to be running the Library of Alexandria close in terms of accrued intellectual achievement.

Copying content already available, writing for the sake of it and pointlessly echoing the opinion of others aren’t unfamiliar criticisms of the blogosphere. But even that content is a step above the one-off “welcome to my blog” posts which are probably the beginning and the end of thousands of blogs a day. All because starting a blog requires no monetary commitment.

There is a cost to hosting a webpage - it’s pretty low though, and this is another issue on the internet. When you are looking for information on the web how can you tell if a web page is genuine, legitimate and trustworthy or if it is maintained by a poorly-informed crackpot? If it’s an eCommerce site, how can you tell if it’s the real deal or a phishing skam run from a bedroom in Cambodia? It’s hard, because copying even the most elaborate webpage costs basically nothing.

Banks used to have impressive buildings to convince customers that they were there to stay and a safe vessel for your money. The tiny cost of building a webpage means that no such signalling is possible. This clearly makes the web an even more treacherous place for veracity.

Of course the idea of regulating the internet is as impractical is as it is repellent; I’d argue it’s least interesting to consider that having to pay for something has an upside.

Internet VCs, the Klondike prospectors of our day, have even coined a name for this phenomena. “The Penny Gap” - the massive increase in demand that occurs when something goes from costing even a single penny to free.

There is a simple reason for this. No matter how fantastic your product, most people don’t want it and they won’t pay anything for it. There’s no product that even comes close to be in demand by half the worlds population. However, if the product is free then a good many of people who don’t want this product will take it. Why? Because they can or because they’ve made a mistake, because it’s the quickest way to find out what the product actually is, or because other people have mentioned it. These are all types of people who have no demand for the product, and no want to satisfy.

Of course it’s not that simple, and advertising revenue throws something of a spanner in this analysis; none the less, the essential signalling mechanism of our society’s desires – price – has been neutered on the web.

“Spit” is the newest kind of unsolicited contact – Spam phone calls over VOIP (Skype and the like). It’s very hard to combat because, unlike email, there is not very much time to analyse whether an incoming call is “spit”, and being audio it’s much harder to filter. No doubt as the internet becomes more pervasive so will unsolicited contact.

It strikes me as a bizarre inversion of the problems of the command economy: on the internet we all have to wade through piles of spam just to get what we want, exactly as Russians queuing to bread (okay, I’d rather have spam than an empty stomach…). In Russia demand and supply didn’t equalise because the government would not allow prices to rise, on the internet we refuse to let prices rise because of our mindset — which is made possible because providing, for example, an email service costs very little. Instead of an inefficient allocation of limited bread, we end up with an inefficient allocation of limitless email.

What should be done? I think I’d probably be happier paying a tiny amount for my online services, just to make all the pointless chatter to go away, much less obvious is how such a system could be enforced, and I’m the last person to advocate regulating the internet…

Housed on Bentwaters cold-war era air force base, and as mentioned, associated with a classical music festival, it has dash of the unlikely from its beginnings. Faster Than Souns is a festival of noise/avant garde/installation art based festival which seems to attract glow stick wielding ravers and the more experimental end of the opera fan spectrum.

The first year I went the ex command-centre of the base, complete with blast walls, hosted various installation pieces and a few small scale musical performances. It may have looked familiar to some of the audience – that’s because it was used for that Channel 4 series where reality TV wannabes were fooled into believing they were going into space; bits of the set were still visible. Two other stages had more conventional dance music. The organisers were apparently still worried that it might be a bit mundane, so threw in an aircraft hanger (complete with signs explaining what to do with unexploded ordinance still visible inside) with a giant framework ball which could be rolled around, causing it to make weird noises from electronics attached to each vertex. (I’m afraid that I can’t write that last sentence in any other way to make it seem more plausible.)

This year’s events were unfortunately a little more conventional. Performances took place in a sound proofed hanger designed for testing aircraft engines (where else?), and proceedings were reproduced through an extremely crisp 8 channel surround sound system. Stand out performances came from Exile and Plaid.

I’m told Tim Exile was using his performance as part of an MA course, in which he took live vocal samples from two trained singers who stood on stage in front of him, and melded them into his trade mark mash of distorted rhythms and processed samples. His performance shifted from melodic and repetitive through to a few moments of straight-ahead jungle towards the end, and he took full advantage of the massive PA to hammer the audience with occasional walls of noise.

Plaid produced the only genuinely accessible performance of the night, playing more or less their normal fare. However, uniquely among the artists, they made impressive use of eight speaker stacks encircling the audience, sending sounds spiralling round us and bouncing all over the place.

Site specific theatre group Punchdrunk also performed in the hanger, simulating air raid sirens, playing “it” with the crowd and trying to evoke a general sense of a fear of flying. I enjoyed the performance, however my friends were a little more sanguine and pointed out that in such a dramatic setting a little more might have been achieved.

This point was forced home latter when the electric doors of the hanger unexpectedly closed accompanied by the sound of a wailing siren. The fire brigade (who were already there, presumably in case an aircraft hanger sufficiently fireproofed to test aircraft engines should spontaneously ignite through the presence of 150 opera fans) rushed in and eventually the doors were reopened. It certainly constituted a dramatic use of the space.

I have to come clean and admit that that I can’t appreciate all the performances I seem to see where a musician uses an effects peddle to mangle the sounds of an attack on an orchestral instrument. Sometimes I think I’m getting something; other times I’m definitely not. However, what made the first year’s FTS so good was that when I got bored of a man playing a cello with a spoon accompanied by time-lapse videos of plant growth there were plenty of other things to go and look at.

This year really only had one focus of attention, and, unfortunately, frequently no focus, since many of the acts took 15 minuets to set up.

Having said all this, the basic premise still functions. Where else do you get to see a miniature mechanical orchestra perform in the darkened recesses of the nation’s cold war infrastructure? Gentlemen, you can’t use a sampled Theremin in here! This is the war room!

I began to trace the figure-of-eight shaped infinity symbol that is the Kinetica logo back to its origins as an early piece of research for this article. It’s been suggested that the symbol, also known as the lemniscate, or ‘lazy eight’, is a representation of an hourglass on its side. Obviously, this action would cause the hourglass to take infinite time to empty thus presenting a tangible example of infinity.1

Kinetica is a museum dedicated to the display of kinetic, technological and electronic artwork, an area of creativity which is sometimes categorised under the more generic term of ‘Time-Based Art’. Since occupying a large commercial space in Spitalfields Market between 2006 and 2007, the museum now operates as a touring programme of exhibitions, events and workshops.

The Director of Kinetica, Dianne Harris, had suggested in her last email that we meet somewhere in the West End for this interview, so that we could head to Canada House in Trafalgar Square afterwards for the opening of Schematic; the first of a two-part exhibition of New Media Art from Canada, beginning with Montreal-based artist Eric Raymond. After devoting some serious thought to whereabouts would be the most appropriate interview territory, I had suggested The Café in the Crypt, below Saint Martin-in-the-Fields Church, a timeless setting with plenty of space.

When I get there, I see that the church is undergoing quite a makeover, but the café is open as usual. I’m early. I hover for a while, take two painkillers I just bought to hide my hangover and head downstairs. At the bottom I’m forced to walk on headstones. The cool, dusty smell of the old building adds to my dehydrated shakiness. I’m both excited and nervous about the interview. Cappuccino at the buffet. Pay, sit down. Frothy, hot, strong coffee. I get shakier as I play with my laptop, sifting through the carefully prepared questions which seem suddenly rather obvious and unoriginal. ‘She must get asked that all the time,’ I think to myself.

Then I spot her. Dianne Harris, Director of Kinetica, in the red hat that her email said she would probably be wearing. The first thing she tells me is that she has been meditating in The National Gallery, or at least trying to meditate amongst the end-of-the-day hordes. She tells me how she thought it might be a good place to find some peace and quiet. I respond with my own story about The National Gallery: It was my first visit to London, and I’d been staying with a friend who lived way out in zone six. I’d been out all night and needed sleep, but couldn’t get back to my friends place, so I went into The National Gallery in the morning, and had the great idea of sitting on one of the nice leather sofas and dozing off in front of Whistlejacket, a large painting of a horse by George Stubbs. Then, after vivid dreams of strangely serpentine horses doing looping figures in an ice arena, I woke up next to a tramp who’d had the same great idea. I’m not sure if our mutual unorthodox use of public gallery space is the best subject to start on, so to break the ice I offer her a drink.

Dianne begins by telling me how the Kinetica team first started conceiving of the museum:

‘There’d been a few [exhibitions of kinetic artwork] in the Sixties, but not so much recently.’ She goes on to describe seminal shows at venues like the ICA, such as Cybernetic Serendipity (in 1968), but that there had never been a permanent platform for that kind of work.

The curator of Cybernetic Serendipity was a woman named Jasia Reichardt who became an important influence on Dianne when they were introduced early on in her career. Dianne describes Reichardt as a ‘realist and mentor’ who helped her to focus on technological art as a valid creative medium; and ‘asked so many questions and re-evaluated everything’ for her.

When I ask Dianne how she and the Kinetica team funded such an ambitious project in such a huge commercial space as the one in Spitalfields Market, she explains how the Irish Construction company, Ballymore, owned and built the building and were looking for a cutting-edge arts organization to move in temporarily. Kinetica were then approached by Future City Arts, who brokered a deal between Ballymore and Kinetica, and the museum was up and running within 6 months. Kinetica was subsequently supported by the Arts Council, amongst other funding bodies, which covered expenses for a whole year, and the museum experienced huge volumes of visitors from the very beginning, following substantial press coverage of the first exhibition, Life Forms, including a feature on The Channel Four News.2

I ask Dianne about the reasons for leaving such a unique exhibition space behind, and the decision to exhibit Kinetica’s artists as a touring museum instead. She explains what a wonderful launch-pad the building was, but that it was only a temporary space to house something that is perhaps better suited to transience anyway:

‘I feel like Kinetica could turn up anywhere, rather than necessarily being governed by one building. In this way, the museum has gone truly kinetic.’

She goes on to tell me that having permanent space has opened up so many more doors than she first expected and the museum finds itself spoilt for choice in terms of where to go next: Kinetica is currently in discussions about a collaboration with The Cambridge Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, where new commissions are to be developed with Kinetica’s artists, who are represented in a similar way to that of a commercial art gallery. The museum has developed an amazing online shop of small-scale Artist Multiples 3 and also an ever-expanding permanent collection.

Dianne tells me about the many artist-led workshops that Kinetica organises with schools and community groups, with projects exploring important contemporary issues such as recycling and alternative energy sources, where participants are shown how to build kinetic structures such as energy-generating wind sculptures.

The museum has also organised a series of forthcoming talks across various venues, including the Science Museum’s Dana Centre, The Bishopsgate Institute, and Sudely Castle. They’re also taking part in The Concrete and Glass Festival in Shoreditch in October this year, and, perhaps the museum’s most ambitious project of all, The Kinetica Art Fair, which is due to open in February 2009.

While Kinetica is committed to running events in the UK, it is also developing an increasingly global reputation, and receives proposals from all over the world:

‘People hear about the museum largely online, especially now that it no longer inhabits a permanent space, (it usually comes first in search listings of its related subjects), but also from surprisingly widespread sources.’ One example Dianne gives is that of a recent request to exhibit Soundwaves (a Kinetica show from May 2007), from a gallerist who read about it in a small, local Brazilian newspaper. This kind of international presence seems particularly impressive for such a young museum.

Having answered all of my obvious questions, and many more unobvious ones that I only thought of when she had answered them, we walk up the stairs of the Crypt and back out into the daylight. As we wander across Trafalgar square to Canada House, we pass The National Gallery, and the conversation turns to meditation again. Dianne explains that the method of meditation she has been using involves a particular type of internal visualisation, and how during this mediation, her mind’s eye began to trace the figure-of-eight shaped infinity symbol that is the Kinetica logo.




Endnotes:

1. Wikipedia: HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_symbol”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_symbol

2. Channel 4 News HYPERLINK “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUPH-w_a0H4″ (05-10-2006) - Coverage of Kinetica’s inaugural exhibition Life Forms, featuring interviews with artists Elias Crespin, Daniel Chadwick and Chico MacMurtrie.

3. See http://www.kinetica-museum.org

Patrick Coyle is a London-based artist and writer.

Schematic: Eric Raymond continues until 6th June 2008 at Canada House, Trafalgar Square, London SW1Y 5BJ
Exhibition Opening Times: Monday - Friday 10am-6pm

As I near the big two five, I’m beginning to have a mental meltdown. But twenty five, I hear you cry, is still “spring chicken territory” – well, I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed.

Lets forget the naive notions I had at the age of 17 that by my 25th I would be well over all and any shenanigans, sexual experimentation, casual social drug use and loud music in my chosen genre, that I would be settling in for the night in a suburban nirvana, with my one year old child and a third of the way into my first marriage with an oppressively inappropriate man.
Instead, at the age of twenty four, staring down the barrel of twenty five, let us evaluate where I am, since I’m currently NOT tucking my toddler into my marital bed whilst my bastard husband sleeps in the spare room…

…Well, where I was, up until three weeks ago was continuing with what has turned out to be a three year office based career in financial services, a far cry from the Hollywood hills flamboyant existence that I should by now be ruefully giving up to settle into my three bed semi in Mumsville…

Instead, literally months from my 25th, I have had a shock realisation that I am not where I thought I would be and this epiphany has resulted in me jacking in my 9 to 5 career to move back in with my mother (after nearly 10 years absence) and to be artfully unemployed whilst I voluntarily help promote a friend’s up and coming band into mega stardom. This, in theory, will provide me with the precious MTV lifestyle that by my earlier predictions I should already be reminiscing about at a coffee morning with other mothers. But you’re never too old. If, at fifty, old men can buy fast cars and faster women to make themselves look younger, why can’t I start living the twentysomething life I imagined I’d have when I was seventeen?

Just look at all those wonderful adverts aimed at people just like me, advertising courses for those who didn’t pay attention at school, another chance to have an improved quality of life and potential salary raises. These adverts work.. I have already tried an Open University course (but in my true fashion didn’t bother finishing it because I went to California for two weeks of debauchery instead). So instead of enrolling in another 12 week Introduction to Social Sciences, I have decided that at twenty four, it’s still not too late. There’s another five – count ‘em – five years of youth left to go, it would be ten if I was a bloke but let’s not get into the whole sexist or “old mothers” argument

Nonetheless, I am having a hard time dealing with my recent impulsive decisions. In fact this has to be one of the worst decisions ever made (my years of sensible mortgage considering wisdom dictate this to be true). Yet here I am having my twenty something crisis, giving up all that is sensible; a boring career and total independence from my parents (except when my car tax is due) to go back and live the dream that I invented eight years ago, daydreaming in a coffee shop with a rolled up cherry flavoured cigarette hanging out of my mouth and nursing a cold three hour old drawn out vanilla latte instead of attending my Psychology lectures at college in a bid to sabotage any attempts by my father at successfully getting me to enrol in a university.

Surely I am not the only quarterager out there who decided at the time that university was a crock and that now nearly ten years later having still not thought of anything else to do has amounted in getting into IVA qualifying amounts of debt by working dead end administration jobs and rinsing the money at the pub and on various colours of UGG boots at the weekend….every weekend. I certainly didn’t expect this for myself. I assumed that something amazing would turn up…and it now has, eight years too late but nevertheless it’s being handed to me on a plate. But herein lays the crisis:

In order for me to catch up on “The Dream” I have to literally go back to being seventeen (except now with huge financial burdens) and start all over again, hopefully losing some of the arrogance that got me into this mess in the first place and using some of the wisdom gained to make this dream a reality this time round. The pressure is immense, for I am no longer a spring chicken…or at least I certainly won’t be once this second attempt at “real life” peters out in another few years.

To summarise: I am in a position nowhere near where I thought I would be. In fact, I found myself exactly where I feared I would be and I have now taken brave steps to try and rectify the mammoth error that is currently my life. But have I really got the energy to start all over again? Is the grass going to be greener on the other side? Is living with my mother going to be all my nightmares realised? I guess there’s only one way to find out!

Read more articles on the quarter life crisis here…

It had been a long time since I’d been back to Newcastle, a town I’d grown up in – and left – nearly a decade ago. Back then I had no idea I would grow up to become an arsey arts journalist with a shock of jet black hair and a neat line in slim-fit waistcoats. Maybe it was the cold I felt, being a soft southerner stranded in the arctic north, but the only culture I remember was the drinking culture. Okay, it wasn’t exactly flat caps and whippets by the nineties, but this was before the regeneration started. The city’s culture mostly revolved around vodka redbulls and those evil bricks of hash that had bits of melted plastic bag in them. Most of my entertainment came from getting drunk and high on plastic fumes and then attempting to recreate scenes from Get Carter around the derelict parts of the quayside.

The quayside has been — in the parlance of our times — regenerated, and the jewel in the crown is the Baltic centre for contemporary art. I remember seeing the Baltic’s very first installation – a giant heartbeat red canvas — stretched across the gutted interior of the derelict mill. It was a powerful statement that said that soon this old warehouse would be filled with modern art. But by the time it was, I had long since left. When I returned a few years later it was to catch up with an old friend. We had lunch in the rooftop restaurant and drunkenly tumbled out into the gallery.

Even under the soak of wine I remember thinking that most of the stuff we saw was shit. Wire mesh, balsa wood and cardboard boxes – it was the kind of art being made in sixth forms up and down the land. Five years and several creative directors later the Baltic has supposedly sorted itself out. I stepped off my train and was immediately blasted by a howl of freezing rain. Some things, I supposed, would never change.

The Baltic wasn’t exactly deserted, but I think most of the people I met in there were just glad to be out of the rain. This is a classic example of a state funded monstrosity: find a derelict area, throw money at it, ask a Primrose Hill focus group what a run down regional area needs, end up with an enormous, over-funded art gallery. A conceptual art gallery, at that. It doesn’t exactly seem like power to the people.

But I couldn’t be cynical for long. The shocking thing is that most of the art, well, it was actually rather good. Yes, at first, I couldn’t understand what this weirdly insular exhibition space was doing in the heart of the North East, but then I realised how much the Baltic changed its character. This place, suddenly, was on the map.

On the ground floor was Bartholemy Toguo’s Heart Beat, an exhibit that, like the rest of the gallery, focused on the classic postmodernist topic of ‘the use and overload of information in an era of global exchange’. But this was more than a 101 in basic Baudrillard: frightening ink blot painitings of the Virginia Tech shootings and the Darfur Crisis were horribly contemporary. You didn’t need a Roarscack Test to know what was on this artist’s mind.

Similarly, Mona Marzouk’s site specific installation in black and gold was quietly understated, the vast empty space of the second floor feeling lightly suggestive of a transnational melancholy: the industrialized world’s reliance upon oil. I stood for a few moments watching the video that accompanied the yellowing walls and felt haunted by the room’s emptiness.

I thought back to the previous week when I had made the journey to the ‘Love’ exhibition, part of the National Gallery on tour in Bristol’s City museum. Crammed into a room half the size of Marzouk’s two paintings was a retrospective starting with the renaissance and ending with one of the figureheads of contemporary British art: Marc Quinn’s ‘Kiss’ statues. Whereas the Egyptian born Marzouk deals with a dramatic subject intimately, Quinn’s sculpture takes an intimate subject and adds a dash of hyperbole: two imperfect figures kiss. Great. His cock’s freakishly small, her breasts sag and she’s half his size. Sounds like real life to me. Then you walk round to the other side and, surprise surprise, he’s got a thalidomide arm and she hasn’t got one at all – about as representative of real life as a bearded lady at a circus.

Why is there an unwritten rule that states a British artist can’t be understated? Or funny, for that matter? Another one of Quinn’s thalidomide arms statues, the pregnant disabled one on the plinth in Trafalgar Square, won out over the much more amusing car-being-shat-on-by-pigeons design. I can only blame the YBA clique for the present rash of po-faced, hyperbolic art being churned out by our supposed talents.

Which brings me neatly back to the Baltic, where Mark Titchner’s installation — the finest example of hyperbole masquerading as transgressionism I can think of — held pride of place above these two excellent exhibits by foreign artists. If you’ve ever seen Mac’s famous “1984” commercial (Titchner quite obviously has) then you’ve pretty much got the idea. Fill a hall with communist style slogans chanting ‘seek imagine create delight’ and ‘leverage collective genius,’ stick a giant obelisk (in this case, a video installation of an obelisk, how daring) at a pulpit in the front, turn the lights down and crank out a lot of pamphlets explaining how the use of ‘black, white and red’ – the corporate colours of a certain unpopular transnational soft drink manufacturer – ‘comments on the blind faith and obedience to authority which is unconscious in much of society.’

The whole spiel was a big yawn. Clearly, someone in Primrose Hill had declared that this was the sort of art the provinces needed. But if it hadn’t been for the murmuringly insistent robotic voice that filled the hall, this exhibit would have been a good place to catch forty winks.

Downstairs in the gift shop were t-shirt prints of Titchner’s slogans prominently displayed beside a handful of those Agyness Deyn sponsored House of Holland prints that were cool about a year ago. It was so self-knowingly ironic I felt like raising my skinny fists in despair, or at least running to the rooftop restaurant for a quick bottle of red.

‘The t-shirt is the message!’ screamed the Titchner print. Baudrillard 101? Check. Got it. Well, actually, I suppose this one’s a Marshall McLuhan parody. But who’s to know? Not, I suspect, the tired, rain-soaked Geordies milling about in the downstairs café.

Needing a break, I walked back across the footbridge to check out the newly opened Lazarides North gallery, currently exhibiting the work of US graffiti artist David Choe. He’s a natural choice: Choe’s known for his hyperbole. As is Steve Lazarides: 25k plus VAT for a 4×4 board might be pushing it a bit far in a Northern town where your main competitor’s centerpiece is a £900 Jack Vettriano print. Predictably, apart from the beautiful, black dressed, black Mac wielding receptionist, I had Lazarides to myself. Tucked away in a room at the back, behind his grotesque graffiti caricatures hid Choe’s watercolours. They were heartbreakingly beautiful. If I had three and a half grand (plus VAT) I might have bought one.

As it was, I headed back over the Baltic to see some material by Barry McGee –- another graffer from over the pond. Even the vivid acid-casualty colours and the burned out truck slapped into the middle of the room didn’t seem hyperbolic after the 25k pricetag on the 4×4s.

I retired to the café for a soup-like mug of black coffee. I gave up the boozing and the plastic fumes some time ago. On the train platform on the way home I got chatting to a teenage girl heading into town for a night out. She said she liked my clothes. Then she offered to suck me off. It’s one of those stories you couldn’t make up.

I boarded my train, a smile on my face. Some things, I supposed, would never change.

I wish I could say that my foray into the world of witchcraft stemmed from a true desire to discover the potential power of paganism or release the goddess within but frankly it was because I was broke. I was fumbling through the £1 bin outside a second-hand bookshop and came upon The Modern Witchcraft Spellbook by Anna Riva. “A spell,” Madame Riva said, “is an ‘instant miracle’ – a way to accomplish your objectives without work, study or delay.”

As I was tired of temping, didn’t fancy an evening course in IT skills and needed an immediate cash flow, I figured one small pound might produce one massive money miracle. I bought the book.

Back home, I found my cupboards were bereft of not only basic food stuffs but vital witchy ingredients:

To attract money: Take a square of green cloth, put in Borage, Lavender, High John the Conqueror Root and Saffron (or any four appropriate herbs), a few crystals of rock salt, and three silver coins. Tie with gold and silver thread in eight knots. Keep on your person or about the house.

What the hell is Borage anyway? High John the Conqueror - of what? Does parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme count as four appropriate herbs? Could I use table salt? When’s lunch?

I tried another spell:

To increase your wealth, soak the gold part of marigolds in water for three days. Add a few more marigolds each day. After three days pour in a little red wine and a white feather. Keep this mixture in your window until you have the amount of money you need.

Right, this meant buying flowers, waiting three days, and wasting precious wine. And the only feather I could find was a very un-white pigeon’s. I needed another method, one that didn’t ask for stuffing spices or unhygienic bird moult. Magic less prosaic and more enchanting.

And at the back of the book, after the increasingly esoteric herbal combos (Gilead buds and Tonka beans anyone?), Anna Riva had this final directive:

To call upon the forces that can grant your desires, you must cast a sacred circle. At the four points of the compass, place a symbol for the four elements. Then ask the spirits for help.

This sounded more promising. I enlisted the aid of vodka (without asking) and sorted out my symbolic circle.

The symbol for West, said Anna, was Water – easy, a glass of tap water (thought Perrier too pretentious.)
East – Air – um, a feather? Light as air… no, that meant back to the pigeon. I settled on an old Happy 30th Birthday (ok, really old) balloon, half-filled with Stolly breath
South – Fire – another cinch, a candle (beeswax, more organic)
North – Earth – not sure if muddy footprints on carpet count…. but then, quite pleased with myself, I found a moonstone (once kept under my pillow to ‘align my womanly cycle’ until I went back on the Pill)

Feeling a sliver ridiculous, but emboldened by booze, I walked clockwise around my circle-space and, stopping at each symbol, ‘called’ on the spiritual forces.

‘Hail, North, Power of Earth, bring me the practical, hands-on element of money into my life ….. uh, cash, basically.

“Hail, East, Power of Air, help me to grasp the abstract, intellectual side of money so I learn to understand overdrafts and negative equity (not that I own a home or anything).

“Hail, South, Power of Fire, make me passionate and generous about money and unafraid to give it away to others, except chuggers.

“Hail, West, Power of Water, teach me to go with the flow, so that when money slips through my fingers, I know there’s always more where that came from.”

Then, a last-minute flourish: I took a 1,000 lire note I’d inexplicably saved and burned it in the candle flame. I figured this symbolised my goodbye to the old money attitude, hello to the new Euro-me, kind of thing. Then I sat in the circle’s centre and envisioned myself with an overall sense of monetary well-being. When I envisioned an overall sense of the carpet burning, I woke up and went to bed.

The next morning, my flat buzzer rang, early. A bike courier thrust a clipboard in my hand and I signed for an envelope. Inside was a brand-new Capital One card with a £800 credit limit. Wow, I thought, this shit actually works!

Ok, I had filled out the credit card application and posted it weeks ago – the point was, I had a terrible credit rating and had been rejected loads of times. Yet, here it was, nearly a grand for me to spend, the morning after I had cast a money spell.

After a few days of over-excited shopping sprees, I embarked on further spell experimentation. Why not call upon the elemental forces to find me a proper job? Temp secretary work was slowly stealing my soul…. So once again, I cast my sacred circle – balloon, feather et al – and asked my spiritual guardians for some serious employment magic.

The very next morning, the phone rang. And it was a recruitment agency, with a possible post at a start-up website. Ok, I had sent them my CV ages ago and it was just a job interview, but I still thought the synchronicity pretty startling.

Was I indeed a white witch? I thought it might be time to test the big broomsticks and ask for the ultimate – a man. I cast my spell, calling upon the elements to bring me a intellectual (air) but practical (earth), easy-going (water) but passionate (fire), brand-new boyfriend who was really, really into me.

And the next night, very drunk at a bar, I met Sebastian. Who was all of the above and really, really into me. And with this hat-trick of spells, I considered myself quite ready to open a coven.

But then….

1. I fell waaay behind in my credit card payments and had to cut up the card.
2. I grew to despise my tedious data entry job at the uber-trendy web company and had to quit.
3. I realised I would never get over Sebastian’s shoulder hair and had to dump him.

Spells, I learned, only work in the short term. And they only affect the material world; there is no guarantee how they will affect you personally. I thought I was waving a magic wand but I was only wishing for what I thought I wanted. And so I ended up in debt, jobless and single again. Oh well. Like the saying goes, be careful what you wish for, you might just get it!

Oh, and Madame Anna Riva? I wikipediaed her and her real name is Dorothy Spencer, she lives in the States and sells voodoo supplies. But don’t worry, I ain’t about to start sticking pins in dolls…. yet.

Tim Exile goes pop!

Jimmy Tidey reports…

Planet Mu’s ‘200+’ celebration of their 200th release, held at Corsica Studios, promised to be significant not only for the numerical milestone it celebrated but also for Exile’s performance of his new material.

If you haven’t come across him already, Exile is the antithesis of the bored looking laptop DJ skulking around behind an inscrutable pile of electronics. His act used to involve using a headset microphone to harangue the crowd for feedback on what genre of music they want to hear before he ‘composed’ a glitch fuelled chaos of beats in the chosen genre, aided by samples of him making various noises into his aforementioned trademark headset.

But at Corsica Studios he gave a taste of his new direction, and it’s a genuine shift in style. The material on his new album is downtempo and although it still has the distinctive Exile-style mass of synths and glitches, the vocal is now the centrepiece:

Catchy, pithy and nihilistic phrases delivered as processed vocals borrow from booty bass and Adam Freeland to give the music if not a “pop” sensibility then a structure and theme that makes them compatible with three minutes of radio play; as always, having a catchy vocal makes music infinitely more accessible.

His performance matched the new style, with a lot of wild gesticulation and crowd interaction. Halfway through the set he ducked down behind the parapet only to reappear bare chested. As in every performance I’ve seen by him, he had equipment problems - I’m beginning to think he does it deliberately to add a bit of nervous energy to the performance.

With the headset microphone and singing along to pre-recorded lyrics Exile seemed every bit the pop star. Given the “Vice” generation’s predilection for exploring novel musical territory, sarcastic, vapid sub-political comment and the authenticity that Exile can derive from being a genuinely talented musician it’s easy to foresee his brand of music attaining a great deal of popularity, albeit with the more fashion conscious consumer.

Of course you can’t please everyone all of the time, and the audience at the Corsica Studios perhaps wasn’t exactly the target audience. The biggest crowd pleaser was an all-too-brief foray in to jungle, and there were mutterings of disappointment at the low BPM count of the set.

Apart from Exile the highlight of the night was a brutal dubstep set from Mary Anne Hobbs. It was certainly augmented by an ear shattering sound system. The toilets benefited almost as much from the punishing vibrations as the room they were intended to serve and I enjoyed watching transient ripples of sound energy coruscate across the trough of urine in front of me while taking a piss. An equally enraptured co-pisser reported that he could actually feel the bass traveling back up his stream of urine, although I’m inclined to suggest that it was probably due to drugs or an STD.

I don’t know if it was the quality of the sound system or Mary Anne Hobbs’ tune selection, but I did see a side to dubstep that I haven’t encountered before – for the first time I was able to properly have it to a tune that goes half the speed of drum and bass.

As for Exile, he’s certainly doing something very interesting, and he’s got plenty of musical ability and stage presence, but alongside all this there is a palpable sense that he has abandoned the creativity of his previous work in order to pursue a larger audience. I can’t say I could hold that against him though.

Alastaire Allday catches up with Scroobius Pip…

“Thou shalt always kill” was massive. Now you’re trying to establish yourself as a serious contender on the scene, supporting Mark Ronson on tour. Do you think having a ‘viral’ hit is a blessing or a curse?

Feels like a blessing to me! We recorded “thou shalt…” at the end of 2006. It was the first song we had written together and within 12 months we have played pretty much every festival, toured America, Holland, France and, of course, all of England! If it’s a curse its the kind of curse i can live with!

How is the tour going? You’ve a reputation as a pretty serious artist, but are there any high-jinks you’d like to tell us about? Are you looking forward to being back in the UK?

It’s all been great fun. I do have a reputation of being a serious artist but i really ain’t. Our live show combines a lot of weird and amusing stuff. Having some bearded guy preach at you for 45 minutes just wouldn’t be a fun night out!

How well do you go down in the USA? Are there many references they don’t get? Do you change your lyrics out there at all?

America has been great for us. The reception has been overwhelming. The fact that all these people know who we are and turn out for the shows is amazing. I don’t change too much. Sometimes, in Thou Shalt…, i swap Stephen Fry for one of my favourite alltime American comedians Mitch Hedburg. Often goes down well.

You’ve got a Chinese myspace. Are you big out there, too?

Have we?! Its news to me! We are just tying up a record deal in Japan which is really exciting but i havent a clue if they know of us in China. Or Japan for that matter!

Your videos are quite lo-fi, but they seem well produced. Do you need to spend a lot of money to make a good video these days, or is it all done on a shoestring? Who makes your videos?

Shoestring all the way! Since day one we have used a guy called Nick Frew. He is a genius. He made the Thou Shalt vid for two hundered pounds! And most of that went on feeding everyone. The budgets have grown slightly but it’s still very much relying on favours at this stage. We would love to have a big budget just so we can pay Mr Frew what he deserves! One day!

You’ve become very famous on the back of a very small amount of recorded material. Are you constantly working on new lyrics while you’re on tour? Is it easier getting noticed without the backing of a major label thanks to the myspace / youtube phenomenon, or is it still a lot of hard work?

It’s still a lot of work and we have more material than people realise. When we gig there are about 11 songs we currently choose from and we have just finished the album which has 13 songs on it and about half of them we have never played live. But, yeah, gigging is really important to us. We didn’t wanna be one of those bands that just relies on the internet for a career. Get up, record a song, upload it, go back to bed! In the 18 months we have been together i would estimate we have played over 200 gigs in around 6 different countries. We want to earn anything that comes our way.

You’re quite political. Are you an angry artist? Anything you’d like to get off your chest?

I’m a very laid back artist! I’m not that angry about much. I just like discussion. And putting up ideas and topics for people to then discuss. There are a lot of things in my past and in the world that have angered me but i don’t want to just shout to people about it then walk away. I want to put views across and see how people feel about it.

Your name is taken from an Edward Lear poem. Would you describe yourself as literary? Is a lack of originality responsible for the stagnation of hip hop in general?

I’m far from literary. I don’t read much but i do have a thirst for knowledge. I think thats what we should teach people. The actual joy of learning and using your mind as opposed to memorizing facts to pass exams. On the Hiphop front it’s tough. Because there are pools and pools of originality (Sage Francis, Atmosphere, Saul Williams, Aesop Rock, Polar Bear, Sway, Poem Inbetween People, etc) but they just don’t get the limelight that some of the more bland artists get. But that’s just the consumer nature of the industry. Whatever is selling will get the column inches.

And, finally, the question our readers most want to know — why do you wear two watches? One of our unkinder readers suggested that you might have two different girlfriends in two different time-zones. Care to scotch the rumour? Or are you really a secret lothario?

Haha. Thats a good theory! Its not true but it’s good! It’s no big thing. Way before i had any kind of exposure i worked in a record shop. I went to buy a watch from Argos and they had it in silver and gold. I couldn’t decide and had to start work soon so i went for the silver. By the time it got to my lunch break i was rushing through lakeside shopping centre to buy the silver! I wish there was a better reason! Haha. Thanks for noticing though….