Delete as necessary
Yesterday, a friend and I saw Adam Rutherford compere In the Shadow of the Sun, a panel discussion on science and art inspired by the big ball in the sky. It was all pretty great, but Honor Harger’s bit in particularly got to me. Honor spoke about the paradoxical centrality of the Sun in art. Light’s the prerequisite of all visual art, yet you can’t even look at the Sun directly without damaging yourself. You can’t see the sun. You see a painting, or a photo, or something else inferred or glimpsed or mediated through technology. Speaking of which, here’s something she played for us; Semiconductor’s Black Rain, made from satellite data recorded in the space between our home and the Sun.

Black Rain from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

It put me in mind of Autechre’s Gantz Graf. Gantz Graf’s half music, half exploding sculpture. All these interstitial spaces: Anyway, I left with this. Creating something is, after a fashion, subtraction. We take whole light and, through pigment chemistry, we filter out wavelengths. What we see is what’s left. We take white noise and filter out wavelengths until we’re left with music. We take a stone and carve out a sculpture. We pick words out of a dictionary and shunt them together. Every time we talk we’re leaving things out and taking things away. It’s always partial, always incomplete and provisional, always circumscribed. Then it hits the filters of our own preconceptions and obsessions, and we’re left with whatever resonates in the spaces left behind.

“An expert’s someone who can read documentation faster than you can” - or so the computer-nerd saw goes, anyway.

This all reminds me of another idea I keep meaning to do something with, but never get round to: that usually ‘having ideas’ is a bit like running an import-export operation between different fields of work, and not really all that much about thunderbolts of divine inspiration. Of course, though, that’s not an original notion…