Winter Lights in Docklands

Canary Wharf has a year-round light show in the illumination of its enormous office buildings, and from 16th to 27th January it had some clever and arty pieces on show at ground level. Here are a few; various videos (including this one with a cute kid) show others.

Much photography everywhere!
"Huge Reeds"

The elements of Bloom are location-aware and able to communicate;
also they made a changing soundscape

Horizontal Interference links the tops of trees with strips of light

The cascade of words in Bit.Fall is derived from a live newsfeed

Drawing with light onto mist: Water Wall

Some "natural" illumination in the Crossrail garden

Interactive: the Cosmic Radiophone plays the sound of the Big Bang
Reflected, Our Spectral Vision by Liz West

The White-Hat Sisters play Chopsticks

Back to the everyday ... rare is the Docklands tree without blue-lighting,
and what a difference it makes against the griddedness of everything else

Poetry Thursday - Carnations on the Roof by Clive James

Carnations on the Roof - is it a song lyric or a poem? This is the sort of question you might ask after Bob Dylan's Nobel prize for literature, and the death of Leonard Cohen. Often, poems need to be spoken rather than read; hear this one sung by Pete Aitken here.

He worked setting tools for a multi-purpose punch
In a shop that made holes in steel plates
He could hear himself think through a fifty minute lunch
'Bout the kids, gas and stoppages, the upkeep and the rates
While he talked about Everton and Chelsea with his mates

...and it goes on, a sad tale really, telling the story of many proud working men in a Britain that was losing its industries.

For a song you need a rhyme scheme - throughout, it's ABABB, which gives opportunities "between the lines" for the music.

Another excerpt:

Forty years of metal tend to get into your skin
The surest coin you take home from your wage
The green cleaning jelly only goes to rub it in

Clive James talks about "words being energised by music" and his lyrical career, and collaboration with Pete Atkin, here. "Writing song lyrics is my favourite form of writing anything" ... but he's never managed to become famous for it, "in fact, I'm almost entirely obscure for it".

When, after a 25-year gap, they started writing songs again, "We couldn't stop, and gradually we realised that we had never stopped. The long hiatus had been part of the process. We had just been gathering our strength in the interim."

Monday miscellany

Check out the sound sculptures of Swiss artist Zimoun (I came across one on itsnicethat.com, a blog with many fascinating posts, but you can see more elsewhere, eg here) -

still from Zimoun: 97 polysiloxane hoses ...

Also from itsnicethat.com, these tree forts by Patrick Dougherty -

A video about the work of Kew's Herbarium and the evolution of plants -
http://richannel.org/collections/2013/kew-gardens#/beyond-the-gardens--the-plant-family-tree

Using our imaginations should be obligatory, says Neil Gaiman in this year's The Reading Agency lecture - read it all on theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/. "Our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming." Literate people read fiction; fiction is the gateway drug to reading, and once you discover that reading is pleasurable, you're on to reading everything. Anything that children enjoy will move them up the reading ladder into literacy; there's no such thing as a bad book for children, he says. Also, fiction builds empathy, allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals - and it shows that the world can be different. (That's why China has lifted the ban on science fiction - to encourage innovative thinking.) Treating libraries as a shelf of books is to miss the point - they are about more than that. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg; libraries help people navigate the information world, giving everyone equal access. Without literacy and numeracy, people are more easily lied to and misled. Our responsibilities to the future include the obligation to read for pleasure, to support libraries, to read aloud to our children, to use the language - and writers' obligations go beyond this - but we all have an obligation to daydream, and to make things beautiful.

Witches Head nebula, photographed by David Malin (via)

"The Witch’s Head nebula [IC2118] is 800 light years away from Earth in the constellation
of Epidanus. As the colloquial name suggests, this heavenly dust storm has
the pointed nose and crooked chin of a fairytale crone. In reality the nebula is quite blue,
glowing in light reflected from the super-giant star, Rigel. "

supervoid - an area of space empty of rich superclusters (galaxies). Voids were first discovered in 1978. "Voids appear to correlate with the observed temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), due to the Sachs–Wolfe effect [says wikipedia]. Colder regions correlate with voids, whereas hotter regions correlate with filaments, because of gravitational redshifting. As the Sachs-Wolfe effect is only significant if the Universe is dominated by radiation or dark energy, the existence of voids is significant in providing physical evidence for dark energy." Wow ... physical evidence for dark energy!

Book du jour

Yesterday evening, unpacking some purchases, I liked the sound the plastic bag made and laid it on the workbench, to be made into a book this morning - a book that revealed this sonic quality. After working out the structure (front), I made a larger (rear) and smaller version - and also versions from tracing paper (middle) and, above that, teabag paper. They all sound different.

While working - and listening to the rustles and crinkles that wer happening as the paper rubbed up against itself - I was thinking of "sounds to read by" and how white noise can be used to mask tinnitus. One of the highlights of a trip to Helsinki in 2003 was the soundscape in the Academic Bookstore - it was subtle and had to be pointed out to me ... sounds of a pen scratching, someone coughing, pages turning - very appropriate! Since then, I've not been able to bear the stupid music that plays mindlessly in the big bookstores. (Or the raucous conversations of staff in smaller, non-music-playing shops ... but that will be another rant, another time...)