It is Thursday, 6 May it is polling day and I found out that I have one month left as the deadline has been brought forward which means that I'll have to to cut down scale down what I planned to do concentrate on some of the basics I'm a little bit cross that my iPhone apps won't be finished because I'm not sure that after this I will have the same motivation to get them finished particularly if they start costing lots of money although doing the projects next year with UWE on the animation and flip books will perhaps provide the motivation over the summer to get them done so I will keep on working on that I just cross because it's a waste of a great deal of time and energy that I have put in this year without the outcome this morning thinking about what I've termed the milieu environment the grounds on which on working in relation to the art of the 20th century in relation to montage and collage again I will not be able to get through the collage book makes sense of that and add that to the section maybe it's not necessary maybe what I have done will be more than enough but the thinking when it becomes particularly difficult for me is that the tale end of this montage in putting two things together which might be visual or they might be conceptual might be that you put ideas together as much as you put images together and that this global network and the databases on the computer have made it easier and easier to collect vast amounts of things that you can put together temporarily or you can try many more things much more quickly iteration maybe I could say that the 21st century will be as a century of the iteration as we can try things out and try things out and try things out Mashable is another word a century of mash and collaboration as people come very quickly see what others are doing and build on it and the idea that this in some way perhaps mirrors the way in which the brain works with neural networks going off all over then making the connections and where originality comes out is by making new connections or unusual collections putting things together that weren't necessary put together before that's where innovation comes fromIt was an idea that I know it was to do with sailing ships the fact that the square leaders gave way to the schooners and the innovation was happening in America which was separate from the Admiralty in the tradition of the square rigged boats that was stopping the innovation because people couldn't cope with the concept of a sail that wasn't square onto the wind and another one yesterday where after years and years and years we discovered or we have discovered that ceramic plates are 100 times better for acrylic pallets that are the plastic ones that the companies sell us even a disposable plastic ones the ceramic plate is just so much nicer to use and so much more easy to clean so the other idea is to do with space and this is going to Manovich I guess the spatial montage as the way we used to look at images and make symbolic connections in our heads with the imagery that we saw so the element of conception was there through the symbolism and film often it references itself you get a film referencing a film referencing a film as we saw with that with the animation that I showed the yr 8's on Monday so you're getting visual references back but it's not just visual because they are conceptual references and somehow a conceptual reference is in a space which is a little bit like a virtual space and the brain which used to be our heads the idea of concept being our heads at the brain has also become the network and the people in the brain are the neurones and the concept is not just sparking at in our own heads when we see something but it's sparking off in this much bigger space which is not a two-dimensional space is a very three-dimensional space possibly a four dimensional space as it brings in time and maybe eventually a 5 dimensional space brining in something else which is the collaboration that is happening the way that it's all sparking at once maybe Jung's collective consciousness whatever it is a good leave the idea of the film is so flat is on a flat surface and in the new projectors are becoming visually three-dimensional but it's more than that because if you add in time that is not temporal but can happen anywhere at any time you're getting much more like this brain sparking off in all directions at once an overtime and over space and this is what the computer technology is enabling. Thinking about Muybridge in terms of creating a sequence of images and the concept of the plate, the still image the frame they were still putting frames of a light-sensitive material into the backs of cameras but led on to the cine film which has long strip of celluloid with consecutive images on which fed back into the film camera and created to 35mm camera and then thinking about in relation to the flip books and modern digital cameras which are able to take a sequence of images either as a movie or as a sequence of images so it's a good digital camera to an extent is breaking down that distinction am I just mention again that iteration is an idea of what the 20th century art is a combination of iteration and being able to take lots of frames consecutively very quickly one after another. The idea of the artists becoming collective rather than an individual even though it may be channelled and funnelled through an individual is very similar or has a simile in me as an art teacher or a games-master being the Channel or funnel for the creative happenings either on the web or within the classroom. Teaching arts and having ideas like the iPhone apps and things like that is a little bit like a farmer sowing seed you cast the seed you don't really know where its going to fall people might not e-mail me back kids might not be interested you don't know whether the seed will grow in a fertile mind you might not even be there if it does grow to see it flower we might be there and it may grow from a tiny seed into a vast redwood tree.

Tags: Montage,innovation,virtual,Muybridge,iteration

Okay so Tuesday first week of my holiday already I don't know what the date is I've spent yesterday and will be spending today teaching some teachers about digital media but getting some ideas as I go the ideas that came up yesterday were particularly to do with rotoscoping because these teachers had done some very successful rotoscoping particularly a cartwheel which fitted in very well to things I've been doing and they entered these rotoscopings for a competition and they involved Julian Opie who is obviously an artist who has used rotoscoping quite extensively in his art so there is the link there to Julian Opie as an artist but also I was introducing them to the idea of a fixed rotation like the cartwheel cycle that remains in the middle of the screen while the background goes past behind like a panorama and I was looking into that a bit and discovered that the diorama a sort of endless landscape not endless but a landscape that went past operated by a couple of cranks and with another crank performer music hall Muybridge sort of character doing a talk err possibly puppets and that sort of thing in front of the diorama possibly with a proscenium so that it really is a precursor of Cinema and it was very popular in fact at one point it says in Victorian times it was the most popular form of entertainment and the people who ran these dioramas would go from town to town giving their shows a bit like the Punch and Judy man I guess so there's a link with and earlier even earlier generation of showmen so it all sort of fits together in retrospective and then there was the programme on television and Paul Merton presented on very early Cinema err and some ideas have people to look at but a particular idea picked up from there was to visit the current exhibition of early cinema in the museum at Hove and that led me then to think about adding exhibitions and meetings to the website that I'm creating and to get in contact with Antony Penrose again to arrange a meeting with him it's going to be a very busy Easter I think but good news today in that my iPhone app has been created as a draft so I need to download and look at that and possibly I can get in contact with the person who programmed the zoetrope app just to get some more ideas from him some connections or maybe suggest things to him err what else has been going on this as a bit of a chatty and newsy recording this morning rather than a meaty one I desperately need to get on with the writing and that my early-morning rambles are making connections but I did have a thought yesterday while I was demonstrating Photoshop to these teachers that a lot of my use of Photoshop is trial and error iteration rather than really a solid knowledge so my demonstrations particularly when I'm trying to demonstrate in talk at the same time are not brilliant but I can do it if I'm not talking so it's definitely that right brain left brain stuff if you believe in that

Tags: animation,Muybridge,blogging,apps,zoetrope