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Notes from meetings
Bondays 1 & 2: rough notes/bonmotes
(These are transcriptions from notes made on 24th January and 7th February, so please accept my apologies for inaccuracies, irrelevancies, liberties taken. I'm putting them forward to the group in the sense that if something's written down, people can modify, debate, disagree and develop at their leisure.)
Bonday 1 (24.1.98)
Those present: Claire Malcolm, Gary Topp, Amanda Smith, Me, Alan Smith, Mark Robinson, Helen Smith, Julia Darling, Sean O'Brien, Linda France, Paul Stone, Katrina Porteus, Margaret Wilkinson, Andrew Crumey, Chaz Brenchley, Andy Anderson, John ?Taggish.
Absent: Roxy Walsh, Joszefa Rogozki, Gillian Allnut, Bridget O'Connor.
Notes:
Alan & Joszefa both have work centred around/located in mines: a possible narrative setting? Helen has done environmental pieces in Quakinghouses. These involve collaborations with scientists/guides. Sean interested in leadmines (Auden theme), Linda engaged with landscape on several counts (prehistoric Northumbria, island setting for George Herbert photos), Katrina use of landscape and dialect, Julia old people's home visits again focussing attention on speech in relation to images of objects and settings. Mark has the Gaps between Hills photos.
North as defined by its geography and geology, not initially by political and cultural boundaries?
Redolent image of Ballroom Flats (Alan) a huge interior space, makes me think of the ballroom in the Swan Hotel in Alnwick: taken from the sister ship to the Titanic (what was it called? The Colossic, the Bloody Hugeic?). Displaced buried and sunken ballrooms and their skeletal dances, the Tommyknockers Ball.
Links between Andrew's interest in information v. misinformation, and Helen and Paul's strategies of telling: placing books and letters in unusual settings. Chaz as missing evidence: Where's Brenchley? Hide a tiny image of him in a landscape which clicks onto a series of stories.
Have to get round the uninteresting element of non-linear narrative.
The possibility of a variety of reading and exhibition venues: Allanhead, New York (T-shirt motif: image of roadsign to New York at end of Coast Road with slogan: "I've seen the sign". Oblique t-shirts still exerting an unholy influence over me). Link Sean's idea of film of going through tunnels with Alan's tunnels, basically.
Talk of the graphic tablet and the apparent absence of Photoshop calls for another session in which we can see all the toys. Perhaps a session where we can see all the films/hear all the radio work, since there is likely to be a film and sound contribution (Margaret interested in this).
How do you search for images/build up a library of possibly-useful ones? A: there are CD catalogues, or you search by associated term. Getting a word to do the groundwork for an image.
On seeing the online novel version of Paradise Lost, Sean invents the Internet author Milton Boon. Q: is he related to Daniel Boone? Or indeed Pat?
Mark proposes North of the Book as an alternative title. Gets round the Flat Cap Theory, and intriguing considering the more far-flung constituents: eg Katrina on Shetland. Hell of an acronym, though. BONNOB no better, especially if you throw in a gratuitous K for Kafkaesque presence. Reminds me of line from Bedknobs and Broomsticks, where the small boy says to Angela Lansbury, "What's this got to do with my knob?"
Need to check on local Internet cafes.
Underland: (Sean's title) if we take the concept of a landscape and flip it, then a mine becomes a skyscaper, a lake a mountain of water. Thinking of cities below ground/below water frees us from absolute representations of "North". True North versus Artistic North. Andy says we can construct a 3D version of Alan's paintings making the patches of colour into hills and hollows. Since these are derived from the microcosm of silt, minerals and fungi, it might be interesting to turn this into the macrocosm: a version of "North" that is a geography, but not geographically bound. Could this be used as a version of that inverted landscape? Imagine going through a microbe and out into the real map.
What happens within it? Quest or a geography? Julia and I discussing predators and saints. The fact that the first "industry" of the area (the monks) produced bibles, histories and hagiographies. Raw products: fantastic beasts and fantastic humans (saints). This relates to what Katrina was saying about seeing the big black cat. We think about geological layers: can we pull a sliver/a line out and turn it up 180 degrees into a picture, a landscape from whatever depth or time it represents? Then we have another means of analysing and dividing things up.
Linda and Andy discussing the contrast between CD-ROM (permanent) and Website (perpetually fluid). Can the landscape analogy be extended to cover this? Theoretically Underland has to be carved from solid rock and is immutable, but the surface is capable of change. I like this idea of working in a medium where we have to carve out and define the very space we can work within.
Margaret wants to explore the way in which this applies to the appearance of text: can a poem be inserted into a story and vice versa so that clicking on a key word takes you from one text to the other (and vice versa). If these have a relation beyond the word, then this might be a basis for collaboration.
We talked about the way writers' spaces could be reproduced or represented in the gallery: digital cameras or reconstructions?
In car on the way back Helen confirmed that she and Andrew had discussed ways of depositing information/misinformation in other websites.
Interstital comments/feedback from everyone
Generally exhausted but interested. Lack of appropriate technology made people feel it was diffuse, not knowing where to put their ideas. Geographic model seems helpful as a temporary repository. Need examples of the writers' work, suggests Margaret. I propose the next session is divided into computer stuff and looking at films: Linda suggests we need to concentrate on striking up conversations, alliances, and not be distracted by films: a more social thing. Julia suggests that this social event be set up in Newcastle.
General weariness with thought of Hartlepool, extent of contribution required, administrative backdrop (Margaret makes point that herding everyone around town on 24th made us passive, whereas we need to be as proactive as possible). I ask Mark and Andrew, given their expertise, whether they'd like to work on the website. This seems a first priority. Sean and Julia have tentatively begun work, Sean on a poem, Julia on an idea for a newspaper of the bizarre (Underland Echo?)
Own thoughts: Groups need to be smaller, so that they can pursue lines of thought without excluding anyone: suggest we offer a couple of dates for each crucial event, so that people break naturally into temporary combinations. Actual collaborative units can't be forced. Crucial meetings are: Software Day, Ideas Day, Decision Day. The training days should be at people's convenience and in areas that genuinely benefit them: this is intended as an exchange of gifts, not a "necessary" lesson. Committee meetings: people need to be paid a per diem, and each of these should start at the appropriate stage of the project, rather than run throughout.
Bonday 2 (7.2.98)
Present: Me, Katrina, Alan, Andrew, Mark, Chaz, Paul, Andy.
Thinking about the voice/composition angle: Keith Morris composes on computer and might be helpful or even a contributor. Unifying soundtrack?
Alan mentions document about the image-origins of alphabets. Can they be converted into contours or even sounds based on the computer's numerical analysis of their structure? Makes me & Chaz think of the Just-So Story "How the Alphabet Was Made" which has an illustration where the alphabet is a necklace with the letters each made from a different natural object. Also Mariscal's invented alphabets and the Pictish alphabet I made. We looked at images of the human voice as recorded on computer (from a book Paul brought): these have a black and white Rorsharch appearance that is intriguing. Can we convert between all these – letter into image, sound into image – how to continue this chain?
We then divided into two groups of more and less computer-competent types, and one group (me Chaz & Katrina) did some basics with Andy, whilst the other embarked on the Website
Some questions arising from computers session and discussions:
Q: Can we get this software (Paintchop, Director, Bryce) onto our own computers?
Q: Who should the website be linked to? New Writing North?
Q: What equipment precisely do people have?
Q: Could we get "sponsorship" from Dolby, ie they give us 16 copies of Photoshop?
Q: Should contracts be drawn up so that copyright of work used is clear and royalties (if any) can be distributed?
We need a strategy for downloading: those nearby can visit TAG and things can be facilitated (eg Katrina will get her laptop wired up on Feb 28th: circulate this date for those who have transportable systems). What can be sent by disk for those who don't? Funds for people going online?
Principle: If we use PC files etc, then Mac users can read them. Vice versa is apparently problematic.
Notes on computer session:
Use of metaphor (opening "files", having paintbrush icons etc): everything has to be a metaphor otherwise computers are a conceptual void. Not entirely unlike a poem.
Ordinary video camera stuff can be put into the Director programme (which creates our overview structure, complete with sites, routes, texts, images, sounds)
You can get a panoramic effect from photos with Quicktime VR, ie you can look around a scene. Successive photos therefore create a "route" through a landscape in which you can place texts and images
What did we do all morning? Effectively we stuck an extra ear on Prince Charles, turned him green, put him in a pool hall, then turned him into an island (thus refuting Donne's claim that "No man is…"). Meanwhile the website was begun, Mark took everyone's picture with a digital camera and Alan got a website of his own.
Over lunch Mark showed us a virtual room on his laptop full of books. It would be nice to have a library where specific texts could be taken off the shelves. Later I thought it would be possible to build a composite study where all our workspaces ran into one huge virtual room
We thought about how to create an axis of text that would turn around keywords. Andy says this involves building a hypercube (?), but this can be done.
Katrina is thinking about filming the Shetlands from the air and manipulating this image: we could build bridges between them, turn Hugh MacDiarmid into an island. I mentioned that Julia would be in Banff (Canadian Banff) and we thought that we were building a kind of New Gondwanaland where all these outlying bits of Northness could reunite in a virtual landmass.
Andy says when you project an image in Quicktime VR it can be more than 360 degrees, ie as you pan around in it you can turn to a different starting point. This becomes interesting if we're projecting onto a cylindrical frame in a gallery: people can walk into a space, turn around, and see overlapping images.
Could we have a strategy for the biographical information going into the website, so that it's not dryasdust info eg a history of injuries and scars?
We discuss the Hartlepool monkey which is apparently on the rugby team's shirt, in relation to Julia's idea of doing a newspaper that concerns itself with extraordinary events and fabulous beasts. We could get a heraldic image of him dangling from a lamppost with various relevant symbols in his paws. He could have a superfluity of paws like the Hindu deities in the gallery.
We discuss the principle of using the key symbols on a map as transformative devices, converting letters into sounds, and sounds into images. Can we get a rolling system of such conversions? Chaz points out most such conversions would be chaotic, not necessarily a bad thing but perhaps necessitating a further level of conversion by analogy with this process: that the symbol doesn't turn a letter into an accurate representation of it as sound or image, but into prepared artworks. We would need to extend this concept to take us from letter to word, from word to metaphor, and from word to dialogue or character (from word to name). But a system in which everything can be converted into everything else by use of recurring symbols is an interesting idea to explore.
Andrew mentions a programme discussed in the book Consciousness Explored, which analyses what bits of a page of text the eye actually focusses on for the brain to assemble the meaning, then fades out the skipped passages. Can we duplicate this so that a text alters to filter out what would not be read? Can this be manipulated so that what is left can be reassembled to form or refer us to a second text? This was related to the way oral storytellers employ key phrases to remember their narratives.
In the afternoon session we dug out some Japanese symbols we could use as backgrounds for the website ("bon" means "tray" or "server", "bonyari" means absent-minded, and so on). Mark and Andrew suggested that everyone should have a website with a link to the NWN one. Alan offered Allanhead as a place to meet and to organise a trip down the mine to the Ballroom if folk were interested.
A series of phrases appeared in the course of the day, which I'll present without annotation in the hope they'll carry some suggestive force for someone:
fingers in the A-drive
cooked trees and raw trees
Prince Charles: half-archipelago, half-aircraft carrier
Out Skerries: the Venice of the North
there's a lovely beach
in the lee of this text
in the wake of this picture
in the shadow of this sound
Lobsterman lives on Fun Skerry
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