Another thought from the week

 I took the image out cos I got worried about ethics- and put this one of me and my brother in doing cultural appropriation.

My talk for a conference about childhood and time is on Monday.  I'm planning to be charismatic - I have a picture of my insides written in my own blood and I'm wearing a T shirt with an image of a Frohse anatomical chart dissection on it with the chart in the background - three representations of inside or to be clever none and three insides.  I have paused to blog as I think there is something in my presentation which could form a chapter or rationale for my PhD writing.  A new point to make, I don't feel like I have had a new point for a while.

I am taken by Ruskin's idea that architecture has failed for a 1000 years, he is specific in saying that the Gothic was the height of architecture as at that point building could still grow, in fact they grew triumphantly. The builders and designers were the masons and journeymen of Europe and they would dwell over generations within their manifestations.  To draw is not to prehend it is to capture a representation of the not-yet that closes down the multiplicity of  potentials, not all drawing but the drawings that plan and shape what is built rather than what grows.

My talk is called "insert place holder" it is a function in film editing software that allows you to put a Tristran Shandy-esque black page in a film where you are not sure what needs to go in but you are sure something needs to go in.  

This place holder for the talk is of course a metaphor - it relates to holding space/time in the present for potentials to emerge.  A place of difference and speculation.  And this holding space like Witkin's holding form is palpable and felt yet, as Glissant so well articulates in the Poetics of Relation, it is opaque.   The notion of a scaffold to hold something back, like doubt, desire, skepticism, the curriculum, hunger or our imminent destruction by fire (parallax).   This is the kernel then from where a proper PhD that actually says something can start.  In my bed last night as I churned my day like rancid butter, I finally fell asleep thinking that knowledge is not an edifice or artifice, it is a flow. 

The picture is from the Odd project.  I was trying to green screen the kids so they could do a film of themselves outside Tesco but somehow I managed to key to them rather than the background and turned them all into Tesco.  To paraphrase Virginia Wolf from Mrs Tupperware.  'There will be days and days like this I thought I was projecting Tesco but in fact I am Tesco'.  Or something like that.