‘So what is the logo about?’ asked a friend recently. So, friend, here’s the answer.
[Read more…] about A Logo Story
Snake Oil
I was hearing voices and not for the first time. There was an epauletted man in ironed khaki across the desk from me. His lips were moving earnestly in French. There was a tea leaf on one of his teeth, a single leaf that distracted me. I knew that this man was not to be crossed. The black fleck on surprisingly perfect dentition got me thinking. I might be better off looking for the future in tea leaves rather than hearing how cooperative this man’s army would be.
Random Erasure and Discovery
Random
‘Societies becoming software civilisation’ is the string of words that I got from a spreadsheet I made this morning. I took ten sentences from a book and typed them into a spreadsheet. I devised a formula to randomly select one word from each sentence. With the resulting ten words, I used a random number generator to select the number of sequential words that I should grab from the arbitrary, nonsensical list. Four was the magic number, four contiguous words from ten. I purposely biased the experiment by choosing the sequential four that made some sense to me. ‘Societies becoming software civilisation’ was my reward for creating the word list in the first place.
Post discovery.
‘Quarried’ Delivery
You will see the back cover of Quarried shows a castle that bristles with telephony devices. Perhaps one of them is delivering this post to your smartphone. The castle is actually a watchtower, built in 1807. Napoleon was a threat and the coast was fortified with Martello Towers to delay if not withstand any invasion plans he devised. The tower was needed for line-of-sight signalling to ships and to the soldiers stationed in the string of Martello Towers that protected the island. Two centuries on and the tower continues to do what it was built for. It relays a cloud of communications.
‘Quarried’ Style
Michael Kenna’s style inspires me. I’ve seen his framed prints for sale in books, online and in galleries. The most amazing for me was an exhibition curated by Chris Beetles in the Huxley Gallery in 2012. Kenna’s art form is his photographic printing of interesting arrangements and patterns found in the natural landscapes. His art is all about tones. Nearly always absent are people. He nearly always works without any form of digital assistance. His analogue world is one of film, chemicals and paper. There’s a continuity that runs throughout his oevre.
‘Quarried’ Memory
The granite that forms Dalkey Hill was very close to where large amounts of rock were needed for construction in the early 1800s. The granite itself was located so close to the surface that it be could be quarried easily. And today, these strip-quarried exposures still being described by geology students in annual field trips, something I also did during my undergraduate years. It’s a place within public transport reach of several universities where keen observers can peer into the interior of a granitic pluton.
