Tim Knowles - Brilliant!

Just thought I'd clip this in.

A thought that springs to mind - The evolution of anything comes not from careful planning, but more from the harvested fruits of erratic behaviour.

This last sentence has been structured from a year or two of thinking on the subject of the importance of the unexpected/'mistake'.

Check this artist out. And this article too!!

Found via this great website - http://artforum.com/archive/id=22013

(Hope I'm not infringing copyright - let me know if I am!)

All material in the Artforum Archive is protected by copyright. Permission to reprint any article from the Artforum archive must be obtained from Artforum Magazine.
Tim Knowles, Pe Lang + Zimoun
02.11.09
Author: Colby Chamberlain
01.24.09-03.07.09 bitforms
Chance often comes off as a cheat. Consider Hans Arp’s Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance), 1916–17: The composition is too balanced to accept without question that the work’s elements fell from Arp’s hand into such a harmonious arrangement without a nudge or two. Chance is an influential aspect of Dada and Surrealism’s legacy, but early examples such as Arp’s cast doubt on artists’ claims of having rigorously followed chance’s lead. The suggestion of chance, it would seem, is sufficient, and a little after-the-fact fiddling is just fine. An exhibition by British artist Tim Knowles and Swiss duo Pe Lang + Zimoun demonstrates, however, the rich yield of surrendering the artistic process to chance movements taking place on a minute scale. What if, the exhibition might ask, Arp had charted not where his bits of paper landed, but the whole fluttering course of their downward drift?
In his 2008 "Windwalk" series, Knowles put himself at the mercy of central London’s microclimates. Donning an irresistibly goofy head apparatus—essentially a wind sail attached to a bike helmet—he set out from Charing Cross five times, allowing the shifting early-morning winds to plot his course. Video recordings, taken from a camera attached to the sail’s starboard side, reveal the walks to have been markedly different in their itinerary and oftentimes hilarious in their futility. A collusion of breezes condemned Knowles to meander back and forth over Trafalgar Square; another pushed him relentlessly toward construction fences and other insurmountable boundaries. Information recorded from a GPS tracking device turned these wayward routes into a cibachrome print of five spindly lines stemming erratically from a central point, resembling nothing so much as a Surrealist experiment in automatic drawing.
The point of reference for Pe Lang + Zimoun is, more specifically than chance, chaos theory, the mathematical study of systems where minor changes in initial conditions lead to wildly divergent outcomes. Untitled Sound Objects, 2008, offers a tempest-in-a-teapot model of such a system: Four hundred vibration motors—the sort found in cell phones—sit in discrete compartments of a wooden modernist grid. When the piece is switched on, these identical nooks become unique snow-globe riots, each with its own jumpy trajectory and bopping hum, like so many dice caught in a perpetual tumble.
A video of Pe Lang + Zimoun’s Untitled Sound Objects, 2008, can be found here.

Website to check Out!

If you're into sketchbooks, or just fancy a swatch at how an artist might work, then check this site out - http://www.gis.net/~scatt/sketchbook/links2.html

It's a great honey pot of aquired images and notes and would be great source material for schools/education/folks who just fancy starting some art without pressure.

Rough Cut Nation, Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

There is an auction later on today at 2pm for Rough Cut Nation, where the fantastic exhibition of street art has delectably decorated the innards of the Grand Old Madam Portrait Gallery herself. Or his-self. I reckon it's Herself...
Anyhoo, this ground breaking, wall busting, aestheticising, carpet carving manifestation will be dismantled and sectioned into smaller, more manageable buyable bits. Challenging task I should think.

It's been a brilliant and exciting project involving street artists and musicians and is an important and poignant step towards creating the Portrait of the Nation, a contemporary update in all manners of media and public participation.

Here's a little excerpt and link:

'Devised by the National Galleries of Scotland Outreach Team, Rough Cut Nation updates William Hole's historical murals to create a collaborative, multi-media installation that depicts Scottish history and identity through the eyes of contemporary artists.
Instead of merely recreating Hole's murals by inserting contemporary characters, figures and events, we decided to transform the way national life is depicted.'
Rough Cut Nation

Grab your purses and go.

One Year Of The Mill: Broken Records, WWPJ, and Some Young Pedro

Top night, but very much missed Sparrow and the Workshop - needed at least one girl!! Get well soon Jill!

Dream Fluently...

The Jazz


Ryan Van Winkle


St Jude's Infirmary

Well, what have I been up to? Well, apart from drawing a great night of two bands at the beautiful central library in Edinburgh last night, hanging up my expo in the music library beside it, frequenting places of social gathering and engagement and verbal lubrication, painting murals on a village hall in the middle of nowhere, drawing a really lovely humanist wedding in the splendid Pollockshiels Burgh Hall, making cards and writing rhymes for family birthdays folks, I've also been making my way through the Sandman series of books. Addicted. I feel like I've not read for a century and now I'm being sucked back into the orbit of imagination. Great stuff.

Drawings above of St Jude's Infirmary and Don Paterson's collection of cool jazzy folks doing some top class beat poetry with top class jazz in Edinburgh's gorgeous central library. This was last night and clashed with the very exciting expo opening of Rough Cut Nation at the Portrait Gallery (also in Edinburgh) which had Tut Vu Vu playing. Apparently it was mental. It would have definitely been a different night to what I'd been drawing! Check it out. It's one of the most exciting projects to descend upon the grand ol' Modom herself. They're doing gigs on Fridays and Saturdays from 5pm too. Worth a look, listen and donder.

Glad to catch the library event though. More drawings in the future too. Keep your eyes peeled for new news. Or Noo News.