Summa: diary (September 26-30, 2026)

September 26 (Saturday). Today is what would’ve been my parents’ seventy-third wedding anniversary. They were married at Berea Chapel, Blaina, Wales in 1953. Death did them part 34 years later, in 1987.

At the start of the 1990s, I made a number of visual artworks based on Welsh chapels, as both things in themselves and features within the landscape. Several made reference to Berea. Berea was a city in Macedonia, where the Apostle Paul and two disciples fled when they were persecuted in Thessalonica (Acts 17. 10, 13). Chapel names tell stories that very rarely have anything to do with the areas where the buildings are situated. Biblical place names are referential; they operate as ‘texts’ that cast upon those things with which they’re associated a deep history, a sense of geographical dislocation, and a spiritual resonance.

10.30 am: I became a tourist in my home town, and took the Vale of Rheidol Railway to Pontarfynach [Devil’s Bridge] (Although in Welsh it means ‘Monk’s Bridge’). I’d not travelled the vale in many years. The railway is run with the help of volunteer enthusiasts who, between trips, polish the engines’ enamel bodywork and brass fittings like attentive lovers. The halts along the way are maintained immaculately too. Anyone who can look at a steam engine and not smile … well, there must be something wrong with them in my opinion.

I made audio recordings of the steam engine, and the rhythm of the closed wooden carriages as they rode the joins in the railway tracks. These will serve as reference sounds for the ‘Platform 3’ [working title] project.

Pontarfynach is the stuff of Romanticism. William Wordsworth wrote a poem about the place in 1824, and J M W Turner drew it in 1795. There’s been no music composition about the place, to my knowledge.

September 27 (Sunday). ‘A day in the life’ (7.00 am to 7.30 pm).

September 28 (Monday). 7.15 am: Correspondence with friends in need and friends indeed, either side of breakfast. 9.00 am: I returned to the sound translation of Elizabeth (Libby) Lloyd’s magic carpet rug. Many cultures have a mythology of the magic carpet. In most, the it has the ability to fly. In others, the carpet is a stationary object. The traveller sits on it, and is mysteriously teleported (sans carpet) to wherever they want to go. In this respect its magic technology is like the sci-fi technology of the transporter in Star Trek. Quite how the carpet ‘beams’ the traveller back to their point of embarkation remains a moot point.

(10.30 am: I heard the distant ‘toot’ of the Rheidol Vale steam train as it left its station. Having travelled on it over the weekend, in my mind’s-eye I could see where the train was, approximately, on the railway track in relation to the timetable’s projection.)

Libby’s Magic Carpet is materially dense and earthy, and gives the impression of being earthbound and non-aerodynamic. And there’s the sub-title to the artwork: The Garden of Eden Theorem. It’s a concept that I need to get my head around.

I spent the day developing sound samples. At this stage in the project, I’m rather like a painter who grinds their own paint before painting. Once the preparation is over (and this will take time), I’ll begin process of composition proper.

4.00 pm: An ambulation, thinking about much. The sun’s reflection was like a beam of white-hot metal floating on the sea’s surface. 7.30 pm: Having watched a New Scientist programme on the subject of time, after dinner, I returned to the intriguingly titled theorem: patterns of life; modelling life; configurations, sui generis; cellular life and death; cellular automata; models of computation. (‘Am I on the right track, Libby?’) Now, how do I link all these ideas to the concept of a magic carpet? This answer is in the domain of art, rather than of science. And art rarely moves in a straight line. My mind bends towards generative music.

A reflection on best friends:

September 29 (Tuesday). 7.00 am: I pulled up the window blind, looked over the rooftops to the clouds above the horizon, and rejoiced that I was alive. ‘This is the day. This is the day.’

8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: In the studio, I was in search of a ‘bleep’ that could be repeated 3,060 times (being the number of cell’s in my collaborator’s design matrix). In my head, I heard the three ‘strokes’ that preceded the announcement of the time on the UK’s speaking clock. 12.30 pm: Task accomplished. Thereafter, I extracted a 50 Hz sine wave hum from the samples. This is the sound of electricity. A transformer is one source of such a hum. The former provides electrical isolation and enables voltage transformation. I think of Libby’s magic carpet as a transformer, with a core and primary and secondary coils concealed inside. ‘Surely, this is the power than enables the carpet to fly’, I conjectured (imaginatively). If you put your ear close to the pile, then, you might be able to hear the vibrations of the magnetic flux (the magic flux).

2.00 pm: A collaboration meeting, online. ‘Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour’ (Ecclesiastes 4.9). ‘Iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another’ (Proverbs 27.17). Both these things were true, this afternoon.

Following my correspondence with a friend about the so-called, and often vilified, ‘academic artist’:

In art school, I had a tutor (a very good painter) who was of the opinion that artists shouldn’t read books. Texts corrupted, he believed. Artists should remain innocent, and strictly visual in their orientation. I began to realise that art schools operated a kind of apartheid. You either made images or wrote about them. You certainly didn’t try to do both. That smacked of dilettantism.

The attitude hasn’t gone away, entirely. The PhD Fine Art (which combines practice-based research with reflective, critical, theoretical, and historical writing) is a threat to this outlook. It implies that an artist can operate in both realms simultaneously and comfortably. (Which is not to underestimate the enormous challenge that doctoral studies represents.) Those who undertake the degree aren’t better artists than those who haven’t. However, they emerge from the experience the better for it, and as a radically different type of artist.

September 30 (Wednesday). 6.30 am: On reflection.

6.30 am: Writing and review. 8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: On with further sample extractions and the development of a sound device that will serve as the warp and weft of the magic carpet. Libby’s rug is woven horizontally and vertically. However, sound can be composed only from left to right and from top to bottom (by a process of superimposition). I set out to create a ‘sonic loom’.

It never rains but it pours. While racing like the clappers to complete the sound interpretation of the rug by the deadline I’d set myself, I received an invitation to participate in a conference, which will be held in early November. In a curious and entirely unexpected way, its theme meshed with one of the projects with which I’m currently engaged in. Therefore, I may be able to respond to the request positively. But consultation is required before a decision can be made. I’ll sleep on it.

See also: Intersections (archive);  Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Studium; Academia; Facebook: The Noises of Art; Bluesky; Instagram; @Threads; YouTube; Archive of Visual Practice