Iain Cameron's Diary
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2005-10-31 - 5:30 p.m.

Another day on the Learning Grid - the vision of design and technology has grown into a concensus.. I followed it through some academic appraisal and a current exercise to update the curriculum and mailed Steve with a suggestion how we could use the core of the vision as the basis of our next survey but one - also mailed the people I met at Oxford Brookes proposing some collaboration. That was really the better part of the day. The network at the office was being worked on and everything was running very slowly indeed - its hard to keep the momentum going when everything takes an age to load.

I have upgraded the account at diary-land which means that am staringt to get web-stats. I was intrigued to see that one of the early visitors had come in from the Sylvia Plath site where I left a note about the Sublime of the Small - something that I had quite forgotten about.

I took a few digital photos of Laurence on Wednesday and I have put them into an AV which uses the recent recording that I like most based on Making Waves and including some Electric Elf. It seems to be about the image of thought - how thought is represented or coded. Obviously you can represent a thought by just writing it down as I am now. Another idea that�s around and which Laurence rather liked comes from Skelton - that poems are attempts to explain mental events. There�s a mental event that has some propositional content but its true extent, character, implications etc are not clear . They are worked out in a poem which uses various devices to share the assessment of whatever that trigger is and what its implications might be. Well imagine that account of poetizing is more or less right (of course it may not be) - how might one represent someone who has thoughts in this manner? Maybe the AV is an offer in that direction.

Have I mentioned the latest EBTG recording to arrive? - its called Temperamental and its even more technological than its predecessor, Walking Wounded. It has been on the car audio most of the week winding me up to wonder how on earth the two of them organise matters. The singing persona seems to have quite a distinctive life-style and preferences. There is a kind of muse-driven search which on this CD seems to take place mostly at night in clubs and involve a personal risk and exposure . There�s a fair amount of retrospection and creation of the back-narrative. And then there�s the dialogue with the partner figure who is seen as hard to handle and out of tune with the lyric persona. This could all be a construction I suppose? Certainly the house-rules are to maintain the boundaries pretty resolutely.

I read a review of a collection of Danto articles - I don�t have the collection. But the review went on a lot about Kant - fair enough if you ask me. Danto has looked like a Hegelian of late but perhaps he is really a Kantian. The reviewer suggests that Kantians think that art is really about propositional meanings - and that this is indeed true of Danto - that this explains why he likes writing about art in the twenty years after 1956 so much. Its certainly a provocative period for philosophically minded artists. The other night I was reading some Adrian Piper about how both her art and her philosophy were formed in that period - and indeed she is a Kantian.

A later view might be that you should put yourself into your art - to the maximum - never mind whether it hangs together as a philosophy. That would be a Deleuzean view.I suppose you might add that you should put yourself into the art so much so that you abandon your narrative self and engage with your minimal self. Part of the small in the sublime of the small is the fact that the minimal self is in fore-grounded.

Just maybe beyond that is the idea that the self that goes in is some kind of narrative self but quite possibly a spurious one who bears an artfully elliptical relationship to the evolving minimal self.

I wrote to Gilbert�s friend Carsten about the short stories.

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