Just around the corner from where I live is a glass-fronted building which has two inter-leafed and over-sized molded books sticking out from the window. On a street otherwise made up of Victorian terraced houses and ramshackle auto workshops, it looks quite the part. Above the front door is a sign saying FLAT TIME HO.

This is Flat Time House, home and studio of the late artist John Latham.

I didn’t know very much about John Latham before I visited. In fact I didn’t even know he was dead, which is perhaps why I hadn’t visited Flat Time House before, imagining it was a working studio. I guess death can sometimes make you more approachable.

When I read about him, I remembered some furore over one of his ‘God is Great’ installations (wikipedia says #2, but I seem to remember it being #4 – edit The Independent says it was #2 as well) which was withdrawn from a Tate Britain exhibition in the aftermath of the 7th of July London bombings. He might have been interviewed about it on the Today programme. But that was about all I knew.

After passing through the initial gallery space which features some of the original visualisations of Flat Time, you can walk down a corridor to a small library/performance suite. From there, you can go through the garden to the Office of Experiments. The Flat Time House website‘s tour of the house tells us these these rooms and house parts are titled The Face, The Mind, The Brain, The Body Event and The Hand. Though to be honest, I get lost around ‘The Body Event’ in terms of the rooms I visited. That might have been upstairs and off limits.

As the name suggests, the building is dedicated the investigation of Flat Time,  a Theory of Everything that Latham conceived together with Barbara Steveni.

If you’re interested, you should read this Introduction to Flat Time, but in a hugely oversimplified nutshell it’s an attempt to get around the contradictions between Einstein’s Relativity and Quantum Mechanics by considering ‘events’ rather than particles as the basic building blocks on the Universe. What we perceive to be physical things are ‘constellations of events’.

In visual terms, The Universe is  described as being like a roller blind:

If one imagines a roller blind hanging against a wall and unrolling slowly from the back, flat against that wall, with the whole of the turning roller visible at all times.

“Passing time” is represented by rotation of the roller and “History” (or “passed time”) by the vertical left and right hand edges of the blind as they descend under the influence of gravity.

“Time-Base” is represented by the lateral width of the roller, on which one can mark various phenomenal events as bands, their “width” representing their “time base”.

Micro-events to the left and macro-events to the right, hence the extreme left of the roller represents the origin of the universe in the big bang at a micro level when (supposedly) everything started from a point, before which there was “no time or space” in the conventional sense and the right hand end of the roller represents the whole cosmos of universes, the “total event” as a whole. So the roller (or a computer modelled analogue of it) can be used to represent the whole spectrum from microcosmos to macrocosmos.

“Flat-Time” is the area mapped on that roller by any given “event-structure” as, and after it has, occurred.

It can be seen that the history of an atomic particle, a leaf, or a person, could be precisely represented by different shapes of stain on the descending flat portion of the roller.

If the banding is on the front of the roller, then as it turns up and over and descends behind, it becomes invisible and inaccessible, even though it remains there and accessible to forensic excavation and reconstruction, just as all “histories” do.

It’s complicated. But it reads like a real theory. It references and builds upon real, peer-reviewed scientific papers. It’s not a clever, post-modern, pastiche science-as-art thing. It seems like a genuine attempt to explain the Universe, that harks back to times when anyone could have scientific ideas, even artists. It’s a throw back to da Vinci and the pursuits of the ‘gentlemen scientists’ of the 18th and 19th centuries.  As Latham says (bold mine):

It may be an irrelevance to remember that Einstein was a Patent clerk before his theoretical work made him famous but the reasons why “Flat Time” has come from the art trajectory are rather more logical. It is just as much the artist’s professional business to envisage, reflect and propose the nature of “what is the case” as is the scientist’s. Both artist and scientist are concerned with the same axis, but travelling with opposite “spin”, the scientist being convergent and the artist being divergent, although both move constantly forward to create the way we envisage and by thus envisaging, shape our “reality” and indeed the possibilities of our future.

Is it really a scientific theory? The whole ‘but is it science?’ thing is a real can of worms. Philosophy of science has had trouble defining what makes a  theory ‘scientific’, which is why something as ridiculous as creationism vis-a-vis evolution gets any credence at all. You just can’t pin it down.

Perhaps with this in mind, and with a tip of the hat to Popperian Falsifiability – ie,  a theory should be refutable if it wants to be thought of as scientific – The Flat Time House crew have laid down the gauntlet of The Wager: “Although technically a wager based on the notion that Flat Time Theory can be proved or disproved, it has been reduced to a legal bet, and welcomes challengers to provide evidence for or against these ideas, laid down in Latham’s publications”. To be honest, I think they’re moving closer to the realms of the clever, post-modern, pastiche science-as-art thing here, but it looks like good fun.

And because we all like games: “Even The Odds continues the theme of game-playing and gambling. Viewers can take part in a specially designed dice game: a gentle reminder of the event/no-event structure of Latham theory.” You can walk away with a pair of  custom blank-except-for-the-ones dice if you throw a 1-1, like the person after me did.

It’s open to visitors by the appointment, so if you’re in the area, you should book a visit.

Large cat, originally uploaded by meltingman.

The new turbine hall installation by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster is good.

As soon as you push through the plastic curtains and find yourself looking at banks of bunk beds, it feels like a sort of mass evacuation isolation ward. There are raised wall-mounted industrial lights and a constant dripping. Like ‘The Crack’ from last year, it places you in a new, uncomfortable post-event London. The Crack gave a feeling of physical insecurity (or at least it did me), that maybe our foundations aren’t as solid as maybe we’d like to think. This seems more of an amalgamation of fears expressed. Biological. Social.

The separate items at the far end of the hall don’t sit as well together, but an oversized cat skeleton and a large screen are a fantastic combination for anyone with a camera.

you made me realise, originally uploaded by meltingman.

Truly outstanding. On sunday night, the mid-section of You Made Me Realise was apparently timed at 18 minutes of pure noise. Last night we thought it was longer. Over on last.fm, it was described as like having a jet engine in your face. For me, it felt like being inside an earthquake. I understand Kevin Shields has been remastering the old albums, rumour has it for the last 3 years. A modern-day Beethoven, more deaf than not, trying in vain to translate the noise he hears in his head.

I cycle past this everyday. I like it. At first I thought it was the most ridiculous flagrant waste of energy I’d ever seen. But then I removed my head from my arse. Plus one particularly cold night while cycling home I stopped to put my hands on it.  I could still feel the warmth in my gloves past Kennington Park.

More info on the gasworks website

Through his dedication to the cause and (I’m guessing) quick-typing wizardry, Dan has shown that it’s possible to disseminate real-world events online in all but real-time. The way he talks around the talks gets across a great feeling of the events  that compliments the youtube footage and flickr group really well.

As Derrida (I think – though it might have been an advert on the telly) once said, in order to understand the object, you have to be able to see what surrounds it. A thing is given definition and context by that which is outside of it.

Is it possible to get another view of how we live our lives by looking at what’s happening while we’re inbetween the ‘doing’ bits?

It might possibly be with this in mind that The Wait Gallery has opened for business.

The Wait Gallery is a space for people to exhibit work they have made whilst waiting for something else. It might be a sketch done whilst waiting for a bus or a train, a photo taken whilst at the airport or the doctors, anything created whilst waiting for something else.

Nice.

From: Niki Doubledee
Subject: Few of us ever met Chris McKinstry in person.

You cannot stop services in a clustered environment.
Work basket I could buy Molly’s birthday.
Here’s the method I use.
Wonder how it first struck him.
Harry, whose insides were aching with hunger, jumped off his bed and seized it.
When the bellows finally stopped pumping and the Jacob’s Ladder stopped sparking, the go button turned back to blue.
But first he drank out of the bucket himself.
This will launch and control LINES.
Wonder did he put that bible to the same use as I would.

But then you google a couple of the lines and some of it becomes intriguing:

One of our beloved colleagues, K. Christopher McKinstry, passed away on January 23. The cause of death was an apparent suicide. Chris was well known to the inner circle of chatterbot enthusiasts who cluster around the Robitron mailing list and the Loebner Prize contest. Even among eccentrics and excommunicated outcasts of academia, Chris sometimes expressed views and ideas that seemed incomprehensible and outrageous. His Mindpixel project however produced a unique contribution to A. I. research and no doubt will serve as a valuable corpus for years to come. Few of us ever met Chris McKinstry in person.

A Canadian citizen, he lived in Chile and worked for several years as a telescope operator there. Our view of him will be forever clouded by what is nowadays called cyber disinhibition. Goodbye Chris, we will miss you. It is people like you who make guys like me look normal.

Some of it is sci-fi:

When the bellows finally stopped pumping and the
Jacob’s Ladder stopped sparking, the go button
turned back to blue. A pale wisp of smoke curled from
the bottom drawer, and I heard a muffled yelp. Arlene
and I wrestled the drawer open. Inside was a living
Klave, blinking rapidly and trying to focus his eyes.
Arlene unlatched the side of the drawer, and either
Sears or Roebuck tumbled out onto the deck.

And some is plain disappointing:

You can apply SP2 without restarting your computer by stopping the following services and applications before applying the service pack:

•	Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MS DTC) and the Microsoft Search and MSSQLServerOLAPService services.
•	MSSQLServer and SQLServerAgent services for the instance being upgraded (for example, MSSQL$NamedInstance).
•	Microsoft Component Services, Microsoft Message Queuing, and Microsoft COM Transaction Integrator.
•	All applications, including Control Panel. This step is recommended, but not required.

You cannot stop services in a clustered environment. For more information, see section 3.10.

But I have to say it’s still the best email I’ve had all day…

Completely agree that the sound was as captivating as the imagery. Standing out for me: the deafening silence of the crowd after Villareal score their penalty, punctured only by the squeal-like noise of the opposing players as their celebration takes them past Zidane… That Zidane’s only words (that I can recall) other than the occassional aqui and si, were a gutteral You should be ashamed of yourself…, muttered into the ear of the referee in the aftermath of the penalty…

the unwired light garden, by eness.

The interaction reminds me a little of some of the digital pieces that featured in the UK Pavilion of Expo 2005 Aichi Japan which I was lucky enough to visit last year.