New and Old

This afternoon saw me visit one of my favourite London high streets, the Kings Road in Kensington, for a relaxed Sunday afternoon. After pouring over the economist while grabbing a quick lunch and coffee at my favourite Lebanese cafe, I filled by bag with pastries from Paul, and made a beeline for the Saachi Gallery. British Art Now is the theme of the latest exhibition, and unsprisingly, to me at least, it was a little bit too knowing and ironic, and I found it hard to really connect with much of the collection. There are of course some standout works, and the permanent Richard Wilson installation in the basement gallery is worth the trip on its own.

One gallery that stood out for me was a large installation by John Wynne, which looked at first glance like the worlds worst curated hi fi shop. Scattered speakers of various vintages, dimensions and designs are scattered across the space, culminating in the corner of the gallery, where they stack against the wall like a hi fi wasps nest. An old upright piano is embedded in this audio diaspora, operated by means of an old hoover. The resulting sound is combined digitally with ambient noise from the gallery space, and played through the speakers, creating a continuously undulating and evolving tide of sound described as an "abstract 3-D opera in slow motion".

The decrepid piano, and speakers, combined with cutting edge digital audio equipment reminded me greatly of the laboratories where I spend much of my professional life. The visual language of laboratories can often be the very embodiment of this 'old meets new' aesthetic that worked to great aesthetic effect in the Wynne installation. Old combining with new is of course also the visual language of the future, one of the reasons 'Blade Runner' captures the imagination so well is the way the film sets build the future on top of the present and the past. Anthony Burgess also achieved a similar effect in A Clockwork Orange, by splicing archaic English vocabulary in to the mix when confecting the slang spoken by the feral youth of the future.

I think it is time to curate a gallery of work inspired by the equipment that scientists have used over the last one hundered years to achieve our current state of technological greatness. These are machines and devices which were often not designed with aesthetics in mind, but accidentally ended up part of the visual fabric of modern life. This accidental aspect is facinating, how many times have I wandered past an unused piece of eqipment in a corridor and marvelled both at how out of date it looks, but also at the way it still suggests a narrative even today. For next week I might start my own photographic record of these devices to honor them.

As an aside, the economist this week contains a special section discussing the human genome, which I found very thought provoking.