stillben

Data Flow Diagrams and photography. 

Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method was a module that didn’t make sense on my degree course and was a book with a purple and blue jacket. I was thinking about it at the weekend. It had data flow diagrams like this, used words like ‘relationships’ and entities. It tried to label actions between entities, often people. One phrase was looping around my head on Sunday before I saw this show…’Normalise data to the third level’. I remember re-reading that chapter many times, that and databases never made sense to me but I passed it anyway. 

I like work like that. Where someone is riffing on an idea that might not make much sense or have a point but where he gets to use show his thoughts anyway. 

A man at the gallery came up to me with avery clean iPad and asked if i would fill in a survey about my visit. Yes of course i would. He held it up for me while i ticked the boxes and scored things very good, hard to say things are shit when someone is standing watching (not that it was). I said I could do with a man like him holding my iPad for me at home, he blushed a bit. I complimented him on his clean device too, and he reeled away. No harm done, being nice to someone.  

From the talk Living with Nihilism by Elijah Millgram at the Ashmolean.

Not sure if this was the work of the Leamington Surrealists or the Situationists. Certainly subversives. 

Le Pont Retard Tesco

Bridge behind Tesco’s last night

Euan is pretending to be flustered.

I went to Oxford today. I went to a show at Modern Art Oxford by Stephen Willats Concious-Unconcious In and Out the Reality Check which had data flow diagrams with pictures of people in them, attributing relationships to the strangers he had filmed on the street, or relationships between static objects, datastreams he called them, using words attached to vases giving one a description like subversive, another manager. he did the same with a tower block, labeling relationships between two rooms/entities and what they did, creative, sympathiser, lover with arrows and boxes like my System Analysis degree i did, which i have been thinking about a bit lately, coincidentally. It had very basic photography in it, which had a solid feel to it. I liked it, it was fun and refreshing. One piece, he tried to capture the amount of information in a walk down an out of Central London High Street, grabbing frames from a super 8 film, printing these and then with text decribing the sounds he heard. 

Then i went to the Ashmolean to see what talks they had on today. They had a philosophical day about Hume, not sure who he is. 

I went to a talk by Richard Fry for about 20 minutes but i’ve lost my notes on that which is a shame. Something about carburettors, brocolli and bureaucrats, something about ideas come from experience.

I went to another talk as i liked the title ‘Living with Nihilism’ title as i thought it might be a self-help. In a way it was. That’s a room full of Nihilists above, I thought, but they were mainly interested in philosophy. It was high level stuff, I think i need to expose myself to new thinking to move on from what I’ve been doing already and see if talking about ideas and managing projects with means-end reasoning can affect this. 

That’s Elijah Millgrain above giving his Living with Nihilism talk. 

Good that Oxford does this kind of thing, you can just walk in and get stuff like this off the street. Free coffee too.