ACHILLES, EXHAUSTED

Image copyright Zenopress 2017

Achilles often raises a sweaty fist to squint through sweat or rain at the display of his smart watch placidly blinking information on his heart rate, pulse, steps taken – many and too many – speed, direction. The watch dutifully uploads this to a website every minute, where he recalls - he thinks he recalls - algorithms collate it into graphs and tables every twenty four hours. He imagines brightly coloured horizontal lines crawling across the screen describing peaks and troughs, intersected by black verticals describing heart rate over distance, strides over time, breaths over heart rate. It was part of some sponsorship deal or other. He’s forgotten by now with whom or what the deal was made.

The brief excerpt above is from a piece of prose in a new anthology which is just out from Zeno Press. All the work in it is inspired by, or related to one of Zeno's paradoxes. Mine takes Achilles and the Tortoise as its starting point. My fellow contributors are:

Richard Skinner 
Maria Fusco 
Steven J Fowler 
John Boursnell
Liz Zumin 
Paolo Inverni 
Jeremy Evans
Nicola Woodham
Claudia Kappenberg 
Giovanna Coppola
Clover Peake
Tasha Haines 
Christian Patracchini

Get hold of it from here. 

FLUMI

New acquisition - a friction beater, otherwise known as a flumi. I tried a DIY version using a superball (rubber bouncing ball), but the first attempt split the ball and the second, the ball was too slick to get much purchase on a surface to make a noise. Either sanding the superball down or getting ones that have some sort of matt textured surface is probably the answer. The flexibility of the handle is also an important factor, the ball vibrates against the surface and anything too stiff isn't going to facilitate vibration. My second attempt was to screw a superball to the fat end of a drumstick - in addition to the too-smooth surface, the rigidity of the stick wasn't going to help. The other thing that I have discovered, and that any proper drummer/percussionist would have told me, is that one's grip on the beater has a distinct effect on the sound; obvious, now. Anyway, it's a great thing and I've discovered a number of objects/surfaces that can be made to resonate, in a slightly unsettling way, in some cases. The bannisters of the staircase in my building being an example - 3 storeys of steel reverberating with a low frequency howl down the stairwell. I will be doing more of this and having another attempt at making my own flumis in a variety of sizes.

A post shared by Robin Bale (@balerobin) on Jul 7, 2017 at 8:39am PDT

POO-TEE-WEET AT THE ASC GALLERY

Homage to K Vonnegut. So it goes.

Poo tee weet by Robin Bale, Electric Spectra, Domain of Sensible Knowledge, ASC Gallery 1/6/17. from Nicola Woodham on Vimeo.

NEW PROJECT....

The Patterers

Further details to be announced in the next week or two.

BIKE CEMETERY VALEDICTION

A valedictory iteration of some of the - now sadly occluded - inscriptions on the Bike Cemetery wall. This video was taken at the Bike Cemetery on a Sunday in May 2017.
WOLF VANISH from robin bale on Vimeo.