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red key, blue castle

From a group of pictures I worked on back in summer 2005. This has come back to me now because it seems to touch on the whole Hidden Fortress and shows how I could be using text differently from how I do now, at least in disparate pictures.

This also made me think of the old Atari adventure game (which i was thinking of when made the picture. This was a computer game with the most basic of plots revolving around solving puzzles and threading mazes and killing the odd dragon in order to unite keys with castles, releasing dragons to slay and eventually getting hold of the chalice. I got pretty good at it. I found the instructions here. The simplicity of the thing holds up and seems to strike a chord in this more numinous quest.

An evil magician has stolen the Enchanted Chalice and has hidden it
somewhere in the Kingdom.The object of the game is to rescue the
Enchanted Chalice and place it inside the Golden Castle where it belongs...

There are three castles in the Kingdom; the White Castle, the Black
Castle, and the Golden Castle.Each castle has a Gate over the
entrance.The Gate can be opened with the corresponding colored Key.
Inside each Castle are rooms(or dungeons, depending at which Skill Level
you are playing). 

I loved that game! I wonder how I can thread this into the work?

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Also today, I had a fantasy about using the graduate project space to work on this project: big screen grab printouts from Kurosawa, a model forest with strings leading off to pictures stuck on the walls, me at the centre playing Adventure. With or without a suit of armour? What's the meaning of the mystery? What's it about?

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Another part of the day was spent photographing material for the library for Abolition 200. The above image has nothing to do with it, of course (it was part of a poster advising people to carry on working for the continued prosperity of Bristol and never mind that cholera nonsense). There are great scrapbooks filled with all sorts of fascinating ephemera that bring out a sense of the great unknown history of life in Bristol.

Perhaps some of these images might turn out to be the 'treasures' associated with the hidden fortress that must be put together? Maybe the quest to find the hidden fortress is actually solved by getting a library ticket (!).

Funnily enough, this is a theme I've already explored with Holden's Silence. But now I have another dimension in terms of folding different 'domains' together. The woods are a map to other places, including the library, which is, in the best Borgesian tradition, the map to all the places human minds have been.

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Finally, there was a peacock butterfly sitting on my wheelie bin when I got home:

The rest of the evening rubberstamping borders on my Turndust covers, and cooked dinner for Lindy.

Technorati Tags: atari, adventure, forest, key, photo, hidden fortress, leigh woods, art, BookArt, eason, cholera, abolition 200, map, library, borges, butterfly, rubberstamp

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Tiercel Movie

Tiercel Movie (The link takes ages but does work if you've got Quicktime)

This has been kicking around for some time. I finally got around to putting on some kind of soundtrack music. I've found that  iPhoto's  pre-packaged web exports seem to do the best job of delivering a file of anything like acceptable size, despite my tinkering with various compression regimes/framerates/palettes/screen sizes. The only problem with this solution (which gives a filesize of about 9mB with identical-seeming quality to my next-best effort at 24mB), is that it outputs to the wrong screen size ( a 4:3 ratio, as opposed to my eccentric choice based on the size of the book pages the film was based on) Anyone know what settings I should use, or what ones have been used in iMovie's settings? Is there something inherent in the aspect ratio I've gone for that defeats the compression algorithms somehow?

Anyway, here, at last, is the Tiercel film on the web. It looks a lot better from here but I thought a 400mB QT was asking a bit much of my reader.

bz

bz, originally uploaded by aesop.

soon to be realized as a gigantic steel sculpture over Bristol.

Nah, just wishful thinkin'.

We only get ships'n'engineerin'n'ships hereabouts. How about a monument to CIDER?