November 11, 2016

Yesterday: After the 9.00 am Art/Sound lecture (on this occasion, my desk lamp rendered up the ghost), Dr Forster and I had a ‘feet didn’t touch the ground’ sort of day, delivering interim, indicative assessment-cum-feedback tutorials to our second year painting students. This was a first, for us and them. These were intended to make them aware of their performance at the halfway stage in the module. In the evening, I cleared away teaching administrations for the week that’s past, finalised track modifications for the forthcoming CD (so that’s now ‘done and dusted’), and got back to the conference paper, with an increasing sense of urgency.

6.30 am: The first light of day:

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7.00 am: Next week’s classes were organised, outstanding Personal Tutorials arranged, Open Day notifications posted, and my diary rationalised for the week to come. 8.15 am: Back to the paper. Full-steam ahead, and into my Hebrew/Greek lexicon.  10.00 am: A little respite, and an initial poke under the bonnet of Pedalboard I — looking for a space into which the new buffer unit can be fitted:

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10.10 am: More writing; more PowerPoint slide generation. The two go hand-in-hand when it comes to the preparation of a conference paper. 12.00 pm: I began to dismantle the equipment in the studio, used to develop tomorrow’s Dialogues4 project, in readiness for transportation later this afternoon.

1.20 pm: Over lunch, I grated and carted boxes, PA speakers, stands and racks down three flights of stairs in order to begin loading the car. I really do try to use as little equipment as possible. But always … always … my load makes me look like Pink Floyd on a picnic outing. Some ideas demand a great deal of you and material commitment. Either you concede fully, and do what it demands, or else give up the idea. Either response is acceptable. What’s not acceptable, is going only halfway with it. So, the shunt: from studio to front passage to car to school to ground-floor concourse to upper studio to Project Room. At this level of complexity, a great deal could go wrong: things fail; problems inevitably arise. That’s not the issue. Whether you can fix them … now, that’s the issue.

3.45 pm: The final proofs for the CDs artwork and text arrived for review. 4.15 pm: Off to the School to set up the equipment for tomorrow’s open-studio project. The whole builds incrementally, like a painting upon a blank canvas: 1. The empty room; 2. the installation of furnishings (desks stands, and plinths); 3. organising the electrical supplies; 4. setting up the mixer and amplifiers; 5. connecting sound equipment to the mixer; 6. Testing the system, one section at a time:

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6.30 pm: Homeward. I still need to complete a sound check on my part of the system, tomorrow morning. An early start is in order.

7.30 pm: My sons begin to return for the weekend of Eifion Gwynne‘s funeral.

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