Implausibly I have two rolls of film which I managed to keep about 17 years without developing. I Found them in a box of old film at Christmas. They are photos from a school rugby tour I went on in 1992. (That's me down at the bottom there.)
The effect of keeping them hidden for so long made the final result more exciting than simply looking at old photos. The film stock has aged, darkened round the edges and taken on ghostly tints.
I have decided to take a couple of rolls in the coming weeks on film stock that is likely to age badly. I'll hide them away in the film box and come back to them in 5 or so years. See you in 2015.
German painter and photographer Richter is exhibiting 49 paintings at the Serpentine which are composed of hundreds of blocks of flat colour. They were composed by a computer programme which calculated created an entirely chance configuration of tones. The gallery note informs us that a dice was then rolled by Richter to choose the orientation and positioning of the works in the gallery.
Standing in the central space of the Serpentine the blocks of colour give me the sense of being in a nursery. The statistical operations they represent lead me back to thinking about the power of number crunching data to rip huge wormholes in national economies when put into the hands of investment bankers. It also reminds me of a title: ‘Un coup de désjamaisn’abolira le hazard.’
Richter’s dice operation makes me think about Stéphane Mallarmé rich and strange poem. I don’t pretend to understand it but I looked it up this evening and was stunned again by its beauty. It's criminal to try and typeset it or translate extracts out of context so here are a few pages from the original French booklet:
