Am in Stuttgart, where I did a fascinating session last night for Bosch. Came in, with a few hassles along the way caused by cancelled flight, from Copenhagen. And in that context this article in today’s International New York Times really rang true. A clever play on our heart-strings, perhaps, but a pretty powerful analysis of the realpolitik, too.
Journal
The Zoo, The Museum And The Campus
A catch-up blog, after a Red Queen month. Highlights of recent weeks include:
- a visit by former Santa Fe Institute president Geoffrey West to Volans on Monday 8th February, who now features in our first Exponentials interview;
- my chairing on the 9th of a Tesco hosted stakeholder session at London Zoo on the thorny subject of ‘sustainable tuna’ (blog to come), followed by a private view of the Science Museum’s new Leonardo exhibition on the same evening;
- my latest Imperial College lecture on the 17th; a wonderful evening with David Wheeler on the 19th, after which he sent me copies of John le Carré’s Absolute Friends (almost finished and hugely engaging) and the new biography of le Carré;
- took part in a panel session on the theme of ‘Will Tech Unicorns Save the Planet?’ at London’s Google Campus;
- talked to a seemingly endless stream of fascinating people coming through the office, including biomimicry’s Michael Pawlyn on the 22nd, Jeanne-Marie Gescher and Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase on 2nd March, David Grayson on 3rd March, and Thomas Ermacora on the 3rd;
- calls with people like Andrew Winston, Jessi Baker of Provenance, and Alex Steffen;
- and ‘Exponential’ working sessions with Lorraine Smith in NYC, David Bent of Forum for the Future and Simon Hampel of Leaders’ Quest.
Meanwhile the magnolia tree stays in bloom in Bloomsbury, the crocuses are up on the Common, the Egyptian geese on the Pond have produced a large clutch of goslings, the decluttering of 1 Cambridge Road proceeds apace, the EU debate gets into its idiotic stride, and the US elections continue to career towards a possible Trump:Clinton shoot-out.
Took the bike into Cloud 9 Cycles in Bloomsbury a couple of days ago. They warned me that the frame may be unsafe, though I responded that the dent in the cross-bar dates back 15 years to when a car hit me, while the slightly distorted front forks, I think, to the Russian collision 18 months ago, since when I haven’t cycled. Not sure which way this is all going to pan out.
Volans, By Murat Sayginer
Out of the blue today, I received an email from Turkey. It came from Murat Sayginer, an artist who in 2014, I learned, did a short film featuring Pisces volans, the flying fish – our totem at Volans.
The film, Volans, was a Vimeo Staff Pick. Spookily, it features many images that have been important to me over the decades, including skeletons, spirals, starfields, 2001-like tunnels, and my beloved flying fish. The style of imagery reminds me of LSD in 1969.
So I asked him how the film had done since it was released? He replied: “It screened at lots of festivals and received over 250.000 views. The community liked it a lot. The flying fish is like my alter-ego,” he explained, “and I got curious about the web domain and found you!”
Currently working as a freelance visual artist and filmmaker he has a project called Animals, consisting of 72 collages that he is selling as open edition prints. The Flying Fish print is the first of the two images above.
The short film Volans ends with one – and then a shoal – of flying fish heading in towards Planet Earth. Exactly the sort of imagery I would have liked to conjure when drawing in the 1970s.
Inspired me to go upstairs, and fish out one of the drawings I did in 1978, according to the dating. This one featured human and ostrich skeletons walking across the backs of a vanishing landscape of crocodiles, but doesn’t show what another in the series showed – a series of golden dolphins breaking through the tsunami front, like claws in a giant linear paw.
Weird what the human brain will conjure.
RIP Captain Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown
Very sorry to hear news of the death of ‘Winkle’ Brown, but his obituary in today’s Times makes utterly fascinating reading. Some of the statistics of his career can be found here, courtesy of the BBC. Tim this morning recalled Brown as a “hoot”.
Finally, Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies
It’s taken us a while to get to see Spielberg’s extraordinary film on the Cold War, but today (hot on the heels of Star Wars yesterday) we did – and found it stunningly well made. Makes me determined to get to The End of the Cold War, by Robert Service, which is one of my stacks of impending books to read.
I have clear memories of the Wall going up, Powers’ u2 coming down, and the subsequent Powers-Abel exchange. And the scene of the young boy preparing for an atomic bomb burst brought back memories of young nightmares, too. I also recall the moment in the late 1950s when we were living in Northern Ireland and Tim went off for many months to fly fall-out monitoring missions around the British bomb-bursts on Christmas Island.
But I had never heard of the parallel-to-Powers story around Yale student Frederic Pryor, nor about the Nuremberg Trials background to the involvement of James Donovan.
A brilliant conjuring of the atmosphere during one of the world’s recurrent periods of paranoia. How long before we’re there again? If President Putin has his way – and perhaps it’s a complete accident that one of the four interogators working over Powers looked rather like an extruded Putin – we will be trading new types of asset across a new generation of Glienicke Bridges or Checkpoint Charlies?