Christmas has passed.
Christmas 2020 was a quiet affair with a very small bubble as London went into tier 4 just as that team was about to leave to join us. The variant we are being informed about gives more cause for concern and the figures go relentlessly upwards. It is so depressing, debilitating and Soul destroying, leading to emotions of helplessness as the problem is too large to be resolved by individual actions, no matter how socially responsible.
Snow and presents
It has snowed. Mesmerising as ever and a welcome reminder that the season’s continue.
I’ve had two surprise presents. No One is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thundberg points to the issues to be addressed if the seasons are to continue to be predictable and Birmingham Lockdown Stories by Jaskirt Boora. I ordered Jaskirt’s book as I was photographed by her in the sun-kissed first Lockdown, for inclusion in the series of portraits people of diverse backgrounds from Birmingham, contending with Covid. Jaskirt included an extract from our conversation about how I have drawn my way through Lockdown.
As I have never grown a beard the portrait is the one and only image of myself with one. Jaskirt also included my drawing of Vanley Burke being listened to at his HOME Exhibition celebrating elder Black Women at the Birmingham Hippodrome.
You can buy a copy from https://www.jaskirtboora.com/store
Digital Traumas cont…..
I am still spending Lockdown-time with my laptop and our relationship with the new virtual server. There is a job to be done: all the significant image files that have been collated on a personal internet space over the last 15 years have to be re-collated to take their place on the new accessible 2021 server presence.
What began as an updating of the internet hosting webspace has become a reconfiguration of the visual life experience documentation, that is hosted. In the process the relationship with images becomes the arranging of inanimate files. I am not making warm creative new images or relationships between images as they are gathered and presented but am organising digital files of information into digital matrixes, included or deleted at the stoke of a keyboard key. The experiential meanings behind the taking and retaining of an image over time is diminished, as the technical requirements of arranging each in a templated structure, that has been selected earlier, is the overriding focus. Perhaps I do not have the computing skills to see creative possibilities as the technical, functional use of the technology determines the job in hand.
The parameters of virtual server organisation via the file manager are being internalised as the compilation process grows the accumulating saved image files. Getting to grips with a new virtual organising platform as an ‘administrator’ has more responsibility than previous use of a web hosting platform as a ‘customer /user.’
A folder cannot be deleted. It can be removed, but not deleted. A trace remains. A database entry that cannot be erased? Although empty a folder is a visual reminder of previous significance, which has redefined, when attention is needed to be paid to active folders of significant value. Another Helpdesk call suggested that folders can be deleted via file transfer protocol.
Eventually it will all have to be backed up!!! Double the virtual space.
Lest we forget
covid update
Seemingly vaccines are on the way, but the figures just keep rising with the UK a terrible third in the world rankings.
Thats it
