Sunday, September 13, 2015

Circuit Boards and wine making


I will not be doing any art work for about 10 days as I will be helping a friend with the grape harvest, Yes, wine making is what I will be doing for the next few days. Unfortunately it is not wine drinking, but the labour of picking the grapes off the vines, de-stemming them (thank goodness the de-stemming is done by a machine) and starting the fermentation. If you like wine from Portugal - lookout for "Quinta da Sapeira". The wine farm is run by Inês (a woman in a man's domian) and she has won gold and silver medals in Paris, Vienna and now Hong Kong

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Vodafone


No matter where you go, who you are with, the time of day or night, you will inevitably see an advert for a mobile phone company. It is the pure definition of being ubiquetes. You can not escape it, it is like the panting woman that is about to give birth - there is no way that you can prevent it (well at least by natural means. Probably by shooting yourself you will no longer see these phone adverts. But if you blotch up the shooting, you may very well be seeing some more adds post recovery). Because circuit boards are a part of our lives, they exist in almost very item that you lay your hands on - so why not use then in our artwork as well. The phone that you are using, the watch that is on your arm, the remote control that opens the garage door and changes the canal on the TV - they all have one thing in common: the circuit board that makes them work. We have reached the stage where the circuit board is the modern day equivalent of the wheel. But just as you do not need to re-invent the wheel, just improve it, so it is with the circuit board. In all of the old appliances that I destroyed, the boards were large, the components were also very large and the space between the lines on the boards were very well spaced. Some of the newer boards, the soldered lines were very much more closer to each other, to the point that they were almost indistinguishable from each other. I suppose size does matter: less weight, space and raw materials.