MONDAY

ONE

Trying to plan for the next few weeks.

Marko told me a story about The Codex Seraphinianus, which Marko’s supervisor, Marco Maiocchi, who supervised his Masters in Design in Milan introduced him to. One day Marko was having doubts about his research, or looking for the answers to a question. He went to Marco who searched his shelves for ten minutes and pulled out the codex. He proceeded to spend two hours turning pages and showing Marko this inexplicable stuff as though it was an ordinary textbook, ostensibly searching for a particular page. Eventually he came to the page he was (performatively I guess) looking for and ripped it out for Marko. Here is your answer. Marko went away enlightened, just not in the way he had anticipated. So Marko thinks I should be patient and continue working on the whale whisperer and we’ll move things on next week and the week after working together with João. He said this week is hectic and they are away for three days, but next week we can work with João, and give it one more week and then one ‘cultural contingency’ week and then we’ll have done it. Three weeks from today is Christmas. So that’s the timetable he has in his head and he’s kind of asking me to stick around and be patient and trust him that things will happen and be OK with the slow pace. I can do that, now I have clarity on it.

two

We also talked about pataphysics, which Marko thinks Marko Maiocchi was also involved in at some point. Really interesting absurdist “philosophy of science” invented by Albert Jarry. Connected to Baudrillard and others.

three

Thinking more about 52 Blue - here is a colour chart of 52 possible sea colours for me to go for. It could be a combination of Scotland and Madeira, because it will be hard to find the purer blue’s in Scotland. They are very much here though.

I could bed it in with Rebecca Solnit’s comments about the blue of water in “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”. In the opening to the chapter ‘The Blue of Distance’, she says:

“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost.
Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the
sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water
is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it,
but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the
blue.”

TUESDAY-Thursday

Spent this time grappling with mudbox, a 3d modellling programme that I decided to try and learn to help me take a more active part in the 3d printing process. So far I’ve better understood the problems Dinarte has been having with the original mesh and I’ve tried in vain to fix the mesh errors (holes, unreferenced vertices, lack of mesh in some areas created by filling in the object). George said it needs to be remeshed. So far I’ve been unable to do that successfully so will ask Dinarte again.

Friday

Today is a public holiday here in Madeira. I took the cable car thinking I would visit the Botanical gardens but I was underdressed for the weather and returned straight away. The cable car seemed like a mistake as it was super windy, but this meant I got some really interesting footage. The trees below the car look like seaweed swaying in the wind. I think this could be useful for AIR, WATER, FLESH and EARTH.

Saturday

It was a beautiful day so I decided to walk to the botanical gardens. My step counter told me this was 42 floors and 11,775 steps. It was worth the walk.