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Quick one as I didn't have time to write this directly after the gallery closed.
A fair few visitors, all young-ish (20s) and mostly with an art bent. Am thinking I should take a photograph of everyone I talk to so I can get the computer to work out the average. The filter that an "art gallery" door puts on wider society is something the art scene doesn't like to talk about too much.
That said, from my perspective it's good to talk to people who at least kinda get where I'm coming from. I love explaining the basic principles, as they're the foundation of what I'm doing, but it's good to get into the details.
However, I can't remember those specific details. To rectify this I'm going to start recording myself with a clip-on mic. This won't be made public and is simply to be scrolled through at the end of the day when I write stuff up. (As a contrast, yesterday I was able to talk about my conversation with Tess because we were looking at stuff online so I just went through the browser history. We may well have covered other things.)
Of course, just because I can't remember them doesn't mean they didn't impact the work. The Instruction Station, of which I'm the CPU, changes without my knowing it based on all inputs. An off-hand comment that connects will change the model of reality in my mind even if I don't notice it. The main challenge is monitoring that change, something I don't think I'll properly figure out for a while.
At the start of the day we had a school visit from James Brindley, one of the schools working with BOM. I spoke to them briefly about being an artist, which I really enjoy doing with kids who might not be succeeding in the school system as I certainly didn't, and yet here I am doing proper thinky stuff and getting paid. (Non-secret: I have no real qualifications past a few GCSEs.) Feels like an important thing too, to show them an adult that doesn't fit into the model of "grown up" that the capitalism doesn't encourage. I hope I planted a couple of seeds.
A new piece / work / game appeared on the shelves yesterday. Brown Instruction Cards are more formal versions of the instructions that come from the Black Box. These are consciously written by me and printed on brown card, which I have decided is signifier of importance. If someone takes a brown card they HAVE to follow it and they HAVE to send me the results. One card was taken yesterday: "Make bad art."
