the little by little suddenly

'One thousand needles: imagine threading them with a straight thread’ (Yoko Ono 1970: unpaginated)

‘Perception over time equals thought’ (Bill Viola 1995: 150)

'Slowness is a formidable power: it has the passion of immobility with which it will, some day, fuse' (Edmond Jabes 1972: 55-6).

As Anthony Hoete has suggested in his introduction to Roam: Reader on the Aesthetics of Mobility: ‘Mobility, in the contemporary context, is a complex concept, ideologically elusive, difficult to pin down. Mobility is a transitory, transformational state, reconfigurable and self-refreshing, time after time. Mobility is an ‘event-space’, a sequence of appointments and rendezvous. Mobility is multi-dimensional […] polymorphous […] multi-scalar […] multi-linear. Whilst comprised of journeys from A to B, these lines constitute networks: from C to DE via KLM. As such mobility’s multi-dimensionality suggests a matrix, or an array of co-ordinates’ (Hoete 2002: 11-12).

Yet, paradoxically, in practice mobility has also come to infer immobility. We are increasingly obliged to ‘kill time’ suspended in the meanwhile non-places of waiting within the multi-dimensional matrix, crawling along or going nowhere in traffic jams and queues and railway stations and airports, inert in front of computer terminals as the server fails to serve our desires. In our haste to speed up our trajectories through the world we are obliged to slow down, and in this tension for many there is a loss of patience and a kind of impossible suffering. ‘Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?’ (Kundera 1996: 4).

Some art processes and practices school us in slowness, and the qualities of attention that allow what is happening to happen and to take (a) place; they teach us about festina lente – making haste slowly. As Buddhist philosophers have recognised, there is an epistemology of and in slowness, and its propositions are informative and provocative for artists: ‘A rediscovery of the now, relocation in the here; return to the primacy of experience, of the event; rediscovery that facts are relations, that all knowledge exists on the threshold and in the interaction between subject and object (which are themselves only hypostatisations); a rediscovery of ambiguity, of contradiction, of difference; a reassertion that things – and people – are what they do’ (George 1999: 34).

In a 10-day conversation with a small group of dance writers and makers on the shore of Lake Como at Bellaggio in Italy in the summer of 2002, a conversation in which I was delighted to participate, American choreographer Susan Rethorst articulated her sense of choreography as a long, curious wandering: ‘Choreography engages what might be called a more sober passion. It lies in small cumulative moments and decisions, glimpses and glimmers that add slowly through the dailiness, that sneak into a whole consuming reality, a parallel to the rest of one’s life’. André Lepecki, one of those centrally involved in this drifting exchange, had written earlier about ‘the time of dance’: ‘to sit, to listen, to be, to observe, to breathe, to think, to remember – the most urgent choreography’ (Lepecki 1996: 107). Now we talk about the time of conversation, and its dance. The luxury of time, of taking time to make time - of slow wandering and drift and waste and interruption and change of direction and silence and connective emergence and the small ‘violence’ of dislocation - of a slowing down into the complexity and detail of what is happening ‘in the middle’.

I think of the generative deceleration described by Matthew Goulish: ‘Most of us live in fear of slowing down our thinking, because of the possibility that if we succeed we might find that in fact nothing is happening. I guarantee this is not the case. Something is always happening. In fact, some things happen which one can only perceive with slow thinking’ (Goulish 2000: 82).

I think of Bachelard’s suggestion that one of his aims is ‘to school us in slowness’ (Bachelard 1988: vii). I think of Deleuze’s challenge to ‘think other durations’ through memory, art, philosophy, to ‘think the time of becoming’ as intensive rather than extensive, of time as the force of movement whereby movement transforms time by producing new becomings. Movement, he suggests, does not move a body from one point to another (translation), but rather in each aggregation/moment of movement bodies transform and become (vibration/variation/ multiplicity): ‘Movement always relates to a change, migration to a seasonal variation. And this is equally true of bodies: the fall of a body presupposes another one which attracts it, and expresses a change in the whole which governs them both. If we think of pure atoms, their movements which testify to a reciprocal action of all the parts of the substance, necessarily express modifications, disturbances, changes of energy in the whole … beyond translation is vibration, radiation’ (Deleuze 1986: 8-9).

I think of Paul Auster, blocked as a writer, falling out of the momentum of New York into the attenuated rhythms and discontinuous intensities and flows of a dance studio, and the moving stillness of a choreography taking shape: ‘In the beginning I wanted to speak of arms and legs, of jumping up and down, of bodies tumbling and spinning, of enormous journeys through space, of cities, of deserts, of mountain ranges stretching farther than the eye can see. Little by little, however, as these words began to impose themselves on me, the things I wanted to do seemed finally to be of no importance. Reluctantly, I abandoned all my witty stories, all my adventures of far-away places, and began, slowly and painfully, to empty my mind. Now emptiness is all that remains: a space, no matter how small, in which whatever is happening can be allowed to happen’ (Auster 1998: 86).

I think of Bill Viola’s explorations of the intervals below the threshold of perception in works where, as Walter Benjamin wrote of slow-motion: ‘the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses’ (Benjamin 1968: 236).

I think of the French paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin illuminated by his encounters with Mongol communities and with the burnt stones of the Inner Mongolian desert in the early 1920s. Years later he wrote: ‘Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within’ (quoted in Dillard 1999: 13). I think of deep ecologist Arne Naess’s invitation to ‘think like a mountain’, and of Wallace Heim’s notion of ‘slow activism’ (Heim 2003). I think of Marina Abramowic’s statement that she is ‘more and more interested in less and less’.

I think of Andrey Tarkovsky, Clarice Lispector, Edmond Jabès, Bela Tarr, Terrence Malick, WG Sebald, James Turrell, Ann Hamilton, Tacita Dean, David Nash, John Cage, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jem Finer. The slow ones.

The texts and images that follow comprise 24 fragments related to conceptions, perceptions and practices of slowness, where each ‘fragment’ should be understood in Maurice Blanchot’s terms as ‘the patience of pure impatience, the little by little suddenly‘ (Blanchot 1995: 34). Or as a single frame within an imaginary film strip of one second: 24 frames per second. The explosion of an instant. A slo-mo rehearsal of a lightning strike, moving at the speed of memory.

[* Please note that for this online version, I have removed one of the frames and its accompanying text, in memory of Lyall Watson who died a few weeks ago in June 2008. A prolific writer and a rather eccentric adventurer, he was the author of a book that was important to me, Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind (1984). In the missing section, please think of a wind you know and its particular qualities; let it blow].

Above all, in dialogue with Hannah Chiswell’s 24 fragments in the original artist's book, these texts and images stage something of a slow and ongoing conversation between two friends, about snow and rocks and sky and lightning and memory and flying and falling and birds. The unfolding loop of cogitation between two attenuated and intensive seconds, a dynamic relational meanwhile between an inhalation and exhalation.
_________________________________________


1. ‘There was this, and then this, and then this: nothing … one could truly lean on’ (Chantal Akerman on her film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), quoted in Margulies 1996: 149).


2. ‘There is a secret link between slowness and remembering, between quickness and forgetting. Think of something utterly commonplace – a man walking down the street. Suddenly, he wishes to remember something, but his memory fails him. At this moment he automatically slows his paces. Conversely, someone trying to forget a terrible experience he has just had will unconsciously quicken his pace, as though wanting to escape from what is still all too close to him in time. In existential mathematics this experience can be expressed in the form of two elementary equations: the degree of slowness exists in direct proportion to the intensity of remembering; the degree of quickness exists in direct proportion to the intensity of forgetting’ (Kundera 1996: 34-5)

3. On a bright spring morning in April 2003, British performers Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters, collectively Lone Twin, conducted an exercise on the beach at Scarborough in Yorkshire, with a dozen or so participants. The proposition was simple: count the number of steps from the Victorian Spa to the beach’s edge, then over a period of 30 minutes walk towards the sea using the same number of steps; at the water’s edge make an action imagined en route, then turn and retrace one’s journey back to the beginning of the beach, again reiterating the same number of steps over a 30 minute period. A simple meditative slowing down and immersion in present process, drawing attention to time’s passing, in counterpoint with the rhythms of beach-side traffic, dog walkers, ball games, donkey rides, a group of girls cart-wheeling dizzily, swaying metal detectors, the crash of the waves, the drift of the clouds. During the group’s attenuated return from the sea, two uniformed policemen moved swiftly towards the lead walker - coincidentally the editor of this volume - and confronted him nose to nose, blocking his passage. They had received a number of phone calls reporting ‘suspicious behaviour’, a group of people moving imperceptibly slowly across the beach. What were they doing? Was it a protest of some sort? In this way a slow private action in public, its internal dynamics, meanings and functions resistant to a normalising survey from the outside, constituted a threatening anomaly to the civic everyday. The most everyday of actions - standing, walking, thinking, at times apparently immobile and doing nothing at all – had produced an unreadable and dissident friction in the complex layered polyrhythms of the seaside. Perhaps unwittingly, they had provoked a small collision of practices of mobility and conceptions of ‘acceptable’ speeds.

4. ‘I like the feeling of the texture of cocoons. A cocoon produces numerous threads. The threads come out so fast that my body is often left behind. At such times my body is empty. I wonder where my stomach and other organs have gone. But the threads that go out may be my organs, or they may go out through all my pores. They spread out into space, no one can stop them. All that’s left of me is contours. In the meantime, my body remains in the cocoon and is suffocated. People often say that I’m not moving or that I look like an idiot. Is it because I move too fast?’ (Butoh performer Akedno Ashikawa in Moore 1991)

5. 400 polished stainless steel poles, each of them with a diameter of 2 inches and solid stainless steel tips, arrayed in a parallel rectangular grid 5,280 feet by 3,300 feet, or 1 mile by 1 kilometre. Each pole 220 feet apart. Each mile-long row containing 25 poles, each kilometre-long row containing 16. A walk of about 2 hours to cover the perimeter of the grid. A field of potentiality in waiting for the untimely, sudden, sublime event of lightning. The conditions for lightning and its ‘doing of the did’.

Completed in West Central New Mexico in 1977, Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field was one of the iconic works of land art. It was intended for the work to be viewed alone ‘over at least a 24-hour period’ (de Maria 1980: 529). Using aerial and land surveys to determine the precise elevation of the terrain, in order for the plane of the poles’ tips to ‘evenly support an imaginary sheet of glass’ (ibid), the work took 5 months to install. Only about 60 days a year fell within the season of primary lightning activity during the summer months. It was possible to observe a number of distinct thunderstorms simultaneously from The Lightning Field. With occasional light snow in winter, and the anomalous optical phenomenon of the vast majority of the poles becoming almost invisible when the sun was high in the sky, light was deemed to be ‘as important as lightning’ (ibid: 530). On rare occasions, a powerful electrical current in the air generated the glow known as ‘St Elmo’s Fire’ which was emitted from the tips of the poles. The conjunction of art and nature, engineering and unpredictability, a tiny number of witnesses and a vast landscape/skyscape, the slowest of events and those moving at the speed of light.

6. During the 1990s, the Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik made a series of related performances collectively entitled Zoophrenia, in which he pursued the game of playing dog in a purposeful way, mimicking a certain kind of canine behaviour to excess. Becoming-dog was a strategy to ‘renounce his identity as a reflective being in order to become a being with reflexes (a dog)’ (Kulik in Watkins & Kermode 2001: 76). At other times, he also ‘became’ a bull, an ape and a bird, but the dog tracked him like a shadow. In 1998, Kulik made a performance called White Man, Black Dog. In complete darkness in a Ljubljana gallery space, a naked Kulik tried to interact and establish an intimate exchange with a real black dog. Intermittent camera flashes produced by two photographers documenting the encounter supposedly burnt ephemeral images into the short-term retinal memories of spectators. For Kulik, such an encounter and its fugitive visual traces constituted ‘the only true, “absolutely real” art’ (Kulik 2003: 23).

7. ‘Oui … Oui … Oui … Oui … Oui … Oui … Oui … Oui …’ (Aurore Clément, on the telephone in the final shot of Chantal Akerman’s film Toute une nuit (‘All Night Long’), 1982, quoted in Margulies 1996: 173).

8. She moves. Her attention adjusts and focuses as she sniffs around a quality of stillness in the action, a quality of action in the stillness, her nostrils flared for the event of it. Slowly slowly. Stalking while never letting on, while always letting on, that stalking’s afoot. Something lives here, and moves here. Something warm. Something animal. Its presence resonates and is carried on the wind in this windless space. Its reverberation comes to her as smell. Just a whiff, the merest hint of a lair, of a pelt, of a world in a surreptitious moment of synaesthesia. Coloursoundsongsmell. Something there. The need for moist attention. The need for a wet nose. Follow your nose. Slowly slowly track it, but but let it be, let it take a place in the open. Patience, go quickly go slowly, stay close to it but not too close: she must move away if she gets too close. How to be near and far? Come and go, just as it comes and goes on the wind in this windy place. The role of the eyes in sniffing it out, the role of the ears. Body all eye-ear-nose. She follows her nose, it takes her closer, closer, then no too close and she can’t smell a thing and she smells too many things, the smell blurs and its shape fades and she moves away again and begins to drift again. Circling. Circling. As if now were here, and she were all alone. S l o w i n g d o w n t o n o w h e r e s h e Breathe. Ready. Again. And. No not now, be slower. Move away again and wait, lie in wait, be still in wait. Wait. Weight. Wet. She remembers an Inuit word she read and wrote down and learnt for the rightness of its rhythm, the shape of its sound in space and the time of its gesture - an onomatopoeic map: QUINUITUQ, the deep patience of waiting for long periods while prepared for a sudden event. QUINUI - like a polar bear waiting for a seal at a hole in the ice. A chameleon invisibly perched on a branch attentive to the flashing insect wings around it. A tick on a blade of grass ready for the passage of fur. Or a photographer standing in a storm at night, camera in hand, waiting for the lightning strike. Then TUQ - a flaring into appearance. An active vanishing that burns itself into the retina for a moment, then gradually dissolves.

9. ‘There are about two hundred shots in Mirror, very few when a film of that length usually has about five hundred; the small number is due to their length. Although the assembly of the shots is responsible for the structure of a film, it does not, as is generally assumed, create its rhythm. The distinctive time running through the shots makes the rhythm of the picture; and rhythm is determined not by the length of the edited pieces, but by the pressure of the time that runs through them. Editing cannot determine rhythm … indeed, time courses through the picture despite editing rather than because of it. The course of time, recorded in the frame, is what the director has to catch in the pieces laid out on the editing table.

Time, imprinted in the frame, dictates the particular editing principle; and the pieces that ‘won’t edit’ – that can’t be properly joined – are those which record a radically different kind of time. One cannot, for instance, put actual time together with conceptual time, any more than one can join water pipes of different diameter. The consistency of the time that runs through the shot, its intensity or ‘sloppiness’, could be called time-pressure; then editing can be seen as the assembly of the pieces on the basis of the time-pressure within them’ (Tarkovsky 1986: 117).

10. Of all of the artist-walkers who spring to mind - Hamish Fulton, Marina & Ulay, Lone Twin, Wrights & Sites, Janet Cardiff, Tim Brennan, Iain Sinclair, Bruce Chatwin, and so on – Richard Long seems to me one of the slowest and most patient, one of the clearest about his choices. Long repeatedly uses walking structures as generative ‘games’ in the production of photographs and texts in which words assume a sculptural quality, as well as ‘non-site’ works for gallery spaces. His walks are playful in a purposeful way, and it’s invariably hard to separate the idea for a walk, the walk itself, and the trace of walk. The walks are conceived by Long as ‘sculpture’, taking sculpture way beyond the usual definition of the generation of objects. Instead, he proposes to make experiential events and impermanent relational connections with and in places. In his registering of their traces lies an implicit set of propositions about reality, nature, our place(s) in the world: a kind of ethics of lightness, movement, process, change, relationality in complexity. We only ever witness traces of the space-time aggregate of the absent/invisible event. The sculptural work itself rarely involves violent interventions; the work is always on a human scale, often discreet, ephemeral, small restrained displacements more often than not employing the elementary and archetypal formal configurations of lines (motion) and circles (stopping points) and their variants (spiral, cross, arc, zig-zag, ellipsis).

In an interview in 1990, Long reflected on the complex relations between duration and ephemerality in his work, a slow dance of endless repetition with difference, of unfolding multiplicity within identity: ‘I suppose my work runs the whole gamut from being completely invisible and disappearing in seconds, like a water drawing, to a permanent work in a museum that could last forever. The planet is full of unbelievably permanent things, like rock strata and tides, and yet full of impermanence like butterflies or the seaweed on the beach, which is in a new pattern every day for thousands of years. I would like to think my work reflects that beautiful complexity and reality’ (Long 1991: 104).

One of Richard Long’s most remarkable walking works is Crossing Stones (1987), in which he carried a single pebble from a beach on the East coast of England, near Aldeburgh in Suffolk, all the way across Britain to Aberystwyth in West Wales, covering more than 300 miles in 10 days. On the beach in Aberystwyth, he deposited the Suffolk stone, exchanged it for another, and then carried this second stone back another 300 miles to deposit it on the same beach in Suffolk. This act of displacement is both heroic and Sisyphean in its epic absurdity. A return journey on foot lasting 20 days, covering more than 600 miles, in order to exchange two pebbles (why those two?), and all that survives is one text work, a brief score-like description of the structure of the event as a whole. The symmetrical transplant effects a re-assimilation by two pebbles on a new beach in a fresh alliance with other pebbles, all of them moving incessantly with tides and weather: so nothing moves, everything stays the same, but everything has changed. (The layerings of time: the moment of choice of a pebble, the rhythms of foot steps, the moment of placement, the rhythms of the sea, the glacial speed of change in stone: slowness is always relative). The pebbles remain remote from each other in their new locations, as far apart as ever, but a new connective relation or tissue is established between the individual stones, the beaches, the coastlines, the edges of Britain. Each of them has crossed to a situation that is the same and quite different. The space between them is blooded and activated by Long’s long walk, a passage which has all but disappeared in its embodied complexity, Nothing is mentioned of the journey to and fro beyond the fact that it took place; three weeks collapse into a few words, and Long’s experiences en route are excised completely in this most radical act of editing and distilling to a pure economy of exchange. It is the experiences of the pebbles, it seems, that are to be privileged.

11. ‘There are, on a few Shinto shrines, some sacred curiosities. Stones that have fallen from the sky. Nobody makes much fuss about them. They are simply there for people to take pleasure in, and as objects deserving of the respect accorded to everything that shares the spirit of divinity. The traditional explanation for their existence is very simple and matter-of-fact. “There is a hole in the sky”, say the priests, “and sometimes things just fall through it”’ (Watson 1984: 319).

12. In the opening sequence of Le Jet de Sang (‘The Spurt of Blood’), a short play written by Antonin Artaud, a pair of young lovers express ardent passion for each other in a (parodic? nostalgic?) exchange that culminates in the young man declaring: ‘We are intense. Ah. What a well-made world’. Artaud then provides a genuinely startling stage direction: precise, hallucinatory, dissociated, anti-romantic, surreal, apocalyptic. It appears there is indeed a hole in the sky, and fragments of well-made civilisations and anatomies fall through it as the lovers’ intensive coup de foudre gives way to cosmic dismemberment: 'Silence: noise like a huge wheel spinning, blowing out wind. A hurricane comes between them. At that moment, two stars collide, and a succession of limbs of flesh fall. Then feet, hands, scalps, masks, colonnades, porticoes, temples and alembics, falling slower and slower as if through space, then three scorpions one of the other and finally a frog, and a scarab which lands with heart-breaking, nauseating slowness’ (Artaud 1968: 63).

Although one might readily associate an Artaudian ‘theatre of cruelty’ with frenzied speed and ecstasy, it is my impression that in his writings Artaud rehearsed a particular ontology of slowness. He returned repeatedly to his sense of time and integrated, ‘orderly’ spaces (e.g. that of the human body) being out of joint, and articulated the pervasive dis-ease he experienced as ‘that abnormal facility that has entered into human relations which does not allow our thoughts the time to take root’ (Artaud 1988: 162).

13. On a footpath, in large letters traced with a finger in the fresh snow, someone’s written a message to the sky: MORE SNOW PLEASE. The gift of snow. Its aura.


14. ‘Relation of walking and thinking, the movement of the body setting thought in motion. Rimbaud composed many of his poems while walking. So does Edmond Jabès. Walking the space of a line, a phrase. As if finding it. A grammar of motion … Edmond Jabès walks. Hands crossed in back. Slowly … In the dining room, Edmond opens a drawer full of pebbles he has collected on beaches. In Brittany, In Italy. “Look at this, wouldn’t you say, a face? And this one here, magnificent”. Almost all his pebbles have markings one could see as a face. “Just look; it’s Verlaine”. Once he has said this I cannot see anything but Verlaine in the veins of the stone. But I think more of how it is sand and stone that hold his attention rather than the sea. Bits of desert … After Edmond’s death, Marcel gives us a most precious gift. Two out of a group of five white pebbles that Edmond has collected for him. These do not suggest faces. They are pure white. They are, strangely, almost perfect cubes. They sit on top of one another’ (Waldrop 2002: 15, 30, 32-3)

15. ‘In 1981, I made a videotape in Japan, Hatsu Yume ('First Dream'), in which there is one sequence where a fixed camera views a rock on a mountainside over a long period of time. When it comes on the screen, the images are moving 20 times normal speed, and gradually, in a series of stages, it slows down to real-time, and eventually to extreme slow-motion. People usually describe that scene by saying, “ … the part where the people are all slowed down while moving round the rock”. What I looked at in that scene is the rock, not so much the people. I thought it would be interesting to show a rock in slow motion. All that is really happening is that the rock’s time, its rate of change, exceeds the sampling rate (the recording time of the video), whereas the people are within that range. So the rock just sits there, high speed, slow speed … it doesn’t matter. I think about time in that way. There are windows or wavelengths of perception. They are simultaneous and interwoven at any one moment, but we are tuned only to a certain frequency range. This is directly related to scale changes in space or sound, proportion in architecture and music. A fly lives for a week or two, and a rock exists for thousands or millions of years’ (Bill Viola 1995: 151).

16. In the late 1960s, in a proposal for a new work called Island of Broken Glass, a work that might be thought of nowadays in terms of a ‘deep ecology’, American land artist Robert Smithson suggested that a small island in Vancouver harbour (Miami Islet) should be covered with broken glass. Eventually, through the forces of nature over a long period of time, the glass would break down into ever smaller pieces until its final return to sand. Smithson’s proposal was vehemently opposed by ecologists, and the work was never realised. Elsewhere Smithson wrote: ‘In the museum one can find deposits of rust labelled "Philosophy", and in glass cases unknown lumps of something labelled "Aesthetics"' (Smithson in Holt 1979: 79).

Meanwhile about thirty years after its disappearance Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) has re-emerged into astonishing visibility (for the time being) from beneath the surface of the Great Salk Late in Utah; the rocks are now caked in sparkling salt crystals in the pink waters of the lake.

17. Imagine it. A wheat field, two blocks from the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and Wall Street in New York City, opposite the Statue of Liberty. First, the clearing of rocks and trash on a disused block of land, then a fresh covering with truckloads of landfill, before the spring planting of seed in 285 hand-dug furrows blanketed with an inch of top-soil. The establishment of an irrigation system, clearing, maintenance, weeding and spraying. Four months of careful tending, from brown to green to amber, then the final harvesting in August: almost 1,000 pounds of wheat. Finally, the return of the land to the rhythms and economies of intensive urban development, and the construction of a new luxury complex.

Reflecting on her land art sculpture-event Wheatfield (1982) afterwards, activist-artist Agnes Denes suggested: ‘It represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics. It referred to mismanagement and world hunger. It was an intrusion into the Citadel, a confrontation of High Civilisation. Then again, it was also Shangri-la, a small paradise, one’s childhood, a hot summer afternoon in the country, peace, forgotten values, simple pleasures’ (Denes 1982: 544).

A wheat field in lower Manhattan. Imagine it.

18. On a February morning of both sun and snow, walking through the fields on the banks of the River Dart at Dartington in Devon, I come across an oak tree that has fallen during a winter storm. Uprooted, its massive trunk shattered, the tree’s canopy lies over the pathway made by dog-walkers and joggers: an impassable obstruction, an interruption in the rhythms of walking and running. It is as if it has dropped out of the sky, like the timber house in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. I am struck by the juxtaposition of a long, slow period of vertical growth and the sudden moment of falling to the horizontal:

‘There is a moment when the newborn first lets out a cry into the dry air, when the pressure of light first falls on the virgin surface of the new retina and is registered by some pattern of nerve impulses not yet fully “understood” … There is a moment, only truly known in anticipation before it happens, when the eyes close for the last time and the brain shuts down its circuits forever (the end of time)’ (Viola 1995: 142).

In the weeks since the oak’s collapse, a new ‘desire path’ has been worn into the grass around it, a perfect semi-circle tracing the outline of the canopy and connecting the path at either side. The old path, now enveloped by the dead branches, remains bare. From the perspective of the buzzard floating far above my head, one might see a large brown D inscribed into the grassy surface of the field by gravitied footfalls over time.

19. [...]

20. First, a score: Yoko Ono’s TAPE PIECE III/Snow Piece (1963): ‘Take a tape of the sound of the snow falling. This should be done in the evening. Do not listen to the tape. Cut it and use it as strings to tie gifts with. Make a gift wrapper, if you wish, using the same process with a phonosheet’ (Ono 1970: unpaginated).

Then a slow and illuminating close reading of a slow and illuminating work. In his remarkable study of sound in 20th century avant-garde art work, Noise Water Meat (1999), Douglas Kahn begins by describing the paradoxical acoustical effects of snow falling: ‘It is a sound of blanketing bereft of warmth, a massive field of intense activity that is oddly quiet, and because the accumulation of snow acts to absorb sounds and the minute crystalline structure of snow breaks up sound waves at their own scale, it becomes progressively quieter as the snow mutes itself. [...] The irony of snow falling is that it produces the conditions for listening closely but then absorbs the sounds that might be heard’ (Kahn 1999: 238-9).

Kahn then turns his attention to Ono’s poetical disposition towards technology, and its embracing of multiple inaudibilities. For the score involves: ‘much more than trying to listen, even though Ono has employed and displayed the technology of listening. She has actually employed a technology one imagines and a technology one ignores. Assume for a moment an impossible transparency of audiophonic technology [...] A tape recording is made of falling snow using such technology and then ignored. Ono’s score instructs the recordist not to listen to it because it is the best way to ensure its accuracy’ (ibid: 239).

Finally Kahn highlights the ethical overlay in Ono’s score between environmental and social relations, the tacit acknowledgement of multiple silences (and silencings) and the emotional warmth in the economy of the gift: ‘A refusal to listen complements both the silence of the imagined sound of snow falling and the silences involved in the very act of gift giving. Whatever else can be said about gift giving, something is always left unsaid. Although speech may revolve around the act, the delicacy of the gesture, especially in Ono’s score, acts to absorb the sound waves of speech. When the audiotape is used as ribbon, the environment of snow falling lies covertly inscribed along the length of the tape in patterns resembling the loops of a bow’ (ibid: 239-40).

21. Las Ramblas: a bustling, tree-lined boulevard bisecting the old city of Barcelona. Lorca once described it as ‘the only street in the world which I wish would never end’. Its name derives from an Arabic word (ramla) for torrents or rapids, for at one time it was a seasonal watercourse, the route of run-off from hills to the sea. The memory of water.

Today Las Ramblas runs from Plaça de Catalunya in the north to Plaça Portal de la Pau in the south, with its harbourside monument to Christopher Columbus. Caked white with birdshit, with a hefty stone map in one hand by his side, Columbus points confidently out to sea, but in the direction of North Africa rather than the New World. This way, folks, must be.

How to remake a river? Or more modestly, for I’m uneasy with Columbus’s unshakeable conviction as model, how to make a small action whose ephemeral traces might reconnect this place briefly and playfully with its naming, and with its past role in the micro-circuits and flows of the hydrological cycle? How to re-member a river? I discussed this with Gregg and Gary. Many triggers for me in what they do, and they have moist imaginations. We chatted in a cafe, quiet little rants and what ifs and didyaknows about weather systems, bodies, maps, becoming-river, Snowflake the albino gorilla. Then Gary said what about ice.

In the end we slid a block of ice from the CCCB, past the Plaça dels Angels and along the Carrer Bonsuccés to Las Ramblas. We placed it on its side on the paving stones in the middle of Rambla Canaletes, near an old iron fountain, then wrung the melted ice from our gloves to start the flow. People watching, talking in the sun. The water of memory (David Williams in Whelan & Winters 2001: unpaginated).

22. After hearing La Monte Young talk at the Barbican in December 1998, Jem Finer, the creator and composer of Longplayer, a 1,000-year-long musical score for looped Tibetan bell-chants spiralling ‘like planets around the sun’ (Finer in van Noord 2000: 3), wrote in his journal: ‘I was interested by his talking about the evening’s performance as part of an ongoing, ever-lasting performance. The time that had elapsed since the last one merely being a pause in the music’ (ibid: 29).

23. Speed of the sound of loneliness is the title of a John Prine song sung by Nanci Griffin, a title borrowed by Richard Long for a walking work he made on Dartmoor in the winter of 1998. Walking continuously from dawn to dusk, Long circled Crow Tor at a distance representing the Earth’s orbit around the Sun; the rock acted as still point or fulcrum in a circuit of 7 miles walked 3 1/2 times, at a speed Long estimated to be at 2.8 miles an hour. Long’s published score of the event goes on to record other speeds occurring simultaneously in a sliding scale of space-times around Crow Tor - an overlay of differential speeds and relational connections moving out from the rock to the galaxy in this simple meditative staging of the vertiginous dynamics of our tiny corner of the universe (Long 2002: 149):

THE ROTATION SPEED OF THE EARTH IN ENGLAND 700 MILES AN HOUR

THE ROTATION SPEED OF THE EARTH IN ITS ORBIT AROUND THE SUN 70,000 MILES AN HOUR

THE SPEED OF OUR MOTION AROUND THE GALAXY 500,000 MILES AN HOUR

24. A man in a snail suit stands waiting at a zebra crossing. Spiral shell on his back, comedy feelers protruding from his forehead. A car slows to let him cross. He acknowledges the driver politely, then lies on his belly and slides imperceptibly slowly across the tarmac, inch by inch. Music: Bakerman, by the band Laid Back. "Bakerman is baking bread. Bakerman … is baking bread. The night train is coming, got to keep on runnin’ …" (from Dom Joly’s Trigger Happy TV).


References
Artaud, Antonin (1968). Collected Works, Volume 1 (trans. Victor Corti), London: Calder & Boyars
Artaud, Antonin (1988). ‘Manifesto for a theatre that failed’, in Susan Sontag (ed.), Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press
Auster, Paul (1998). ‘White Spaces’, Selected Poems, London: Faber & Faber
Bachelard, Gaston (1988). Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement (trans. E.R. Farrell), Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture
Benjamin, Walter (1968). ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ [1936], in Illuminations (trans Harry Zorn), New York: Schocken Books
Blanchot, Maurice (1995). The Writing of the Disaster (trans. Ann Smock), Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press
Calvino, Italo (1993). ‘Quickness’, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, New York: Vintage Books, 31-54
Carruthers, Mary (1990). The Book of Memory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Deleuze, Gilles (1986)). Cinema I: The Movement-Image (trans. H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
de Maria, Walter (1980). ‘The Lightning Field’, in Kristine Stiles & Peter Selz (eds) (1996), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 527-30
Denes, Agnes (1982) ‘Wheatfield: A Confrontation’, in Kristine Stiles & Peter Selz (eds) (1996), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, 543-5
Dillard, Annie (1999). For the Time Being, New York: Vintage Books
George, David (1999). Buddhism as/in Performance, New Delhi: DK Printworld
Goulish, Matthew (2000). 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance, London & New York: Routledge
Heim, Wallace (2003). ‘Slow activism: homelands, love and the lightbulb’, in Bronislaw Szerszynski, Wallace Heim & Claire Waterton (eds), Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance, Oxford: Blackwell, 183-202
Hoete, Anthony (ed.) (2002). Roam: Reader on the Aesthetics of Mobility, London: Black Dog Publishing
Holt, Nancy (ed.) (1979). The Writings of Robert Smithson, New York: New York University Press
Jabes, Edmond (1972). The Book of Questions, vol. 1 (trans. Rosmarie Waldrop), Hanover NH: University Press of New England
Kahn, Douglas (1999). Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press
Kulik, Oleg (2003). ‘Armadillo for your show’, in Adrian Heathfield (ed.), Live Culture, London: Tate Modern / Live Art Development Agency, 20-3
Kundera, Milan (1996). Slowness (trans. Linda Asher), London: Faber & Faber
Lepecki, André (1996). ‘Embracing the stain: notes on the time of dance’, Performance Research 1:1 (‘The Temper of the Times’), Spring, 103-7
Long, Richard (1991). Walking in Circles, London: Thames & Hudson
Long, Richard (2002). Walking the Line, London: Thames & Hudson
Margulies, Ivone (1996). Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, Durham & London: Duke University Press
Massumi, Brian (ed.) (2002). ‘Introduction: Like a Thought’, in A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, London & New York: Routledge, xiii-xxxix
Moore, Richard (dir.) (1991). Butoh: Piercing the Mask (film)
Ono, Yoko (1970). Grapefruit, New York: Simon & Schuster
Tarkovsky, Andrey (1986). Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair), Austin: University of Texas Press
van Noord, Gerrie (ed.) (2000). Jem Finer: Longplayer, London: Artangel
Viola, Bill (1995). Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994, London: Thames & Hudson / Anthony d’Offay Gallery
Waldrop, Rosmarie (2002). Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press
Watkins, Jonathan and Kermode, Deborah (eds) (2001). Oleg Kulik: Art Animal, Birmingham: Ikon Gallery
Watson, Lyall (1984). Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, London: Hodder & Stoughton
Whelan, Gregg & Winters, Gary (2001). Of pigs and lovers: a lone twin research companion, in Live Art Magazine no. 34, March-May


(‘The little by little suddenly’, in Ian Abbot (ed.), Slow, Devon: Elusive Camel Books, 2007. Limited edition artist’s book. Contributors include Matthew Goulish, Kirsten Lavers, Kevin Mount, Cupola Bobber. This version - with one frame 'missing', no. 19 - is reproduced here in memory of Lyall Watson, who died in late June 2008).

shuttle 12: sweat

liquid self (portrait), Zingaro, Sicilia, 11 September 2006

_______________________________________

Lone Twin: 'A story about sweat'
Said while rain dancing and out of breath in front of an audience at SceneKunst Theatre Festival, Aarhus, Denmark. Slightly planned, but mainly made up:

This is a story about sweat, sweating and perspiration. What do you call them? Ecologists? They tell us all water is constantly in a cycle, it’s either on the earth, or being evaporated, moving up into the sky going into the clouds and raining back down again. Water in a cycle. And sometimes we wonder if we’ve seen water before. If maybe some of the rain we saw on the way here tonight we might have seen before, maybe we’ve watched that rain already on the television. It was raining when they took down the Berlin wall, when the hammers went in and we wonder if some of that rain that we watched on the news in England could be this rain out here tonight. Maybe this rain out here has some of the water in it that was once frozen and helped to sink the Titanic in the form of a mighty iceberg. Maybe the rain out there is quite sinister and dangerous and has a very interesting and ludicrous past. Now, we want to extend that idea to personal sweat, we’re here sweating and maybe some of you here are also sweating? Some of our sweat might be some of your sweat. Or maybe some of our sweat was Winston Churchill’s sweat, or maybe Florence Nightingale’s sweat, or maybe some of Bruce Springsteen’s sweat, which is personally at the moment my favourite sweat. Or maybe – I don’t know – the Queen of Norway’s sweat. I don’t know if they have a queen there I’m slightly off-track. But we’re interested tonight in some of our sweat becoming some of your sweat, and that it might enter into some of that rain that also might contain some of our sweat.

Lone Twin: 'Dart action'

Wearing a tracksuit and a sports hat: run from the Yew Tree in Dartington Hall’s graveyard, Devon, England, through the Dartington Hall Estate and into Totnes. Follow signs for Bridgetown and find the left bank of the River Dart. Run the full length of the river path. At the path’s end continue into the Dart until about knee deep. Take off your sports hat and with your hands on your knees wait for sweat to drip into the river. 

_________________________

Texts from Lone Twin's The Days of The Sledge Hammer Have Gone series, from of pigs and lovers: a lone twin research companion, 2001. Photos: (top) David Williams; (middle two) Gary Winters/Lone Twin; (bottom) Hergé - Tintin, Snowy & Captain Haddock work up a sweat in the desert

song & dance

"Gary Winters and Gregg Whelan say the idea for The Boat Project first emerged during a cycle of performances called The Days Of The Sledgehammer Have Gone (1999-2005), in which they had explored the human body’s connections with water, and its intimate imbrication in weather systems and the hydrological cycle. In material, poetic and comic ways, these performances activated the body’s own meteorology of sweat and tears and playfully merged them in circulatory exchange with the circuits and flows of river, sea, cloud and rain. In related ways, a boat casts the body into a dynamic relational matrix of materially active elements, energies and rhythms and invites it to improvise: wave, tide, current, wind, wood, salt, sound, weather, sky". (From the introduction to David Williams (ed.), The Lone Twin Boat Project, Chiquita Books, 2012)

In the wake of a sail on Lone Twin's Collective Spirit yesterday, with Olympic yachtsman Mark Covell at the helm, today my body still hums with sensations. In seas off Hayling Island, with the wind gusting to 20 knots, we passed through intermittent bursts of rain and sun. At speed, riding the surf, the boat itself 'sings' a particular tone, an audible vibratory hum of its own. 

On water the gravitied mass of the boat flies, it becomes all lightness and movement. Its weight is translated.

I was intrigued by how sensitively Mark reads with his peripheral vision what's at play, in particular the wind, deciphering its imminent arrival and implications on the sea's surface, its energetic trajectories. Also his reading of waves, the impact of patches of sunlight on wind ('puff'), the lightness of touch on the tiller.

Sailing, one feels part of something much bigger than oneself. Dynamically transforming systems, processes, agencies, unpredictabilities. To sail is a dance of relations, response-ability and im/balance, a choreography in which one's body is all eyes and ears. 

Despite my clumsiness at trying to tie a reef knot (some lingering memory about a tree, a bunny and a hole - but no idea how to tell that story with a rope), it's a while since I felt so awake.

a boat of our time

This interview with the award-winning boat designer Simon Rogers took place in November 2011, during research for the Boat Project book. Lymington- based Simon is the designer of the exquisite wooden vessel at the heart of Lone Twin's The Boat Project, an ACE 'Artists Taking The Lead' commission as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. The boat and the book will be launched on 7 May at Thornham Marina, Emsworth, before a maiden voyage along the south coast from mid-May until August - with curated events and celebrations in Brighton, Portsmouth, Hastings, Margate, Milton Keynes and Weymouth. 

For full details of The Boat Project, the book, and to reserve tickets for the launch, see here.

____________________________________________

DW: As the designer of the boat at the centre of The Boat Project, could you describe its particular attributes and qualities?

SR: It’s a boat of our time; and that was the first part of the original brief. It reflects modern design of the year 2012. In terms of its form, for example, the chines of the hull (the angles of its bottom) are very in vogue right now in high-performance yachting circuits. It’s not as light as one could make it – obviously we have the donations, and the materials, the fact that it’s made out of wood. But the idea was not to make something from the 1940s or 1950s. We are not trying to make a retro, clinker-built boat. We’re trying to build something that looks modern, and a proper reflection of what’s currently going on in the industry – and at the same time something that would be fun to sail.

It will plane; it has a planing hull so it will go quickly without pushing a lot of water around. It’s a very efficient, low-drag shape, with a fairly large sail area. Nonetheless it will be very easily driven, very light on the helm; and it will be a pleasure to sail – everything will be lightly loaded. Less experienced sailors, even those who have never sailed before, will be able to sail the boat with instruction.  There’s nothing there that’s going to bite you or be horrible; the winches are very small, the loads are all very small, and it will sail in a nicely balanced fashion.

Part of the original brief was to make something accessible to those who are less experienced. It’s a simple boat to sail, it’s not at all complicated. And it’s an easy boat to transport. Transportation by road was one of the driving features for the overall length of the boat. It could have been any length, but it had to be able to fit on a trailer; the maximum beam is 2m 55, and we’re at 2m 53. Obviously we wanted to stay within the weights of what was allowed on the road. It needs a 3.5-tonne towing vehicle, which Discoveries, Landrovers and so on can manage. And at the same time we wanted to be able to move it easily and quickly.

If an informed person looked at this boat, they would say that it had an association with a sports boat, which is a generic group of fast modern sailing boats. You’d look at this boat and think yes, this is of the same genre as a Melges 34, a Melges 32 or a Mumm 30, or indeed any high performance boat. It is a much heavier version of that style of boat, but we felt it was a decent reflection of 2012, which is really what it was all about.

In terms of the boat design, is there anything that’s particularly unique?

There are some functions within it that are specific to the particular project. For example, lots of boats have lifting keel systems, but the specific items that we’ve tackled are going to allow the boat to be transported easily as well. There are functions that other boats have had to tackle as well, but we’ve done it in maybe a slightly different way – if not markedly different. The lifting keel enables you to go into extremely shallow water, and to get the boat out of the water in extremely shallow water. If you put a trailer in, and lift the keel up, you can then take the boat in to about 500mm of water, not much more than knee deep. You’ve then got the trailer as well, so you’d be waist deep in water with the trailer. So you could get it out of a lake; if you wanted to go up to Rutland, or Grafham, or any of the major inland waterways, you’d be able to get the boat in and out of the water fairly easily. That was a big part of the design project. When we started the project, we didn’t have a clue where the boat would be operating. So we’ve tried to make it as adaptable and able to access as many bits of water as possible, without having to use a crane.

What kinds of knowledge do you glean from your own experiences as a sailor, lived understandings that enable you to approach the design of a boat?

Well, you have a trained, embodied experience that you draw on when you design a boat. I’ve been designing boats for 21 years within this business, and an entire childhood with boats. It would be hard to say which bit of experience I use for what; it’s all become a bit of a blur, and it’s all part of the design mix. But yes, in my opinion if you are going to design boats, you need to know how to sail. And the other most important thing, particularly with a project like this – and it is where we are probably a little bit unique - is that I’m also an apprentice served shipwright as well. So I do know how to build a wooden boat, and I do know how to construct pretty much anything that we design. In fact I won’t design anything that I don’t know how to build.

The really nice thing about working specifically with Mark Covell is that I don’t think I could have tackled this the way I have without having somebody like him being the project leader. I’ve known Mark for a long time, and he’s a tremendous boat builder and a great sailor, an Olympic silver medalist; he understands about boats. So between us, from a technical point of view, we’ve really had all the bases covered. And Gary and Gregg have been brilliant from that point of view, in just allowing us to get on with it.

We’ve worked really hard on ensuring that as much of the timber that we have received becomes structural members within the boat. Of course we had no idea what was going to be donated before we started, or how much – so from that point of view it was quite a difficult task. And I think Gary and Gregg did a really good job of managing the donations, really focusing on the artistic aspects of the project, and letting Mark and I focus on the technical aspects. We’ve supplied the canvas and Gary and Gregg have worked on the artistic aspects and brought those other parts together – indeed the major parts, as that’s what it’s all about.

Normally we would know exactly what everything is going to be built of, and we’ve had to accept that certain things will be different. We get a particular piece of wood, and think that it would be great at doing a particular job, although it might be a little bit heavier than is ideal. When we first designed the boat, we assumed certain specific gravities for certain materials that we needed in order to make the boat float and do its job – and then made an allowance within the structure for the exhibits. We decided that where a donation is on the boat is irrelevant. It was unpredictable in terms of density - some of it might be very light, or very heavy, but we knew it was going to be wood. So we knew it was very unlikely to have a specific gravity greater than 1, in other words that it was going to sink. There aren’t many woods that sink, there are a few but not many. And we’re not going to get 40 square metres of lignum vitae! That would be an extremely unlikely scenario. And if we did, we wouldn’t be putting it on a boat like that because it’s extremely valuable! So we were able to make certain assumptions. We were looking at nearly 400 kilos of donations in some way, shape or form – and I suspect we’ll be somewhere close to that in the end. Obviously when we designed the boat we had to know what it was going to weigh at the end in order to get the displacements right and actually get the boat to float correctly.

Is the epoxy process something that you’ve used before?

Yes, we use it all the time. Basically what we have is a cored hull – a wooden core and glass laminates holding the surfaces together, or the donations, or whatever happens to be in the middle, and that does two things. First, the glass skins take the load. On a beam, the top and bottom surfaces do the hard work; and the bit in the middle, as long as it doesn’t crumple or sheer, holds the two laminates apart – just like an I-beam, a steel RSJ. So that does the tensile work, and the bit in the middle is what we call the core material, and that deals with the sheering loads. Wood is a good material in this context; as long as it keeps the skins at the correct separation and doesn’t sheer, then it works. And secondly, the glass skins and the epoxy keep the water out. So it’s two-fold. And then we can choose what we put in the middle, as long it does its bare essentials, and we’re away. A lot of production boats have balsa wood cores; that’s quite a normal production technique because it’s light, and also it’s very good in sheer.

As a material, are there things that wood allows or enables? In other words, what’s good about wood?

What’s really good about wood is that it is unidirectional, in that it’s very stiff down its grain. At the same time it’s not particularly weak across it. It’s not as good in that respect as some other materials, but it’s stronger one way and you get a longitudinal stiffness.

The process is this. First, you put up a bunch of transverse frames – very precisely cut building moulds – and then you bend the batons around them and glue them along the edges as you go: what we call edge-glued strip planking. That then takes on a natural curvature, and the long pieces of wood, the batons, take up the fair between frames right the way through; so you end up with a nice smooth, fair baton. You then cover that in glass fibre, flip it over, remove the inside frames – and now it’s pretty stiff and stable, if a little bit wobbly. Then you have to fair the surfaces, and then fibreglass the inside. So you now have two skins either side of a core material in the middle. We then fill and fair the outside of it, and away we go. It’s a very simple construction method which we could only really do in wood: because of its flexibility and strength, and the fact that it’s stiff in the fore and aft plane. If you were making a fibreglass boat, you’d have to make a full mould with a perfect surface on it. So the really lovely thing about wood is that you can form a shape very quickly and inexpensively.

Does the layer of donations on the hull have a structural function, or is it largely decorative?

Well, it’s a mixture of both really. We would normally have to reinforce the topsides for putting fenders along the side. We’ve got 10 mms of donations on the outside of the core. The core itself is thinner in that area because we have this material going on the outside. So we have engineered it so that you end up with something slightly tougher in the topside area, where the donations are integrated. It is heavier than you would normally build it, because the donations are there; but those donations definitely provide a structural component - although as I say it’s not the lightest way of doing it. We wouldn’t normally choose to build it this way, but because of the nature of the project it’s a very nice way of doing it.

Like everything, when you’re engineering something you have to understand the mode; things have different modes of failure – how possible failure occurs. So, for example, boats have to be stiff longitudinally because you’ve got a force in the back stave trying to snap it in half, or athwart-ships (from one side to the other, at right angles to the keel). Or it has to be made stiff longitudinally and athwart-ships where the main mast bulkhead is, to take the rigging loads. On the topside of the hull, do we need the donations for panel stiffness, to stop the water getting in? Probably not. Do we need it from a longitudinal stiffness point of view, in that mode? No, we probably don’t.  Do we need it from the point of view of fender impact and toughness in the topside? Yes, we do. So it’s not a straightforward answer to your question, which is perhaps a little complex than it seems; but in engineering terms, in certain modes, yes, it is definitely useful.

Are there any particular problems with the epoxy system?

In the old days there used to be certain health problems. There were certain epoxies that were rather toxic, and as time has gone by they have become increasingly friendly. An epoxy is a fairly nasty matrix; it’s not something you’d want to inhale too much. A lot of the stuff is vacuum bagged, which means that when the resin is laid in, it doesn’t actually produce any fumes per se at any significant levels until you start to heat it. Obviously it depends on the epoxy. You put a plastic bag over it, vacuum it all down, and then all the nasty fumes go outside the factory. So it’s like a closed mould, and it works pretty well. But if it does get on your skin, it can be fairly nasty; and certain early epoxies were known to be mildly carcinogenic.

What’s the life expectancy of an epoxy hull in contact with water?

We don’t really know. We’ve been going forty or fifty years with epoxies, and we still don’t know. But to all intents and purposes an epoxy hull should last a lifetime, certainly.

Is the wood effectively completely stable within the epoxy?

Yes, it is. If you use a polyester resin, it does absorb water, at very microscopic levels, through osmosis; tiny amounts of water are drawn in and wick up the fibres, and then causes problems. But an epoxy is a pretty perfect barrier that waterproofs the wood; pretty much 100% it’s sealed, and a wooden core is protected – unless of course you puncture the skin at any point. An epoxy is a like a skin, a polythene membrane; but if you puncture that membrane, the water will pass through and then travel down the fibres of the wood. So you only need one little pinprick and it can create quite a few problems. Over a period of time you’ll fill the core up with water. And if you think about a hull being pushed down into the water, you have a head of pressure, and the water is trying to push in quite aggressively. However if the laminates are thick enough it’s not really a problem.

In your role as a designer, you create a sort of Platonic model, a detailed schematic outline of an ideal, something virtual, in a set of drawings. And then there’s a handing over of this plan, which is a kind of map or score, for others to realize as a three-dimensional form. After this handover, what is the nature of your relationship to what then goes in the build shed, and to how the journey proposed by that map actually takes shape materially?

I pop in and out. Of course there’s a high level of trust; which is why when Mark approached me I was keen – with lots of others, I probably wouldn’t have taken it on. Mark’s an absolute perfectionist, he loves doing things really well. He’s obsessive in the nicest possible way. Passionate might be the best word to describe him. And I knew the result was going to be good before we started. In a project like this, when you’re not milling surfaces like you do with a lot of production moulds, when you’re strip planking there is an element of interpretation; and the builder does have significant input into how you tackle certain problems. Mark will give me a quick call and say, can I do it like this? And I’ll say yes. There are five hundred ways of achieving the same result, and one that I’ve chosen is based on the fact of our normal approach. But if Mark says, well actually I’ve got a piece of balustrade here from a Victorian house; and I’d like to do it this way so that I can use this piece of timber; then there’s a quick hand calculation to make sure it’s okay, and yes, fantastic, go for it. So that dialogue is ongoing. I get phone calls from Mark all the time.

So for example we modified the hog down the centre of the boat - that’s the centre line structure – with bits of timber from HMS Victory and from Warrior. We modified the design to be able to incorporate those specific bits of timber when we got them. Because why would you not use those timbers under the mast step? Wonderfully dense, strong, stiff pieces of oak that are several hundred years old, with all of their associated history. It’s what the projects all about. It’s a little bit heavier than we planned, but it’s low down in the structure. An extra 10 kilos of weight in the bottom of the boat, but the incorporation of such materials is the point of the project; and that’s the fun part – working with these historically and personally laden materials. With a project like this you need to be flexible, and Mark’s been superb to work with from that point of view.

We started with certain constraints, and what we’ve tried to do is build something that’s going to be fun, fast and exciting at all levels. If you are a complete beginner, you can still go sailing and enjoy it. If you are an expert, you can sail it and understand its pedigree. You can look at aspects of the boat and the project as a whole and say, yes, that’s a good-looking boat, and a fair reflection of what’s going on. Although it’s not the lightest, there are features whose genre and styling are those of a modern boat. That’s something that most people, whether experienced or not experienced, will relate to, and it’s a really important feature of the design. People have a picture of a boat having to be that old classic thing with big overhangs, built using overlapped clinker boards, steam-bent frames and so on. That was the 1940s. This boat will be launched in 2012, and we wanted to have something that reflected the current moment. That was something that Mark got hold of very early on, and he helped steer Gregg and Gary away from that older idea. When Mark came to me as a designer, he knew the direction we would be coming from – we’re all about high-performance sailing boats, that’s what we do for a living. Of course the materials are a little bit different. I’ve done lots of cedar strip boats in the past, so I’ve got a lot of experience there, but it is about producing a boat that is going to be appreciated by the general public for what it is.

It was interesting at the outset that Gregg and Gary weren’t boat specialists, and I think they have appreciated what it is we do. To the layman, what is modern? There aren’t so many preconceived ideas, and what we’ve done is focused everybody’s minds by presenting what is; and it will become abundantly clear when you see it that it’s not a historical reproduction of something that has been done years ago. It is fresh, fast, new; it will be fun to sail; it will be beautifully balanced to steer; everything will be lightly loaded. It’s 2 tonnes rather than 1.4 tonnes. The structural weight of this boat will be about 700 kilos; if we were using a fabulously light material and all the latest technology, we could build it at 200 kilos. 400 kilos would be a very nice middle ground, in carbon. But because we’re using wood we’re 40 or 50 percent heavier. That’s what The Boat Project is about, and we were able to shape it towards its current form. That form will be recognizable, whereas the actual visible impact you get will be quite different. At a distance you’ll see a modern boat, in the genre of a high-performance planing hull form; and as you get closer, the donated exhibits will become more apparent and it will look extraordinary. That will really catch people’s eyes and make them go ‘wow!’

So a dual layering of the contemporary and something that, on closer viewing, looks hand-made in an unusual way; a combination out of which a layered complexity emerges …

Yes, there’s a second impact. So it’s very much two-fold: modern and artisanal in a unique way. Visually, it will make a very strong impact; I think it will be exquisite. The combination of woods in the cuddy, for example, is lovely, and a lot of skill has gone in to producing that structure. Commercially you would never be able to justify doing it – and it makes for a completely unique work of art. That’s what makes it so exciting for me. And there’s another notable thing for me: in 2008, in the last Olympic Games in Beijing, my cousin won a silver medal, and with the Games coming to London, our feeling was that somehow we needed to get involved. We spent two years trying to find a way to do this. We were looking at support boats for the yacht and dinghy racing as part of the sailing events, but the funding was cut, budgets were reduced, and things got tighter and tighter. And we found ourselves in a situation where we weren’t going to be involved. So when Mark approached us in the summer of 2010 and asked if we were interested, I pretty much tore his arms off! Or maybe we both ripped each other’s arms off, because we immediately clicked – and likewise with Gary and Gregg when we met up a few weeks later; we instantly hit it off, and were absolutely on the same page. That was very rewarding. So not only is a really fun boat, but actually it’s a great movement to be involved with. And to have let the Olympic Games go past and not to be involved would have been a tragedy for us.

There are so many aspects to the project, and people will latch on to the aspects that engage them. You mentioned layers, and this is a very good way of describing the project. And that’s why it’s so interesting to so many different groups of people. This boat isn’t just about creating something for sailors; it’s for everybody. As long as you’re interested in a piece of wood and its background, the broader context of its story, then there’s something to get excited about.

Gary and Gregg were both in Totnes at the time of the build of Pete Goss’s boat Team Phillips, as I was; and there was an enormous community engagement and spirit around that project, people felt very involved. It feels to me that there’s a trace of something related in this project. In terms of the kinds of hopes and wishes that people invest, the possibilities of a new life in a new vessel for those donated objects, which are like little talismans of continuity, and then collectively an ongoing interest as the boat takes shape and finally emerges in its finished form …

Yes, there is a palpable sense of community around the project. Of course anybody that has made a donation has had input into the boat itself and is implicated. They will have a natural affinity for some part of them is integrated inside this particular project - they are in it. With well over a thousand donations, that’s a lot of people, just at that first level or layer. Then there are the artistic aspects of the project, which bring another wide group of people; and then the sailing aspects, which engage yet another group of people. And ultimately it’s a bit like an onion with all of the different layers. You start with a small idea – engineering meets art and sport in a water-based context - and organically the whole thing grows and attracts different kinds of people. I know about the sailing aspects and community, and I’m confident that those people will enjoy it immensely. And I’m very proud to be involved, and honoured to have been able to create the first bit – the framework – from which the other elements and layers can build and grow.

Simon Rogers interviewed by David Williams, Lymington, November 2011. For Simon Rogers' yacht design website, see here

Photo by Gary Winters at the Boat Show, London, January 2012