shuttle 13: salt

Scientific research suggests that people's sense of taste is diminished significantly by certain conditions present inside aircraft cabins: notably, the lower humidity levels, adjusted air pressure, and particular frequencies of ambient white noise. So, for example, a drier mouth and throat have the effect of decelerating the communication of odors to the brain's receptors, and thereby stripping food of much of its flavor. Therefore, in order to enable in-flight food to taste roughly the same as on the ground, airline caterers compensate by supplementing their food with about 30% additional salt.

For the Danish artist Signe Emma, a gifted graphic design graduate from Kingston University near London, this information triggered a research project of her own, Airline Food, which resulted in a series of large scale scanning electron micrographs of dissolved salt. 

Astonishingly, these images resemble exquisite, crystalline landscapes as if viewed from the window of an aircraft at great height.

For Signe Emma's website, with further details of her 'Airline Food' series, see here

as my soul me ella ella tell me

'The use of the word 'subjectivity' is as enigmatic as the use of the word 'responsibility' - and more debatable. For it is a designation chosen, in a way, to preserve our portion of spirituality'
(Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster).

A November drift in freezing London with Sue, around visits to Roger Hiorns' exquisitely self-generating sculpture/installation, Seizure, and to Susan Hiller's brilliant ellipsis-filled exhibition 'Proposals & Demonstrations' at the Timothy Taylor Gallery.

Reflections on scale, reproduction, proliferation, consumption, astonishing beauty, morphing magic lantern colour fields, dream life, angels, spirits, the paranormal.

A copper-sulphate crystal encrusted abandoned flat in South London.

Levitations. Voices from beyond the grave in the static of old recordings. Unknown ghostly languages. Churchill says, "Mark you make believe my dear yes". Another voice: "He begged for bread in a dream".

Cushion covers with print images of Ann Frank, Mother Teresa, Prince William. (Let's face it, an unlikely trinity in any context. Why these three? My mind races around possible connections between them).

Serried ranks of little edible people.

Who needs drugs?

*****

Susan Hiller, on abandoning anthropology for art: 'I didn't believe there was anything called objective truth, and I didn't want to be anything but a participant in my own experience. I didn't want to stand outside it'.