A series of coincidences gets me to Venice.

When I first came to Italy many years ago (after 4 years living and working in Japan) one of the first jobs I got was via a company which was trying to introduce Virtual Reality into Italy. Their chief graphics programmer was Aaron Brancotti. I did a project (photorealistic simulation of interior lighting) for the company, and did not work directly with Aaron, but we became friends. Then the company started to go a bit gah-gah, money started to dry up, Aaron and I went our separate ways, keeping in occasional contact.

Sometime during the early 1990's, as I was sipping a cold beer in the garden of a bar an idea came into my head for a sleepy clock. This clock would sleep with it's hands at 6:30, and only when it heard someone nearby would it show the real time. From the idea of the clock to the making of the clock passed about four years. I had to learn how to control stepper motors, how to get a small "on board" computer to hear sounds and move the hands of the clock up to the right time. I also invented some "mysterious" chimes which ring when the clock is disturbed. Here is the result:

The clock is about 1 meter (3 feet) high. Some people complain that the decorative artwork of the clock is not in keeping with the "style of the idea". I don't care, I like the joke.

At some stage Aaron saw the clock, enjoyed the fun of the idea, and that was that. Then one day in 1997 I got a phone call from him. As an expert in Virtual Reality he had been asked to supply some exhibits for an exhibitition at the Biennale di Venezia. This is an international modern art exhibition which is organised every two years in Venice, Italy. The exhibition (called "Unimplosive Art") was sponsored by, among others, the Sicilian local government. Why? Who knows? Here's the poster:

(Click on the poster for a partial translation...)

Anyway he could not come up with an easily implementable idea for this exhibition. But he did remember my Sleepy Clock

So Aaron tells the bloke, Carmelo Strano, who is organising the exhibition about the clock. (Strano is "strange" in Italian, so you could translate his name as Carmel Strange). His secretary calls me and I go to a private art gallery, Studio Broccola, in Milano (where the exhibition was being organised) with the clock. I went by train, cradling the heavy clock on my knees, because I hate driving in Milano. A sort of "be aggressive or die" style is required, and I have not yet got the hang of it. Now, heading towards my 50s I don't think I ever will...

...anyway...

Carmelo saw the clock, liked it and decided it would look well at the entrance to the exhibition. I agreed to let him have it on loan and took it back home to redo its internal wiring. I began to worry about it catching fire and it being my fault because maybe the clock (which is powered from the 250V Italian mains) was not wired up properly. So, a lot of work to make the power supply safer.

I still had bad incendary dreams though. They went like this: I wake up, switch on the radio, and hear that half of the buildings on the Venetian island of Giudeca had burned down, firemen are trying to establish the cause of the fire, but they suspect a British Built Clock had something to do with it. Arrrgh!:

It didn't cause a fire though, in fact when it arrived in Venice I got a phone call from Carmelo saying that it did not work any more. Arrrgh. I had taped instructions for starting it to the back of the clock, and I wondered if they had been followed. I'd written them in broken Italian, maybe resulting in a broken clock.

The trip from Milan to Venice is about 4 hours by car, I went with my friend Pinuccio Longo who wanted to see what it was all about. We arrived, the day was grey, low clouds threatening rain. We took the "Red 82" water bus ferry (Vaporetto) to Giudeca an island south of the main island proper

In Venice the waterbuses are the equivalent of the Metro (tube, underground) in other cities, they even have their own metro type map:

The colored lines are the canals used by the water buses, the grey areas are the land of Venice itself, and the white is the sea. .

Above is an old photo of a "vaporetto", and below is Pinuccio wondering what he is doing on one, when he should be back at home, back at work.

I was beginning to get anxious, what if it the clock had blown up? What if I could not fix it? We arrived at our stop, Zitelle, and found the exhibition, next to the Luxembourg Pavilion. It was being set up when we arrived. Here is a blurry photo of Mr. Strange and friend:

You can see a fractal based image on the wall.

An art-student, Fabrizio, was also there. He was being paid Lit 3,500 (about $1.50) an hour to keep an eye on the exhibits. He pulled out my Sleepy Clock from behind a screen.

At first it looked as if the only real problem was that someone had disconnected one wire of the power supply unit (PSU). But when I reconnected it I did not hear the usual loud clicking sound of the stepper motors aligning themselves. Now I started to sweat. If the PSU was buggared, then so was I. And in fact the PSU was buggared. Where once flowed 12V flowed 12V no more, but a miserable 1V.

Maybe the clock was damaged too? Arrgh. Or maybe just the power-supply. How could I find out? I bought two a 9V batteries from a grim bar near the Luxembourg Pavilion, connected them in place of the PSU ... and tick tick tick tick it worked! But for a few seconds only, the batteries soon becoming exhausted by the large current required by the stepper motors. One component of the power supply was hot and probably burnt out. Having decided that I would have to take the power supply to Milan to fix it we went to have a look at the rest of the Biennale.

"My" exhibition was in two large rooms. We went around with Fabrizio, who described various exhibits, though I had to explain to him the significance of an EPROM containing the image of a digital photo of the same EPROM. An EPROM is a computer memory chip which can be erased by shining light on it. This EPROM's round glass window was not covered, and the image contained in the EPROM's memory was being displayed on a monitor. The light from the image on the monitor shone onto the "erasure window" of the EPROM. So the image was destroying itself!

A good idea, but hardly immediately obvious to even the most informed casual viewer. I understood the idea without the written explanation, only because I am (officially) an electronic engineer. Fabrizio thought that the image never changed. I was happy to explain it to him, and I explained it to Pinuccio:

"It's like when you look at yourself in the mirror, you are ugly, and you get even uglier when you see yourself, and so you get more depressed and so more ugly and so on..."

Pinuccio said "the critic becomes an artist himself when he makes an exhibition" and Fabrizio replied "Yes, that's what they would like to think". He was not impressed by critics, and we consoled each other about the hard work there is to do when you physically want to create something. The real work gets done by slaves and craftsmen.

There was a video and a few photos of Orlan, the French Performance Body Artist. She has public plastic surgery to transform herself. She is her art. Pretty nasty to watch though. Good idea but a maybe a waste. Perverse? No fun? She must be mad. Fabrizio said she was at the opening, and was impossible to look at. I did find a link to a WEB site with graphic photos of plastic surgery, do a Google if you want to find it yourself, I would not recommend it ."Orlan body art" are the keywords.

Much of the exhibition was videos explaining things. When I see a video screen in an art exhibition I just want to run. There were also slide projectors which projected onto deliberately torn white paper. I could not be bothered to try to look at the images, I don't know what was projected.

We crossed back from Giudeca to the main island, a light rain had started as we looked for a place to eat. After lunch in a small comfortable wood-lined bar we went to look at other exhibitions. A large cardboard cut-out house impressed me it had a sort of inverted 3D perspective effect which made my knees wobble.

I liked this false window too, actualy painted on the wall of the gallery, looking onto a very non Venetian landscape:

There were two big mirrors face to face (which you could walk into) infinitely bounced our images across and between us.

The following day, back in Milan, I fix the power supply (you don't want to know the grisly details) and on Saturday morning I arrived at Venice train station Santa Lucia, and had to wait a quite a bit for the ferry to Zitelle. As I waited I worried. I had fixed and refurbished the power supply, but the clock was in the exhibition and I could only hope it still worked. Fabrizio and Carmelo were already there with two technicians who were putting the final touches to various bits and pieces.

I got to work myself, and lo and behold the (expletive deleted) works! Even when the steppers are going full time the voltage stays at a perfect 12V. We put the clock at the entrance to the first room of the exhibition, with the PSU hidden behind a panel. And I'm dead chuffed.

They tell me that the discussion between Strano and the French Nobel Prize winner for biology, in front of the invited press, will take start at 16:15. I had booked a hotel for the night, imagining cocktails and maybe a meal afterwards. But this is not what is planned, in fact Strano's helpers are praying for an early end to the discussion so that they can get the 20:00 train back to Milano. Well, I slowly come to the conclusion that I'll not wait for the probably unintelligible discussion, and leave.

Partial translation of the poster:

"From physics to metaphor, till today art has lived a period, not a brief one, of implosion, as has been said by academics, ie. expressive facts having a certain analogy...chaos is no longer the opposite of order. Chaos has a new meaning, and this (new meaning) too, is complex."

I read other words about this exhibition: "Anti-deconstructionist, New Classicism, the Art of Fractals and Chaos"

Happy?

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