
Russell Davies's Interesting 2007 was very enjoyable and surprising: the talks were all meaty (not a single one was poor!), and the enthusiastic and engaged attitude of the attendees and speakers left me feeling energised about making some proper progress on some of my dormant projects outside of work. For me the day was a welcome reminder that the internet/blogging community often behaves as if it has the monopoly on both the creation of interesting things and the explication of what's interesting and important in the world - this classifying tendency is all too inward and techno-utopian*. It was also very lightly and humanely managed by Russell and his crack team. For all of that, bravo.
I didn't take notes, but did make drawings: Russell had asked me to do some. I'd planned to do a hundred, but the talks were so good that I kept forgetting to knuckle down to the job. The drawings were done in a carbonpaper-less duplicate book because I wanted to give away the drawings and - as the selfish artist often wants to keep hold of their own work - wanted to be able to keep an imperfect copy for myself.
About half of the "originals" went into Russell's In box on the stage, and many of the others I gave to the subjects (hey, stick them online if you can); there are a few here too, and all of the "copies". The originals I set a white and black point for in the computer afterward, and the copies were simply Auto-Levelled, a process that leaves most of the aesthetic judgement in Photoshop's hands and, rather appropriately to the drawing method, results in a rather nice shadowed, ghostly quality. The drawing here is of Adrian who is from both Howies and some beautiful Welsh woods, and did a great talk on wood-chopping.
* Grant McCracken's suggestion that it isn't the architectures of knowledge that are falling, rather "what collapsed was mostly the intellectuals' favorite interpretative frames" leaves me unsure whether we're in agreement or whether he's supplying a refutation in advance. And I forgot to give him the drawing of him as Dr Manhattan.