Today I wandered over to Goldsmiths Hall in the City to visit an exhibition which opened only yesterday of Church silver and gold plate and vessels. The exhibition is said to the be the largest collection of religious metal work ever assembled and has a very impressive 300+ items on display ranging from the 10th century to modern times.

Goldsmiths Hall, one of the livery companies of the City of London is just round the corner from St Pauls and the very grand building is sited on a small side road - and I can only presume that the road must have been a bit larger in the past.

I met a friend outside and on going inside you are faced with the impressive grand staircase - and we actually did the tour somewhat backwards, so what you should do is go up the staircase and stop on the landing to admire the huge Primate’s processional cross currently used by the Archbishop of Canterbury - and then look up to notice the ornate ceiling of the building. Going up to the right (we went left) you then go into the main exhibition and it is laid out in a mixture of mainly historic timeline, but also thematically.

Going around the room you start with the medieval period and some of the oldest gold vessels known to exist and then moving through the civil war, the commonwealth and then on to the restoration - followed by Georgian and Victorian high Anglican.

There are some quite informative boards dotted around the place and it was interesting to learn that much early silverware was simply unfashionable domestic plate/vessels which are then donated to the local churches when the families upgraded to more fashionable pots and pans. Indeed, in the 18th century, there was a trend towards baptizing babies in bowls as opposed to fonts - leading to a spate of donations to churches of - of all things - punch bowls.

I know the Church and wine are common bedfellows, but being baptized in a punch bowl is taking it a bit far!

Once you have worked your way around the exhibition, going back down to the ground floor are two more areas set aside to show off modern church commissions.

As an exhibition it works on quite a few levels - there is the historic aspect of the displays. Also, you are learning some quite interesting history about church silver and gold - but also this works as a visual treat as the range of metal work is quite considerable. Indeed, some of the 17th century silver is so austere that it almost looks modernist in style - which is contrasted by the completely over the top gaudy gold work of the restoration period.

The only criticism of the display I would make is that there is a presumption that the viewer will understand some of the terms used to describe the items. A couple of bowls were displayed with a technical name, and frankly I have no idea what they are in actual fact. Most of the items have an obvious use, but there is the odd bit of head scratching at times.

There is also a rather good guide book available for a mere tenner at the front door, which has a lot of photos of the silverware we just looked at. While the photos in the book are very high quality, there is a slight issue as each item is photographed on its own, so it is not possible to know the scale of the items - and a tiny pocket sundial is shown larger than a plate which in real life is huge. Nevertheless, the book is a visual feast and the text adds quite a lot to what I had just seen in the displays.

We managed to spend about an hour and a half in the exhibition all told, which is not bad - especially as it is completely free of charge.

The exhibition is only open for a couple of months though - so you need to get down there before July 12th.

http://www.thegoldsmiths.co.uk/events/

They also play suitable ecclesiastical music in the background which adds to the atmosphere.

Sitting in Starbucks this morning having a break from working at home all the time and a chap approached me and said “hello”. Turns out someone I used to work with in North London now has a job in docklands. I can’t really see a former programmer working with the city-types we have around here, and he was wearing a suit - which was probably the bigger shock.

Anyhow, had a mare of a problem with the T-Mobile Wi-Fi service and had to phone up customer care to try and figure out what is going on. I loathe calling customer care people, especially when it is computer related as they invariably just read off a script and spend 20 minutes running through all the tests I have already done myself. I am no IT guru, but I know how to debug basic problems. You can imagine my delight then to get a chap on the phone who not only seemed to know what he was doing without needing a script, but his suggestions actually sounded sensible for once.

Alas, it seems there is some sort of issue with Windows XP generating IP addresses for the T-Mobile routers - and it is a recent issue which is cropping up all over the place (someone has done a software update I bet), so they need to get a human to come and visit the coffee shop to get it fixed.

Fortunately, as I have a monthly account with T-Mobile, I am able to roam on to BT’s local Wi-Fi service, and while nothing like as stable as the T-Mobile platform, at least I don’t have to work at home this morning, and hence can have the surprise of a former work colleague coming up to me to say “hello”.

The Bank of England is normally open on only one Saturday per year - on Open House Weekend, and the queue to get in has always been awful. However, as part of the London Festival of Architecture - they will be open for a second Saturday so there could actually be a chance to get in without having to spend hours outside in the queues.

If interested - you want to be there on Saturday 28th June and the tours start at 10am. They take you round the impressive interior and the museum is also open. The museum is somewhere I have wanted to visit for ages, but like the bank - is only open Mon-Fri, so this is a double treat.

http://www.colf.org/event-details.cfm?e=613

Last night I wandered over to the Tate Modern to watch a series of short videos on “Early Experiments in Computer Animation” - which rather appealed to my geek-side. Alas, it proved to be a bit of a disappointment.

I was hoping for a lot of mathematical animation - the sort of thing where you plug in some fancy equations and sit back to see what happens, and indeed the first two film shorts were exactly that. I was very happy. However, the remainder of the event was dominated by films where a computer was used more as a canvas to paint on - rather than using the processor inside the computer to create the animations itself.

The first clip, Cibernetik 5.3 (John Stehura, 1965) was a dramatic sequence of very early sine wave animations and geometric shapes set to music which seemed to be a fusion of The Andromeda Strain and Quatermass and the Pit (I hunted and can’t find a copy on the internet to share).

Imagine early 1990s rave music videos - and this is a very early precursor of those.

The second, called “69″ by Denys Irving was a silent film which looked like the author had pointed a camera at a computer monitor and recorded what was happening - and was totally silent. A bit boring for most people I expect, but as I used to play with creating geometric patterns on computers back in the 1980s, it was quite exciting to watch someone doing the same thing before I was even born.

Then the rest.

Poemfield was an exploration of fonts - and just flashed words on the screen then played with the colours and sizes. Frankly, boring and nothing which couldn’t have been done with conventional animation techniques anyway.

Around Perception was a Canadian funded film which opened with a lot of text about how the film is deeply emotional - and then proceeded to spend 16 minutes just flashing colours and shapes on the screen to a rather hideous sound track. It could have been made using cardboard cutouts frankly!

The remainder were of a similar genre - they claimed to be computer animations, and while it is quite possible that a computer was involved - there was no evidence of it. These were animations which could be produced quicker and easier using conventional techniques of the time - and doing it on a computer was nothing more than ego boosting showing off.

In a way, they were the opposite of what we have today - where, for example - the cartoon series, South Park is designed to look like just cardboard cutouts, but is in fact entirely created on a computer. It just doesn’t look like it.

Personally, I really wanted to see more mathematical based animations, as I am a huge fan of the early 1980s experiments with fractal graphics which lets the computer generate the image itself based on a series of rules - rather than being simply a canvas on which the animator manually draws each image themselves.

I have lurking around a VHS tape I recorded many years ago of a “rave night” event by Channel 4, where they spent an entire night on programs to do with the early rave culture and the fusion of electronic music and dynamic mathematical models of computer animations. Think Mandelbrot and the evolution of fractal mathematics, and you’ll have an idea of the sort of thing which really excites me.

Oh well - at least the Tate Modern is just down the road from my house, so I didn’t waste too much time.

Links from the event:

John Stehura, Cibernetik 5.3, 1965–69 USA, 8 min

Denys Irving, 69, 1969 UK, silent, 8 min

Stan Vanderbeek and Kenneth Knowlton, Poemfield # 2, 1966 USA, 6 min

Pierre Hébert, Around Perception, Canada 1968, 16 min 27 sec

Malcolm Le Grice, Threshold, 1972 UK, 13 min 47 sec

Lillian Schwartz and Kenneth Knowlton, Googolplex, 1972 USA, 5 min 20 sec

Ed Emshwiller, Sunstone, 1979 USA, 2 min 57 sec

Larry Cuba, Two Space, 1979 USA, 8 min

Last night I spent a very comfortable couple of hours over at the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC) in the heart of the City of London for an open evening. It was ostensibly to try and persuade people that signing up for the Territorial Army would be a good idea, although to be honest I was there for the displays and a nice evening out.

I am not ethically against signing up for the Army, it just isn’t my personal idea of fun - and would really clash with my work load requirements.

The barracks - which the HAC has occupied ever since 1641 - is just a short wander down from the rather drab Old Street area - and is a delightful oasis of greenery surrounded by office blocks, and a few residential flats. The main area is actually a cricket lawn, so the groundsmen were undoubtedly wary of what was going to happen to their turf that evening.

Dotted around the edge of the arena were quite a few displays of military hardware, including an Apache helicopter and a Chinook transport helicopter. I see the Chinooks going over my flat every day (often several times), so it was personally very interesting to get up close - and go inside for a look around. That specific helicopter had been on transport duties earlier in the day and they can cram some 40 odd people in the back, although it wont be comfortable. The Air Force chap inside answered some questions about deployments in Afghanistan and he explained that they fly about 50 ft above the ground so that the terrain hides them from their target until the last minute - and it is too late for missiles to be able to lock onto them. They have a lot of problems dodging telephone and power cables though - and the Americans apparently tend to fly at about 300 ft to avoid them. Alas, that also makes them a lot easier for the insurgents to shoot them down.

Some people were also being allowed to sit in the cockpit of the Apache attack helicopter, although I declined the offer.

I was also interested to see a polo demo going on and had no idea that the HAC had a polo team. As an ardent fan of the sport that was quite interesting and got me thinking it is about time I started watching it again at the Guards Club - which I used to go to every weekend when I lived in Windsor.

The main part of the evening though was the military display - and it started off with a demonstration of defensive postures from some 17th century Pikemen and Musketeers. Quite interesting to watch, especially as the “lazy posture” is quite camp and raised a laugh (I can imagine Larry Grayson looking quite butch in their company!). Towards the end of the display, the musketeers also fired their guns, and as I was a) not expecting it and b) kneeling down at the time - it very nearly caused me to fall over in shock.

This was followed by a more conventional display of horsemen pulling a gun cannon - although they preceded this by explaining how they train the horses to be used to the harness and weight by having a person follow a young horse in harness and manually simulating the effect of dragging a cannon. Something which I hadn’t seen before, so was quite interesting to learn about.

Then the main display! A simulation of an attack on a terrorist base in an undefined part of the world - although the fact that they were all in desert clothing tended to give the game away a bit. The set up was a tent in the corner for the terrorists who had just kidnapped a BBC reporter (who screamed most admirably thoughout) and a rescue by the army. Even though it was just an “act”, it was still very dramatic with all the smoke flares and gun fire going on - and quite a cheer was roused when the terrorists were killed and the hostage rescued.

I wandered off at that point for a visit to the historic headquarters building with its huge display of commemorative silverware and medals awarded for bravery. Fellow blogger, The Londoner somehow got a guided tour - I am not jealous!

All in all, a very enjoyable evening - there is something deeply English about wandering around a cricket pitch with a Pimms in hand watching soldiers on display. Obviously, the evening was not for my personal enjoyment - but as a recruiting drive for the Territorial Army and I did overhear one family chatting to their son (?) about whether he was interested in joining and it sounds like they got a least one new member that evening.

The audience was also packed full with an awful lot of eye-candy, which - erm, ahem - anyway