Tuesday 7th November
Life can be a bit of a Rollercoaster. Library at 8 studio at 9. Quick chat with Hammam and Dave who both laughed at the 3rd year degree show name, and then laughed some more.

Meeting at 10 with Andrew Clay at the Round Foundry. Andrew Gave me loads of information about the collection of buildings and their owners and who to approach for projects in the spaces outside.

I left feeling very upbeat. I then went to China Town but no one there new the landlords contact details. Apparently the building is earmarked for demolition anyway.

Went back to Uni and had a chat with Dave who again put me off attempting anything too big. The long and the short of it was he would rather see me return to a project from last year and start casting models.
I thought about this long and hard and realized that when he said my current project was not as clear as last years he was right. I still hadn't worked out what I was trying to say or the question I was trying to ask. I spent the afternoon in a small amount of despair as I cast wax bullets ready for the following day.
A ray of hope appeared on the way home as I turned the car near St Marks Church (abandoned) I took a quick look and decided this was the venue I had been looking for.

Work was shit so I decided to spoil myself with a steak dinner and several beers. 2 beers in and I started flicking through initial notes I had made in the summer about things that were on my mind and which had been the starting point of my current project. All of a sudden I gained a lot of clarity about why I was pursuing certain ideas and not others and what it was I was trying to ask. I quickly wrote down a few words, which were as follows;

Man has ceased to believe in a higher being and placed his faith in science, a science funded and driven by the military machine. Our new higher being is money. War makes money and drives science forward but what now that our environment is changing. Have we started to create our very own living Hell?

Once this was noted I picked up Marshall McLuhan again and read the passages I had marked out.

"Readiness for war characterizes contemporary social systems more broadly than their economic and political structures which it subsumes." (14)

He continues on the following page;

"The corporate word from the old men from Iron Mountain is that war is an inseparable feature of the economic establishment." (15)

McLuhan then points out the vicious circle we have gotten our selves into when he writes;

"The Old men of Iron Mountain have not a clue to the origins or persistence of war as a quest for that identity that is always threatened by technological innovations. They are quite aware of the vast research and development activities that are accelerated by war, but it has never occurred to them that the innovations resulting from this research and development are precisely the ones that obliterate the identity image, indispensable to peace and tranquillity among nations." (16)

I retired to bed slightly drunk and swollen from red meat.

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(14) Marshall McLuhan “War and piece in the Global Village” pp 116. (15) pp 118 (16) pp 120.