Saltram House

The title of the exhibition “Sinopticon” is a compound construction of two words‘ Sino’ meaning China and ‘ optics’, meaning ways of seeing.

Taking chinoiserie as a starting point this exhibition explores the relationship of Western Europe with China both historically and through contemporary eyes.‘Chinoiserie’, a French term meaning ‘Chinese-esque’, derived from the Seventeenth Century as an entirely European style that was influenced wholly from China and the East. The China that was being emulated was in fact fictitious and very few real images of life in China had reached the west. Instead a Utopian land was described and repeated through the use of decorative motifs and styles. The influence and desire for China, it’s trade and culture, ramified in to the 19th century, opium wars, trade and colonialism.

More about the historical background can be found on the Sinopticon website.

The exhibition started on a beautiful sunny afternoon at Saltram House, then later we drove to Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery. From the museum we walked to Plymouth College of Art and then on to Plymouth Art Centre.

Saltram House is the perfect location to exhibit contemporary art pieces connected or responding to the question about the position of Chinese culture, industry and aesthetics in everyday lives of West European people. Saltram House is full of Chinese art: original wallpapers with Chinese motifs, Chinese porcelain, Chinese craft works, and fascinating old print books about Chinese methods of torture and Chinese way of life. It was pity that we could only see one page of each!

A few artists had their art works secreted into the very fine interiors and furnishings of Saltram House. Ed Pien presented a wonderful paper cut, called Bloom. A famous artist from Korea, Meekyoung Shin exhibited her soap vases from the Translation collection, also to be seen in the Museum. We were most impressed by two high-gloss ”lacquered” chess-tables by Wessieling. All the chess pieces represent the international world of fashion. The work is a visual metaphor for cities at war and globalisation within the fashion and textile industries.

Modern world fashion is a key source of income and investment in China and India. The pawns on the chess board are a front-line of dress makers dummies and the main pieces represent the major fashion cities of the world. Shanghai’s Pudong tower is King on the chess board. The modern Pudong district of Shanghai faces the old European style buildings of the Bund and the tower is a symbol of China’s economic growth and positioning in the global power structure. On the red/black chess board the pieces are all in place before the game. On the yellow/black board further on in the exhibition you can see the results of the battle. See these photos:

Chess-tables by Wessieling. Nr.1

Chess-tables by Wessieling Nr.2

Also in Saltram House a fabulously beautiful embroidered cape can be seen with really funny images of eagle-penises, made by Grayson Perry. Of course these conform to the Chinese style:

High Priestess Cape by Grayson Perry

There are many more striking-controversial-beautiful-interesting-funny art works to see in the Plymouth City Museum.

Eliza Gluckman - Curator of Sinopticon

Tom Freshwater (National Trust) and Lucy Day (Co-curator at Day+Gluckman)

The Tower is an inverted pagoda of flowers, sharing its island platform with features typically found in Chinoiserie motifs – scholar’s rock, trellis, fantastical leaves and a small architectural element that calls into question the scale of the whole piece. Like Hong Kong or Taiwan, parted from the Mainland, it drifts around seeking ownership.

In which Kasia and Jim interrupt Chris’s sales of The Big Issue, and then discuss with him and Steve their view of contemporary art from the streets of Exeter:

We presented this video at the inaugural Live Art Meets event at the Exeter Phoenix Café Bar on the evening of Tuesday 24th April 2012.

Videos of that event will follow shortly, from a variety of different angles!

Here’s the “manifesto” we handed out

Loss of BT Retail Business Broadband Service on 3rd October 2011

Like any major national organisation we experience power outages on occasions. In order to protect our systems and therefore customers’ services, we have warning systems and emergency generators that ensure customers are rarely aware of any power outage affecting our facilities.

 

On Monday 3rd October 2011 there was a loss of the external power supply to Birmingham Telephone House at 11:41 am. Internal backup maintained power until 12:29 pm at which point a total loss of power occurred. External power supply was restored ten minutes later at 12:39pm. The external power outage was caused by a main circuit breaker tripping, followed by a failure of the backup power supply after 48 minutes.

 

The total loss of power at 12:29 pm caused a loss of Broadband service for a total of 1.3 million BT Retail Consumer & Business broadband customers.

1.2 million BT Retail Consumer & Business Broadband customers had service restored in under one hour. 0.1 million Business Broadband customers who use a static IP address required more complex resolution and service was restored within 3 hours to more than 80% of these customers. 18 thousand Business Broadband customers took longer than 3 hours to restore service because of a static IP traffic routing error. Service was restored to all these customers within 24 hours and this routing error has been identified and fixed.

 

We provide priority repair options for businesses that apply to the vast majority of faults. Major incidents like this are an exception and we worked to restore systems as quickly as we could, whether Business or Consumer. A power management team was deployed instantly to Birmingham Telephone House and have implemented changes to prevent this incident from happening again. Whilst we do not guarantee that Broadband service will be uninterrupted we recognise how important it is for businesses to have a stable and reliable internet connection. We have 99.9% network reliability and incidents of this nature are extremely rare. We take every precaution to prevent incidents happening and to learn from incidents to prevent them happening in the future. Should anything go wrong we provide 24×7 technical support from business dedicated UK based teams.

That all goes some way towards explaining how an 8 minute power cut in the middle of Birmingham at 11:41 eventually caused our broadband connection to fail here in the middle of nowhere in South West England at 12:32 or thereabouts. However that explanation raises at least as many questions as it answers. For starters, here’s the one uppermost in my mind at the moment:

Who was responsible for the “main circuit breaker” that seems to be at the heart of the matter? Western Power Distribution say it wasn’t them, and BT Retail say it wasn’t them.

The BT high level escalation team have suggested to me that the answer to that question might possibly be BT Operate, and that I call the BT Corporate Press Office to see if they can help. I think I’ll give that a try next.

Kasia’s Studio (My summer studio)
The Haldon Hills, Devon, South West England
Saturday 1st October 2011

An interview with Doreen, in which she recognises Hell when she sees it, and feels herself drowning in a really stormy, turbulent sea.

Hell-Purgatory-Heaven - triptych by Kasia B.Turajczyk

BT request prompt payment for their business broadband "service"

As luck would have it I was already experiencing some disruption to my “service”. I certainly didn’t want things to get any worse, so I did my best to pay as quickly as humanly possible, and clicked the “Pay Online” (It’s fast and easy!) button. On the next screen BT invited me to part with my credit card details, which unfortunately I was unable to do, since the appropriate boxes were missing:

BT request my credit card details, but forget to provide the right boxes!

I clicked “Next” anyway, and BT invited me to part with my credit card details once more, which I dutifully did:

BT request my credit card details once more.

I clicked on “Pay Now”, only to discover that I couldn’t pay now:

BT helpfully block "Verified by VISA"

That’s because BT were helpfully blocking access to any site other than their own, including VISA’s attempt to use 3-D Secure to prevent fraudulent transactions on my credit card account.

Since my router was already rebooting itself with monotonous regularity I figured that recommended course of action wouldn’t help a whole lot. I gave up battling BT’s excuse for a broadband “service” at this juncture, and phoned up BT’s telephone payment system instead, which did at least eventually manage to automatically take £126 pounds off me. The only trouble then was that my BT broadband router was still disconnecting me from the internet every couple of minutes.

Next I phoned my old friends on the BT Broadband helpline.  This time around I listened to an automated message that was brand spanking new, to me at least:

BT is currently doing work to improve the broadband network. This may cause some customers to experience a temporary loss of service.

I was certainly experiencing a continually repeating temporary loss of service, so maybe my tardy payment was merely a red herring?  I’d discovered I’d have to wait to find out since the “wait time is 5-10 minutes”. Unlike last time I was at least offered the option of receiving a call back from BT when someone was free to answer my questions. Twelve minutes later Mark from Dundee did indeed ring me back, but he was unable to answer my first question, since he and his computer system appeared to have no knowledge whatsoever about any ongoing “work to improve the broadband network”.  Neither had BT’s broadband status page:

BT's known broadband problems at 11:27 on November 7th 2011

Mark didn’t think my continuing disconnection problem was anything to do with BT’s methods for persuading people to pay promptly, but could offer no alternative suggestions. By this time our router seemed to have settled down, and it had stopped frantically clucking and clicking. Rather than waste any more valuable time of either Mark or myself I resigned myself to accepting just one more of life’s little mysteries.

P.S. I’ve discovered that if you lie to BT’s original message asking you if you’re the account holder, and instead tell them that you’re not, they will let you play around on the web long enough to successfully pay your account online using a credit card!

However I have had rather more success with my enquiries at Western Power Distribution. They are responsible for keeping the lights on in Newhall Street in Birmingham, and I called them up to discover if the initial version of events I gleaned from the Birmingham Mail was accurate or not.  I spoke to their corporate communications department, who in turn spoke to the relevant district manager for the area in question.  It seems the problem was a “catastrophic failure” in a 132 kV underground electric cable at 11:41 on the 3rd. However WPD employ “triple redundancy” on their high voltage cables. 7,295 WPD customers including BT, were initially affected, but by judicious switching to alternate supplies power was restored to every customer within 8 minutes.  Western Power assured me when we spoke that original fault was in the process of being repaired, and that all 3 HV cables would be back in action soon.

This leaves a number of unanswered questions, foremost amongst which in my mind at present is the following:

If electric power was restored to British Telecom’s facilities in Birmingham by 11:49 on the morning of October 3rd, what precisely was it that caused my broadband connection to suddenly stop working at 12:32 or thereabouts?

Following Anthony’s suggestion I phoned up Ofcom at 16:40, and given my recent experiences with British Telecom I was pleased to discover that according to their automated operator I was first in the queue to speak to a real human being. Shortly thereafter I found myself speaking to Alex, who wanted to know if I wished to register a complaint.  I told him that whilst I was certainly not exactly a happy bunny, at this juncture I was only seeking information and advice.  Having briefly outlined the contents of this blog for him, Alex suggested that my next telephone call should be to the Ombudsman Services for Communications to find out more about something called the “Alternative Dispute Resolution Scheme” (or ADR for short”.

According to the Ofcom website:

Under Ofcom’s regulations, phone companies must be a member of a recognised Alternative Dispute Resolution Scheme.
The schemes provide an impartial alternative if you and your phone company can’t agree about a complaint.
It is free, and is open to residential customers as well as small businesses with up to 10 employees.

Here at The Dreamers we’re certainly a small business, and we most definitely have less than 10 employees, so maybe I’m getting somewhere useful at long last?

Also according to Ofcom:

If you haven’t reached an agreement with your provider after eight weeks – or earlier, if they agree you’re at a stalemate – you can then ask an ADR scheme to consider the case. The complaint must also be less than 9 months old.

It looks as though I still have plenty of time left to continue my fact finding mission before registering an official complaint, so I still haven’t got around to clicking the big blue button on the Ombudsman’s website:

How to make a complaint to the Communications Ombudsman

• Thank you for holding
• We are very busy at the moment and apologise for the delay
• Your call will be answered as soon as possible

“As soon as possible” turned out to be 16:27, when Anthony picked up at BT’s end. I enquired about the reason for the long delay, and he told me that BT had been receiving lots of calls from the Sheffield area that day, because at one point around 100,000 people had been without a broadband connection. The BT broadband service status page seemed to confirm as much:

A long list of BT broadbandless dialling codes on October 14th 2011

I’m slightly curious about how a problem reported at 11:46 can be fixed by 11:40, but I digress. Anthony couldn’t give me any details about the causes of today’s problem, so I asked him instead about the causes of the October 3rd broadband outage. He told me that one of BT’s authorisation nodes in Birmingham had suffered a power cut, and that as a result 25% of BT’s broadband customers had lost their internet connection, around 1.2 million customers in total. I told Anthony I was more than slightly curious, because last week William had told me that 3 of BT’s authorisation nodes had gone down, and 2 million customers were affected. I gave Anthony some more details of my requests for more information about the underlying causes of that outage.  I idly wondered whether BT Wholesale possessed such things as batteries and/or diesel generators to prevent brief power cuts in Brum from inconveniencing millions of their customers nationwide. I idly enquired whether BT could reveal the area in which power was lost, so that I might pursue that line of enquiry. Anthony went away to speak to his supervisor. When he eventually returned he passed on to me his supervisor’s suggestion, which was that if I was still unhappy I should give Ofcom a call. I assured Anthony that I was indeed still unhappy, and would follow that course of action.

Pablo Picasso said:

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? .. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

Contemporary Art in the Community is a joint project between Kasia Turajczyk and econnexus.org. 

The primary aim of the project is to take contemporary art out of galleries and museums, to take it out of artist’s studios, and to show it to all sorts of different people in a variety of environments and locations around South West England.

We would like to discover from the ordinary people of South West England what kind of art they like and what they don’t like. What contemporary art means to them?  Are they interested in art at all? Is there a place for art in their life, living room, kitchen, mind? Or maybe they are not interested in art at all? We will let them see diverse art works and ask them about their feelings, their thoughts, and about them. These are the questions and the items we are going to be asking people.

Maybe we will ask you too!

Contemporary Art in the Community Nr. 1/n

Widemouth Bay, North Cornwall, South West England –  Thursday 29th September 2011

Thank you for your enquiry, received on 12-10-11

First of all, please accept our apologies for any delay in this email reaching you, as we have been extremely busy lately.

I am sorry to hear you’ve been adversely affected by our recent outage.

Unfortunately we do not have any further details as to the cause or nature of the outage, and following discussions with my supervisors regarding this, I regret we are unlikely to receive any further information from BT Wholesale on this matter.

I do apologise for again any inconvenience caused during this time.

Here at Marketing Dreams we have certainly suffered from some inconvenience, and we will continue to seek  ”further information from BT Wholesale on the recent outage”. Surely somebody somewhere must have some idea about what went wrong?