1. This morning I went to London to get a visa for my trip to India. There has been a postal strike in London and I didnt want to risk waiting for the visa to be returned by mail with less than two weeks to go. A lot of other people had the same idea as there were about 500 of us queuing for visas. Perhaps I can count this as a first experience of Indian bureaucracy. First I queued for a card, which allowed me access to the room where I could queue to submit my application. This took about an hour and half, followed by another hour or so waiting for my passport to be returned by a woman who sat at a window calling out our numbers in apparently random order so as to return our completed passports to us.

It was not chaotic but it did begin to get fraught, I think because of the apparent unpredictability of the process. There was no sequence or order to the numbers that we could discern. One woman near me got increasingly upset and said how terrible the whole thing was and complained that there was no method to it. In front of her a tall man turned and said calmly and quietly: ‘But there is a method, but it is a method that works for them, and not for us'. An analogy for the relationships between researchers and their subjects, perhaps.

2. With a couple of hours to spare before catching the train home I walked along the South Bank of the Thames to Tate Modern. This is the new art gallery created from a vast brick built power station, a key feature of which is the turbine hall, a ‘room' some six floors high that runs the full length of the building. Currently this features an extraordinary installation by Afur Eliasson, who has put a mirrored ceiling on this vast space, making it seem even taller, reduced all the lighting and placed at one end of the space a large yellow disc backlit with sodium lamps. (Actually it is half a disc, but since it is placed at the top of the ceiling the mirror effect makes it looks like a full disc.) This disc is a convincing simalacrum for the sun, low in the sky in early morning or late evening. This atmospheric effect is emphasised by jets of gas, which I take to be frozen carbon dioxide that are injected into the space periodically . These fill the space with a chill mist, and at some times form clouds and (I have read) even gentle rain.

I had read about this installation and seen pictures of it but nothing can prepare you for encountering it (not even, somewhat paradoxically, actual sunrise and sunset). And more remarkable than the installation itself is the effect it seems to have on people who enter it. There is an extraordinary sense of calm, somewhat similar too, but clearly different from the feeling of awe you sometimes find in a cathedral. People lie on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, seeing themselves mirrored far above. A curious dissociation of the self, appearing both on the ground and in the sky (like those tales people tell of near death experience I think).
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/eliasson/about.htm-

3. Back across the river, St Pauls Cathedral is currently being cleaned and repaired and the facade of the main entrance is covered with scaffolding. Interestingly the scaffolding is largely hidden, being draped by a huge white plastic sheet, on which is printed an enlarged drawing of the facade, reproduced at a scale of 1:1. The facade has disappeared to be replaced by a lifesized drawing of itself: a kind of double Christo effect. (It was Christo, you may recall who, somewhat controversially, draped the Reichstag, and other landmarks, in polythene).

It is a curious effect because the drawing seems somehow more real than the actual facade. (Perhaps in the same way that many find the Parthenon a disappointment after having seen so many postcards of it). There is a quality to the drawn image that is more direct, more tangible and more individual than the anonymous carved stone that we normally see.
http://www.stpauls.co.uk/page.aspx?theLang=001lngdef&pointerid=42213fsySbUx6o8Hziz3D6vuQ6QMgewJ

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Our project is about using images to touch realities not easily reached with words alone. I think today I have learnt something about this, but I am not yet sure what.