You’d never know it, but…there has been action. Trapped in Glasgow by snow, I hastily re-wrote my contribution to this sold-out event The Curios Society at the Whitechapel

(Saturday 3rd March, 3pm, Whitechapel), so that Eggs and Aliens was delivered by ‘Fiona’, the ‘Scottish’ digital Word voice, who, when slowed down as far as she goes sounds almost exactly like me anyway.

A totally subjective trip from the first Alchemist to alien abduction, via a female mad scientist, two linguist spacewomen and a picnic, Eggs and Aliens‘ images were gamely moved along by the non-digital flesh finger of Robert Williams.

So I missed in person, Robert’s excellent discussions of his work with Dion and the brilliant Kate Briggs’ talk about the alchemy of translation, but an audio recording exists. Below are the images I used in Fiona’s presentation and you can read the thing in the Writing part of this site…

Huge thanks to Jane Scarth and the tech team of The Whitechapel for the massive effort and for agreeing to let Fiona speak in the first place. She’s better than I am at pronouncing ouroboros anyway.

“Assembling on the first three Saturdays of Mark Dion: Theatre of the Natural World, The Curios Society meets to investigate the weird and wonderful, the unlikely and impossible. 

Alchemy can describe a philosophical tradition, an esoteric practice, a way of thinking and at times, an artistic methodology.

We meet artists Robert Williams, Kate Briggs and Jane Topping to explore ideas of the alchemical in art. From transmutation in translation to the figure of the alchemist in popular film cultures, this talk charts a course through the mysteries and cultural intersections of alchemy.”

From the Whitechapel website.