Dialogue

Long train journey to Telford for the Community Rail Awards and I’ve started doodling with the Echoes of a Market work in mind.

“Active listening is technique that is used in counseling, training, and solving disputes or conflicts. It requires that the listener fully concentrate, understand, respond and then remember what is being said. This is opposed to other listening techniques like reflective listening and empathic listening. Reflective listening is where the listener repeats back to the speaker what they have just heard to confirm understanding of both parties.[inconsistent] Empathic listening is about giving people an outlet for their emotions before being able to be more open, sharing experiences and being able to accept new perspectives on the troubled topic that is the reason of emotional suffering. Listening skills may establish flow rather than closed mindedness, negative emotions include stress, anger and frustration.”

From the archives: Dialogues: Art, Performance, Film at Rich Mix, January 30 2014

“Conversation makes the world go around. And in recent times creative works of conversation have been a forceful part of contemporary art practices, ‘relational’ and participatory performances, and the rising genre of the essay film in experimental documentary cinema and video. Conversing has long been prescribed as the means to solve all manner of dis-eases, from Sigmund Freud’s talking cure for psychological imbalances, to physicist David Bohm’s proposition of creative dialogue as the primary tool for organizational and social change. But what do these dialogues in art, performance and film do for, or with, the spectator? What do they tell us about the stakes of being social with ideas?”

I went to the Museum of Science and Industry and saw the £50 banknote shortlist exhibition.

The exhibition had few artefacts but there was an enigma machine which the selected scientist for the new note Alan Turing famously helped crack with the Bombe.

“The Enigma machine is an encryption device developed and used in the early- to mid-20th century to protect commercial, diplomatic and military communication. It was employed extensively by Nazi Germany during World War II, in all branches of the German military.

Enigma has an electromechanical rotor mechanism that scrambles the 26 letters of the alphabet. In typical use, one person enters text on the Enigma’s keyboard and another person writes down which of 26 lights above the keyboard lights up at each key press. If plain text is entered, the lit-up letters are the encoded ciphertext. Entering ciphertext transforms it back into readable plaintext. The rotor mechanism changes the electrical connections between the keys and the lights with each keypress. The security of the system depends on Enigma machine settings that were changed daily, based on secret key lists distributed in advance, and on other settings that change for each message. The receiving station has to know and use the exact settings employed by the transmitting station to successfully decrypt a message.”

I went to Handforth on a site visit with Dwell Time today. It proved to be quite a long journey by train but a really great meeting and we made use of the train journey to catch up and plan.

Train dialogues with flasks of coffee.