Afternoon Delights – Midnight Eyes

1981

The 69-year old filmmaker Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon is a kind of personification of the missing link between the british psychedelic era of the late 1960′s and the culture of today, in the regard that what one could say sums up the bulk of his work really is a unique peek through the lens of someone who seems to always have been in the right place at the right time, and through the years has maintained an inspired perspective – so as to present us with a seemingly timeless documentation.
In 1965, while already deeply involved as a writer of poetry and prose,  he took on studies at the London Film School and made many friends on the Cambridge scene, one being Syd Barrett of the then little known band Pink Floyd. During that same year they shot the super-8 movie Syd Barrett’s First Trip – a film of Barrett getting high on magic mushrooms in the Gog Magog Hills near Cambridge. It was not Barretts first trip though, and the film has later been raised to cult status perhaps due to the title and also confusingly been dubbed as a documentation of an LSD trip. Not that that would have been unlikely, seeing how Lesmoir-Gordon had a reputation as the “Acid King” of Cromwell Road, having secured a sizeable liquid stash of LSD from poet John Esam.
A few years out of school he formed his own production company together with the like-minded wizzkids of Hipgnosis, the creative collective responsible for some of the most amazing record sleeves in music history (among others the sleeves of countless Pink Floyd albums). Here Lesmoir-Gordon collaborated on transferring some of the visions of these bands into the film medium, in those experimental years before the music video formula was established.

So for a man who during most of his life up until the late 1980′s seems to have remarked himself in the field of music and film (and the combination of the two), it could appear surprising to find him turn his interest to the field of science and mathematics. But only if you were unfamiliar with the work of one Benoit Mandelbrot, an academic of french & polish descent who in 1958 moved to the United States to work for IBM in New York. In 1979 Mandelbrot would devote himself to the then little explored area of fractal geometry, and with the help of the most advanced computers of that time he generated images of the various patterns that these infinite calculations amounted to.
His discovery of his own structure (the Mandelbrot Set) and the publication of his book The Fractal Geometry Of Nature in 1982 – took both the scientific world with storm as it did the laymens world, no doubt due to the inherent beauty and awe-inspiring colourful shapes of these computer-generated demonstrations.
And somewhere here is where the paths of Mandelbrot and Lesmoir-Gordon would cross. The psychedelic aesthetic could now transfer into something that is meaningful on a whole different level. As Lesmoir-Gordon would find through Mandelbrot, what is simply a consequence of scientific reasoning is both an explanation of the world and a mystifier of it. The notion that everything is connected into infinity through the reoccurrence of identical mathematical patterns certainly corresponds with the philosophies of the East as well as the culture of the acid trip, where an almost religious emphasis is put on the profound sense of connection with the world while tripping.
In 1995 The Colours Of Infinity was initially broadcasted on Channel 4 in the UK, a documentary hosted by Sir Arthur C. Clarke and with a musical score by none other than Lesmoir-Gordons old friend David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. Since then, Lesmoir-Gordon has co-written two books on the matter of fractal geometry and has followed up his documentary debut with sequels on related subject matter.

Simon Eliasson, 2012.
(with additional credit to Mick Brown of I-Spy Syd In Cambridge)

It was recently announced that Malmö City will soon own a public artwork by one of Swedens greatest living artists, Matti Kallioinen. The artwork, bearing the title Spectral Self Container, will be installed in the summer of 2013 next to the Central train station and the western harbour.
A visual approximation (or sketch) of the sculpture can already be viewed here, where it is evident that these are two of the so-called “super-pretzels” that Kallioinen describes in his book The Synthetic Supernatural (2011, here in translation by Hans Olsson):

“The “super pretzels” that I have been working on in the last few years look strange and are “hard watched” because they are topological freaks whose causal logic gets tangled up in itself, just as with their relatives, the Möbius strips and the Klein bottles. An ordinary tree may be described as an extrovert fractal, the limbs pointing outwards from the trunk, the branches pointing outwards from the limbs. The tree’s topology radiates an innocent lack of self consciousness to an anthropocentric eye. The super pretzel, on the other hand, seems to have self reference as its primary function. With its extremities flowing in and out through one another, it presents itself, self consciously and somewhat pompously, as a premature solution to a still unknown existential conundrum.”

(Note: the pictures above are from the photo series Group Resonance published in Cabinet Magazine 2009)