A Difficult Path to Tread

In a previous issue of Canadian Military History (Vol.5, No.l, Spring 1996) I looked at the recently unveiled Canadian War Memorial in Green Park in London, UK. I drew comparisons between the memorial and its counterparts on the Somme and at Vimy Ridge, I was fascinated by the fusion of abstract and figurative elements, and speculated that this combination of hard modernist edges with dramatic use of statuary seemed to be a particular strength of Canadian war memorials. Later that year I was invited by Professor Terry Copp to join a Canadian universities study group in France. At Caen, Normandy I had the chance to examine the new Canadian garden at Le Memorial de la Paix. This is a quite original, even controversial, installation, more of a peace garden than a monument. As a garden space it seems to want to tell a particular story; its layout invites speculation and association. There are, though, many ways of ‘reading’ a landscaped space: this is my attempt

Peackeeping, Peace, Memory: Reflections on the Peacekeeping Monument in Ottawa

Since 1948, under the auspices of the United Nations (UN), Canada has contributed over 80,000 men and women from all branches of the armed forces to global peacekeeping. During the 1950s and 1960s, Canada was, in fact, the greatest contributor of ’Blue Helmet’ soldiers to UN peacekeeping endeavours and became the undisputed leader in global peacekeeping. Although peacekeeping was never the sole preoccupation of Canada’s foreign policy, Canadian politicians liked to be seen as projecting an image as ’helpful fixers,’ acting as a voice of moderation between the extremes of the two superpowers during the Cold War. It was a Canadian statesman, Lester B. Pearson, who first used the UN Charter to create the idea of an international peacekeeping force—a concept that earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1957

Review of: Denis Cosgrove and William L. Fox, Photography and Flight. London, Reaktion Books, 2010

The permissive explorations of such photographic artists as David Maisel, Michael Light, and Laura Kurgen conclude this study. Following in the aerial footsteps of Ruscha, Maisel takes photo- graphs of the Los Angeles topography from 10,000 feet, reversing its opalescent light by printing his images in negative so that the pale sky becomes ominously black, buildings appear white e ‘hollowed out as if by bombs’ (p. 134) e and the freeways become winding arteries, lending an overall impression of apocalypse summarized in the title of Maisel’s series Oblivion. As Cosgrove and Fox point out, their ‘sunshine and noir’ iconography pays no homage to the convention of mapping. They refuse to offer conciliatory means of orientation. Instead they decouple us from the familiar and force us to approach the urban on new, if uncannily familiar, terms

Improving reconfigurable systems reliability by combining periodical test and redundancy techniques: a case study

This paper revises and introduces to the field of reconfigurable computer systems, some traditional techniques used in the fields of fault-tolerance and testing of digital circuits. The target area is that of on-board spacecraft electronics, as this class of application is a good candidate for the use of reconfigurable computing technology. Fault tolerant strategies are used in order for the system to adapt itself to the severe conditions found in space. In addition, the paper describes some problems and possible solutions for the use of reconfigurable components, based on programmable logic, in space applications

Why Not Try Radio Tapes?

If you don\u27t produce radio tapes because you lack staff or a fully-equipped studio, you are missing out on a lot of free publicity. In Connecticut I have gotten the Experiment Station on the state\u27s most powerful radio station using a minimum of equipment

Karin Krommes: Cosmic debris and swarming metals

Karin Krommes' studio in Bristol is compact and clean; her pristine canvases are neatly stacked, their painted engines float in a talcum of whiteness, speaking of both mass and delicate weightlessness, of affinity and yet also of detachment. Neatly aligned on a narrow shelf small boxes contain the powdery remains of moths and fragile insects; other boxes contain the dismantled parts of model aircraft. Tucked between two boxes is a compact envelope. It contains exactly one hundred Austerlitz Insect Pins, used by entomologists and curators to display dry mounted insect specimens; double coated, black enameled spring steel with very fine points, each pin 52mm long, with a filament-thin diameter of 0.7mm. Such a high level of specification is crucial both to the proper display of the specimen but also to Krommes whose work similarly relies on exactitude of observation, on the precise rendering of differing metal surfaces ...There is something both touching and discomforting in the way that certain paintings relate to one another. The pairing of the two ejector seats, for example, is like a husband and wife team, a partnership in which the cushioned straps, the sagging seats, the knobs and dials have something in common but are finely differentiated, espousing their own unique, even idiosyncratic, character, which Krommes in her relentless pursuit of the particular pins down and paints with unnerving steeliness. This diptych remind us of a couple, their history of closeness, the complexity and entanglement of shared emotions

EDGE:LANDS. Catalogue of drawings and paintings by Paul Gough

EDGE:LANDSSketching somewhere and nowherePaul Gough is interested in drawing in-between places, liminal zones, waste grounds, empty places that were once something and now have been allowed to lapse back into their habitual shape. Look at his drawings of the former airbase at Greenham Common, or the ash-heaps of the old north Somerset coalfield, the abandoned village of Tyneham or the forlorn gullies on the Gallipoli Peninsula. They are powerful evocations of absence and embedded memory. Writer Marion Shoard coined these unloved, unseen and often unexplored spaces as the ‘edge land’, a mysterious hinterland of brick piles and rubbish tips, derelict industrial plant and ragged landfill, forlorn filling stations and scruffy allotments, abandoned ordnance lying amidst rogue plants.Thirty years ago, the naturalist Richard Mabey in his book ‘The Unofficial Countryside ‘, had also opened our eyes to the vitality of these unkempt places. He, however, found little to cherish and celebrate in these wasted hinterlands. Instead he marvelled at the resilience of nature in such abject conditions, its refusal to be ground down by toxic contagion.Mabey’s astonishment at the hardiness of nature is a reminder of another astute observer of the English scene, the painter Paul Nash. Before the Great War a modest painter of fluffy elms and vapid sunsets, Nash was transformed by his experiences while serving as a British officer on the Western Front in 1916. In 1916, in a letter home he wrote of walking through a wood (or at least what remained of it after recent shelling) when it was little more than ‘a place with an evil name, pitted and pocked with shells, the trees torn to shreds, often reeking with poison gas’. A few days later, to his great surprise, that ‘most desolate ruinous place’ was drastically changed. It was now ‘a vivid green’, bristling with buds and fresh leaf growth:‘The most broken trees even had sprouted somewhere and in the midst, from the depth of the wood’s bruised heart poured out the throbbing song of a nightingale. Ridiculous mad incongruity! One can’t think which is the more absurd, the War or Nature…’ Nash’s ecstatic vision permeates Gough’s recent oeuvre. Over the past decade his drawings and paintings have reflected a dread fascination with poetic dereliction and the quasi-industrial sublime, borne of long sojourns in and around many such No-Man’s-Lands.More recently, two young British poets have also wandered in (and wondered of) the hinterlands that make up the British banlieue. To Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts the wilderness is much closer than any of us think. They describe the English edgeland as a set of familiar yet ignored spaces, ‘passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged’, which are now the new wild places on our very own doorsteps. Theirs is a compelling vision, shared in Gough’s many images of former sites of battle, abandoned workings and ancient slagheaps, a land riddled with trenches and troughs, adits and mineholes, ivoried elm and wild buddleia. Gough’s drawings are not representations of any one particular scene. Instead they are accretions of places, spaces, times and seasons brought together on to a single surface; they are sites of both legend and anonymity, places emptied and yet full of emptiness, dis-membered topographies that have had their constituent parts re-membered through the act of drawing. In his drawings, created over decades of measured practice, Gough has laid vision to his own complicated, unkempt and previously unexamined edgeland. He has made tangible those places that have long thrived on disregard. In his work he meets the challenge that we should ‘put aside our nostalgia for places we’ve never really known and see them afresh’.M.R.H.Paul Farley and Michael Symmonds Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness, 2011.Richard Mabey, The Unofficial Countryside, 1973.Marion Shoard, Edgelands: an essay, 2002