- Venue
- Cornerhouse
- Location
The Implicasphere project aims to explode and tangle the apparent simplicity of meaning of ordinary, concrete words like 'mice' and 'string' by exploring the associations that attach to them.
Implicasphere's co-editors Cathy Haynes and Sally O’ Reilly invited specialist speakers and the audience to help chase ‘all things smoky’ from the collective mental thicket for a new issue of the occasional mini-publication. Pre-recorded readings and interviews with a Soho jazz raconteur and a celebrity chef, interspersed with film footage, anecdotes, cultural arcania, Foley art and live sets by The Montgolfier Brothers and magician Bobby Reader provided a thoroughly interesting evening. The event was very humorous and definitely lived up to its billing as ‘piratical, amateur and partial’.
The word 'implicasphere' is adapted from a term coined by science writer Douglas R Hofstadter and refers to the radii of associations that encircle each word in the imagination of those who hear, read or simply consider them. If you were to ask someone what they thought of when you say 'bread', and they respond with 'toast', then their implicaspheres are likely to be small; but if they say 'raven' then their implicaspheres are creatively – perhaps even insanely – broad.
Dependent as it is on the vagaries of its editors' imaginations it leaves its material in an unstable state, caught in the excitement of the first encounter with an unfamiliar idea. This is sometimes problematic. The Montgolfier Brothers musical performance was perhaps only strenuously linked to the theme of Smoke. Complete with Victorian era photography of Manchester serving as a backdrop to the stage the band had more in kin with an Elbow gig at the Night and Day Café round the corner. However, isn’t this the point of Implicasphere? It is about taking a word such as ‘smoke’ (past publications have included ‘beards’, ‘onions’, ‘folly’ and ‘nose’) and touching the very reaches of the bubble of associations that word creates?
Multimedia and performance artist based in London www.jack-hutchinson.com
