Traffic lights and Samuel Beckett

Wiring the traffic lights at a four lane junction

Another morning drawing exercise that was designed to get half asleep students' numbering and patterning sequences into gear and to open out attention to the possibilities inherent in everyday street life. The problem set was to make a drawing that demonstrated the possible sequences of wiring needed to run a set of traffic lights that were to be found at a busy four lane junction. It was suggested that students use colour coding, but no clues were given as to how to set about this. This was well before the days of computers so the problem was one that would have had to have been solved by traffic light engineers as part of their everyday job. Because the image of traffic lights is so powerful most of the drawings done combined traffic light imagery with complex webs and weaves of red, amber and green. Sometimes attempts were also made to represent an actual street corner as some students found it easier to think about what was happening if they were able to visualise an actual four lane junction, others could think mathematically and realised that the actual junction box and wiring did not need to represent traffic lights, simply a set of possible connections. The various levels of diagrammatic and pictorial thinking that were realised by students at the end of the session were then unpicked at the critique. One particular area that we were interested in at the time was that of information graphics as it was being called then. The various answers to the problem highlighted some of the basic issues surrounding this field. In particular the layered nature of visual communication. Some people (the traffic light engineers) could understand pure diagrammatic form, others might need a more emotional engagement in order to enter into the communication and others simple pictorial clues. The fact that all these layers of complex information could be operating at once was for me fascinating and was something I would try and explain, whilst Patrick might be more concerned with the flat dynamics of 'funny' images and Colin more focused on mathematical possibilities of visual permutations. The big point being as always that take anything seriously, even the most boring thing that you see everyday when you cross the road, and it can open out possibilities. 

This sort of drawing might be done very quickly and if we had enough time left a similar problem might be set, this time based in literature. Again, culture was supposed to be everywhere, high and low meshed together the one informing the other. In some ways quite post-modern, but it would never have been read as that at the time.

The sucking stones sequence.

This was a drawing done in direct response to a passage from Samuel Beckett's Malloy. As always read by Patrick, who would put on a slight Irish brogue accent for the purpose. In order to get an understanding of the text the only way is to give it in full, so here it is, The sucking stones sequence from Malloy, first three-quarters of the action usually read out.

I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of  sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about. But I shuffled them well in my pockets, before I began to suck, and again, while I sucked, before transferring them, in the hope of obtaining a more general circulation of the stones from pocket to pocket. But this was only a makeshift that could not long content a man like me. So I began to look for something else ... I might do better to transfer the stones four by four, instead of one by one, that is to say, during the sucking, to take the three stones remaining in the right pocket of my greatcoat and replace them by the four in the light pocket of my trousers , and these by the four in the left pocket of my trousers, and these by the four in the left pocket of my greatcoat, and finally these by the three from the right pocket of my greatcoat, plus the one, as soon as I had finished sucking it, which was in my mouth. Yes, it seemed to me at first that by so doing I would arrive at a better result. But on further reflection I had to change my mind and confess that the circulation of the stones four by four came to exactly the same thing as their circulation one by one. For if I was certain of finding each time, in the right pocket of my greatcoat, four stones totally different from their immediate predecessors, the possibility nevertheless remained of my always chancing on the same stone, within each group of four, and consequently of my sucking, not the sixteen turn and turn about as I wished, but in fact four only, always the same, turn and turn about. So I had to seek elsewhere than in the mode of circulation. For no matter how I caused the stones to circulate, I always ran the same risk. It was obvious that by increasing the number of my pockets I was bound to increase my chances of enjoying my stones in the way I planned, that is to say one after the other until their number was exhausted……Beckett goes on, and I'm sure anyone interested will now be heading off to get the book, which was also the point, the library always had stocks of the books used for morning drawings, so any student fired by a text could nip in at break time and get cultured up. As you can see its a long piece and students would be asked to begin drawing as the reading was proceeding. Once the reading got to the end it would be started again. The reading becoming a mantra of shifting stones and possibilities.  Students would attempt to draw the possible sequences, columns of stones would become linked by arrows and lines and replacements of some initially fixed areas of a drawing with new images of stones as one stone replaced another. But as this was about stones and not traffic lights colours if used would be browns and dirty greys, smudges of neutrals made as stones were rubbed out and shifted into new spaces. Images which were again of possible sequences this time not reading as bright line diagrams but as 'sacks of potatoes' as they were sometimes described. The possibilities of positioning of each potato in a sack being seen as an appropriate simile or visual metaphor.  How would you read these images; as poetry or as mathematics or both? This was the point, the layering was the game, the possibilities of reading switches were what gave the best of the images produced their life energy and it was life energy captured in the making of images that we were looking for.  Derek's e mail remind me of these particular morning drawings and as I was writing I started to think about what was perhaps one of the best examples, playing pool and thinking universal physics. I'll come back to that another time.