From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Very often at SiliconANGLE Media, companies will come in and they'll present to us about a new product that they're announcing and we'll really have a deep detailed product discussion on speeds and feeds. But in this CUBE conversation, I really want to talk about the API economy. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my friend, Steve Keniston. Steve, great to see you again. Thanks for coming into the studio. Thanks for having me on theCUBE, Dave. I love it here. So the API economy is something that you hear all the time. And as I was saying at the top, a lot of vendors will come in and say, hey, we got this big product that we're going to announce next week or next month. And we want to pick a thought leadership topic and we want to vector our product into that. And yeah, that's good, it's great to do that. It's trying to be relevant. But what I want to talk to you about is this notion of cloud and the API economy and how it's emerged in the network today. So I want to start with a developer perspective. And if you think about the way infrastructure has traditionally been deployed and what it means for a developer, can you help us understand that old view of the world and how it worked? Sure thing, Dave. And by the way, thanks for doing this, right? Having been on both sides of the table, the analyst side as well as the vendor side, you couldn't have hit the nail more on the head, right? Vendors like to come in and talk about product and talk to the analysts about how their product fits into what you guys are hearing in the market space. But I think what's happening more and more is this evolution of the conversation that needs to happen that sells to people who are trying to solve business problems, not solve speeds and feeds problems, right? So as you look at the API economy, right? And you think back to when infrastructure vendors were traditionally selling infrastructure, the conversation was always about, I wouldn't even say a DevOps style. I think that's fairly new. I think it was a test dev style, right? That was a developer developing some code, tossing it over the wall and some operations people trying to install it. And the minute that happened, right? Of course, that code set didn't fulfill all the requirements that were needed by the vendor or by the business, right? It wasn't secure enough. It wasn't, it didn't have all the right capabilities to fit into the infrastructure. Wasn't patched, integration. Didn't talk to the right systems. The punch list of stuff that operations guys have to go through. The developers. They didn't know. Didn't know, frankly, didn't care, right? Didn't understand how the database was laid out so it talks to it in a different way. So traditionally what would happen then is the implementation guys would say, okay, let me go fix this. And they'd do some fixing of it and they'd try to deploy it and it wouldn't work behaviorally the way the developer had designed it. And then there would be this conflict, right? You know, it's not working right, right? Well, it worked when I gave it to you. Yeah, hey, your application doesn't work. You just tell a guy, hey, your code doesn't work. That's the last thing an application developer wants to do. And that process. Well, it worked when I gave it to you, like you said. Exactly. But another point you made is it created a lot of tension. A lot of tension. And the process in and of itself became very, very inefficient, which then you saw the spinning up of. Well, wait, no, now the business guy. Now the business. Says, where's my app? Right. All right, and meanwhile, you have the application development team and the deployment teams sort of doing this back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And, you know, they're trying to work together. But the line of business isn't getting the solution that they need to be, to drive a competitive business. So time to value was impacted substantially. Okay, so then actually, as you came out of the downturn, 2009, 2010, you saw shadow IT emerge. Right, so from your perspective, what did that bring to the table in this conversation? I think the biggest thing shadow IT brought to the conversation is the whole notion of cloud, right? Cloud was, yeah, it's there. We still see the number one reason why people use cloud as for data protection. I want to back it up. They think it's cheaper. It's not tapered. You get rid of a lot of that management capability. Or test dev too, right? Or test dev. But I think test dev, right, is slowly becoming even growing more and more because of this whole notion around shadow IT. It was, look, every time I toss this thing over the wall to the folks that need to implement the solution, I get a lot of pushback. And to your point, it creates a lot of this tension. I'm gonna go create my own way to develop this. And I'm gonna do all the development of that in the cloud. I'm not gonna wait for things to be provisioned for me.  I'm gonna go develop the code that I want and say, well, I'm done. It works, and then hand it off. And because it's in the cloud, hopefully the folks that need to deploy it can attach to the cloud and all of a sudden everything works the way it's supposed to, right? Still misses a lot of the things that the corporation needs from a protection security standpoint. Am I working with the right data set standpoint? Does the database look the same way it does here?  Is that happening, right? And there's still the big question mark. The epiphany from developers as a process of that shadow IT is, wow, I can essentially deploy infrastructure as code. Correct. And then when that hit, that's when you really started to hear the discussion of dev ops, the whole dev ops meme exploded. Although, I would observe, when we talked to a lot of people on theCUBE about this, is it dev ops or is it ops dev? What does that really mean? What it means is that most organizations, at least up until recently, I still say most organizations, don't have infrastructure as a code on-prem. If they want that, they got to go to one of the public cloud providers. And so, but they're looking for that public cloud experience on-prem. And so you had a lot of sort of ops dev, ops guys sort of learning the development piece that was relevant for deployment and the vendor community stepping up and delivering more of an API oriented experience. I think a big part of that too, Dave, to what you're just saying is, now all of a sudden the ops guys were learning things that was a little outside their comfort zone. And because of that, probably a lot of folks got frustrated. So the vendors, to your point, have made it a little bit easier to be able to deploy this through an API economy or through APIs. Why? Because they've started to automate a lot of the learning and the thinking because it's pretty simple. When you have infrastructure as code, there's a lot of things you can do programmatically. Now I can take that learning away and put the ops guys back in charge of ops. I don't need to go learn dev. I need to understand it so when they hand it to me, I know what I'm doing. But that whole API conversation is now moving away from education but more towards the true fulfillment and building out of these new applications that are making businesses more competitive. Okay, so when you think about the API economy, that term gets thrown around a lot. What does that mean to you? To me, the API economy, if you look at it, think of a great use case. I would think of a use case around manufacturing. If you think of a manufacturing company or a manufacturing organization, you have your suppliers, and we all know that just-in-time manufacturing is kind of the way to do business today. You have your manufacturing on the floor, and we know that a lot of systems are doing a lot of components within the manufacturing, and these systems are getting smarter and being able to learn and tell you when things are broken and not working. So you're actually getting real-time service to keep the floor running as fast as possible. Then all of a sudden, your inventory is now moving to some sort of inventory control system and those systems are talking. The vendors who are buying that inventory and then go sell to the public are working with APIs to be able to talk to that inventory and see what they need and when they need it. Then in turn, those vendors are selling to the consumer, and the consumer is using social media now. They're not picking up the phone and calling for customer service. They're saying, hey, this sweater is really nice, or hey, my iPod broke or whatever. So you need, as the original manufacturer, to be able to be tapped into these channels to get that information, and it's a circle, and that circle is really all held together with code. Okay, so that brings me to sort of the discussion of cloud and essentially what organizations, we talked about Dev Ops versus Ops Dev before. I would posit that the organizations, application development heads, CIOs, they want that cloud-like experience and they want it wherever their data is. They're not going to bring all their data into the cloud, too much data, governance, compliance, security, all that stuff. So they're going to bring the cloud operating model to their data, which means they're going to bring the API economy to their data, wherever that exists. It's in the cloud, on-prem, at the edge, someplace in between the cloud and the edge. And so I want to get your perspectives on how that's evolving in your view and where it needs to go. How that's evolving. Yeah, I mean, where are we today in terms of being able to programmatically across my infrastructure cloud, on-prem, edge, be able to control my infrastructure programmatically and get it to do what I want in the same way that I could do that in the cloud? I think that's a really good question and as I think about it, I think there are different organizations or there are different vendors who have been able to provide solutions to clients in a way such that... There are vendors who have provided solutions to clients that have done so in such a way that it's not holistic across your different infrastructure components, as you and I think about infrastructure, the storage servers, networking, et cetera. I think different vendors in different segments have done a better job. Think of Chef and Puppet. Chef and Puppet have gone a long way to the provisioning of servers and systems to be able to spin up systems that then in turn go build an operations around driving, building an application, testing an application, passing that testing process through a series of automated tests processes and then passing it back to development to go fix it. I don't know that you see the same type of the same level of automation that you see maybe at the server level, in the storage level, yet, yet, I say yet. All of that is coming. I see more and more that when you think of technologies coming down the pipe like a copy management functionality, right? The ability to reuse data. Now, that whole environment, it started a while ago, but you see it evolving more. The tools to then automate a lot of that process are now starting to come to fruition. They hadn't been there before, but they're starting to come networking, kind of the same thing. And that means when you talk about automation, you're just talking about programmatically invoking policy so that the system just does what I need it to do and I don't have to go manually reconfigure because the big vision here is distributed cloud, but managed with a single point of control. And when you think about these workloads that are going to require this new type of infrastructure, everybody talks about AI, machine learning, deep learning, it's requiring a different type of infrastructure and different type of mindset. Microservices are a big part of that. Functional programming across location. So edge, something in between edge and cloud called middle tier, right? And the cloud tier. So you've got processing happening at the edge, maybe real time, maybe aggregating data in the middle and then sending it back up to the cloud and then doing maybe more detailed modeling. That management of that distributed infrastructure cannot take place without the API economy. Do you agree and why and maybe help us think through how that will evolve? So I totally agree. I think the company or the business wants to be able to ensure, and I think you said it best, I'm not going to bring the data to you or am I going to bring the data to you or you're going to come to the data, right? The data has to. Yeah, the cloud model. The cloud model is the data, right? So I need to be able to have access in all those access points, right? That's very important to me because each one of those access points is going to give me the access and the capability to be able to tie in and talk to and touch customers in a different way, right? Or consumers of the data, right? And the customer in this case could be, and this is where the automation piece comes in, could be the developer, right? So the developer, right? Now, today is the person that we're selling to, right? We're not selling to the traditional infrastructure people. Although, of course they have accountability and responsibility for making sure the infrastructure is secure, stable, they've got enough storage, they've got enough horsepower to run the business. However, the person who needs to be able to access those capabilities or the data that actually lives on the disk, the developer doesn't care anymore what disk it is, they just need access to the data, right? So now I want to be able to come in every morning and I want the latest and greatest data set available to me so I can go build against an infrastructure that looks like reality, right? So that I know as I'm building my new application for consumers that I'm building it as fast as I can, as robust as I can, and as accurately as I can right away. And then I want to distribute that again quickly so that as many people who need to consume that application have the ability to do so. When we talk about things like, and I ask you sort of, we talk about things like containers and microservices. I worry sometimes you get, you know, maybe easy to manage dozens of containers and even hundreds but start managing hundreds of thousands and you know, same thing with microservices. Some of these microservices aren't so micro. They explode. Yeah, they explode. Macro services. Should we, is there a concern about API creep where I've got sort of this API economy blossoming but I've got all this now API complexity out there or do you see the industry being able to manage that? Is that, is API sort of a way to manage that? Will there be an abstraction layer there? How do you see that all evolving? Should we worry about API creep or should we even be embracing API creep? No, I think the jury's still out, right? I think that you hear a lot of the vendors talk about, oh yeah, we support, we have a RESTful API within our set and we can kind of write to anything. Is that really true? Can it write to anything? Because the more APIs that you see, right, the more little tricks, I mean we saw this when networking was going to be standardized, right? Are we going to standardize on an API eventually so that when you do say you write to anything, you can? I mean, hopefully, hopefully you can, right? But I don't know. Yeah, well, and the concern there would be just different quality and robustness and what you get from one vendor which might be rock solid, another one maybe not so much and is a weaker point in the link.  And it's not just quality, right? It's functionality, right? So you might be able to take advantage of certain things but you can't take advantage of others, right? Of course that becomes strategic selling for the vendor to say, hey, here's what I can offer, right? But at some point, again, when you're talking to that 23-year-old developer who just wants to sit down and be successful at building their application, they don't necessarily care or want to hear about that, right? Just like they don't care about what this gets on, they need certain functions to be able to work. It's the iPhone world now, right? When I push a button, I want it to work. I don't have the time or the cycles to try and go fix something. So the cloud operating model from an IT operations standpoint has been profound. One of the things we predicted at Wikibon is that over the next 10 years actually started probably two years ago. But from two years ago to sort of eight years on now, we predict $150 billion will come out of sort of undifferentiated IT labor costs, provisioning servers and loans and managing all that infrastructure, which doesn't add any value to the business, disappears or gets shifted to other activities. So it gets replaced by vendor R&D in the form of product that actually is cloud-like, public cloud services and the API economy. Shifting those resources into application development, design thinking, other value add- Analytics. Analytics for sure. All this AI buzz up the stack, if you will, that is going to allow people to differentiate with their digital business. Everybody talks about digital business. Digital businesses are those that differentiate with data. And that's what people want to spend their money.  That's why everybody complains about how we spend all our money on keeping the lights on. Big part of that is infrastructure management. Correct. Final thoughts. Caught me off guard. Okay. Well, I got some final thoughts. And then let me chat a little bit and then you can chime in. So I would say we're entering the next great phase of cloud. I mean a lot of this is driven by cloud and somewhat by open source. The first phase is going to kick the tires, what is the second phase was, wow, the economy is killing me. So I'm going to shift my CAPEX to OPEX. Actually, maybe the fourth phase. Third phase was shadow IT. I got to go fast. And I think the fourth phase was, wow, businesses and CEOs realizing that we can't just let shadow IT run away, run amok. We need to embrace the cloud model and bring the cloud model to our data. And as part of that, it's the API economy that we need to embrace and foster and invest in and shift the labor cost out of undifferentiated lifting to the things that add value. And I think the API economy is that vision. It does that. Yeah, so I would completely agree. So I haven't been in a sale in a customer call. I haven't been in a customer call yet this year where, for example, DevOps hasn't come up, right? And to me, that shows me that CIOs are thinking exactly what you're describing, right?  I'm not laughing. I like your shirt. So I haven't been in a sales meeting yet this year where we haven't had a conversation with the CIO or the executives at the table where we weren't talking about DevOps. And to me, DevOps instantly rings the API economy. Why? Because it injects a level of automation that really is what the CIO or the C-level is looking for, right? Because it does things like help take away some of that expense around the heating, cooling, whatever expense because you get to then offset pushing data into the cloud and leveraging the cloud in an OPEX-type model more. I think that the executives have been hearing a lot of, we have a cloud strategy, right? And you get to the people on the development floor or in the IT shop, right? And they say, yeah, well, we can't really do a lot of that. And I think the C-level is starting to see a lot more. If I can have the API economy help me, help them solve some of their problems, we can get to a cloud model a lot faster and meet the business requirements from a secure standpoint, from a data standpoint, a compliance standpoint that we need to be able to hit. And I think that's really important. Well, developers are driving the bus, hop on board. Steve, thanks for the chat. Thanks for having me, Dave. Appreciate your perspective, you're welcome, anytime. All right, thanks for watching everybody. This is theCUBE Conversations with Dave Vellante and Steve Kenneson. We'll see you next time.


OK, welcome, everyone. Happy Valentine's Day, everybody. Thank you. How sweet of you to join us. I'd like to confirm that we posted the agenda in three public places in town and on the website and emailed to interested parties. So we're legally ready to go forward with this meeting. And we will take public comment after we've gone through the agenda with limiting it to five minutes per person, per topic. And we'll start off with the prior meeting minutes from January 24th, the regular select board meeting. Do you need to have any changes or corrections on those? No, sir. They're pretty thorough to me, so I'd move to approve those. Second. All in favor? Aye. And then we also have the meetings from the special select board meeting of January 11th. Short and sweet. Short and sweet. Proof goes. I second. All in favor? Aye. And also the special select board meeting on January 19th. These are all around trying to figure out when and how we're going to have the town meeting. And the agenda here. And I'd move to approve those. I second. All in favor? Aye. All right. Thank you. OK. We have at the top of the list, we have a guest, Asia. Arshad, hi. Arshad. Thank you for having me. Yeah. What's up, too? What do you want to talk about? Farmers' market? Yes. Today, my hat today is the Farmers' Market Manager hat. All right. OK. I'm here to officially request permission to use the park for the Farmers' Market of 2022, which runs from Memorial Day weekend through Columbus', well, Indigenous Peoples' Day weekend. Every Friday from 3 to 6 PM. I'm happy that you guys do that. I know we have, because of COVID, we asked you to spread out and also that also was spreading out the wear on the park. We stayed away from that main strip along Route 100 last year, and it seemed like it did help it out. So I'm now Frank's been doing a lot of work with getting lime on the lawn to get it done. Trying to bring it back. Trying to bring it back, yeah. How do you feel about the new format of the flow? So it's been actually really nice. It allows us to use more of the park, and so actually it brings people more into the heart of the park. So people tend to kind of spread out more. People then kind of wander over to the gazebo. They get food from the market. They wander to the gazebo. So rather than just kind of sitting on that one area, they do tend to actually spread out. We've had some families then start playing Frisbee back towards the Huntington House and while they listen to the music. So it really has started to move using kind of the whole park. And in fact, that front area, no one really goes on it because it's really shady. It is really shady. I think that's a lot of why the grass wouldn't recover so quickly there. And I made sure to stagger the booths. I mean, the booths were never in the same spot every single week, even because I would use the monument as my marker and move them. So I mean, people love the new layout, and vendors are happy. I know that you have concerns if you were further back away from the road. Less visibility might mean less participation, but it is safer to have people further away off route 100. So I'm fine with that. I would only suggest that if it starts showing a lot of wear there, because if you have a continual use in the same spot all the time, whether you stagger them or not, you still get all the traffic. If it starts to wear, possibly move it to maybe even further back of the monument, maybe for a year or two, and then switch it around a little, you might have to do that just so the grass tries to stay. We've mowed it longer this last summer. It was raw this summer. It was like a hayfield. But that's because of the traffic, and I was trying to keep the grass better by mowing it high. I know it doesn't look as nice, but with the kind of use it gets, it's harder on the ground. I was more worried about the elderly people who kept tripping over the grass. Yeah, well. And actually, the length of it actually kind of became an issue for safety in terms of the peak. Because we had people from the parkhouse coming with their walkers and everything, and it actually was tripping people up, which was actually kind of tricky on my end, because technically, I hate to say it like this, but if someone tricks and falls during the market, I get sued, not the town. So, I mean, I understand obviously not mowing it down to pigeon, but it was, it was a, my farmer husband was eyeing it a little too enthusiastically. I'm wondering whether you could have him change the day that he mows the lawn. Well, we talked about that, and I did speak with him to try to mow it on like a Tuesday, and a lot of times he didn't get to it at that time, and the weather didn't cooperate where it could do it, so it's kind of a crapshoot really. So it's nice to try to keep it as good as we can.  You know, that's okay. Just pick up, you know, trash that was left after your gatherings, and that's fine. I mean, I don't mind, but just be nice if it was a little bit better cared for. So I have to pick up garbage every morning, Friday, and immediately after the market. So I'm not sure when you come through, maybe it's Friday evening or Saturday after people have visited, but I actually end up picking up at least one or two bags of garbage in the morning as my service to the town. Oh, yes. Before the market. It's usually Suzuki week, that's a tricky week. So I end up picking up a full bag of garbage in the morning when I'm setting up on Friday, and then immediately after the market, and the vendors help, they clean up everything. So if there's garbage, it must be the late night, Friday riots, I don't know. It would very well be. We pick up garbage when we get there. Yeah. You know, two o'clock in the afternoon, and we check again for relief in our general area. All right, well, I've moved to approve their use. Are you going to do a formal application for your park use? Oh, yeah, I can tell you that. Yeah, yeah. I did that last year, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I should have requested that. And I should have thought to send it to you knowing this was out there. But yeah, I've seen no problems, and we're happy that you all do it. It's people, people really love it. And they actually, if you look at the Airbnbs that are near the center of town, they all use pictures of the market in their advertising. So even if they themselves don't come to the market, it is a draw. It is a draw. Yeah. And thank you, Kevin and Paula, for making sure there's produce at the market. It's nice to have a farmer's market have real farmers there. Yeah. All right, now I'll move on to the first item. I just pushed you ahead since you're on the guest list here. We've got the bids for the emergency generator for this building here, which is our command center. Command center. We've got three bids, one from Vermont Power Technologies doing business as Brookfield Services. And they gave us two bids, one for a 12 kilowatt hour model for $8,257, and one for a 14 kilowatt for $8,836. We also got a bid from Central Vermont Electrical Contractors. And their price for the 14 kilowatt, and they specified no propane installation of $12,375. So it's not clear whether Brookfield bid includes or doesn't include propane. They also put a bid in with propane installation for $16,300. And then a third bid from BC Johnson and Company. They have it broken up even differently than the others. They have the bid for the 14 kilowatt generator for $8,493. The propane installation of $6,874. And then the electrical upgrade for $16,675 for a grand total of $32,042. So obviously, we're not going to award this bid right now because we have to make sure we've got apples and oranges separated and right. But at least we got three people bid. We do. This will happen. Yeah. So we'll award this in the future. But we'll work on digesting that information. Thank you for those two bids. We've got the tax maintenance contract for CAI. What does that stand for? I had to ask. I had to ask. Sorry. CAI, oh, technologies. OK, it just says CAI. Anyway. Oh, cartographic associations, that makes sense. And it's just their maintenance. Yeah, their maintenance contract for $17.50. Not $17.50 at $1,750. That's for the whole year. All right, so I'd move to approve the contract. Second. All in favor? All right. Thank you. All right. Moving right along, we've got a liquor license for Sandy's books in bakery. And I'd move to approve. I can second that. Yeah. All in favor? Yep. All right. OK. All right. Thank you, Sandy, for running that place. All right, now I get to the exciting part of the fiscal year 23 budget. That's what you're all here for.  I'd like to preface this with thanking the Budget and Finance Committee for we didn't keep track of how many hours. But we did it pretty good this year. We did have a few extra meetings at the end to kind of wind it up. But maybe one worked really hard and very thankful for the volunteers that did that. So the amount to be raised by taxes is this is for the town portion, not the school portion, of course, $966,359. And the, no, wait a minute. That's the amount to be raised by taxes. And then when you add in the other funding and grant sources, we come to a total budget of $1,397 and $1,397,011, which will bring us to the fiscal year 22 tax rate or the increase of it, 2.13%. We really, I think, at one point, we had an 18% increase. And we were like, no, more meetings. Can't do that. They whittled their down some. So we have the final legal warning to sign our lawyers fine-tuning that. So we'll take care of that later on these weeks. But that's the information that y'all are waiting on there. Thank you for that. Martha? I'm doing. Just am I correct that you're going to be approving this at some date soon in the future? We've just approved it. We're going to sign the warning, the official warning. OK, signed. Excuse me. Right. I want to make sure you're OK. But no, this is that. No more discussion. No more meetings about this one. Yeah. So that's coming up the warning for the annual town meeting that was coming to come. And we have a request to appoint Dorian Jones to fill the vacancy for a library trustee. I think that's great that she's interested in the willing to do that. So I'd move to appoint Dorian Jones to fill who's which vacancy? Who is she? Oh, library, my mom. Yeah, library. Library trustee. You? My mom.  All right, she's gone. All right, so. Yes, I can that. On favor? All right. OK. And thank you, Yola, that she's not here. But Nancy? So you know that Dorian will just, you're appointing her from now until the 28th of March. Right, just to fill this point. And then she runs for the remaining one year of Yola's term. And then if she wants to stay on, she runs for a five-year term next year. Yeah. All right, well, thank her for us unless she's out there in Zoomland watching. No, she's not. Something wrong with my face. All right. OK, that's our list of new business. Joan, are you online? You've got some more updates for us? Yes, I'm here. OK, so the first item is I had a sudden meeting with a couple of folks from Green Mountain National Forest, Chris Matric, and Brian Austin, who we've been working with on the West Tilbury. And we think we're ready to go out to bed now. We have all of our easements lined up. That was the last task we needed. But there are still more steps that have to be taken on Brian's end. It's basically bureaucratic things that need to go through the system further up the chain at the Forest Service. And there are a couple of problems out of arisen, which may mean that the construction has to be postponed for a year. Soon to say yet, we wanted to let us know that it was a possibility. The reasons are that the Eastern Federal Lands Group that Chris and Brian report to have been just very slow for the past two years in reviewing documents that need to be approved before things can move ahead. Not really clear what the issue has been. It's been going on for a while.  And Brian apparently found out just recently that they can't say how long it's going to take to approve those documents. It could be too long a delay, which ends up, we can't move forward without those approvals in hand. And as a result, we may not be able to go out to bed until sometime like May or June, which would be too late, push everything back too far for us to be able to do the construction project this year. The second part of the problem with Eastern Federal Lands is funding. Apparently, Green Mountain National Forest has been waiting for a long time for funding to come through. They know it's approved, but they have to go through a number of steps. And it's not clear that Eastern Federal Lands itself, which is the regional umbrella of the Green Mountain National Forest, whether they've gotten any money from folks in DC. So funding is the second issue, which eventually will come. But they can't say whether it will come soon enough for us to be able to move ahead with construction. So they are going to keep us posted. And both Chris and Brian have offered to come to a next meeting or one after that and give us an update and explain things further. Otherwise, we're all ready to go. The documents are prepared, and we were planning to have enough meeting sometime soon to just launch all of that. But we're fairly at least on hold with that. Excuse me, Joan. Could I just ask a quick question? This was about the West Branch. We have a fuzzy connection there for a minute. This is about the West Branch project, you said. West Hill Bridge. West Hill. West Hill Bridge. Bridge. OK, thank you. I'm sorry. You're laying with her a while. OK, that's what I thought. But I just couldn't hear you for a minute. I'm sorry. Thank you. OK, well, that is what it is. So I forgot to mention. The issue also is it's not clear whether there's going to be a temporary bridge available by the time we need it. Our service does not have a bridge that's large enough for that crossing. And it's something we asked a month ago. We asked V-Trends whether they might have a bridge. And what I recall from that was that all of their temporary bridges were going to already be in use for other projects. I knew we shouldn't have sold that train car. But all right. Well, yeah, it's who's surprised? The government's moving slow. Stay tuned. Hopefully we'll have some good news. But I want to bear for something less than that. Another item I just need to run by you. We've got a town garage stormwater project. It's got bid for the fifth time. And we're hoping the fifth time will be a charm. Bids are due on March 7. And the question is, is there going to be a design phase, which is way back in, I think, 2020, if you remember that? We agreed to provide a match for the cost of the design. It was matching a matching grant of 10% of the cost. And the amount was $3,535. And I was reminded of that because WRP sort of lost track of it back in 2020 when things were sort of going haywire with the pandemic and folks working from home and stuff. They forgot about it. And so did we. So we still owe them that amount. And I went back and my records just to verify that we did agree to it. And I do have records that we did. And at one point, probably more than a year ago, I did submit a partial match, which included my time on the project, Cudor's time. And then we also contributed about $1,200 worth of work that was done by a contractor to take the test holes. If you remember, when those were done back, we were looking for the location to place the defender. So that leaves us with a match still owing to WRP of about $2,300. And talking with Cudor about it, we agreed that one way that he felt a good way to match and WRP likes the idea is that we need to provide or someone needs to provide some fill for the project. And the estimate for that is going to be one load of a dump load will cost approximately that amount. Now it's going to be the right amount to fill that the engineer estimates it's going to be needed. So I'm proposing that we provide that amount of gravel for the project when the time comes, and then we will have match requirements. And WRP likes the idea, Cudor likes the idea, so I'm hoping he will too. All right, that's great. Thanks for figuring that out. So we'll see if we get any bids. Yeah. Well, they're going bad in a different way. They got some recommendations from the engineer for larger size contractors who would A, have the equipment, and also have the experience in installing defenders. So other than trying to keep the work local, which is always something that WRP tries to do, it just wasn't working, obviously. So we're hopeful that we'll get some of these bigger contractors who have the wherewithal to do a project like this. Because we're realizing that it's more complicated than it appeared on paper as well. What else you got for us? I'm just working on the annual B-trans acquired financial stuff, which I can't do much on the actual financial statement or the financial plan until it is passed. But there's some other paperwork, if you remember, that happens annually. Like updating the standards and procedures for road work. So I'll have that ready for you at the next select board meeting. All right. Great. Thank you. Joan, will there be some time where we can sit down and go over these bids for the generator? Yeah, we need to do that. Yeah, it's kind of complicated. OK, so I'll be in touch with you and we can meet and go through them. That'd be good. All right, thank you. Great. All right, that's it. Great. Thank you, Joan. Yes, yes, OK. Anybody here to speak on behalf of the library or on Zoom? I have nobody on Zoom. No, no, all right. And the highway is running pretty good. I got a phone call about 9.30 last Saturday night and it was a dollar general truck off the road on Northview Drive. The hollows. Yeah, and I asked if we could help and treat the road because the record's on the way. And I said, well, that's the dirt road. I don't think we're going to do any. We don't even have a dollar general here. No, anyway, I went and looked. I couldn't see where it went in the ditch, but it serves them right for taking a truck on the back roads. Anyway, that's my report from the highway road. The GPS, I guess. Yeah, that's the GPS. Terry, you got anything holding up in the cold weather? Yeah, everything's. Yeah, did you get that alert this afternoon about to be on your guard in case Russia decides to cyberattack our sewer system? Actually, I have a class on that on Thursday. So hopefully you don't attack before Thursday. Right. Let's see if they get the memo to wait. Have them hold back a little bit. I think we're a little bit off the radar, I hope. But we're going to have our air compressor for a fire department this week. Oh, good. Great. Cool. And the price will be $15,000, $750,000. That's the one you had your eye on there. Awesome, that's a good avenue. But I'm joking aside, what in our water or sewer system is critically connected with the internet? Well, all my readings go through that. But our water is not. We don't have any monitoring on the water that goes through the internet or anything. So, but all my sewers do. Yeah, but it's just the reading. The system would still function. Yeah, we'd still get water that just can't flush. I'd sew it. It just can't flush. You know, I don't think they could make it happen to anything. But I'll tell you better after. After the meeting. OK. Yeah. No, it was just funny that came through just for the meeting. Yeah, because I just signed up for it a couple weeks ago. Yeah. So. All right. Thank you. Is Jeff out there as the energy coordinator? You got anything to report, Jeff? Yeah, hi. I submitted a draft report from the energy coordinator for the town report. Yep. If you're welcome. It's all about the initiative of its life. I had a conversation with Norwich Technologies. They're going to be the contractor for GMP's Resiliency Zone. What they will be putting in is called Agrable PayX. These will be PV panels on a very tall rack in the old gravel pit because they'll be enabling grazing to occur underneath them. Norwich Technologies is going to take a look at whether there's extra space for additional PV panels there and also whether public service or public utility commission might change a little bit in their definition of projects that could, if there was land and with PUC modification, could potentially provide a location for community solar in the town. That would be nice. So we'll continue following up on that. Yeah. Rochester Climate Initiative at the end of the year had to say goodbye to John Pobans. John has moved on. He just moved on to the old spokes for home in the Burlington area. Alyssa Johnson is taking over the support responsibilities for us under the RACI project. And we've started setting up a Google Docs. And Isaacson's going to set that up so the three task forces involved will be able to share information and people update each other's work without worrying about whether we're working on the right copy or not. EV charging, I have a call in to Green Mountain Power. What I'd like to do is find out where the right line is in each of the proposed spots where GOP stops paying. And they would expect Rochester to fund the improvements necessary for the charging station that they propose. I hope to hear back from them tomorrow. The Jen, forget her last name. Jen was not in the office today. That's the school. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, much appreciated, Jeff. So moving on to. Welcome. Yeah. Moving on to the old business. We have some legal trial discussion. We have some folks, I think, in the house that have some want to talk more on that. Is that why you're here, Laurie?  Exactly. No, I just saw it on the agenda. I didn't know if you were taking any further action. No, we haven't taken any action. And as far as I understand, we haven't been approached with any proposal or petition or request from the people that were investigating that as an option. I know they did actually contact Chris Bump about the process for applying for a driveway off of Route 100, too. So I guess they're just exploring all their options and haven't heard anything back. Been a lot of footprints going up the side of that hill off of Route 100. From Route 100? Good for them. OK. Yeah, so nothing really to report on that. And the Green Mountain Power location of charging stations, I guess that was kind of touch up. We had touch on with Jeff there. So that is really it that leads us to public comment. Is anyone out there that has anything they'd like to contribute to tonight's romantic meeting? Well, going once, going twice. Thank you all for joining us. And we're going to pay some bills and go home to our loved ones. Happy Valentine's Day. Thank you all. Happy Valentine's Day. Thank you.


Felly while you're getting comfortable I will introduce next panel, I'm David Morris. I'm very glad to be here and very grateful to the organisers, all the participants and the女fenutio community, for this set of invitations to explore such an extraordinary concentration of work, so I'm very glad to be partied to that. Mae'r next two speakers I'll introduce now, so Nicola Simpson recently completed a PhD at Norwich University of the Arts on right mind mind mind the transmission and practice of Zen and Vajrunaya Rydus Method Practices in the poem objects of Dom Silvester Gwyddaid, DSH 1963-75, which is a nice segue from the last question there. The four buyers are online, but I would draw attention to her exhibition from 2016, performing No Thingness, which brought together Dom Silvester Gwyddaid, Ken Cox and Lee Won Chia, and has published extensively on Dom Silvester Gwyddaid among other things. Gustavo Grandal Montero is a librarian and special collections curator at Chelsea College of Arts in Camberwell College of Arts University of the Arts London. Trained as an art historian, he writes and presents regularly on arts and librarianship topics, including artist books and publishing, and his research currently for his PhD is very much focused on concrete poetry in the UK context in the 1960s. Thank you. I just want to very briefly begin by thanking a couple of people. First of all, John Ryland's library, who I sort of dipped in and out of the archive for about 20 years, and they've always been amazingly supported, particularly Stella Hulkeard, who I'd like to huge thank you to for all her help in understanding Lee's work and Dom Silvester's work. I'd also quite like to thank Nick Sawyer, who sat with me in pubs many a time, answering my questions on Lee and Dom Silvester, and David Modala, the spreading galaxy in the counter-cultural arts scene in 1960, so a very big thank you to Nick, and also to the Listen Gallery in Matadale as well, who's here who allowed me to look at work there, both Dom Silvester and Lee. So my talk today, begin again, and again, and again, and again, performance, no-thingness, and dependent-related transmission in the poem objects and poem environments of Lee Wanchir, Dom Silvester, Wairdard. It's divided into three parts. Firstly, I focus on some of the poem objects and correspondence that Lee Wanchir and the Benedictine Monk and artist Dom Silvester Wairdard sent to each other in the 1960s and 1970s. As I've mentioned, these archive documents largely based in the John Ryland's library. Wairdard met Lee initially through their shared involvement with Signals Gallery and later the Listen Gallery. After Lee established the LYC Museum, Wairdard periodically sent Lee batches of papers and manuscripts of his talk, writings and endless ideas for unrealised sculptural projects and poem objects. Most of these are directly related to Wairdard's interest in tourism and Buddhism. Therefore, I suggest the friendship between the two artists was centred around, in Wairdard's word, a rarevified theological discussion of their shared interests in Buddhism and Taoism, and the central importance that performance could play in the experiential transmission of these eastern epistemologies. Secondly, I shall examine how an understanding of the eastern phenomenological concept of no-thingness or emptiness or no-thingness, with its emphasis on the interdependence of all phenomena, underpins the dependence on the other, the participant, in the performative and textual strategies in these artist's work. I suggest such a discussion, focusing on dependently related phenomena, provides a conceptual framework with which to envisage the network of influence, friendship and transmission between Lee and Wairdard and between other artists of the transnational, even a transhistorical avant-garde. Lastly, I want to talk quite briefly about Begin Again, the exhibition of 250 of Wairdard's reversals and reflection poems held at the LYC Museum in 1975. To coincide with this exhibition, the LYC Museum printed its first publication, Begin Again, a book of reflections and reversals, a selection of some of the works that made up this exhibition, and I've just realised I've left it on my seat. Do you mind? I'm so sorry. Thank you. Sorry about that. I've got everything organised. But I want to begin by drawing attention to the performance I'm staging for the duration of this session. This is the staging of Wairdard's play, P Stroke Q, a play he wrote for the French fluxus artist Ben Fortier, and as he states in his article, Parameters and Parameters, the actors are two looking glasses placed on stage and the dialogue is them looking at each other. There are many interpretations of this play. Firstly, for example, what is known as an infinity mirror is created when a pair of mirrors are placed in a parallel way. A series of smaller reflections appear and give the impression of receding into infinity, which they aren't ideal mirrors, but you get that impression from this. Secondly, in calling it P Stroke Q, Wairdard invites a consideration of a post-Wittgenstein language game at play here, where the mirrors as proposition are a picture of reality or a model of the reality as we imagine it. Thirdly, in his article, Parameters and Parameters, Wairdard frames this play as having a cagiant silent dialogue, performing the Buddhist experience where the transmission of ultimate truth occurs without words. This play could also be said to perform the meditation at the heart of most Buddhism's mind, reflecting on mind, and the consequent understanding of self and other. It is also a play, I thought, which actually fits quite nicely with some of the ideas in the exhibition at the moment, a sort of unknowable speech act, reflection, repetition and imagination. But the type of this play also demonstrates effectively Wairdard's intention behind the development of the alphabets he used to make the reversal and reflection poems that featured in the Begin Again exhibition at the LYC Museum. In certain fonts, as you can see, I had to choose them carefully, P will reflect in a mirror as a letter Q, and the possibilities offered up by this reflective and reversal alphabet were a way for Wairdard to explore the subtle codependence of each object and all other objects. I've also chosen to stage Pster at Q today to suggest a way we can think about the dialogue that took place between the Benedictine monk at Pernish Abbey and the Chinese artist building his museum in Cumbria throughout the 60s until the early 80s. We compute on mirror P, DSH, and on mirror Q, the letters LYC, and enable an unspoken transmission to take place alongside my talk. These two mirrors enact a model of reality as it is understood within Buddhism, where everything reflects everything else infinitely across time and space, where an unspoken transmission about no-fingness and dependent relations can take place. I'm now going to turn to the archive objects, which are evidence of the actual findable textual transmissions. They are part of the story and friendship between Wairdard and Lee, and here we have one of the first poem objects Wairdard made for Lee. It's one of his Cosmic Dyslaminate poems, made in 1968, and if the seller might correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think it's ever been exhibited. Wairdard is all better known for his type strikes, a number of which he made specifically for Lee has demonstrated by this work from 1969. However, between 1967 and 69, Wairdard made many of these laminates for his friends that included cut-up texts, found ephemera from the room he was in, spit, jam, dust, sand. Unfortunately, when I looked at this work, it was too fragile for me to unwrap it fully and examine what, if any, objects might be contained within it. But Wairdard has included a fragment of text that reads verified theological discussion. It's a phrase which aptly describes in some ways, and playfully, the conversation both artists had in their work about the experience of what I've mentioned earlier is turned in Buddhist and Taoist epistemologies as nothingness. One definition might be useful from the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Kasangyatso Rinpoche, he writes, Emptiness is the way things really are. Although things appear directly to our senses to be truly or inherently existent, in reality all phenomena lack or empty of true existence. They are mere appearances to mind, totally dependent upon the minds that perceive them. The words of the American literary critic Jonathan Stalling are also helpful in explaining this concept of nothingness further. Unlike in Western philosophy and metaphysics, largely grounded in ontological being, not nothingness, the conceptual frameworks of the Mahayana, Zen and Vajrayana Buddhism and Taoism do not make use of the concept of nothing. Instead, the primary philosophical argument is the rejection of the very category of somethingness and therefore its binary supplement. They each aim at emptying all some things of their assumed autonomous thingness through admitting some degree of contingency. In other words, all objects have no inherent autonomous existence. They exist through a mere invitation of name on ever changing, dependently related phenomena. All phenomena lack self-nature or findable autonomous essence, but are contingent, dependent upon their causes and conditions. To understand this experientially, Buddhisms are unanimous in their presentation of the meditation on the I, the self, as a way to unself the self and thereby unself all other phenomena. In Buddhist teachings, the definition of an I is imputed independence of one or any combinations of five aggregates as they are known in English. What we experience and conventionally call our eyes just a momentary mind event and an experience of one of these five aggregates. For example, an experience of form such as our body or a feeling such as happiness or anger or boredom. A categorisation such as an opinion or a thought, all of which have no independent existence or permanence. However, these moments of mind run together very, very quickly into our untrained mind, its undistinguisher where one begins and another ends. In other words, our I begins, again and again and again and again. It is through this conceptual and critical framework that we can understand much of both Wairdard and Lee's work and perhaps this rarefied theological discussion they were attempting to have. As Lee writes on the paper insert, enclosed in begin again, in here, the first word you are greeted with, and I know it's in other publications as well, not just this one, who are you, who are you, who are you. It is a question that these poems and cosmic multiples and total environments ask. Wairdard's answer perhaps to this question, who are you, can be found in this, sorry, where I've gone, sorry. Wairdard's answer can be found in the preface to this book in here as well, where he writes, from the Taoist traditions of Catholicism came my awareness of what reflection means. The eye that is grammatically said to be my own self, my mind, my body must be the peephole and access to the other. Why shouldn't words reflect on themselves? And there's another answer here in this work that's in the exhibition where Dom Sylvester has sketched out autobiography of DSH for Lee, where we can imagine the grid represents, I'm assuming, the 20th century. And there is here this peephole and access to the other represented by the absence of the graphical squares to mark up Wairdard's existence from 1924 to 1968 when the work was made. Here is another example of a laminate poem Wairdard made for Lee. And in the note you can see he writes, my dear Lee, it was beautiful to meet. I've made a little nothing poem where the intention is so much loblier than the paper scraps all stuck together. We can locate, this is the nothing poem unwrapped. If we can locate in the composition of this poem the black field with a single white geometrical shape, some kind of interdependent dialogue with Lee's cosmic multiples, then there is an equally interdependent dialogue with Wairdard's structuring of nothing into his type-strax in Lee's use of the page in his poems. Therefore, alongside the poem by Wairdard, we can consider the poem Lee included in his artist book for the all-in-nothing show at the Listen Gallery. The poem in this reads, all-in-nothing show, all nature is my work, all my work is nature, changing from, from to from, in the night, in the afternoon, in the morning, whole I receive, whole I give away. To fully understand what Lee means by the concepts of all-in-nothing, it is useful to think about all-in-nothing as codependent risings, not binary oppositions. Both artist's poetic practice was singularly concerned with how they could bring on to the page what stalling has written in terms of American poetics as an extra-linguistic experience of emptiness. It can exist independent of causes and conditions or have non-relational and a satonomous meaning. In this view, even emptiness is empty of emptiness, positive or common as presence, as it relies on other different signifiers like fullness or completeness to derive its meaning. The empty page in Lee's poems and Dom Sylvester's poems can only signify negation through its reliance on other alphabetical signifiers in the surrounding words. There's no symbol for emptiness, a blank page of the word nothing can itself represent ultimate reality or offer nontological stability as it cannot hide its relational contingent nature. The nature of nothingness cannot be captured in language, but such contingency can be experienced in participation and performance. I haven't got any images of the Golden Moonshine that we've seen some earlier, but this is a poem Dom Sylvester wrote. He didn't actually get to the show, I don't think, but he did write Lee a poem on occasion of the show and it reads, My dear Lee, thank you for your invitation. I wish I could come and see your studio, tree, transparent leaves, showing nothing, vividly, cloud shell, blue foam, earth, from the moon, how well Lee fits. I don't see a reference there to the names that we saw earlier in those other photographs. Why do we talk about this transmission of ideas of notingness between a Catholic Benedictine monk whose knowledge and experience of Buddhism and Taoism was like so many Westerners at that time, or to didactic, before he became directly involved in the migrant oral traditions of Tibetan Buddhism through Trogyam Rinpoche, and that of the Chinese migrant artist who states, I express in my art ideas which are based upon the religion and philosophy of the Chinese. To date, there's been little criticism that's focused on such East-West encounters within British avant-garde activity in the 60s and 70s, and this scholarly problem of framing East-West encounters within art history is clearly summarised by the American academic, Bruce Compton, when he writes of the difficulty in speaking simultaneously to the histories and modes of analysis of Western art and visual culture, and that of the Buddhist traditions, which have played an unavoidable role in the lives and works of a number of 20th and 21st century artists. Thomasson offers up this phrase, into human intrigue, to explain the constellation of individuals, ideas and practices that are linked historically to a post-war Buddhist sangra of artists, larmers, teachers and new Western converts that congregated in a peculiar form of collectivity. He suggests a strange kind of art history which can function as mapping of a constellation of individuals, ambitions, failings, ideas, initiatives, works and doesn't works. The artist and critic Kay Larson, in envisaging the interdependent network of influence and Buddhist and Taoist teachings that inform the artist John Cage, relies on a Buddhist image of the interdependence of all objects, the diamond net of Indra, to find a way of looking at the kind of counter-cultural and avant-garde activity of Buddhism and artists in America. She writes, imagine the universe as a vast net of silvery cobweb like connecting tissue, stronger than steel, like a four-dimensional tennis net stretched through infinity and eternity. At each node of the net is a diamond, each diamond shines with its own inner light and collects and reflects all the light from all the other diamonds, took on the net at any point and you will send waves everywhere and lights flashing everywhere. No one diamond is greater than any other or la lint. The diamond net of Indra is a shimmering image of interpenetration which Larson argues can be used to understand Cage's own practice but also how that practice is still affecting the transnational avant-garde today. Both Thompson's suggestion of an interhuman intermedia and Larson's critical framework derived from the image of the diamond net of Indra focus on the interdependence of people's stories, objects and non-meetings in order to map out the relationship of a western, American avant-garde to Buddhism. It is an interdependence that as I outlined earlier is the performance of the play happening here in front of us in P-Strope Q. Reginal A Ray terms this an interpersonal body and articulates the meditative experience of this interpersonal body as follows. The fact is the more we descend into our body the more we uncover a vast expanding interpersonal world of connections with other people. We discover connections with others that have already been there perhaps forever presenting themselves as fully formed in their existence predating any level, sorry, predating any discovery of our own. We discover that our own body is at a more subtle level actually an interpersonal body. Our embodiment, this body of ours, has inherently a vast perhaps unlimited interpersonal dimension. This interpersonal body or Thompson's interhuman intermedia which I want to argue Lee makes a focal point in his cosmic multiples, total environments and later the LYC Museum itself. I'm really relieved there was far better images earlier of those kind of washing lines both in the Golden Moonshow and then also in Up in Cumbria as well. If, as I stated above, the nature of nothingness cannot be captured in language it can be experienced through action, through participation, through performance. In fact, Lee's cosmic points and total environments in offering up a whole world or cosmos as he says also create a conceptual model that we can use to visualise and understand the interdependent art histories, spiritual practice and artistic practice that acknowledge Buddhist epistemological teachings on emptiness and the interdependent existence of people and objects. It's a conceptual model I've just termed very briefly a matrix of interdependent transmission. So I think works like this of Lee where the inside and the outside are all related and you can actually see these lines of connection and lines of transmission, they're visible, are really useful for conceptualising the relationships of self under the artist, participant, artist and friends, even our relationship here today to Lee's work. In this unlimited interpersonal dimension of these total environments in Lee's words, my own beautiful world, spaces of alterity and spaces of experience, first Lee and then the spectators are placed at the centre of creating. Each act creating the world in you again and again and again in a series of moments all dependent and related and continuous. Lee writes, my work is very simple and yet has many possibilities so this means you can play and recreate anywhere, anytime. Such a process driven toy art can be given a further context by applying the analyses of Buddhism as in performance by David E. R. George. It is crucial to understand Buddhism as a process, a practice where one by every position is vacated as soon as it is occupied. It is thus that the performative paradigm research itself for this emptying of all phenomena, of all substantialism means that what we are left with are acts, events and not objects. As much as it is about our individual experience of languages event and objectors event, through participation in Lee's cosmic multiples and total environments, it is also our experience with others, the experience of other as event. This unlimited interpersonal dimension also extends to the LYC Museum in part title to acknowledge, I think, the imputation of name whenever changing flux of objects, people, buildings, gestures, words, etc. Applying the performative paradigm of Buddhism enables a critical framework that can position the personal anecdotes of Lee brewing tea and offering homemade bread and biscuits to visitors in the museum. Equally alongside the direct participation in one of his total environments and the moving of a cosmic point. I think that's from the Oxfordshire, isn't it? Again, that's a photograph of a photograph, so I apologise for that. Oh, it's not appeared. I don't know why that's happened. Very empty. Very empty. Perfectly empty. It's showing it's here on my screen, but I don't know why it's not on there. Let me try to go back and come forward. Oh, well. We'll have to use that one instead. So, finally, to discuss very briefly, Wada's exhibition Begin Again, another point on node in this constellation matrix on net of transmission. By the late 1960s, Wada, informed by his reading of Taoism, was developing a typographical alphabet that could construct words which, when rotated or reflected, revealed an alternative word hidden inside. These poems were executed very simply in thick felt-tip pen, predominantly in the colours to hand. They might have been the only ones available either at the post office in Prynysh or in the abbey itself, orange, green, red and purple, initially on paper and then later on to thin perspect sheets. By the mid 1970s, Wada had created several hundred of these poems, and in 1975 they were exhibited at the LYC Museum. So, here is an image from the invitation card. I couldn't show you the front of it, but this is what happened in the middle. It's a reproduction of the poem Begin Again, the title of the museum, and obviously if you could place a two-way mirror in the centre of the work, you would see both words reflected infinitely. So, Steffan Thurmeson, writing in the introduction to this book of reflections and reversals, said they're not palindromes. A palindromic topologist strives to arrive at the point of departure. Dom Sylvester conjures his way away from it. A palindromic conjurer turns his top hat inside out to put it back on his head. Dom Sylvester slips into his axe, snatches the rabbit and changes it into a dove, or vice versa. A palindromic trickster tries to confirm the law of identity. Dom Sylvester succeeds in questioning it. What is thought to be one and the same thing, he transfers from a set of coordinates to another set of coordinates, an hay presto. So, as you can see in a work like that, hay presto, indeed, you see a dependent-related phenomena of two words. However, in another talk that Dom Sylvester gave, Words As Zips, he discusses this kind of magic hay presto transformation again using the magician's image. Making these two-sided poems, and these are only a few out of several hundred, it's the simple coherency of two magics in a single word that startles me each time I find one, and that does something quite moving each time. I look at it again, and it does this to me, and I think because it is so objective, it isn't something that I have put there as part of the word itself, or at any rate the agreed convention of spelling it. There is a lot to be said for the equivalence between shamans and monks, so like a good shaman, I find magic and meaning in transformations. All poetry is a transforming of data, a recycling of the recyclable, but some transformations are more transformations than others. So these reversibles here I find have a strong element of the ability to form transas, as they pivot from one formation to its transformation. So there's another example of one of these reversals in the exhibition at the moment, and this time this was made for the Buddhist scholar John Blofeld. I don't know if anyone knows of John Blofeld's writings, he was a great friend of Dom Syvestes, and his Taoist word was bamboo wind. So this is an object that was made, I don't know who by, I always speculate it was Lee himself, but I don't know. Somebody made it I think for the exhibition Begin Again, but you have the word windgrove, and reflected though as the mirror over time has become quite delicate is the words mind alone. And this is the more the original drawing for this object that Dom Syvestes made. So in this book that came with the exhibition, there was 250 of these reversals and reflections made, and in this book that was made specifically, we have another example here, you're still using the word mind. One Dom Syvestes hit upon a wood that worked, he went with it, and so we have mind, you can see, and you can rotate it for ache. So what I was going to suggest in conclusion that the participation of turning a disherinversal or moving one of Lee's points as we can do in an exhibition space upstairs invites us to ask the question, who am I? But in the spirit of interdependence with the exhibition itself, I actually want to conclude today with the words that my attention was drawn to by Hemad yesterday by Doh Hussu, is that who pronounced it, who and we? Hello, good afternoon. I would just like to start by thanking David for the introduction and the organisers and everyone involved with this fantastic conference. My talk is about books, specifically the books that Leon Chea designed and made himself at the Air Force Museum, but also previous to his book to Cambria. Alongside its extremely active exhibition programme showing 323 artists between August 72 and March 1983, the Air Force Museum ran a magical publishing operation under the Supreme Air Force Press. In addition to nearly 100 exhibition catalogues allegedly documenting every solo artist and group exhibition at the gallery, he also published artist books, monographs, annual diaries and a magazine at YC Arts. All the publications share the square format 14 x 14 cm and sometimes the length of 14 pages and were designed and printed by Lee-Wang Chea in C2 with only a very few exceptions. Lee is engaged with the book Making and Publishing, predates the YC Museum. During his time in Italy, he produced a number of handmade scrolls, made with him and painted on fabric of different sizes, mounted on calves for the concertinas. During this period, he also produced the print box, the white book. Much more significantly, from the point of view of Lee's use of printed matter in his practice, are the series of publications produced after his arrival in England in 1966. Since his first solo exhibition at the Song Gallery, Lee was involved in the concept and design of the publications made to accompany them. These publications were made in relatively large editions, several hundred copies, in a square format of 14 x 14 cm and 14 pages. After his move to Wuthby in Cumbria, he also published a catalogue for two exhibitions in his artist studio, again continuing with a format of 14 x 14 cm. This is an illustrative talk, a preliminary survey of the book's design or coding design by Lee or printed by Lee, but more research remains to be made on this subject. The survey is based on three collections. The one at Chelsea College of Arts, where we have about 100 LWC publications plus five previous publications by Lee. Also realised on Tate Library, it has about 75, but particularly on the fantastically jointed archive at the John Rhinelands Library, which holds the most comprehensive collection, including 108 individual LWC press. I'm starting with early engagement, first engagement with related formats. As mentioned, Lee produced a number of handmade scrolls. This one was an installation shot from the Canadiens show in 2001, where you can see three of these scrolls from the early 60s. He produced a number of these handmade scrolls of different sizes, up to several metres long. Some mounted on card for the concertinas, as you can see on this picture. This work is closely related to his calligraphic work, 50s watercolours and paintings from 1959, and incorporate the cosmic point, a motive that he used since 59, first in painting then in other media, incorporating eastern cosmology, western modernist aesthetics, originally as fractionalism. He also produced a print portfolio called the White Book, and a series of small catalogue were published to companies of his exhibitions. But it's really only when Lee moves to London in 1966, having been invited to exhibit at the Signal Gallery, that he really started engaging with artist books and catalogue. He also starts writing in English and producing poetry, including concrete poetry, probably through influences and contacts with all the signals artists, and later the song artists, like me, SH and David Meddalo. This engagement with the book and publishing is very influenced, I think, by the 1960s New avant-garde practices that he encountered in London in the mid-1960s, on concrete poetry, flaxus and also early concept of publications. These publications are unlimited or rare to be large editions in the hundreds, inexpensive, and allow the artist to have the right contact with an audience outside of the gallery and of the market system, and often the term democratic multiple is used to refer to the style of production in the 60s. Use of language is also another key aspect of the 60s New avant-garde, and his texts often address an imaginary interlocutor using the second person. They use both poetry and prose, including concrete poetry, as mentioned, and show a very personal poetic that often uses new or invented English words. The result of combining two different words. This is the cover of the publication for his first show at the Song Gallery in 1967 for the show Cosmic Point. Again, 14x14 cm, a square, 14 pages, includes two poems and a text, a meditation by Meddalo about Cosmic Point, and then includes a series of concrete poems, and four Cosmic Points by Lee. This is one of the first ones. You can see here, for instance, a reference to the use of color and the symbolic value of color, red for the sun, white for the moon, gold for the earth and the stars, and black for cosmic. The use of the square, I think, probably has got a relation with Chinese ideas, particularly Taoism, I think. Sometimes you use the square to represent the earth, with the size of the north, south, east and west, and that is one of the symbolic meanings of the square. He also uses triangles and circles in many of his work, which again have got particular symbolic meanings in Chinese culture, for instance, the circle for heaven. Of course, I think there's also a connection with historical modernism, particularly constructivism, for instance. You can see a syncretism here, this cosmology that brings elements from western and eastern cultures, as we discussed in previous presentations. I'm not so sure about the significance of number 14, specifically. If anyone can enlighten me about the populatation symbolism of number 14, I will be very interested in knowing about that. This, as I say, was made in a relatively light edition that includes 500 copies of these illustrations of works, concrete poems and photographs, and then four cosmic points in these four symbolic colors that I mentioned before. In 1968, Lee Won Chihun had a second exhibition at the Stone Gallery for a show called Multiples or Cosmic Multiples. This is in February 1968 that includes the Cosmagnetic Multiples that mass produce metal panels and four magnetic points in red, white, gold and black, these colors that we just mentioned before. The catalogue is particularly interesting in the reuses, as you can see, poems from the previous one, with additional new text. It has also an introduction by Nicholas Logsdale. I'm going to find it very interesting how he mixes his previous concrete poem with additional new comments and new texts spanning ideas in a very conversational manner, almost. On the press release for this exhibition, Nicholas Logsdale writes that he believes that his work is an art for everyone, and this is actually the first example of multiples being produced by the Stone Gallery, which is something that they did in the late 70s with a number of other artists as well. On the press release, there is a further elaboration about the symbolism of the colors that we mentioned before. In addition to the reference to the sound for red, there is also a reference to blood and life, gold, nobility, black for origin and white for purity, and use of mathematics as well for titles. This is the catalogue for the third and final show of me with the Nissan Gallery for the Moon Show in 1969. Again, it includes an introduction by Nicholas Logsdale and then a series of pages. We can see what that related to some of those installations that we saw earlier. It's quite interesting to use colour paper, red in this case. Again, this is 14 by 14, 14 pages. The work relates to the exhibitions to the installations in the gallery, but I think that the artworks in their own right as well. I think that these catalogues have got a high grit nature in that if you have a continuum where traditional catalogue documents an exhibition of an artwork at the other end of a publication that is an artwork, I think this is longer. The gallery catalogue is somewhere in between, but possibly closer to the artwork in its own right than to the purely documentary side of the spectrum. As you can see here, we have some examples of quite documentary photographs. We have seen all right this text. From 1968, the artist moves to both me and Cumbia as we discussed earlier. He publishes two catalogues to coincide with the two exhibitions that he holds in his studio. These, again, are harry catalogues that I think that they should be seeing or can be seeing works in their own right as well as documenting what was happening in those exhibitions. They are self-designed and printed. In fact, we have two copies at Chelsea of these 68 catalogue, and I noticed that the pages aren't anything older in both, so it's a very VAY nature. I think they are part of the learning process of Lee getting to grips with the printing process here. Again, examples of these very almost conversational texts alongside. It's interesting that every two pages have got white pages. I think they didn't quite work out the folding of the pamphlet beforehand, maybe intentional. It's interesting also use of images versus text that sometimes can be seen as poetic prose. Sometimes it's actually something that you could argue is concrete poetry. This is a range of use of poetry and text here because we point. This is the second catalogue that he publishes in 1969. Who are you? Again, use of concrete poetry alongside the documentation of work and use of photography as well. It's something that he started using after he moved to London. He hadn't done before. I'm moving on now to AYC Museum, AYC Press Publications. From 1972 he started making a large amount of publishing in the museum. Bookmaking and publishing is an area where museum and artists listen and practice his curatorial and organizational work and the work of others, other artists, interconnect and sometimes merge into each other. There are black lines here between the artist book and the catalogue but also between the institutional and the personal, the documentary and the artwork. These wide ranges of poetry include concrete poetry and I think that the publications in the same way as the gallery are both history of radical experimentation but also constant change and evolution. This is the cover of a book that we saw earlier, Water Plus Color 56-7, which is an artist book that was published in 1977, ten years after the first catalogue published at Lisong Gallery, which is an autobiographical work. I find interesting for instance the use of general paper for this, where it was cheaper at the time to buy or this deeper symbolic meaning here, a reference to gold maybe. Again this huge lack of documentation in terms of his work in bookmaking and book publishing, so often we can just speculate really. As mentioned before, the series of catalogues that he publish is an extraordinary programme, both in volume and range. Again they are all the same size, 14x14, according to his own numbering system he published 108 catalogues at the LYC museum, possibly so out of series. The first two catalogues are very interesting, this one published in 1972 and this is the second one published in 1973. These are catalogues that don't document specific exhibitions, there are much more statements about the museum, we could call them institutional catalogues really. They have a range of content that goes from the autobiographical, also goes into the history of the institution, talks about the origins, talks about plans. For instance, here you have got the use of the dot, but also these famous statements like the LYC museum is me and the LYC museum is all of you. Starting from the very first catalogue that was printed only a few weeks after the opening of the gallery in August 1972. Again you can see the DIY nature of the printing, look at the numbers of the colours for instance. It's a very interesting mix with the personal and the works of others, the documentation and the artistic. This is the second one published in 1973, a fantastic concrete poetry cover with the names of the artists that have been involved with the museum up to that date. It has got a very influential, a very important text I think these mistakes, a text which is a real manifesto for the museum and includes there a statement where it says that the LYC museum would never think of charging for one copy of the catalogue. So that's another interesting thing, what was the size of the editions of this catalogue that he was making and the fact that probably they were given away for free to visitors. Probably they were distributed also to friends of the museums or connections of the museums. In 1976 he published another of these you could call institutional catalogues, so catalogues are not about specific exhibitions but about the museum. It's a fascinating publication called What Does The Eye Do, that's the cover. It starts with this, fantastic, almost, I don't know, a series of handmade drawings and statements and then you have got a compilation of all of these statements about the museum. It has all hand writing, using offset, the photograph of printed equipment, which I believe that he had outside from around 1975. It also includes visitor comments, quite a few pages of them, so bringing these multiple voices into this publication is not just, this voice is the voice of, and not just the voice but you can see the actual handwritten comments. Probably taking from the visitor's book going into the publication, which is quite an extraordinary thing really. So the catalogues, the same as the diaries that I'll show you in a moment, the perfect example of how a museum leaves its own practice in this field, a single project really. And again, how the lines between the personal and institutional really blare into each other. The diaries are an even more unusual format, between 77 and 83, he probably said that I'm not a diaries. This is the first one from 77, that normally have got some sort of text by Lee, and then that is followed by an actual calendar that often has got things like references to exhibition openings, and also tends to be illustrated by images of Lee's own works, 28, 29, 80, 81, 82, at the last one for 1983. Here you can see the actual collection at Chelsea, or the catalogues made at the museum. I think we've been seeing four or five, so it gives us many of the scale of the publishing project. We already discussed the DIY nature of the early designs and printing, these changes over time almost constantly. The small runs that he prints is difficult to tell exactly, but when there's a statement that is rare, you often see that it's very small, about 100 copies sometimes. But he was publishing between 75, this is like episode 74, I don't think he published anything, but between 75 and 82, he was publishing on average about 11 of these catalogues a year, so pretty much one per month. And they are both group and solo exhibition catalogues, as I say, they're supposed to document all exhibitions that took place during this period. This is the set, Lee's home set, at the John Ryland's library. You can see how he bound them in here volumes as well. Some of them are experimental in terms of form, I get another constant in their structure. This is what got the calls inklings, for instance, published in 1975. I'm finishing now. In addition to the material published for exhibitions or for the museum, the airway theme press had a series of monographs, poetry, but also anthologies that were published not normally on occasion for an exhibition, certainly not documented in an exhibition. As you can see that for once, although most of them are square, these are not for team by for team. This is the exception to his publishing standard or habit. Some of them are slightly larger, like, for instance, Begin, again, is 31 centimetres, I think. And it's also unique in that several of them, not all of them, but several of them are partially or totally printed externally, not by Lee himself. And this is Begin, again, that has been just discussed by Nicola. And Flower Tales by Gwynffith Nicholson. So this is the Begin, again, sign page copy from the John Ryland's archive. This is the initial statement from Nicholson's Flower Tales on the title page. The initial statement for the Norma Gwarnett book. And this is the last of the airway theme press publications. Wall, four poets, four artists published in 1981 and printed the tiny free press. He didn't make any more books after 1983, although I think he did some scrolls, one of them at the Tate collection. But this was the last series of books that he published. Thank you very much. Just by way of response, I wanted to respond slightly anecdotally and very briefly to what I think sort of entangles these two presentations in a certain way. So I was speaking to a man called Peter Mayer last year, and he's one of the early or 70s anthologists of complete poetry with Bob Cobbing and other folks. But he's one of the few people from that scene, as far as I know, who read and spoke Chinese. So I was very interested in this and wanted to talk to him about that specifically. And also in relation to the concrete experimental poetry activities going on in Taiwan, simultaneous with much of the concrete poetry that was going on. Transnashly, but not really networked into that grid. So I was quizzing him about this with Mary Mayer as well, and sort of emerging from him was the name of Lee Wan Chau. This was his response. And so what I appreciate about these two presentations and Lee Wan Chau's work is how his practice offers a bridge to think about not so much who is not recognised in terms of, say, a history of concrete poetry, but more how we can think differently about what we understand as something like concrete poetry and more expansively to include Chinese script, for example, which doesn't feature in any of the anthologies in terms of contemporary poetry, as always, historical stuff. So that leads me onto two more direct focus questions which are about distribution and about language. So, I mean, distribution I wanted to ask you, Gustavo, about, and language more to Unacla. So the question about distribution, how are these objects and publications circulating? Who was reading them and where are they now? I'll ask the two questions together because they relate, I think. And then the question of language is how the sort of inter-linguistic practice of Lee Wan Chau, so his poetry in English, Italian and Chinese, how this speaks to the kind of this moment where language, abstraction, visuality and materiality in many different places globally are all sort of thrown into flux and, yes, themselves in different ways. So maybe, Gustavo, you want to say? OK. I think that it's always that Lee thinks that the publication is a medium that allows an artist to, as I say, get out of the gallery, get out of the market and have a direct relation with an audience, a different relation with an audience. And I think that he probably saw that in London in the mid-1960s, and it was something that was relatively not uncommon in new avant-garde cycles around Europe and in North America. And I think that he has, that was something that resonated with his interest in participation, but also in making out that was accessible, or could be seeing us at least for the point of view of his invitation, democratic and, you know, unopened to everyone. I think that the world by definition is really democratic too, that allows you to distribute, in this case, art. The thought actually came out earlier that there will be these copies of these exhibition pamphlets and things, won't they, in the stashes and draws of people who just, as you say, walking over in this wall and they're there in part of family archives that will be completely unrelated to any kind of art historical discourse or any institution I think. And I think that's fantastic that so many of these things will have found their ways into just homes and lives of people that, you know, came across a museum unexpectedly. So, I just think most of them will just be there. Yeah, I think very recently, apart from the collection of the Draw of Islands, I think it has got a decent collection, but it is, you know, very partial. I think we, at Chelsea, we had a very good collection of the earlier ones, part of the song by himself. And then at some point we acquired a whole set that is not complete, but it's almost complete. And I have my suspicions where it comes from, but I don't know where it comes from. And I have asked my predecessors and no-one remembers where it comes from. I don't think that, you know, there are a few copies in other public collections, but not very many. The Lisong Catholics, as mentioned, they were published in quite high hundreds and it was, you know, it's a very historic and significant gallery now.  Not necessarily all of them, but at least some of them. Lisong Catholics, though, is the only thing that's possible to know, as I say. I haven't found any documentation, apart from when you have a statement saying what is the size of the issue. I got the suspicion that a lot of these Catholics were made, let's say, maybe 100 copies, maybe 80 copies, maybe 150 copies. That visitors will take them away. I'm pretty sure that some of them, particularly later on, were sent to friends of the gallery by post. But, again, I have no evidence of that. So, yeah, it's interesting. The distribution of these things, I think, is part of the things themselves, in a way. The friends of the LYC all received a catalogue, and as an artist, he also received 50 copies. So that's what I know. And my catalogue was also in yellow. And I asked him why, because I showed polaroids, black and white polaroids and silk screens. And, of course, they all looked yellow. But he said, well, I just have some yellow papers. I wonder, is there anyone in the room who can claim a sort of full set? There must be someone here who has a full stack, I don't know. I probably have a full set. Okay. I have to come. Well, respect. But the friends also that are telling us as well. Oh, yeah, yeah. Sorry, there's a question at the back, please. I think that you have suspicions of where they come from. You were using, I think, examples from the Chelsea Library. Well, Clive Philcock was librarian at the time, and he would know exactly where they came from. I'm afraid he doesn't. I ask him. I think that he would tell you that they were part of a mail-off programme of the time. So they weren't acquired and purchased by the library, but they were sent by two various key people. And certainly this is where some things appeared in my mother's archive. There are these documents, and that's how they appeared there. They weren't purchased when they weren't visited, but they were on a mailing list or at work distribution list. But the bit that's really interesting is missing from most of the archives are the invitations. Because the invitations were definitely mail-out oriented and were widely dispersed, but never really collected or curated. Thanks for the answer. You're totally right that in many cases that would be the way where this type of material would make its way into the collection, but it's not in this case. I have discussed this with Clive, and I know for a fact that they were quite at some point as a whole sad, because they came in a box. So that's how they came together. You're right that many other materials of a similar kind came through the post, through invitations and in other forms. With this collection of catalogs at Chelsea, we also have around 30 plus imitation cards as well, which I'm not sure whether the John Blylon's necessarily will have. So someone else could be really right. They're very important materials. You're totally right. The content of the catalogs put me in mind of something I thought earlier, and the singular thing is put me in mind of the suspended discs, because they're a mistake for us. It's been given that the office of those is always black. I think the simple point is it's to get the students to be done. So I think maybe you've come to this rate now. Do you have any other person that's mentioned his work in the context of the relationship with John Cage? When I was researching my film, I became completely intrigued by wondering whether Lee was aware of John Cage's work or not. I chose Steve Beresford to perform the music in response to my own editor's footage because he performed John Cage's work. I felt there were enormous parallels in terms of the use of silence and nothingness, as you talked about that. In terms of when I was looking for the sound recording, I listened to it for about 20 hours, and it was all a BBC programme called Music of our Town, which was the kind of avant-garde classical programme that was going out on what became idea 3. It was a different presentation. He must have known Cage's work, because Cage was very well known in the 70s, but I'd just ask Madeline if he'd ever met him or whatever. No, I don't think so either. I mean, Dom Syfester met Cage. Cage went to Prinish at the time when Lee knew Dom Syfester. I think Cage came... I can only find it because I might know better from 1972, just before Harpsichord was performed down in London. Cage certainly went to Prinish for a few days and some quite nice letters he wrote, not to Dom Syfester himself, but to other people. They certainly went on a tour of the local poets around Gloucestershire, but I don't know whether they went as far as... I wouldn't know. Cage went to Glock in London. I certainly want to find out more whether they met or... but he would have definitely known of Cage, I think, through the network. The other thing that's always... I'm just not going to battle about the sound in the space, but it's a public space. The claw studio is where the children do... I'm constantly giving Kate a hard time because my film is about silence. It's totally about the spaces between the sounds. And I've just realised that the same dichotomy exists in Lee's work because his own work was very, very silent and quite empty and solitary. But his work in the gallery was all about people and the children and the response of the children and the local community. And there is that kind of strange dichotomy. And I've just had this wonderful moment where I've realised that that tension, that dichotomy, is reproduced in what's happening in the cloth space at the moment and I like that, Kate. It's all right. There was one occasion when I hit the baseball and there were the people on board backs because I was so annoyed at the noise they were making in response to the film in the background. But that's what it's about. That's what the museum was about. I think in terms of that Cage and the Sound, it's about interrelationship with sound and silence. I think that's a really good segue to go and experience the work. So we're at lunchtime and thank you both. Thank you all.