The Life of Ivor Cox, ‘Beyond Technology’

Or “Two Spirits of Non-Conformity in the Machine”

‘Ivor and Oliver’, photo by Lucy Cox, editing by Wonk Bridge

There is no guarantee that exceptional deeds, even a lifetime of them, will necessarily command acclaim. That innumerable, unknowable feats of exception are attained daily throughout the world, under modest circumstances, awaiting our discovery and otherwise doomed to obscurity, is a truth that may both harness us to the most implacable anxiety, and present to us a store of ever-self-renewing hope as to the essential value of our actions.

It is for this reason that the biography of the ordinary person, as yet unacclaimed, is the most neglected of all the literary genres — for the slightest pursuit of it reveals that ordinary is not ordinary at all, but merely ‘ordinary’. This goes double when the ‘ordinary’ person in question lived in interesting times, in those subduction zones of historical event where diverse circumstances collide and new arts, disciplines, and practices are born. It goes treble when the person in question had some personal or professional involvement in those emerging forms. Whether the form in question is the concerto, the algorithm, or the digit ‘0’, first practitioners often risk obscurity among a context that history has not yet awarded to the newness of their discipline, with glory instead reserved for those groundbreakers’ first- and…