Bob would love these Apple AirPods Pro

I discovered an Apple computer for the first time in the mid 1980s. My dear friend Judy Freeman introduced me to her old art college friend Bob Cotton, and we became friends immediately. Still are. Soon after meeting he suggested I visit him at his workplace, Newham college, in East London, where he was head of graphic design. As an artist the coming of computer graphics meant he had to bring Apple computers into their design school. I still find it hard to remember what a creative bomb had then been released. 

Bob has always been interested both in contemporary art and the history of art and creativity. He infected me with his enthusiasm and love of these machines. He already understood the theories that had informed the crossover between technology and art, psychology and systems thinking. He told me about the ‘Dynabook’ and his admiration for the brain of a person who could envisage such a thing before it was technically possible. He just knew it would happen. Probably the iPad is as close to a 'dynabook' as most consumers will have known.

We continued to both work and play together, sharing love of music, fashion, film and technology. Both having grown up in the sunny world of the 1960s. The arrival of the World Wide Web changed everything or at least seemed to make ’everything’ he had been excited about possible. Bob dived in and explored the new media and came to be an early describer through his books about what this new media world might be like.

I brought my first  computer a Z88 Sinclair notebook, but immediately knew I’d have to get an Apple, which turned out to be an Apple Performa computer complete with 16MB of RAM. My life was transformed, not for the first or last time, but certainly importantly. I’ve never had any other ‘computer’ for work or home.  I’ve renewed them when new technology insisted and my bank balance allowed. From laptops to iMacs, the iPod touch, iPods and my current MacMinis (my second already) with several screens and speakers  to facilitate the music, films, photography and other work which is my mix of new media. They always packaged all their products with wit and panache, which I’ve always loved. Unpacking this box made me think I should blip it. Even the images of the AirPods on the front are actually embossed. I expect any one who has bought an apple product will know what I mean.

But I never forget how much I owe Bob Cotton, so I am offering a chance for you to explore his work which he has spread around the media that have so inspired him. He will be pleased that I have just bought these Apple AirPods Pro in a recent sale (Apple products have always been too expensive) and am loving them. As I’ve been writing I’ve been thinking of so much music he and I have shared over the years and am playing them as I type using online music libraries, some of them originating from those heady 60s. 

Bob is even responsible for the name of my Blip name, Clean Steve. When he lived in Yarmouth on the Isle Wight where I visited him whenever I could, his next door neighbour was so intrigued to find that the three of us were ‘connected’ by ‘tentacles’ that he wrote this song with that title.

You can explore some of Bob's life and work here – You’ll have to scroll and peruse.

One of his works can be found here – called 'The media stream. A visual stream of modernism to 21st century all and now'.

I hope to go to the Isle of Wight to visit Bob and his wife Mary again, soon. Time passes too quickly, and there is so much to say and do.