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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
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I've been working on this blog for about 5 months and I am still feeling out the medium. One thing that I love is how fast ideas move by. As someone who thinks slowly, and has trouble being "in the moment" I find the pace here challenging and stimulating. But there are some drawbacks. I don't have time to follow up right away on all the interesting recommendations that get posted in the comments. Later, when I'm ready to go browsing/researching/video_renting, they can be hard to find. So I've made a new page of recommendations. I did this for myself, but realised others might get something out of it too. It's sort of like a links page, but not quite because often there aren't links, and each entry has a referral back to the thread where it appeared on this blog. Now that I've done the back posts, it shouldn't be too hard to maintain. I'm not sure if this is a throw-back reaction I'm having, an old-fashioned desire to hang on to things, or a genuinely useful type of archive. We'll see how it goes, I might abandon the idea if it starts to drag me down. Anyhow. Recommendations from comments on this blog are currently posted here.
Ah spring. Found my very own Erick Swenson artwork embedded in some old leaves in the back alley.
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(or option click / right click here for download)
music by Tom Moody, graphics by Sally McKay
Robot Landscapes is presented as part of digifest 2004: On The Move. It runs May 1 to July 4 in Case Studies at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. Participants are Wai-Loong Lim, Sally McKay, Jenny San Martin, Jon Sasaki, the teams of Kirsten White and Marc Sullivan, Magda Wojtyra and Marc Ngui, Arek Jackowski and Dorota Gelner, Magic Pony and curator Paola Poletto.
The activity over at Simpleposie is heating up. Jennifer McMackon poses an art-related question every day, and the Toronto art discussions over the past couple of weeks, while fractious, have been pretty interesting.
photo taken from Henrik Larrson's excellent online collection of pictures
Went to the Kraftwerk concert in Toronto last night. My friend Andy and I chair-danced like dorks and tried not to elbow our staid neighbours, who were demurely toe-tapping and text-messaging the entire time. Upper Canadians might just be more reserved than Germans. Anyhow I haven't laughed so hard in a long time, and the show was flipping great. The set was really perfect, the four guys and their machines framed by bands of light behind and below. I loved all the cycling footage during Tour de France. You can see the video here (scroll down). Autobahn portrayed nostalgic vacation illustrations from the heady days of early highway design, depicting the whole concept as a sort of cute, out-moded human project. That subtle (well .. subtle by Kraftwerk standards anyhow) ecological stance, juxtaposed against groovy, flesh and metal, fetish shots of cyclists, made it clear that bikes and computers are the cyborg partners of choice for these fellows. Vitamin also made a big visual impression: a field of trippy spinning pills like in Drugstore Cowboy and a great, simple wireframe animation of Alkaseltzer type fizzing action in a glass. Andy was pleased that they played Pocket Calculator, which he has been singing regularly, while making pokey finger motions, for at least the ten years that I've known him. The graphic was hilarious.... a big calculator with poking finger! Says Andy, "My god these guys are so literal." He's right, but they do it with gusto and it makes for a lot of fun. Thanks to Tom Moody, whose earlier Kratwerk post inspired me to go.
Note: afterwards we went down to the floor to check out the island of equipment. I didn't know what any of the machines were, but I do recognise a mitful of floppy disks when I see them. I asked the guy what on earth he had on floppies, and he, with a wry smile, said "lighting cues." Mysterious.
Comfortably behind the trend, as usual, I 've just found out (many thanks to Lauren and Rick) about www.zefrank.com. There is a lot of good entertainment on this site. My favourite so far is this deadpan faux doc on Homeland Security design."
singing Na-na-na-na to Ottawa. Go Toronto May Police! (game 7, 2 minutes left, 4-1 Leafs)
more cyborg notes
I watched part of a kid's show the other day and didn't get the name of it. I've scanned the TV Guide and Google and can't come up with it. In the show, a boy and his friends have a pal named "Cyborg" who hangs out with them. Cyborg is a half-man half-machine (go figure) and very tame and normal except that he seems to be an adult and is hanging around with nine-year olds. Anyhow, Cyborg gets kidnapped by a dude whose name I didn't catch. This guy used to be half-man, half-robot, but he had removed his human parts. Dude plans to help Cyborg become superior, like himself. Cyborg, strapped down on an operating table, protests " If you take out my biological parts, you remove the best part of me!" Dude responds, "But all of your memories and emotions will be downloaded into your improved body." A playback montage ensues in which we see Cyborg's memories; lots of hanging out with the kids at picnics and flying kites and whatnot. Cyborg manages to free himself from the operating table and pushes a button that reverse the setup so Dude sees the flashback as if with Cyborg's own eyes. It's a big surprise, "I never knew the world was so beautiful through human eyes." Yes, according to this show we humans have very good eyeballs and they make our experience...superior to robots' experience! Dude is stricken and upset, realising that without any human parts he is actually inferior to Cyborg. But it all ends happily cause the kids help him out, and undertake to teach him how to be more human by letting him join them and Cyborg in the park to throw the football around. I'm not making any of this up.
There is an interesting thread here about Richard Serra and other things to do with minimalism.
Bicycling Tirana (dvd still), 2003. From Rainer Ganahl's website
I've only seen a few installations of Toronto's Images Festival so far. Rainer Ganahl's bicycle video, Bicycling Tirana at Paul Petro Contemporary Art (still up until April 24) is pretty great; pov at about chest height, cyclist riding into oncoming traffic, mostly with no hands. The mood is oddly calm and transcendent, even as the cars are coming straight for the camera. The other video, simply titled Bicycling also has a strange serenitiy. A cyclist, shot from above, dreamily, lazily, doubles a passenger round and round in a Manhattan intersection, unconcerned as cars whizz by. I recognise this particular cycling frame of mind, a kind of blissful remove from the anxieties of car-drivership, despite the constant proximity of the big metal beasts.
There are some confusing works on canvas, big paintings of website pages about a suicide bomber who used a bicycle, and a painting of the text of an email from a cyclist describing a traffic conflict with a car driver. These paintings are kind of pretty, but I think the labour of depicting the web in paint is a questionable use of time.
My favourite piece in the show is the mail art project, Use a Bicycle. Ganahl, who lives in New York, made his own postage stamps which say things like Al Queda, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Shock and Awe. He sent eight Twin Towers 9/11 souvenir postcards to the Toronto gallery, and they all arrived. In the message area of the card is the simple imperative assertion: use a bicycle. This juxtaposition of human-powered transportation against US conflict in the middle east is both audacious and obvious, a simple beautiful statement about the ramifications of various technologies. Rainer Ganahl is clearly in love with the bicycle, an attitude I comprehend. He has written a good bicycle-related artist statement that you can read here. It was this quote, however, from the Images Festival guide, that drew me into the show. "The bicycle is really -- next to the computer and the radio -- my most important instrument for making it through my life."
use a bicycle, mail art project with self-made stamps (detail), 2004. From Rainer Ganahl's website.
News flash: Catherine Obsorne is now online! More on this soon.
cyborg notes
I read in Edge* that Eye-Toy is working on an interface that will read facial expressions. Remember in the old days when AI advancements used to pose questions for ethical and philosophical debate?
Speaking of play, how about a tiny game that you ingest - taken in capsule form. A nanotech neurotransmitter that just stimulates the relevant brain bits. You can have it running in the background and turn your attention on and off of it at will. Come to think of it, the searchable i-tunes implant database will be pretty nice too. Volume control inside your head. Ears are just for wetware interface and avoiding physical impacts. I'm also waiting for the small muscle mod chip from Social Science™ that allows you to select and implement a variety of facial expressions so you don't have to leave your carapace gawping and drooling while you tend to important internal matters.
*sorry I can't find the quote online - read it in hard copy and then lent it to my friend
The pictures above are from Toronto's Alex Wilson Community Garden. Alex Wilson wrote a great, influential book called The Culture of Nature. When he died, this garden was made in his memory. It's right on the best graffitti alley in Toronto, which also happens to be my off-road route to work. Will post the occasional spring picture of this garden and alley because A: it's a beautiful thing, and B: there's another, very much alive, Alex Wilson on Digital Media Tree who spends a great deal of his time birdwatching in Central Park, one of the most cultured pieces of nature on the planet.
"We must build landscapes that heal, connect and empower, that make intelligible our relations with each other and the natural world: places that welcome and enclose, whose breaks and edges are never without meaning. We urgently need people living on the land, caring for it, working out an idea that includes human life and human livelihood. All of that calls for a new culture of nature, and it cannot come soon enough." Alex Wilson, 1953-1993
As I am currently fussing about USA, I have found recent posts over at michelle kasprzak blog quite stimulating. Nice history of passports and also this "says-it -all" quote, both from MK:
"It is interesting, the idea of moving to a place being equated with approval of what that nation stands for. It does seem like a vote of some kind. I know a lot of Canadians in America that worry about these things, and the reflection their choices make on them. Sometimes opportunities are too good to pass up, wherever they are located. My cousin is currently working as an airline pilot in the United Arab Emirates. Does he support their goverment? I'm not sure, but I do know he was offered considerably more money to fly for an airline based there than he was making here, so he went. We tend to ask these questions a lot more when someone settles in America, which I think is a good examination of conscience, but a move sometimes simply means an opportunity for change, money, personal growth, or any combination of these things. Where one chooses to settle, either temporarily or permanently, can sometimes be quite arbitrary. A generation or two ago, some Eastern European immigrants had to choose between places they didn't know very well - Australia and Canada, in one story that I remember. I think Canada was chosen because it seemed not so far away from Europe, and yet offering a blank slate. Not a compelling "vote" in favour of Canada, it's true. But interesting to think about the misperceptions, fantasies, and other reasons for choosing a place to immigrate to - the American dream being the strongest example I can think of.I take MK's point, but at the same time I can't help but worry about when to draw the line...when is another country's foreign (or domestic) policy soooo bad, that to even be associated by geography is to be too complicit?
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Castle in the Sky is the film that I could not watch due to a parental block on my Playstation. Arg!!! Well fine, now I got other means to watch whatever I want ... so I'm allowed see kid's movies like this one, co-produced in USA by Disney, ironic. Anyhow, my stupid tech woes aside, this is another really lovely anime [via] by Hiyao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away). The story is a bit weak compared to his others, written for a younger audience maybe, but the artwork is unbelievable. Miyazaki has a knack for nature, and the grasses, trees and clouds in this film are simply stunning. The tale revolves around Laputa, a floating city in the sky that has been long abandoned and overrun with plants and trees. Huge, soft spoken robots are the only surviving inhabitants and they wander about the place growing moss and taking care of birds' nests. This is the most poignant and gripping aspect of the movie. I got a bit bored with the rest of the plot, but honestly I've never seen such a good-looking movie, so I dozed and let the pretty pictures transport me. |
Kiss Machine in the Toronto Star: "With agriculture, when you get down to only a few species, people get sick," [Emily Pohl Weary] says. "It's the same thing with cultural creations. You don't want any one or five big magazines to rule the world."
A recent thread elsewhere directed me to this excellent, informative essay by Mr. Wilson on the historic relationships between art and Central Park.
"Throughout its history there has been a dialectic between an “elitist” and a “populist” concept of the Park. It was conceived by cultured (and wealthy) people who wanted a park to match the great public places of Europe, and also to increase the value of real estate uptown. Theirs was a Romantic view of Nature, by way of American Transcendentalism. The Park would be for quiet contemplation and relaxation. The lower classes, in so far as they had access, would be edified by the models both of Nature and of their social betters."In case there are any readers of this page who are unaware of the rest of Digital Media Tree, it is full of great, smart writing. Browse around.
"...infinite vigilance is not possible"
Nassim Nicholas Taleb at Edge.org, also published in NYTimes on April 8/04.
Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave. Yet vicious black swans by definition do not repeat themselves. We cannot learn from them easily. All of which brings us to the 9/11 commission. America will not have another chance to hold a first inquiry into 9/11. With its flawed mandate, however, the commission is in jeopardy of squandering this opportunity.
I went to see the Whitney Biennial yesterday. The Globe and Mail's Sarah Milroy described the show as "tremulous." Tom Moody will no doubt speak for himself, but he has been heard to characterise it as the "fey, twee Biennial." I was a bit surprised to see so much low-impact, pretty work, and found myself tiring of all things quirky, pale pink or minty green. That said, the show made for a great art afternoon and some stuff, mostly dealing with violence and/or death, really struck me. Here's my list of picks.
Emily Jacir is a Palestinian American with a US passport that allows her to travel where other Palestinians can't go. She uses this power/freedom to fulfill requests such as. "Go to the Israeli post office in Jerusalem and pay my phone bill," and "Go to my mother's grave in Jerusalem on her birthday and place flowers and pray." Some requests are practical, some symoblic, some expressions of love and connection, some are vehicles for vicarious wish fulfillment. The documentation is simple and straightforward and the piece carries its own impact without fuss or fanfare. You can see most of it here.
Sue DeBeer's Hans & Grete is a big, funny/sad 2-channel video installation. The floor is covered with huge funfur pillows for flopping and watching (strewn, when I was there, with saggy, weary teenaged art viewers). The piece has 4 characters, two teenaged boys and two teenaged girls, played by two actors. They are twinned and juxtaposed in various ways, with lots of fairytale type reference, stuffed animals, sex and air guitar. The characters deliver monologues that each have their own heartbraking mixture of violence, idealism, childishness, ego and pain. The website is great, and generously and openly cites DeBeer's primary source material which includes writing by Ulrike Meinhoff and Eric Harris' suicide note. My favourite scene is when the character Kip is in the forest with a little stuffed toy dog. The dogs eyes glow amber and it speaks to him in a smurfy voice. He makes the dog elevate into the trees. The scene is twilit, understated and damn scary.
Jack Goldstein was an important 70s artist working with film and mass media. I'd never heard of him, and according to this useful article by Jim Lewis at Slate it's not a huge surprise.
By 1991 he was broke, angry, depressed, strung out, and one day he simply moved away, out to the California desert—disappeared, really. Almost nobody heard from him; if you came to contemporary art afterward, you may not even have heard of him. And yet an artist like Douglas Gordon, whose giant videos of a ponderously live elephant, shown at the Gagosian Gallery in New York last month, pleased so many people, owes a great deal to Goldstein, as he may or may not know himself.The piece shown here is film of volcanos and underwater scenes. The colour is extreme and the image breaks down, the highlights burning out into amorphous areas of white, orange or blue. It's a gripping abstraction of images of the elements, that ends with a lunar eclipse, accompanied by an alarming, high-pitched tone, the only sound in the piece. I loved it.
Chloe Piene's Blackmouth was really great; a slow-mo video of a young girl covered in mud (or something) and roaring like a lion or a monster. Prepubescent power/anger/angst.
Barnaby Furnas's bloody violent paintings were unsual enough to really catch my attention. They strike a fine line between cartoonishness and abstraction. Sam Peckinpah in paint (with a bit of real life war and bit of video game graphics resonating in the mix).
Cory Arcangel/BEIGE showed their famous hacked Nintendo clouds, and a great little screen tucked off to the side with Super Mario sleeping to crazy hacked Nintendo music (heard through headphones). I was happy to see this work, after hearing so much about it, and while I like the ephemeral, performance and online presence of Beige more than this installation, I'm nonetheless glad that they were in the show.
I am currently sitting in an internet cafe in Times Square. The floor space feels about the size of a small Walmart. It's very well-lit. There are banks and banks of blond wooden counters, each with a row of screens and keyboards. You pay for a ticket at an automatic booth (like buying a metrocard). The ticket has a number printed on it that you can then use to log on to a terminal and access the credit you purchased. It's a fast and easy system. The place has some human employees that wander around looking dazed. There is banal, pop-music jazz playing just loud enough to be noticeable. The atmosphere is working for me. It's very service-oriented but far from sterile. The keyboard is black with previous users' finger grime. It's a bit disgusting but there's something I like about it, just as I like the layers of human cultural residue that make up a city. Keep trying to remember not to rub my eyes til I've had a chance to wash my hands.
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Discussion about (capital N) Net (capital A) Art going on here and here, instigated by a highly irritating article from the New York times titled "Internet Art Survives, but the Boom Is Over". (follow first link for Tom's annotated version)
A little Rodney Graham goes a long way, and this can be a beautiful thing. I find his 1991 insert into the James Bond book Dr No both delighful and inspiring. It's a bookmark the size of a page, designed just like the page, with a piece of text that flows in and out of the story. Bond is paralysed from some drug and a centipede is cralling on his face. Graham sends the insect travelling down Bond's whole body and back up to where it started. It's a sexy little story! Hilarious. I'm very drawn to this gentle form of intervention, and I see it as part of a larger(ie: beyond Graham) practice of piling art ideas into pop culture and vice versa, packing together a bunch of ever-morphing cultural snowballs. Unlike my big-picture snowball model, however, this project is based on a strict loop structure, which is Graham's usual form. The story makes a sort of self enclosed narrative bubble that blips out the side of Fleming's narrative like a friendly hernia.
I went to the opening of the AGO's major Rodney Graham exhibit on Wednesday night. When I saw "Phonokinetoscope" in Liverpool a few years ago it had me completely charmed. I've always been a bit of a sucker for conceptual formalism (Ed Ruscha, David Askevold) (hm...mostly men). If you throw in some fetish gadgets with moving parts, like film projectors and bicycles, I'm sold. However, I think Graham's work loses impact when so much of it is shown together.
Catherine Osborne's column in the National Post today takes issue with Graham for being cryptic, and making work "geared exclusively to the very few who have the time to decipher all the innuendo and in-jokes." I don't really agree (but if true, what of it? There is nothing wrong with artwork that requires a little thought or time investment). This show is no more obscure than a bunch of work by Donald Judd or Janet Cardiff. It has easy narrative, easy form, and spectacle. What more hand-holding does an art-going audience need? "Vexation Island", for instance, is a long slow one liner packed with a visual irony that comes more from Gilligan's Island and vacation advertising than from any esoteric art vocabularly. It's handed to us on a platter and all we have to do is invest the time to watch. But then the work, so tightly packaged and perfectly contrived, falls just a wee bit flat. I do agree with Catherine when she says that Graham "forgets to break out of his own circular thinking" and " leaves us out". As I wandered from projection to projection, watching one hermetic loop after another, I started feeling pretty dis-engaged. I think I understand the work, but I'm not sure how rewarding it really is. My summary of the big show: a lot of Rodney Graham goes a little way, and this can be a somewhat sad and empty thing.
Tony Benn on Democracy Now (thanks to B. Smiley for the link)
Benn served in the British Parliament for over half a century and is the longest serving Labour MP in the history of the party, which he joined in 1942. In May 2001, Benn retired from House of Commons to 'devote more time to politics.' While most politicians in this country leave office to work for corporations or become corporate lobbyists, Benn left government to become one of the harshest and most vocal critics of war and is now a leader of the Stop the War Coalition in Britain.
"The only power in the world strong enough to deal with the danger created by the splitting of the atom is the unity of the of the human race. You can split the atom and that means you have got to unite the human race if you are going to control it. If you don't, if you are going to split the atom and the human race, you're finished, like the dinosaurs. "
[...] "
"I think it is a great mistake to think of politics in terms of personalities. You know, you kill Saddam or capture him. What difference does that make? You kill Osama Bin Laden, what difference does that make? It isn't about that. It is about movements and what the peace movement is about. Its strength comes in the fact that it is not asking you primarily to elect anyone. Its saying we got to have an understanding of the world and that understanding then becomes the mainstream of opinion, which no political leader could ignore. "