|
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 |
View current page
...more recent posts
Sunday Devotional - Jerusalem
Jennifer McMackon 2008 (via Prolonged Hacking and Gnawing)
(found)
(found)
(found)
Rocco Counts 2006
Vid Ingelevics Platform #7D 2004
Vid Ingelevics Platform #10B 2004
I'll follow Leah Sandals' lead and do a shout-out to Vid Ingelevics as well, for this quote that she found on some especially vindictive Globe & Mail threads:
I will give an example of exactly the kind of thing that we will not see anymore with these short-sighted and ideologically-motivated cuts to Canada's cultural programs by the federal government.And before any tories get all wet over these platform images, they are for hunting humans.
As an independent curator I worked with a team on a project for one of Canada's largest public archives to digitize and put on-line a history of Eaton's department store display windows that covered the entire country and almost a hundred years of our history. With almost 200 hundred images, this important aspect of Canada's history is now available to anyone in the country (or the world) who has access to a computer and the net. A significant chunk of the funding for this ambitious project was provided by Canadian Culture Online, a program that the Tories have just cut.
Speaking for myself, it is truly disheartening to have a government that demonstrates such utter contempt for our culture and, ultimately, our history.
(found)
VVORK has posted a clusterfuck of flags.
(found)
Cheap political mudslinging at its best!
Kristin Demchuk
Glow 2007 video stills
  
|
7a*11d presents
FINALLY THE NAME PAYS OFF Lipsync Smack Down Cabaret!
Thursday August 21, 2008
The Gladstone Hotel Ballroom
1214 Queen Street West, Toronto
9pm door, show at 10pm
$11 admission
(tickets available at the door only)
Featuring a truly appalling line-up of talent that will include performances by:
Chandra Bulucon
Keith Cole
Paul Couillard
Jess Dobkin
Fat Femme Mafia
Ed Johnson
Andrew Harwood
Johanna Householder
Ina unt Ina
Kirsten Johnson
Louise Liliefeldt
Shane MacKinnon
Elle McLaughlin
Allyson Mitchell
Roy Mitchell
Adam Paolozza
Andrew J. Paterson
Fay Slift
RM Vaughan
Lindy Zucker
(curated by Shannon Cochrane)
And someone will hump this Miniature Pinscher before the night is over.
It's that sort of event, if you know what I mean. (wink wink)
(found)
Sally McKay
It's sunny out now (and we like to appear up-to-the-minute on this blog) so I'll post this GIF of Sally's that I found on the DMT server. We are having problems uploading new images to our site and our generous web host/god is out of town so I'm surfing through the image archives to show you stuff that I don't feel you were happy enough to see the first time.
This is slightly paradoxical to the up-to-the-minute mission statement mentioned above.
(found)
(found)
Sunday Devotionals - KLF (thanks to GVB)
KLF & The Great Tammy Wynette - Justified and Ancient
The Timelords/KLF - Doctorin' The Tardis
KLF burned a million £ - part 1
(found)
Arthur Zajonc on CBC Ideas: How To Think About Science
André Masson, Goethe and the Metamorphosis of Plants, 1940
This podcast is really good. Here are my notes: Zajonc rhymes with Science. He is a quantum physicist with an investment in experience and phenomenological contemplation. He has studied Goethe, who undertook contemplative scientific investigation of phenomena, biology and colour. Zajonc talks about how both he and Goethe believe that through careful observation of nature, something changes within ourselves that allow us to have insights. For Zajonc, this is how science works. The insights, as when Newton saw an apple falling and connected it with the movement of the moon, come first. The analysis and computation comes afterwards.
He has some skepticism about mathematics because the structures of math itself lead us into other dimensions where we have insights that we could not achieve through observation. We reduce the messy, variable and multi-dimensional experience of nature (the world) to a pared-down, one or two dimensional model. The model is very useful, and widely applicable, but it leaves out a lot of information. Models, he says, are a form of idolatry. We become enamoured of the model because it is a form of our own thinking, and we spent our enthusiasm on the model instead of on the phenomena. He uses the example of quantum physics in which the fundamental elements of matter are not “things” at all.
He talks about how our technologies remove us from experience, remove us from the “aesthetic and moral dimension” of sensual experience. He gives the example of the Manhattan Project, in which it was impossible for the scientists working on the project to experience the phenomenon of the atom bomb until it had been detonated. Without experience, morality is lost. We advance our technologies, but our morality cannot keep up. Genetics and neuroscience are currently in this predicament. Zajonc is also studying spiritual thinkers because he is invested in contemplation. He values religion not because of it’s particular dogmas (though he shows respect for the "honourable" place of religions in history) but because religious study is a study of experience. And, he reminds us, so is science.
(found)
Globe and Mail poll results as of 5:23 pm today. Vote here.
(found)
XPACE 58 Ossington Ave., Toronto Tuesday-Saturday, noon-6
August 14 to August 23 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, August 14, 7-10 pm
Featuring the Zeesy Powers Grant Awards Ceremony at 8:30 pm and music by DJ WMD
(found)
Sunday Devotional: Herp Albert & the Tijuana Brass
(found by L.M.)
Notes on Blogging
I really like the recent bubble of talk at simpleposie about AGYU's advocacy work. I'm in favour of the project, myself, and I also think the discussion around it is really valuable. It's not just good in the specific instance, but it's good in general, that any art issue, at any time, can now be taken up and debated in public.
I was really influenced in the 90s by an essay that Kevin Dowler wrote for YYZ book Theory Rules. Dowler talked about the very poor way in which art professionals tried to defend the National Gallery's exhibition of Vanitas by Jana Sterbak (better known as 'the meat dress'), and their acquisition of Barnet Newman's Voice of Fire by claiming that decisions on the value of art were best left to art experts.
Until recently, the uselessness of art, its pure negativity, ensured its freedom to function as critique, since it rested beyond (and therefore was incapable of infecting) the horizon of everyday life. However, with the erosion of the autonomy of aesthetic practices and the broadening of the scope of reception (once encouraged by the avant-garde), art can no longer hold the privileged position that was the sign of both its freedom from constraint and its lack of utility.In other words, the way I understood it, contemporary art's value in society was diminished by expert claims that the criteria for judging art were only inherent to the art world itself.
Kevin Dowler, "In Defence of the Realm: Public Controversy and the Apologetics of Art", in Theory Rules (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1996) p.82
One of the motivations for starting Lola magazine was to emphasise the vitality of contemporary art by demonstrating that it indeed had meaning and impact beyond the select realm of art experts. The project was not welcomed by everyone. I recently received an email from a Lola reader saying "...I bitched a lot about Lola way back ... because it seemed too lowbrow and scene-y..." Those were the days before blogs, when art discourse was pretty much restricted to print media. The dearth of arts coverage was bemoaned by people who naturally wanted reviews, but it also created a weird sense of security. Artists were public figures and art was a public experience, but you could pretty much guarantee that nobody would ever publicly challenge your work unless you were super famous.
With blogs, the public nature of all art practice is more healthy and functional. It still feels like early days. There is a sense of surprise on the part of the artist when all of a sudden their project is being heatedly discussed online. And it's not pleasant to be criticized, especially if you don't think the critic has put any rigorous thought into their comments. But unlike a Globe and Mail review by John Bentley Mays which the artist must passively receive as if a judgement from on high, these threads are discussions with multiple points of view, and the artist can join in and defend themselves. Not only that, but any and all art projects, including those that might never register on the radar of print media critics, could be up for discussion at any moment. The artist is denied the security and mystique of silence, but in return we get the understanding that art does matter deeply to lots of people. And that's better.
(found)
Do you have a nerdish interest in colour and $30 to spend on a made-in-California-new-media t-shirt? Joester is helping to promote the online conference 080808 and so are we.
As you may know, BCNM and Greg Niemeyer have been running the algorithmically timed 0n0n0n conference series since 01/01/01.
This time round we are stripping everything away from the conference except an online discussion...and the conference T-Shirt.
The conference theme for 080808 is Digital Color: Something from Something or Nothing. This refers to the standard digital format of 24-bit color. Each one of 24 bits (0 or 1) describes how computers should mix light to achieve a specific color. We will focus in on this process with our website, which allows you to change individual bits of the color format to see colors change. When you register (fee $30.00), you can reserve a bit, set the bit to either 0 or 1, and then explain your choice. You can also review other participant's explanations of their choices. This, we hope, will produce a conversation online about color, something and nothingness. It will also determine a palette of four colors which will define the custom-designed and custom sewn conference t-shirt (hence the fee). The conference t-shirt will be shipped to all participants after the conference closes.
Visit: http://studio.berkeley.edu/080808
It would be great to see your comments up there, and you will get a unique T-Shirt from the process.
The conference ends on Friday August 8 at 8 PM.
UPDATE: conference has been extended to 08/23/08
(the competition for who gets to control the shirt colour is heating up)
Photos by Andrew Wright from Death by Chocolate.
An animated discussion (Catch that pun? Did you? Did you?) at simpleposie on the AGYU's current survey of artists.
(I'm closing the comments here to avoid cross posting)
(This rule does not apply to me)
(opened again)
Selections from The 1930s: The Making of "The New Man"
Gläserne Frau, 1935, from Deutsche Hygiene-Museum, Dresden.
Note: the exhibition The 1930s: The Making of "The New Man" did not
have this piece, but did have Replica of The Glass Man, 1995,
After original by Franz Tschakert, also from the
Deutsche Hygiene-Museum.
André Masson, Goethe and the Metamorphosis of Plants, 1940
Carl Strüwe, Snail Tongue, 1928
Ivo Saliger The Judgment of Paris, c. 1939
Salvador Dali Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War),1936
Alex Colville, Bodies in a Grave, Belsen, 1946
Me and GVB went to Ottawa to see The 1930s: The Making of "The New Man" at the National Gallery with our friend J. A major theme was artists' interest in biology, and the physiological workings of the world. The show opened with a replica of the very first "Visible Man", a life-sized sculpture by Franz Tschakert. I was also really taken with André Masson's painting of Goethe's brain/mind as he worked on his biological observations. As these nifty science inspired works gave way for massive eugenics-inspired paintings of Aryan uber-citizens, my own present day enthusiasm for art/science combinations started to irk me a little. But the exhibition was really comprehensive, lots of surrealism, and post war art as well. Alex Colville's painting Bodies in a Grave, Belsen kind of brought it home to me that the artists of that dense era were both engaged in the ethos of the time, and passing comment on it as well. Even the most politically embedded were bearing witness to facism and its horrors, and now, in the museum, we can get a pretty good look at that socio-political era with all the compromised ethical complexity that comes with a humane point of view. It's a great show, very well curated. GVB pointed out that no curators are named or credited anywhere in the exhibition, which is odd.
Because it seems related, I'm pulling and repeating a paragraph from L.M.'s recent comment, an excerpt from George Friedman writing about Solzhenitsyn...
Solzhenitsyn saw the basic problem that humanity faced as being rooted in the French Enlightenment and modern science. Both identify the world with nature, and nature with matter. If humans are part of nature, they themselves are material. If humans are material, then what is the realm of God and of spirit? And if there is no room for God and spirituality, then what keeps humans from sinking into bestiality? For Solzhenitsyn, Stalin was impossible without Lenin’s praise of materialism, and Lenin was impossible without the Enlightenment.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn 1918-2008
From a 2007 essay Solzhenitsyn’s Refusal by Pierre Tristam
The Gulag Archipelago is a study in power’s perversions at every level of a society unwilling to dilute it, from the very top (Stalin) to its bottom-feeding power-trippers: the secret police, the interrogators, the privileged prisoners, the prison guards (every one of which is analyzed in chapter-length details). Those hierarchies shouldn’t sound unfamiliar to anyone who’s known the hierarchies of a school, of a corporation, of any organization built on the pyramidal notion of power. Nor would Solzhenitsyn’s endless tales of policing, suspicion, torture, subtle or grand repressions sound unfamiliar to those of us pawned and pawed by the convenient terrors of “homeland security” and the “global war on terror.” If “The Gulag Archipelago” isn’t read much nowadays, it’s from ignorance, not irrelevance.
(found for Simcoe Day)
Sunday Devotional - Patti Smith (who can cover any song on earth)
You Light Up My Life on Kids Are People Too
(via Anthony Easton)
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Don`t Smoke in Bed
Within You Without You
Chat écoutant la musique (Entr’acte) by Chris Marker
Lets see the Dog Whisperer do this!! by bltmic
(found)
We're back from the woods. I'm having trouble remembering how to type. At the marsh I startled three species of heron all at once: great blue heron, night heron and green heron. We saw lots of cute little black bats, tiny furry flying cousins to Bat-boy. And we saw a hawk moth for the first time. It looked like this image stolen from butterfliesandmoths.org except the flowers were tiger lillies.
