sally mckay and lorna mills

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

Score
Humans: 0
Cats: 0

cat typing

Adam Zaretsky

Sarah Peebles
(click through the image & scroll down to see & hear these bees in action)

Adam Zaretsky is going to be presenting on Appropriate Pervert Technology at the Subtle Technologies Festival (June 4-6). And Sarah Peebles will be talking about Pollination Ecology with Dr. Laurence Packer and Rob King. These are just two artists who jump out at me from the jam-packed schedule. Zaretsky sounds like a hoot. Here's an excerpt from his project VIVAVIVO!

Living Art is Dead:

What is so sexy about the biological today? Is artistic product as fickle as our hollow markets? Worse still, is artistic product just an aid in the panic diversion of cash flows? Is art just another way to lure press coverage away from our mismanaged Computer World? Are the technologies of Cloning, Transgenics and Genomics just charismatic suck-holes seducing faux-independent art exploration? Are our artists slaves to the rhythm of the latest big boom/bust bubble, the biotechnological fad market? I would say yes, often yes. Sometimes bioart is a gateway drug, the road to harder drugs, war, creative accounting, fraud and dashed dreams. Some artists are like unwitting pimps and pushers, hooking dupes of waning cultural capital on the next ‘born to lose’ high-risk venture.

Subtle Tech is an ambitious festival that always provokes some kind of crazy-assed interdisciplinary discussion. I go mostly for the Q&A sessions, where artists and scientists try to find common ground (and often and fail and sometimes go at it tooth and nail...and I know, I know...that's not supposed to be the idea - it's all about sharing concepts and playing nice. But hey, why should the dialogue between two different disciplines always be conflict-free? Let's get into it!)

(found) (and it speaks to me)

HAPPY VICTORIA DAY.

HAPPY VICTORIA DAY.

We take time off from work.

We put on some nice clothes.

And we sing this song.

[shit fuck damn they've taken it off youtube already]

Sunday - EUROVISION 2010!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ALL 39 CRAPPY SONGS IN ONE 10 MINUTE VIDEO!!!!!

bonus gif: LITHUANIAN PANTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

lithuanian pants.gif

based on a jpeg courtesy of Anthony Easton

[but they'll never get the Lithuanian pants off this blog]
.

- GOODNIGHT SWEETHEART -

Jim Bassett, our lovely host at Digital Media Tree, turned us on to this awesome tool that will enable you to make GREAT DIGITAL ART while barely trying, just like I did today.

No, I shit you not, I didn't put the slightest effort into this and look at how great it is.

great art.jpg

Ha! Eat that Rhizome.

David Trautrimas - The Spyfrost Project at LE Gallery, 1183 Dundas St. W., Toronto. Until May 30th.

Terra Thermal Inducer 2010 Digital print on archival paper, 35” x 22.5”

Mnemonic Doppelganger 2010 Digital print on archival paper, 35” x 22.5”

Carbon Inversion Device 2010 Digital print on archival paper, 30” x 20””

Wangechi Mutu at the Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas St W, Toronto ON. Until May 23, 2010

Sunday - The Sonics

Psycho a Go-Go

Strychnine

Boss Hoss

Carlo Cesta @ Art School (Dismissed), Old Shaw Street School at Argyle and Shaw, Toronto, ON.

Until 8:00 pm Sunday, May 16.

Milk and Cookies 2010 installation detail from his tower of chrome plated milk crates

I love big artist run site-specific projects. The quality isn't too uneven, a few duds, but more surprises than I expected. Heather Nicol's sound & light piece, In the Trenches, is exquisite and makes great use of a small arched opening that reads as a gravestone made out of negative space. (no photo will do it justice).

Paulette Philips' Bridge of Sighs is another jewel that can't be photographed well enough to post here. (I tried)

R.M. Vaughan previewed the exhibition for the Globe and Mail.

And if you like your art info sprinkled with adorably clueless doe-eyed wonder, check out VOCA's post for such treasues as

"It has also become popular for artists, collectives and independent curators to mount exhibitions in abandoned spaces.

And, it seems that performance and related interdisciplinary works have replaced painting, sculpture and drawing – even ‘conceptual’ works – as the art form du jour."

Lisa Neighbour @ Art School (Dismissed), Old Shaw Street School at Argyle and Shaw, Toronto, ON.

Until 8:00 pm Sunday, May 16.

Kopf in den Wolken 2010 (that's my discarded plastic glass of lemonade in the bottom of the top image, sorry Lisa, didn't notice the viceo at first)

Gwen MacGregor & Lewis Nicholson @ Art School (Dismissed), Old Shaw Street School at Argyle and Shaw, Toronto, ON.

Until 8:00 pm Sunday, May 16.

Waxed 2010 Crayon (installation detail)

Colette Laliberté and Sandra Rechico, 2 > 1, (installation details)

I snuck into the press preview of Art School (Dismissed) yesterday and it's a really good show. Friday-Saturday-Sunday, 12:00 to 8:00. go see it.

Curated by Heather Nicol in the old Shaw Street School building at Argyle and Shaw.

With Debbie Adams, Luigi Ferrara & Company, Paulette Phillips, Lois Andison, Catherine Heard, Ed Pien, John Armstrong & Paul Collins, Gordon Hicks, Rambunctious, Johanna Householder, Karin Randoja, Barbara Astman, Alexander Irving, Lyla Rye, Barbara Balfour, Michelle Irving, Rick Sacks, Wende Bartley, Shelagh Keeley, Holly Small, Mark Crofton Bell, Stan Krzyzanowski, Fiona Smyth, Yael Brotman, Henry Kucharzyk, Chrysanne Stathacos, Ian Carr-Harris & Yvonne Lammerich, Colette Laliberté & Sandra Rechico, Phil Strong & Laurel MacDonald, Lyn Carter, Nina Levitt, Lisa Steele & Kim Tomczak, Susan Cash, Pamila Matharu, Carlo Cesta, David McClyment, Safety In Numbers, Moira Clark, Lisa Neighbour, Monica Tap, Nicole Collins, Lewis Nicholson, Ker Wells, Tara Cooper, Gwen McGregor, Jane Wells, Christine Duncan, Heather Nicol, Michèle White, Peter Freeman, Luke Painter, Jay Wilson.

Rob C. put me onto this crazy stuff about "imaginary" colours. As a result of our subsequent conversation he sent me this most excellent gif. It's based on a drawing by René Descartes.

rob's descartes gif

I actually read Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy not that long ago. It was really worth it...especially because I had no idea that the whole thing is awkwardly framed as proof of the existence of God!! Poor guy. It sucked to be into science back then. The first section of the book is a letter to the Dean and Doctors of the sacred Faculty of Theology at Paris asking for endorsement.

I have always thought that two topics — namely God and the soul — are prime examples of subjects where demonstrative proofs ought to be given with the aid of philosophy rather than theology. For us who are believers, it is enough to accept on faith that the human soul does not die with the body, and that God exists; but in the case of unbelievers, it seems that there is no religion, and practically no moral virtue, that they can be persuaded to adopt until these two truths are proved to them by natural reason.

He didn't get the money.

(found & altered)

Zdeněk Burian

Sunday - Two Editing Masterpieces

Lil Jon - Get Low (fan video)

Link courtesy of Joe McKay (click through image)

TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL

Torontoist covers Too Cool For School. Join us on Saturday afternoon at Harbourfront.

"I want a feminist writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision again, because we need to reclaim that sense to find our way through all the visualizing tricks and powers of modern sciences and technologies that have transformed the objectivity debates. We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name." [Donna Haraway, “The Persistence of Vision,” in The Visual Culture Reader, Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed., (London: Routledge, 1992) p.678]

temporal pulse

"It is in that languidly unreeling pulsation, that hypnotically erotic, visual throb of Duchamp’s Precision Optics, that one encounters the body of physiological optics’ seeing fully enmeshed in the temporal dimension of nervous life, as it is also fully awash in optical illusion’s ‘false induction.’ But it is here, as well, that one connects to this body as the site of libidinal pressure on the visual organ, so that the pulse of desire is simultaneously felt as the beat of repression." [Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MASS & London: The MIT Press, 1998, c.1993) p.138]

"The cerebral cortex is not above the body in an ideal or ideated remove; it is, instead, of the body, such that the reflex arc of which it is a part connects it to a whole field of stimuli between which it cannot distinguish." [Rosalind Krauss, ibid., p.124]

"The nervous system is not contained within the body’s limits. The circuit from sense-perception to motor response begins and ends in the world. The brain is thus not an isolable anatomical body, but part of a system that passes through the person and her or his (culturally specific, historically transient) environment. As the source of stimuli and the arena for motor response, the external world must be included to complete the sensory circuit." [Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered," in October, no. 62 (Fall 1992) p.12]

Note: you can blame L.M. for this post because A: she introduced me to Trippy Text
and B: she said I should use it to write my dissertation.

Libby Hague