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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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City Beautification Ensemble started colourizing urban fixtures a couple of years ago. Lately they seem to be concentrating their efforts on bike parking. I like them because they really are trying to make things look nice. At first they were pretty slap-dash, and there'd be big messy overspray around everything they did. They got some complaints and then fixed up their methods! Very responsive and responsible for a gang of lads with buckets of paint. Apparently their website is 2% complete.
I like yellow bikes because for a small annual fee you can have access to these plucky little well-oiled one-speeders whenever you like. I picked one up the other day while out on errands. The hard part is bringing them back to the hub on time, cause they are so much fun to ride.
QUIZ: Hey all you who went to art school! Remember this crazy shit?
name that author...
"The painter is concerned with representing solely what can be seen. These points, if they are joined one to the other in a row, will form a line. With us a line is a figure whose length can be divided but whose width is so fine that it cannot be split. Some lines are called straight, others curved. A straight line is drawn directly from one point to another as an extended point. The curved line is not drawn straight from one point to another, but rather looks a drawn bow. More lines, like threads woven together in a cloth, make a plane."
Mouchette is a really successful online persona: a sad, creepy little girl based on the 1967 film by Robert Bresson. The website has been around for years and years and as far as I can tell the identity of the people behind the persona is still unknown. My favourite thing about Mouchette is the email. There's lots of places to make comments on the site, and having done this I periodically receive email such as the one below:Dear Sally McKay,
Last time we met in private, on a page that I made for you alone. We shared that brief moment just once in our lives, never again will you see that page. But now I made a new private page for you only:
http://mouchette.org/to/you?Sally_McKay,4e45bf9966bd2cc144256fd0e74f33b9
Look everywhere, the page has some secrets inside
I can't wait to have you click on me again,
*bisou*
Mouchette
The page I was taken to was incredibly disconcerting. Too-close-up pink skin, panting little girl breath, and a bar you could pull that showed an image of raw muscle tissue underneath. When I tried to go back a second time I got the message:the page you are looking for is not hereI'm not comfortable with the child suicide, sexuality and violence. But being comfortable is not what Mouchette is about, she's provocative and she knows it. There's a forum for sending Mouchette hate mail that is also unnerving in it's brutality. But panning through the random painful angry posts, made me think about the genuine challenges of free communication in public space. People ain't always pretty.
you won't ever see it again
I like it when Lisa Neighbour works with monsters. Her piece in the current group show by Persona Cantare is an eight-foot high drawing of The Hulk, made with macraméd ecletrical cords that power two green lightbulbs for the eyes. Lisa had been working with power cords and interesting light bulbs for a while. The Hulk is my favourite. The big pop monster icon is a great foil for the artsy-crafty hippy reference of the macramé. And I do find something monstrous in the fact that so much cord, and so much work, is embedded in a line of current that is only lighting two small bulbs. There's a scary store of unused energy in the piece that is mounting and waiting to blow. Lisa's last piece, for Persona Volare ( the 1999 incarnation of P.Cantare), was a wall full of cheap-ass ugly coffeecups and rocks for smashing them. Which we did, in a sort of fun-house art catharsis.
Another piece in the show that I like is Chantal Rousseau's sweet, little, ceiling video installation (above). You have to climb up a ladder and poke your head up into the cobwebs through a gap in the tiles. There you'll see an animation of skulls licking each other and bouncing around, flickering in the corner behind the ducts.
Rebecca Diederichs' piece, (a gorgeous collaboration with her late husband, Reid) really has my brain gears going. But she is a good friend and co-art-conspirator so I will write more in depth about her work at a later date.
From His Master's Voice:
Stanislaw Lem If we lived a billion times more slowly, and correspondingly longer, if a second - in this fancy - equaled an entire century, we would certainly conclude that the continents of the globe were processes, seeing with our own eyes how changeable they were, for they would be moving before us no less than waterfalls do, or ocean currents. And if, on the other hand, we lived a billion times faster, we would conclude that the waterfall was an object - because it would present itself to us as something highly immobile and immutable. The difference between "object" and "process," therefore, gave no need for concern....
No Media Kings is a blog/website by Jim Munroe. There's a lot going on here and his fabulous CD zine, Novel Amusements, is fodder for a future post. Today I'm interested in the stuff he's writing about games:"In his documentary about Counter-Strike (Sierra, 2000), Carter tries to make a connection between videogames and martial arts. I think he fails at this, but he makes a valiant and genuine attempt to communicate what he knows to be true: that despite how bloody, violent and pointless the military first-person shooter looks to people on the outside, the game had a positive impact on his life.He's talking about Tim Carter, who I saw present at Digifest in Toronto last year. I find the guy scary as hell. Too much talk about 'brotherhood' and 'honour'. But Jim's not scared of the dark side, and I very much appreciate his investigative curiosity and allegiance to freaks. Jim Munroe is like a kinder, gentler Dave Eggerers, a prolific rockstar personality embedded deep in the politics of indymedia. Go look at his site - there's something for everyone.
When I face the challenge of explaining that there's more to punk than pokes the eye, that there's a rich vein of politics, creativity and philosophy running through a subculture founded on negativity and antagonism, at some point I have to abandon the intellectual arguments and just say it helped me. It may be fucked up, but so am I, and it gave me a way to live and think that let me focus my energy instead of having it cook me alive."