GG_sm Lorna Mills and Sally McKay

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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.

- sally mckay 5-01-2004 12:41 am [link] [3 comments]


found erick swenson

Ah spring. Found my very own Erick Swenson artwork embedded in some old leaves in the back alley.

- sally mckay 4-28-2004 7:02 am [link] [6 comments]


robot vid
click for streaming video
(or option click / right click here for download)
music by Tom Moody, graphics by Sally McKay


This Friday, April 30th (6-9pm) is the opening of a show I'm in called Robot Landscapes. I'm pretty happy with my piece, a lot of which was worked out here on the blog (see the sketches and preliminary gifs here). The show is in a series of vitrines. Each artist has been given a window, and the task of creating a landscape for a tiny, solar-powered robot. My piece is a window within a window, a small mirrored diorama running a simple sci-fi inspired animation. Viewers will don headphones and peer in at the strange little space enclosed. Tom Moody has collaborated by writing an excellent piece of music that meets the graphics in a charged-yet-ambient, abstract zone.

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.

- sally mckay 4-25-2004 4:59 pm [link] [8 refs] [36 comments]


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.

- sally mckay 4-25-2004 12:37 am [link] [add a comment]


autobahn
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.

- sally mckay 4-24-2004 9:46 pm [link] [1 ref] [10 comments]


zefrank


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."

- sally mckay 4-23-2004 5:55 pm [link] [3 comments]