sally mckay and lorna mills

Lorna Mills and Sally McKay

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Today I was inspired by Mr. Wilson's May Day post to go outside and look at plants. I am fond of plants, and prefer that they live, therefore I've given up trying to grow things myself. Luckily my good friends/neighbours can handle it, so I went over there and hung out in the back yard.

I've been directed to The Memory Hole (Rescuing Knowledge, Freeing Information) by two separate sources today (Tom Moody's blog and Ben Smith Lea's post to IDEAL mailing list). American media is by and large trying to ignore the US Military Intelligence condoned torture of Iraqi prisoners. But the bloggers are on it. The quote below is from The Memory Hole's "some favourite quotes" section.

"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who loves his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
H.L. Mencken

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.

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.

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.

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