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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 |
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Just got this great image and message from friends via email...thanks for the permission to post here! - sm
[My friend] sent me this wonderful collage that her brother made of the Transit of Venus. I just love how such an abstract and unearthly event is rendered tangible and familiar. The projection of the sun (inverted!), and being held by [the girl] between her hands reminds me of that famous Blake engraving where Uriel (?) is measuring the cosmos with calipers. Here it's a young girl and her dad grasping the same thing.
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The Transit of Venus has a special place in the history of science. Timing the passage of our second planet across the the sun gave up the first big yardstick for measuring the cosmos. It was the stuff of high adventure and scientific prowess - sailing to Tahiti and crossing deserts with astonomical instruments, funded by kings and states. I saw the transit too, sitting on the bedrock of the Canadian Shield having waited for the sun to climb above the morning mist. I used a few layers of silvered mylar from an emergency blanket to cover the objective lenses of a pair of binoculars and so protect my eyes (not a recommended technique!) This allowed me to look directly at the Sun and Venus. There were a few fleeting moments where I swear I actually felt myself to be sitting on one planet and watching another cross in front of the huge sun ... meaning, it wasn't a mental or conceptual thought, instead it was a direct experience - as solid as watching someone walk past on the street. written by guest poster: Gordon Hicks |
Infrasense by Robert Saucier and the collective Kit is on at Interaccess (in conjunction with Subtle Technologies). Horse-shaped machines lumber along tracks. Blob-shaped machines with miscellaneous pieces of obsolete computer equipment stuck all over them lumber around hither and yon. There is some kind of technical interrelationship between the two types of machine involving sounds that are broadcast from the horses. These are "Trojan Horses" and "Bugs". The pun is somewhat compelling: to manifest in clunky, clumsy three dimensions an image of computer viruses that normally have no corporal reality. But it's not working very well. Hardly any of the machines were moving. There was a hand-held controller console with levers to push that appeared to produce zero results. There is supposedly a web component to the project where you can input directives to the "bugs" but the terminal in the gallery was A: confusing in the extreme and B: offline and disfunctional. I can't find a link to the web part of the project anywhere (not on the Interaccess site nor the Subtle Technologies site). To be fair, the installation is complicated, and I think this is the first time it's been installed. For robot-art afficianados there may be some interesting tech going on. I do, however, find this kind of object-oriented technology art pretty tedious. Is it R&D? if so, to what end and in whose service? If its all for the fun of puttering/tinkering invention, then please let go of the forced, tacked-on content and just give us some cool machines (that hopefully function) to interact with (or maybe we can just go watch Junkyard Wars on TV).
 digital mock up of Infrasense taken from Subtle Technologies |  installation shot of Eddo Stern's GodsEye View taken from Postmasters |
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I am looking forward to this video screening on Thursday night for several reasons:
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Where: Cinecyle, 129 Spadina Ave (down the alley)
Who: Trinity Square Video presents Lukas Blakk + Tracy Tidgwell, Heather Keung, Allyson Mitchell, Andrew J. Paterson, Yura Yurinskiy, and Karim Zouak. Conceived and initiated by Day Millman.
Of all the paintings in Matt Bahen's current show at A Space, this one (the PR flagship image, nabbed from the A Space website) is my least favourite because it's the only one with eye contact. This painting has an iconic presence, a valorous, masculine, Harlequin Romance mystique that the others do not share. The formula, however, is pretty much the same throughout; each canvas is divided into two panels,* with a thick-paint-renedered sniper on one, and a series of thermograms on the other. The snipers are wearing ghillies, a term that describes this kind of ribbony, raggedy, flora-esque camo. In most of the paintings the snipers look un-human, like threatening-yet-familiar animalistic blobs of malicious nature. The heavily mediated human forms represented by the thermograms (re-renedered here in pixilated paint chunks) provide a contrast that emphasises a chilling objectification of everyone involved in war. Says Bahen in his artists' statement:
"The target for the sniper is free of context."
...and...
"It is important to pay attention to ongoing world affairs as we are both victor and victim in the same breath"
*Remember 20 years ago when abutting figurative painted images from radically different sources was supposed to mean a negation of content? Hah...thank goodness that's over and done with. I prefer this ernest, perhaps heavy-handed, over-abundance of narrative resonance any day.
Update: my posts in the comments section below much better articulate my interest in the this work than this original post. Thinking out loud.
Just got in from a very fun (last minute plan) weekend in Montreal riding bikes at Un Tour La Nuit (8000 people), Le Tour De L'Ile (20,000-30,000 people), and our own self-directed jaunts around town (6-7 people). Lots of cycling combined with sitting in the park. Perfect in every respect. Montreal has no right turn on red which lowers the stress level considerably. It also has lots of accessible public space and a culture that accomodates 'hanging out' with gusto. The top image is the intersection where Maison des Cyclists is located, a bike community centre/store/cafe that functions as a hub for both activism and recreation (everyone that you can see in the picture is on a bike except the guy on the steps who's bike is parked in the huge, 1/2 block-long bike racks).
A friend of mine has been feeding me Lawrence Lessig media. I know this is old hat for most of you, but anyone wanting a refresher, reminder, or (as in my case) introduction to his lucid inspiration on free culture should take time for this graphically-enhanced lecture. Lessig's book is available here in PDF. Below is an excerpt from a section on blogs and democracy (pg. 42).
[For] most of us for most of the time, there is no time or place for “democratic deliberation” to occur. More bizarrely, there is generally not even permission for it to occur. We, the most powerful democracy in the world, have developed a strong norm against talking about politics. It’s fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme. We say what our friends want to hear, and hear very little beyond what our friends say.
Enter the blog.The blog’s very architecture solves one part of this problem. People post when they want to post, and people read when they want to read.The most difficult time is synchronous time.Technologies that enable asynchronous communication, such as e-mail, increase the opportunity for communication. Blogs allow for public discourse without the public ever needing to gather in a single public place.
But beyond architecture, blogs also have solved the problem of norms. There’s no norm (yet) in blog space not to talk about politics. Indeed, the space is filled with political speech, on both the right and the left. Some of the most popular sites are conservative or libertarian, but there are many of all political stripes.And even blogs that are not political cover political issues when the occasion merits.
The significance of these blogs is tiny now, though not so tiny.The name Howard Dean may well have faded from the 2004 presidential race but for blogs.Yet even if the number of readers is small, the reading is having an effect.