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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Excerpt from Wired:
[Quadriplegic Matthew] Nagle turned the TV on and off and switched channels (trapped in his hospital room, he's become a daytime-TV addict). Then he opened and read the messages in his dummy email program. "Now I'm at the point where I can bring the cursor just about anywhere," he said. "I can make it hover off to the side, not doing anything. When I first realized I could control it I said, 'Holy shit! I like this.'"
What are you thinking about when you move the cursor? I asked.
"For a while I was thinking about moving the mouse with my hand," Nagle replied. "Now, I just imagine moving the cursor from place to place." In other words, Nagle's brain has assimilated the system. The cursor is as much a part of his self as his arms and legs were.
[...]
At a conference in 2002, Anthony Tether, the director of Darpa, envisioned the military outcome of BCI research. "Imagine 25 years from now where old guys like me put on a pair of glasses or a helmet and open our eyes," Tether said. "Somewhere there will be a robot that will open its eyes, and we will be able to see what the robot sees. We will be able to remotely look down on a cave and think to ourselves, 'Let's go down there and kick some butt.' And the robots will respond, controlled by our thoughts. Imagine a warrior with the intellect of a human and the immortality of a machine."
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| From Thinkquest: "Now we can explain what the electron cloud is. It is the probability distribution of finding an electron around a nucleus. In places where the cloud thickens the probability of finding an electron grows. We can imagine "glancing" at an atom every second to find where we can see an electron. It will show that in most cases we see an electron in the place where the Schroedinger function defines the probability of finding it as high. Very rarely we would see an electron in the places where the probability is small, and never in places where there is nil probability calculated with Y2 function (That is for example inside the nucleus.). Yet let's take a piece of paper with the nucleus marked on it and mark with a point each electron we have noticed. After a while we will get a picture of an electron cloud." | ||
Thanks to Goodreads for posting Kevin Temple's recent Globe and Mail article on the Canada Council's proposed changes. It's a good summary of the situation.
I just won (!)first(!) prize in a colouring contest and....I am very freakin' proud of it! Eventhough I cheated. The event was A Night of Colouring for Non-Children, organised by Lise Brin. The evening was really great...sitting around beers and shooting the shit while deeply focussed on colouring-in fine, captivating drawings by artists such as: Chloe Bell, Rose Bianchini, Meredith Dault, Anthea Foyer, Brenda Goldstein, Jason Van Horne, Miranda Iossifidis, Rosemary Mosco, April Penny, Nathan Saliwonchyk, Marnie Thorp, Carol Tripp, Daryl Vocat, Julie Voyce, and Holly White.
The way I cheated was by drawing as well as colouring...which is just so terribly wrong, since drawing has it's own fun local event. Also, a nearby table of colour-ers agreed that I had cheated and even said so loudly (yet non-confrontationally, for which I thank them, as I am aware that they were already justifiably mad cause when they wanted to borrow our table's brown crayon we made them give us a silver as trade. And then we wanted our brown back cause silver is really kind of useless, especially if you already have grey, or "gray" as it is called by Crayola).
So...yeah...I am more competitive than I thought. And I have been more competitive than I thought since grade school. As we accumulatively decorated the back room of the Cameron House with crayoned pages hung from clothesline, I was transported to grade 3 art class, when the teacher would put everyone's manilla-paper offering up around the room and I would secretly scowl at the much better job other people did than I at both making an impact, and poignant nuance, in our efforts with stubby broken classroom crayons. Arg!
Anyhow, here's what I won: 16 stars (votes), a beautiful hand-drawn-and-coloured red ribbon, a smattering of applause, a chocolate bunny, and some interesting Fimo-like stuff that makes erasers. I am going to bed a proud and happy woman. Many thanks to Nanmac for letting me in on the action.
NB: Brett Lamb, who was sitting next to us, has posted some notes and pictures. And yes, we did steal his crayons. It was that kind of night.
"They're Made of Meat," by Terry Bisson.
Note: this tally has been updated to reflect new responses as of 9:00am Feb.21. I have also received a request for a breakdown of response by gender, which has been added.
Here (below) is a tally on the response to my informal survey on the perception of gender essentialism in art making. I am very grateful to everyone who participated. People have been really thoughtful, and I've also benefitted from some excellent email conversation on the topic.
Most of the responses were from people in my age bracket. My goal is to prepare a proper survey to administer in art schools. My main concern is to determine whether young people studying art today are getting a message that their gender predetermines certain styles of practice. This test showed me that I probably need to provide a little more context and neutralise the question a bit in further research. MK put it very well in an email, "...this whole line of questioning, posited in a research context, can be seen as trying to support a theory that may disadvantage one group - when in reality, I think what you're investigating is more anecdotal, experience-based evidence of how biases play out, rather than attempting to define how men and women 'should' make art so that it's in line with their respective biological imperatives!" People seemed to feel the need to be persuasive, and while the discursive aspect made for really interesting reading, I think it would probably skew results in a real, by-the-book survey. I've got lots to go on now, however, and thank you thank you to everyone who participated. Also thanks to NSL for sharing her wisdom and research experience.
Question 1:
12 people said they do not think there is a difference
4 people said they do think there is a difference
(7 were equivocal, 1 did not answer this question)
Question 2:
7 people said they have not been told there is a difference
10 people said they have been told there is a difference
(5 were equivocal, 2 did not answer the question)
Of the 4 people who said they think there is a difference, 2 were women aged 20-30
24 people responded altogether:
10 women: 2 aged 20-30, 6 aged 30-40, 1 aged 40-50, 1 aged 60-70
11 men: 2 aged 20-30, 4 aged 30-40, 2 aged 40-50, 3 aged 50-60
3 who did not answer these questions
BY GENDER:
Question 1 Women (10 in total):
6 people said they do not think there is a difference
2 people said they do think there is a difference
(1 was equivocal, 1 did not answer this question)
Question 1 Men (11 total):
5 people said they do not think there is a difference
2 people said they do think there is a difference
(4 were equivocal)
Question 2 Women:
3 people said they have not been told there is a difference
5 people said they have been told there is a difference
(2 were equivocal)
Question 2 Men:
4 people said they have not been told there is a difference
5 people said they have been told there is a difference
(2 did not answer the question)
I'm finally reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. Here's my favourite bit so far. This is from the chapter where Leibniz arrives on a boat to make connections with the natural philosophers in England. Our narrator Daniel Waterhouse is acting as host. Leibniz seems to know his way around already.
"You have been to London before, Dr. Leibniz?"
"I have been studying London-paintings."
"I'm afraid most of those became antiquarian curiosities after the Fire – like street-plans of Atlantis."
"And yet viewing several depictions of even an imaginary city, is enlightening in a way," Leibniz said. "Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle – all on the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe – for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient."
Help me start my research! Please answer these questions. You can post in the comments section below or email me.
1) Do you think there is a difference between the way women and men make art?
1b) If 'yes' describe that difference.
2) Have you ever been told that there is a difference between the way women and men make art?
2b) If 'yes' describe the incident and the artwork(s) involved. You may, of course, keep the people in your anecdote anonymous to protect privacy.
3) How old are you?
4) Are you a man or a woman?
THANK YOU!
Okay, so the other day when I went to the AGO and posted about the sculpture and landscape shows, the reason I went was to accompany a visitor who wanted to see the Christo show. At the time I decided not to bother posting my extreme distate for Christo's work, as why give it the attention. But now the "Gates" are going up in Central Park, and so there's a bit of discussion here and here but not there about what a dreadful idea it is.
I say Christo is good for kids: "See, art can be anything you want it to be ... especially if your arrogance supersedes your aesthetic judgement and you don't mind inflicting your massive ugly whims on everybody else."
It is supposedly a good thing that Christo pays for it all himself out of his hard work selling maquettes, etc. But I find it even more frustrating that the guy just moves his ideas forward, without peer review, or, and this may be the only time I say this, market validation. I know he has to go through lots of bureaucratic hoops, and maybe the fact he's able to pull off the required permissions means that he has some cultural credibility, but I'm not convinced. This quote from today's NY Times is chilling:
The [police] department is dispatching helicopters that broadcast live aerial feeds, building a 24-hour command center in the Loeb Boathouse at the park and adding several hundred police officers to the park's 125-person police force. There will be 20 officers on horseback and 43 on scooter patrol. In addition, the artists have hired a 36-person private security team to maintain round-the-clock surveillance. Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner, said the artists would reimburse the city for any costs it incurs, including the increased security.As if littering the park with yellow fabric weren't oppressive enough, there's gonna be massive surveillance and police presence protecting the stuff as well. How nice for everyone.
"It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique. [...] The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing nature, such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world—in other words—expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces."
Jackson Pollock in a 1950 interview with William Wright, quoted from Art in Theory, Blackwell Publishers, 1992, p. 575-576)
There's a nice new audioblog on the block. Sardonic. Insightful. mp3s. After Birth of the Cool.
I have always disliked Henry Moore's sculpture with what you might call a passion. His big holey ladies creep me out. But I can't help feeling a soft-spot for this one outside the Art Gallery of Ontario because lots of people, some of them adults, really do enjoy smacking it to make sounds and clambering on it. The AGO has a ton of Henry Moore's indoors too.
 John Marriott, Where the cat's at, video projection and colour photograph, 1999. (taken from here) | This image is from artist John Marriott's video, Where the cat's at, in which a cat wanders about the AGO and seems to have a particularly intense time (slinking around low to the ground with it's mouth open) in the Henry Moore Sculpture Centre. There's an old shotgun review by Reid Diamond online here. |
While on the subject of the AGO's permanent collection, I think Richard Hill's curation Speaking about Landscape, Speaking to the Land is well worth seeing. The room highlights Rebecca Belmore's big megaphone, with iconic Canadian landscape paintings from (roughly) 120 years of history hung on all the walls around it. Nice to see N.E. Thing next to Emily Carr! And that great big Jack Chambers painting of the 401 has always been a favourite of mine.
 Speaking about Landscape, Speaking to the Land, installation view (taken from here) |
 Jack Chambers 401 Towards London No. 1, 1968-1969 (taken from here) |