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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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I am putting up art in Fly Gallery's window this coming weekend. The piece is tentatively titled "Qualia Street Party." There will be a combo opening party and Von Bark lecture later in April, details to be announced. In the meantime, if you happen to pass by 1172 Queen West next month, keep your eyes peeled for Fly, smack in between Queenglad pawnshop and the Saigon Flower restaurant.
The latest Instant Coffee bulletin has a small rant about Les King. If you ever go out on Queen St. in Toronto you know the guy. He is an artist who sells his work on the street with the line, "Would you like to buy an original drawing?" Here's the Instant Coffee post, and a response from my friend Von Bark who has probably purchased more of Les King's drawings than any one else I know.
Instant Coffee: We ventured out for the first time in a while into the Toronto gallery world. At an opening we witnessed exactly what makes an "Outsider Artist" actually an outsider artist. At many openings Les King attempts to sell his amazing depictions of the metaphysical and on too many ocassions is kicked to the curb for his unconventional ways of trying to get by as an artist. How can gallery owners and patrons be so fucking crass and intimidated by an artist just trying to get by and have a place to sleep. He is an outsider artist not because he hasnt been trained in the accepted field of education but because he has been made an outsider by the self righteous "insiders". So glorify the romantic past of artists being shunned by the elite but realize what that elite is now. If you can't buy a 10 dollar drawing then thats your business, but have the decency to stand up for someone who needs a break and is honest about they are doing. Les is an amazing artist and deserves basic respect for having the balls to do what he does.
- Jay Isaac and Jenny Bishop
Von Bark: So Les got kicked out of an opening? He was probably bothering people, and not stopping. If Les understood human politics he wouldn't be an outsider. If Les knew how to stay out of people's way and not bother them so much then... well... Les is persistent. A lot of people are persistent. The people who run the world are persistent...
Haida Gwaii blockade, Day 5, March 26, 2005.
Thanks to Roberta Aiken of Byrd's Eye View Photography for permission to post this image here.
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas—creator of the Rock 'n' Raven Haida Manga cartoons mentioned earlier on this blog—has posted a comment about the Haida Nation blockade of logging company Weyerhaeuser on Haida Gwaii (aka: Queen Charlotte Islands). The photograph above is from the Haida Gwaii Info Centre, part of the Islands Spirit Rising campaign. There's tons of good information on the Haida Nation website, thanks for the link, Michael.
There is also an excellent article providing background and context at The Tyee. Apparently a solidarity action is being planned for Toronto. There is information about how to get involved at OCAP's website.
UPDATE: Chris Lloyd has a show on at the Art Gallery of Calgary right now (up until June 12). Go see it!
Chris Lloyd is still writing to the Prime Minister of Canada. I met Lloyd in Halifax in 1999, when the project was already underway, and we published one of his letters in Lola magazine that summer (although his website states an official start date of January 1, 2001). Lloyd's letters have been online since 2003. The diaristic style may seem unremarkable in the present day morass of blogdom, but this guy is a kind of pioneer in this strange, now common, activity of transmitting your personality, avatar-like, into a public realm. By mailing trivia about his life to the Prime Minister and announcing that fact in art galleries and magazines, Lloyd was an early adopter of that funny humble/arrogant stance of the small-time, self-made celebrity. I like the project for its extreme Canadian-ness. In this little country, it almost seems plausible that the Prime Minister might actually give a shit about the life details of his people. The fantasy is comforting and claustrophobic at the same time. Of course, I don't think Lloyd has had any discursive response from any of the PM's over the years, but he continues on as if in dialogue. Here's a quote from Friday's post:
Today is Good Friday; do you have any special plans? Any church services? Do you spend the weekend with your family? Are you a member of any secret societies? How was your visit with Bush? I saw you on the front page of the National Post and bought a copy from a newspaper box. I figured since I usually don't read the 'Post I'd just keep the cover page to use in a painting, so I left the rest of the paper in the box. It wasn't until later in the day I remembered that there was an article in that edition about my show. So I bought another copy. The article by Julia Dault isn't half bad.
Just a quick note to say that I am very much enjoying the Toronto art and related topics blog: Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter. Nurwisah is a good writer, and he casts a sharp, politically oriented art-eye on the city.
Murray Whyte had a really good story in the Toronto Star yesterday about performance art and activism, describing the generative phenomenon of public street interventions in Toronto. Refreshingly, he mixes together the work of people who identify as fine art artists (like Germaine Koh, Free Dance Lessons, and Jillian McDonald) with urban activists (like the Toronto Public Space Committee, Reclaim the Streets, and Critical Mass). In between are those whose self-labelling is more blurry (like The City Beautification Ensemble ... and of course many others, some not specifically mentioned by Whyte).
In an earlier post, there was some discussion of "the general public" and how we artists do or do not need to strive for more popular appeal. But the idea of a general public is in many ways a false construction. Why, exactly, do artists so frequently extract themselves (ourselves) from their (our) neighbours to posit this "them-not-us" relationship? Whyte's article celebrates a batch of urban activity that explicitly sets out to break down such boundaries. Here are some of my favourite quotes from the article:
Jillian McDonald:"I've done some of these kinds of projects in sanctified art spaces, like galleries, and it's always less successful," says Jillian McDonald, a Canadian performance artist in Brooklyn. "People who come to those kinds of spaces know what to expect. And I really love the delight that is possible for myself, as well as the audience when you're outside of that, in public, because anything can happen."
Germaine Koh: "I'm not interested in somebody coming to the work with the question `is this art?' The more interesting question is simply, `What's going on here? Why is this person in the storefront, and do I need to call the cops?' They jump to the issues right away, rather than being able to push it aside into a definition that's more comfortable."
Dave Meslin: "Any time you do anything in public space that goes beyond this monotonous habit of non-engagement is an intervention," he says. "It's a culture jam just to smile at someone, or make eye contact."
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| It is indeed a sad day. Time to say goodbye to Giant Squirrel, who has served us well the past few years as Lola window display, household companion, and thing taking up too much room. As I write, he lies ready in my backyard, waiting for the cruel teeth of the jigsaw. But fear not, a new demented plywood animal will rise from the sawdust. Stay tuned. |
"Human beings are natural born soul makers, adept at extracting unobservable minds from the behaviour of observable bodies, including their own."
Paul Broks, quoted from a column in Prospect, via Edge.
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Siobhan Roberts has written a very interesting article in the Globe and Mail (March 19) about two Princeton mathematicians who have proven that fundamental particles have free will. Unfortunately you need a paid subscription to read the whole article online. John Conway and Simon Kochen have addressed particle behaviour mathematically, skirting quantum mechanics, and come up with a theorem that refutes the idea of "hidden variables," a notion that "if we only knew every possible force affecting the world and all its particles, then we would be able to predict their predetermined paths." The term free will is pretty loaded. It sounds at first as if these guys are suggesting sentience at the subatomic level, which is too trippy even for me. Roberts is careful to point out, however, that this is not the case. She quotes Hans Halvorson, a Princeton philosopher:
In fact, what it seems is that [they] proved indeterminism — that the future is not fixed by the past. There are good arguments that free will and indeterminism don't have a lot to do with one another."Dr. Conway and Dr. Kochen rebut.
Kochen: There is no essential difference [between free will and determinism]. We're not talking about free will as a moral decision, about good and evil, or whether or not you should divorce your wife. If the experimenter's choice is to be called 'free will,' I don't see why one may not use 'free will' for the same property of the particle.
Conway: The world is a wonderful, willful place. Where does free will come from? Well, we're made of particles. So probably, somehow, our own free will is derived from that of the particles we're made of....
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Surprisingly, the article makes no mention of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Anyone who has read Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver trilogy will be a bit familiar with Liebniz' 17th century theory of monads. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy has a useful quote:
...it must be said that there is nothing in things except simple substances, and, in them, nothing but perception and appetite. Moreover, matter and motion are not so much substances or things as they are the phenomena of percipient beings, the reality of which is located in the harmony of each percipient with itself (with respect to different times) and with other percipients.Neal Stephenson puts words in Leibniz' mouth, and as is often the case, the fictional account is easier to grasp than the real source material. The following (long) quote is from the second book in the trilogy, The Confusion (p. 655-6), and is part of a conversation between Leibniz and a young princess.
Leibniz:...summing up, it would appear that monads perceive, think, and act. And this is where the idea comes from, that a monad is a little soul. For perception, cogitation, and action are soul-like, as opposed to billiard-ball-like, attributes. Does this mean that monads have souls in the same way that you and I do? I doubt it.
Princess: Then what sort of souls do they have, doctor?
Leibniz: Well, let us answer that by taking an inventory of what we know they do. They perceive all the other monads, then think, so that they may act. The thinking is an internal process of each monad — it is not supplied from an outside brain. So the monad must have its own brain. By this I do not mean a great spongy mass of tissue, like your highness's brain, but rather some faculty that can alter its internal state depending on the state of the rest of the universe — which the monad has somehow perceived, and stored internally.
Princess: But would not the state of the universe fill an infinite number of books!? How can each monad store so much knowledge?
Leibniz: It does because it has to. Don't think of books. Think of a mirrored ball, which holds a complete image of the universe, yet is very simple. The 'brain' of the monad, then, is a mechanism whereby some rule of action is carried out, based upon the stored state of the rest of the universe. Very crudely, you might think of it as like one of those books that gamblers are forever poring over: let us say, 'Monsieur Belfort's Infallible System for Winning at Basset.' The book, when all the verbiage is stripped away, consists essentially of a rule — a complicated one — that dictates how a player should act, given a particular arrangement of cards and wagers on the basset-table. A player who goes by such a book is not really thinking, in the higher sense; rather, she perceives the state of the game — the cards and wagers — and stores that information in her mind, and then applies Monsieur Belfort's rule to that information. The result of applying the rule is an action — the placing of a wager, say — that alters the state of the game. Meanwhile the other players around the table are doing likewise — though some may have different books and apply different rules. The game is, au fond, not really that complicated, and neither is Monsieur Belfort's Infallible System; yet when these simple rules are set to working around a basset-table, the results are vastly more complex and unpredictable than one would ever expect. From which I venture to say that monads and their internal rules need not be all that complicated in order to produce the stupendous variety, and the diverse mysteries and wonders of Creation, that we see all about us.
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Then there's Mary Midgley ...more on this topic coming soon...
Some of my animated gifs will be appearing at YEAR ZERO ONE for the next couple of months as part of their Splash Page Project. I'm very proud to have my images appear on this excellent website about digital and media arts.
Another self-promotional update: The joint catalogue for the AGYU's What it Feels Like for a Girl and Sinbad in the Rented World exhibitions is out now. I wrote an essay. Lisa Kiss did an excellent design job, and the other writing is really good. RM Vaughan is his usual insightful self, and there are two pieces of fiction, a nice bit by Dereck McCormack on sequin expert Herbert Lieberman, and a brilliant disturbing story by Sheila Heti about living in the big city.
Incidentally, the Art Gallery of York University also has a blog now. I like the idea of inviting comments and dialogue on curatorial blurbs and essays. There is an interesting 28-post open discussion from January between Philip Monk and Mike Hoolboom, with participation from Demetra Christakos and Mike Cartmell.
Many thanks to guest poster Joester! Nice job. Joester posts may continue to appear on this blog from time to time.
I just got back from San Francisco, where Joester and I actually attended the same penny arcade.
The display on the right was called "Laughing Sal." The mannikin loomed and laughed demonically for an unnervingly long time on a single coin. This place is all about value for $$. Note the demented tourist that forced her way into the shot. The execution chambers provided dang good cartharsis for a quarter, but the Opium Den might have been my favourite display. When activated, doors and curtains opened to reveal all kinds of psychedelic horrors. I also very much appreciated the opportunity to play Pole Position again! Such a sweet little old racing game...I still remember every curve and oil patch.
Okay, my guest blog stint is almost up, but I do have one more thing to say. There’s an ad here for the new Star Wars film that says “ You Cannot Control Your Destiny”. Especially, I would add, if you’re making a prequel. Anyone remember the first Star Wars? Wouldn’t you have said that one of the themes of that movie was “you don’t have to work on your uncle’s space farm your whole life”, or “You Can Control Your Destiny”? A better blogger might find a way to tie this into the politics and social fabric of the day making some keen cutting observations, but I am but a lowly guest blogger and will leave that to the professionals.
The Penny arcade in San Francisco is totally great. It might seem like a tourist trap but it isn't – or it is but in a good way. There was lots of great stuff there, but the surprise was these execution games. You pay a penny (now a quarter) and the doors slowly open to reveal a deathly tableau of either a guillotine or a gallows. After a few nervous seconds the act is committed and the door closes. It's fucking awesome. Way better than any "head shot" in Splinter Cell. It's a perfect antidote to the knee jerk reaction to the violence in video games. Shit dudes, violence is a part of our culture like it or not (and if you need it for emphasis) beatch!
I started Prereview a couple of years ago, and I’m starting to ask myself the question, “How many uninformed reviews can one man write?” Prereview had it’s internet sensation moment in the sun about a year ago but my hits are way down now. By all indication I really should put it to bed, it was clever and fun but now it’s over. Or at least that’s what I think and then I’ll see a poster for "Beauty Shop” a (spinoff of Barbershop II staring Queen Latifa), or the Longest Yard Remake staring (inexplicably) Burt Reynolds, and the site will seem relevant again. So, I’ve decided to keep going until the movies get better, which I think should be about Christmas.
Whenever I go to an arcade now-a-days (yes, I'm going to post about video games again LM) I always end up in the "classic games" section. But I never play them. Sometimes just looking at Donkey Kong or Defender is enough to satiate whatever nostalgic nonsense I was craving, but mostly its because they don't have the games I want. I don't want to play Pacman, I want to play the crazy trackball football game with X's and O's that made your arm hurt. I want to play Zaxxon and the Red Barron, not centipede or Galaxia. What I really want to play is the above game that I have poorly drawn from memory and can't remember the name of. You were the triangle space ship that bounced off the walls, but I can't really remember what the bad guys looked like. You had a fire button and a knob that you could turn to change your direction and a thrust button. It was similar to but much better than asteroids, and a contemporary. If anyone remembers it let me know.
UPDATE: I FOUND IT! Spent way too long looking on KLOV but it was there! . It's called Omega Race and it's the only vector game by Midway - that's part of the reason it was so hard to find because I was assuming it was Atari who seems to have made most of the vector games. The other tricky thing was that the game is not a race, it's more like asteroids. Maybe they mean a race of peoples called "Omega". My drawings turned out to be pretty good. Now I have to find one on ebay
There's a sign that says "security camera" on the security camera at Walgreens (drug store chain). I tried to take a picture of it but the manager wouldn't let me. Maybe it's just as well, some things are better in the telling. Anyways, I keep trying to figure out what the sign is really saying. "We're spying on you, and we're telling you we're spying on you - in fact, we're telling you we're spying on you in the same font that we're telling you where the cold medicine is kept". Gotta love that.
The other day the local news ran a story about how crystal meth can be easily made from cold pills and kerosene. (Talk about responsible reporting). I have been fighting a cold and buying box after box of Advil Cold and Sinus, wondering each time how many I can buy before I'm on some FBI watch list. I keep making a big show of how sick I am each time I go in there to buy more, as if the crystal meth guys wouldn't think of doing that too.
Ico playing with my new Progress Bar sculpture. I've included the cat to prove that it really moves.
Thanks Sally. Fans of Prereview know that I tend to rant so, in the spirit of "dance with the one that brought you" here's my first post.
I'm a video game junkie, but I do have to confess that I'm getting a bit burned out. Here's a short list of things I'm getting sick of.
- Strafing. Every shooter/platform game can be won by understanding how to move and shoot at the same time. Make it harder or different. If I see an enemy moving I shoot slightly ahead of them or I shoot with a larger weapon, but the AI never does that to me. In general, as long as you shoot and move you live.
- Hello my name is Snake and I'm the CIA's best agent with super duper abilities, yet I cannot step over this knee high log. If you want to make the game realistic, then let grown men and women step over logs. Climbing ladders should not be rocket science either. I've died way too often at the foot of a ladder for want of the ability to climb it without pressing some fucking action button. AND I shouldn't have to have been a trucker for five years to be able to back up while crawling. Video games that pride themselves in realism need their own Dogma movement.
- Let me accurately throw or drop my grenade, you bastards.
- God I hate performing combo "tricks". As soon as I have to memorize combos I feel like my life is ebbing away in a sad unending succession of video games, instead of the happy unending succession of video games I intend it to end in. A Teken fan I am not, (although I like talking to Teken fans because y'all are freaks.) Tony Hawk underground actually makes me want to buy a skateboard and sell my PS2, not because it's inspiring but because anything (including broken limbs) must be better than memorizing "X-Y-Square" every time I want to perform a "goofy-foot oly to flipside 360".
- Boss fights are always the same. "Oh, it's really big, but that means it’s slow so I should get in close!" No fucking shit, just like every other boss fight ever. And if you've figured out how to move and shoot on top of that you'll never die, I promise.
- I don't give a shit about your stupid fucking story. Tell the story in the game not in cut scenes, or not at all. Here's the back-story to my favorite commodore 64 game – "KILL HIM, MY ROBOTS". What more do you need? All Your Base Are Belong To Us, indeed.
- I wish Katamari Damacy would make the local news for every 100 million times someone takes offence to GTA. And I also wish that North Americans could get the money to make cool innovative games. Here's a brilliant idea – What if Japan was a market for video games?! If a game won't sell really well here but will in Japan, then make it here and market it in Japan! OMG! I know, I'm a fucking genius.
- I guess that's all for now. There's plenty more – I've yet to play Grand Tourismo 4 but I hear that you can still gain advantage by driving into people in the corners with no repercussions or damage to your car, a problem which has plagued the franchise since its inception. Anyways, feel free to comment with your video game pet peeves.
I like blogging but boy am I getting sick of the sound of my own voice. To alleviate the pressure, I'm introducing a "guest poster feature," new brains who will enliven this page with occasional variety and alternate viewpoints that are, well...not mine...exactly. To start us off right, the apple is gonna fall straight down out of the tree. Please allow me to introduce my first guest poster...sibling, artist, bad speller and brainiac...Joester! Joester posts coming soon.
I just found out about Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas' Rock 'n' Raven Haida Manga via Geist magazine. Thanks Geist, this guy is great.
Tom Sherman has a great rant about video in the current issue of Canadian Art. "Fuck film," he says, "The dead ideas of film are being heaped onto video. Cinematic history is like a ball and chain." This evangelical stance is pretty entertaining. I can't tell for sure how tongue-in-cheek he means to be, but I'm guessing this posture is somewhat self-conscious. Sherman is sophisticated, and he knows video. He has been insightfully pushing the medium for nearly its entire 40 year history. He also says:
Art is a perceptual and intellectual activity conducted by people who question and often despise the status quo. In the 21st century reality is defined by layer upon layer of media, often by media stacked high upon one another, unattached to any absolute truth (no matter how momentary and fleeting any sense of truth may be). Video is not only the best medium for critiquing television and cinema, its media next of kin, it is also a perceptual, philosophical instrument for questioning reality in broader terms, for finding problems with the way we connect with the world, and doing something about it.
Goodreads has posted a C Magazine article by Emily Vey Duke titled "Suffering, Empathy, Art and the Greater Good." I love Vey Duke's writing for it's open-heartedness and genuine striving. I like that she is casting around for ways to better connect art with a non-art-educated public. I disagree, however, that there is something inherently wrong with teaching Duchampian nominalism. Also, I believe a healthy suspicion of art tropes about beauty and truth is not only a beneficial trait, but imperative to a genuine and communicative expression of either beauty or truth. In my student days it was an over-reliance on emotion, direct expression, machismo, and navel-gazing therapeutic personal brain barfs that seemed to be dragging art into a murky and inaccessible quagmire. Now I see Vey Duke calling for us to value the "explicitly emotional in art as highly as we value the ambiguously clever" and my instincts are to cry out No! Gawd, spare us the myopic whinging and purging of a bunch of young artists' personal angst.
At the same time I recognise what seems to be a systemic lack of rigour and ambition (and I would not exclude my own practice, especially considering a recent rash of afternoon napping). I chalk this up to the legacy of post-modern slacker-type despair ... in which making anything at all was seen as somehow heroic in the face of the perceived (I've always believed incorrectly) abject meaninglessness of all symbols. Furthermore, a crappy-looking aesthetic was required as a sort of apology, an acknowledgement that the artist was aware of the sheer audacity of saying anything at all. After the cold brash onslaught of deconstruction, an intimate personal approach was necessary..."please don't take my little art offering too seriously, it's just my two-cents worth of pain and insight."
Fortunately artists like Vey Duke and others have taken up symbols afresh as considered and effective tools for art communication. Hearts are back on sleeves and this is probably a very good thing. I am just wary of current trends of creeping anti-intellectualism. Expertise has become a bad word in the art world, and this is a problem. If you believe in your work, then there is nothing wrong with working really hard to achieve excellence in your field.
For the most part, I agree with Vey Duke. My plea to artists (and I plead with myself here as well) would be: don't be ashamed to work hard for your art. Don't sell yourself short by presenting self-effacing shoddy work if you have in you an idea that is excellent. Don't hold your own intelligence in check, and be brutally honest with yourself and apply your own criteria to determine what is good enough.
This is a montage of our recent "exhibition in progress" at the Art Gallery of Sudbury. I apologise to curator Corinna Ghaznavi and fellow artists Gordon Hicks and Rebecca Diederichs for the poor quality of these snapshots... believe me the art looked great. The day was open and fun with lots of good discussion. Those folks in Sudbury know a lot about science and art! I showed video on two screens, and lots of working sketches on bulletin boards. I collected drawings of neutrinos from people who had time to stop and hang out. Gordon had a spinning loop projected that he tweaked and teased into all kinds of shapes throughout the day. Rebecca made a collage on the spot with images she generated on the computer, prodding at the question of what happens when neutrinos pass through matter. There were also lots of balloons popping. The Schroedinger's (Balloon) Cat project was an excellent ice breaker. Each balloon had a cat sticker inside, half of them live cats, half of them dead cats. Here's how our sign read:
The Black Box
| The Balloon
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In the interest of privacy I won't name the folks in the pictures above. But thanks so much, you were all great!
Famous conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner, quoted from a 1972 talk published in Artists Talk, edited by Peggy Gale, (Halifax: NSCAD Press) 2004, p.94
"Guerilla theatre is probably the most elitist, most dangerous form of political response known, because it's generally done by comfortable middle-class people and imposed upon working-class areas. The one thing in working-class areas that's the most highly prized is peace and quiet, because the econonmic conditions really are not conducive to it. When a middle-class person is propagating quote unquote, liberation—which is a vile word, because it means that you're better than the person you are liberating—he marches into working class neighbourhoods saying, 'Liberate yourself, man, set yourself free....' The poor bastard gets up, he's worked all night, and looks out the window and says, "Could you please keep quiet," and they say, "Fuck off man, you're just uptight." That's guerilla theatre. And he's totally justified in taking a shotgun and shooting him."
Beflix has a really nice collection of glitch art . My favourite one so far is here. Also be sure to check out the "best of the year" links.
Sara Diamond is coming from Banff to take on the position of President of the Ontario College of Art and Design. Seems like a good time to re-read Morris Wolfe's hilarious little history book, OCA 1967-1972: Five Turbulent Years. Wolfe tells a bizarre tale of a Canadian school in which the administration attempts to get with the times, bringing in more experimental artists and practices and opening up classes, to the outrage of the staid student body. The story climaxes when Roy Ascott (a favourite teacher of Brian Eno at Ipswich school of art) is brought in and promptly cancels classes. Chaos ensues. Morris, who saw it all, has a dry sharp wit and doesn't shy away from painful details. An exemplary quote:
OCA students had always been rather docile when it came to protests. Although the story may well be apocryphal, I'm told that during J.E.H. MacDonald's tenure as Principal [1928-32], the students walked out, protesting some real or imagined slight, and congregated in Grange Park. At tea time, MacDonald came out with an offering of milk and cookies. The protest was over.
The cbc radio 3 website is closing up shop. I liked cbc radio 3, and I'm sad that this is their last issue. They've asked past contributors to send in a little blurb about "endings." You can find mine and others' on the table of contents page.
Here's what I am working on right now...
Experiment In Progress: Neutrinos They Are Very Small
Art Gallery of Sudbury
March 5, 10:00 to 5:00
Rebecca Diederichs
Gordon Hicks
Sally McKay
Curated by: Corinna Ghaznavi
Curator and Artists are present from 12:30 to 3:30 for demonstrations and discussion
3 artists and a curator visited the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. Taking the idea of neutrinos as a starting point, they began to consider the conceptual and practical approaches of art and science to construct worlds and make the imagined tangible.
The artists are available throughout the exhibition to discuss their resulting experiments and works in progress.
March 5 is a precursor to the resulting exhibition scheduled for next fall at the AGS.
“Neutrinos they are very small
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.”
Excerpt from "Neutrinos They Are Very Small"
by John Updike
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."