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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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Digital Media Tree!
Rumour has it that the war on Christmas has really heated up this year, so I offer to you a more robust (and perhaps just ever so slightly gay) nativity scene as the best defence. (images courtesy of RM Vaughan).
As for those of us in the Canadian Corner, beware of all those creeps bearing gifts. (election time!).
I'm paying attention to the campaigns so that you don't have to, freeing up more time for everyone to visit the Sex Clubs that are popping up everywhere (usually next door to Starbucks) now that the Supreme Court has declared them legal.
(t'was the ruling we were all waiting for, before we went totally crazy this Christmas season. ...stinky couches and carpets aside, the Supreme Court has established that the test for criminal indecency will be based on whether it causes harm, not whether it offends someone's taste)
word of the day: telepistemological
Hey I'm guest-curating a show at the Doris McCarthy Gallery with artists Scott Carruthers, Crystal Mowry, and Marc Ngui...It's going to be really good and if you are in GTA in January you have to come and see it!
January 19 - March 5, 2006
Doris McCarthy Gallery (University of Toronto at Scarborough)
1265 Military Trail (UTSC campus)
Opening: Thursday, January 19, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Free bus departs 401 Richmond St. W. at 6:30 pm
NOTE: there will be party favours on the bus
Catalogue Launch: Sunday, February 5, 2:00 - 5:00 pm
Free bus departs OCAD (100 McCaul St.) at 12:00 noon to AGYU, Koffler Gallery, Doris McCarthy Gallery UTSC and Blackwood Gallery UTM
For more information call 416.287.7007
or visit www.utsc.utoronto.ca/dmg
Yikes!! (via B. Smiley)
"We provide a team of qualified posters to post new topics or replies on your forum, message board or community. Our posters are selected in regards to your specifications. Our deep and diversified team allows us to provide you with posters who have a genuine interest with your website’s topic. They will join your forum and interact with your members, hence stimulating discussions and enhancing interest on your boards."
Julian Stallabrass is an interesting English Marxist art critic.
"...One of the drawbacks to the sorts of analysis I do tends to be that all the complexities, personal motivations and particular histories and so on of the single person's work may get flattened by that analysis. That's right, but there are certain things you can only see by looking at them in that way. The art world's pretty good at producing monographic studies. There are lots and lots of them out there. More than anything else, and usually tied to promotional purposes. I guess my instincts intellectually are to look at the characteristics of a particular field and try to work against those. It's extremely frustrating actually -- and students feel this and I do too -- that it's so hard to find larger synthetic accounts. They may well have their faults and you may well want to pull them apart and disagree with them but if they didn't exist you wouldn't be able to do that, and the fact of their paucity is an ideological matter."
strange science news: fetal cells get into mothers' brains.
"When the researchers induced stroke-like injuries to the brains of some of the mother mice, the foetal cells became six times more concentrated at the damaged areas - suggesting they may be involved in repair.and more
Prof Dawe says it is not yet clear how they are summoned to the sites of injury, but he suspects they are drawn there by "SOS-like" signalling factors from damaged tissue."
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snocat remix by Rob Cruickshank. Thanks Rob!!
animatronic cat with super groovy soundtrack. (thanks to Gordon Hicks) Note: big quicktime file.
By Design: Historical and Contemporary Objects from Canadian Collections
Design Exchange, exhibition runs til December 31st
Excerpt: Art objects draw threads between personal experience and shared bodies of knowledge, but the connections are often ephemeral and oblique. Design objects, on the other hand, make direct reference to current events, business, manufacture and historical trends. "I don't like the words beautiful and ugly," says Michael Prokopow,"What we think about objects is irrelevant. These are pieces of history, evidence. We have to contend with them as cultural artefacts."
[more]
There is an excellent essay by Ian Hacking in the excellent new issue of the UofT mag with the not so excellent name, Idea&s. Hacking writes about technology ushering us back into Cartesian ways of conceiving mind and body. He talks about a huge range of stuff including organ donation, Japanese attitudes to organ donation, genetics, Body Worlds, cyborgs and brain death. It's not online. Here's a couple of tidbits:
For quite some time, our popular culture has had a vision of creatures that are neither human nor machine, but some mix of the two. Yet the ethnographic facts about these fabulous beings are not what one might expect. They have a far more entrenched role in Japan than in the West. This fact is of curious interest in connection with brain death.
[...]
We think that a person who is maintained simply by machine and who has no consciousness is finished. We say, oddly, that the person has become a vegetable. We mean that there is nothing there but a mechanism. Hence, there is no longer a person there in the hospital bed. We are content to say, "brain dead, so dead indeed." Note how Cartesian we are. The soul, we think, has flown; now there is only a body kept going by chemistry and mechanics."
The Marvels of Chemistry
Speaking of petroleum, let's take a look at the photograph on this page. What's that? You don't see what petroleum has to do with it? Well, look again! Except for those objects made of metal — and of course, the people themselves— almost everything in the photograph is made of synthetic or man-made materials. What's more, most of those materials were originally derived from petroleum, and they are among the many marvels of chemistry.
(note: images and quote are excerpted from a clipping from an old Disney kid's book on science, featuring Donald Duck & his brood ... circa. 1965?)
Yesterday M.Jean and I went to see Body Worlds 2. It was both utterly predictable and entirely fascinating. I thought of it as an R&D mission, but I don't have anything conclusive to report. At least not yet. A few notes:
The show is really sexist which is distracting and irritating. All the female cadavers are in super-feminine poses: ballet, figure skating, angel, and the so-called "Yoga Lady" could as easily be titled "Doggy Style." feh. Given that the premise of the show is about as essentialist as you can get, the unsophisticated cultural overlay was pretty annoying.
A weird detail is that each display bears a brushed steel placard with Gunther Von Hagens' signature. It's all very 19th century curio-cabinet, which I find kind of groovy and grotesque.
The show is laced with big purple banners carrying quotes from Nietsche, Goethe, Kant, Sartre, and the like. Secular and existential and weirdly comforting.
The dead guy playing baseball is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen.
Both M. Jean and I thought we could smell human decay on more than one occasion, and both of us suspected it was just our imagination.
The body parts are really neat and I was not repelled or disgusted. I held a Plastinated human brain in my hand, which felt a tad transgressive. By the end of the exhibit, other (living) people's faces looked the way I felt: thoughtful, mildly deppressed, and mildly confused. Afterwards I felt leaden and tired, as if I'd been watching trashy TV for 12 hours.
A few quotes:
"Societies that lose all sense of reverence for the dead will lose it also for the living."
- Andrew Stuttaford
"What I do is not art, nor is it science,' he says. 'It reaches into artistry but the effect goes beyond education because feelings and emotions are involved."
- Gunther Von Hagens, quoted by Imogen O'Rorke in the Observer.
"It would take a lot of beers for me to be attracted to a skinless woman. So beauty is skin deep and this exhibit proves it. Or does it? There is something profoundly beautiful about the skinless body. I propose that the famous saying should be corrected. Sexy is skin deep whereas beauty goes through to the bone. [...] I do not perceive it as gratuitous exploitation, or even if it is, it is justifiable as it invites us (or invited me at any rate) to confront the unthinkable. There is no snobbery, just an unforgettable and accessible presentation of anatomy and a desire to give knowledge."
- Jim Eadon
Yes, I have been playing with dolls. Love that face-editing stuff. This art game on rhizome made me go looking for paper dolls online. There's lots. duh. I must be regressing. Before I went doll hunting I was browsing for cats and found this site, which may not have the best cat pictures ever, but does have the best fancy flashing fonts and winking bears (click on MiniMiezen).
I should just make mention here that Canadian Club, the Persona Volare exhibition at Rodman Hall in St. Catharine',s is f***ing great. If you are looking for a field trip, go there and see it. I wrote a little bit about their last exhibition here. I enjoyed all three of their shows, but in the past have felt that the artists were really disaparate and I couldn't see much reason, other than convenience and social fun -- which are fine reasons -- for all these works to be shown together. This time, however, the show is really coherent! Maybe some cross-talk has been developing over the years. Not only that, but everyone's work is cranked up a notch, really, really good stuff. Of course I am always thrilled to see the lovely and brilliaint art of the lovely and brilliant Lorna Mills. Other highlights for me were Rebecca Diederichs' big digital banners that hit a fine juicey balance between abstraction, typography and narrative; John Dickson's foggy sci-fi cardboard city that was spooky cool in affect (apparently where there's smoke there's not always fire); Chantal Rousseau's totally freaking awesome little black and white animations about strange birds; and Michael Davey's wonky snow cones on the shoe tips video. I liked all the other works too by Lyla Rye, Lisa Neighbour, Brian Hobbs, Carlo Cesta, Kate Wilson, Johannes Zits, and Reid Diamond.
skeptical neurologists & friends debunk brain philosophy
Warning: this video contains the word "qualia."
