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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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I am organising this fun performance night for digifest and Harbourfont. It's the same night as the Mods & Rockers opening, come and join us!
Teaching Tech
Performance Lectures on Art and Science
By Susan Bustos and Amos Latteier
Friday, May 12, 2006, 9pm
York Quay Centre
235 Queens Quay West
Art and information meet in an entertaining evening of performative lectures by Susan Bustos and Amos Latteier. Scientist Susan Bustos has performed around the world, adopting the mantle of evil scientist to discuss pseudo-fictions in feminist forms of bio-chemical mutation and other hot topics. For this event she’ll speak about the parallel worlds of knitting and proteins. International performer Amos Latteier has delivered his multi-media performative lectures in Europe and the USA. His ground-breaking work on pigeon aerial photography has achieved wide recognition from artists and geeks alike. Tonight he will inform and enlighten us on the timely topic of Ant and Human Societies.
Susan Bustos is a graduate student in biochemistry at the University of Toronto where she researches the structure and misfunction of mutant red blood cell proteins. She writes and publishes ladyscientist, a zine about women in science, career anxiety and crafty experiments. She likes to knit and is amazed at how the process of knitting parallels protein synthesis in the cell.
Amos Latteier is an interdisciplinary artist who performs PowerPoint lectures and creates interactive public art using technology. He delivers slide lectures on scientific and cultural topics including ant societies, models, statistics, and pigeon aerial photography. He has performed lectures across North America and in Europe. His recent public art projects include a cell phone-controlled slide show, a chainsaw-powered walking machine, a 500 lb potato battery, and several hovercrafts.
I am guest-curating this fun show for digifest and Harbourfont. Come to the opening, and you can also catch the Performance Lectures that same night!
Mods & Rockers
May 12 to July 9, 2006
Opens Friday May 12, 7-9pm
York Quay Centre
235 Queens Quay West
In Britain in the 1960s, mods and rockers frequently clashed in bloody battles. For this exhibition, however, we ask them to merge in the name of art. Four pairs of artists, one Mod and one Rocker per team, will collaborate on art, video and sound works that illuminate the polarities of the partnership. The artist teams are Myfanwy Ashmore & Lorna Mills, Chandra Bulucon & Andrew J. Paterson, Rob Cruickshank & Veronica Verkley, Tom Moody & John Parker.
Myfanwy Ashmore, HΩ (video still), 2006
Myfanwy Ashmore graduated from the Sculpture-Installation department at the Ontario College of Art in 1996, and received her MFA from York University in 1998. Currently, she is working at the Ontario College of Art & Design as a Technician in the Academic Computer Centre. She has exhibited extensively including international exhibitions, in Philadelphia, Chicago, Seoul and Amsterdam. She has also been the recipient of numerous grants from The Toronto Arts Council, The Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2003 she was nominated and short-listed for the prestigious K.M. Hunter Award through the Ontario Arts Council.
Lorna Mills, Untitled (video still), 2006
Lorna Mills was born in Yorkton (Saskatchewan) and currently resides in Toronto. She was one of the founding members of The Red Head Gallery, where she mounted four exhibitions: "Space-Time-Colour" (1991), "Retail" (1992), "Literal" (1994) and "Body and Soul" (1996). She works in a variety of media including painting, photography, film, digital animation and video and has recently participated in several collective exhibitions including "Cross-Eyed", Toronto (1998), "The Video Archaeology Festival" Sophia (1999), "Meat/Viande", Montreal (2000), "Great Lakes", Toronto (2001) and "Persona Volare" (2000 & 2004). She presented "Happy Valley" with David Acheson, curated by Corinna Ghaznavi, at the Walter Philips Gallery, Banff Centre for the Arts (Alberta) in 2002, and "Reality Show", curated by Stuart Reid, at the Tom Thompson Memorial Art Gallery, Owen Sound (2003) & The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa (2004). Recent exhibitions include "Canadian Club" w/ Persona Volare at the Centre culturel canadien, Paris (2005) and "Time Lag" curated by Janet Bellotto, Basel (2005).
Chandra Bulucon, THIS IS ME (detail), 2005
Sole proprietor of audio production company Puppy Machine Productions, Chandra Bulucon is also an interdisciplinary artist and a financial advisor. A recent recipient of the Untitled Art Awards, she has shown her work in such places as the AGO, YYZ Artists' Outlet, and the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts. She has also collaborated with groups such as Tops'n'Bottoms, Just Like the Movies and Instant Coffee, and has been featured in eye Weekly, Toronto Star, and the dearly missed Lola Magazine.
Andrew J. Paterson,Mono Logical (performance still), 2003
Andrew J. Paterson is an interdisciplinary media artist and writer based in Toronto. He is the co-founder of the YYZ Books publication Money, Value, Art: State Funding, Free Markets, Big Pictures and his writings have been published in FUSE Magazine, Public, MIX, and Lola. His videos and films have been screened nationally and internationally and are distributed by Vtape (Toronto). More information can be found at www.ccca.ca and www.vtape.org
Robert Cruickshank, Spiral Inscriber (installation detail), 2004
Robert Cruickshank is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist. His work in various media including electronic, kinetic, and robotic installations, sound art, electroacoustic music, and photography have been exhibited in Toronto, and internationally. Much of his work is associated with InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre in Toronto, where he has developed a number of hands-on workshops for artists using electronics., and is currently a member of the Board of Directors. His work combines a knowlege of physical computing with an ongoing fascination with sound, light, and motion. It is as much informed by the kinetic art of the early 20th century as it is by contemporary new media art. Works such as Spiral Incriber (2005) combine microcontrollers with intricate electromechanical systems, reminiscent of early clockwork and mechanical devices, and reflect his interest in obsolete technologies. Many of these works are collaborative in nature, and he has been part of several long-term collaborative projects at Interaccess, such as Space Probe (1998), SenseBus (1999), Art Interface Device (2001-present), as well as being a member of I/O media, a collective of sound and video artists exploring real-time improvised performance.
Veronica Verkley, puppet created for the film Rhinoceros Eyes, 2003
Veronica Verkley is a Toronto sculptor and filmmaker. Her work combines technology, animals, and scavenging techniques; and ranges from the mechanical to the ethereal. She has shown extensively, including a public art commission in the Don Valley, an animated short film, and a Canada Council new media research and production project. She is in the Symbiosis collective, on the board of Subtle Technologies, and she works in film and theatre doing animatronics, puppeteering, & animation. This summer, Veronica is headed to the Yukon to do an installation for 'The Natural & the Manufactured'.
Tom Moody and John Parker, Bathtub Stickers (still from animation), 2006
Tom Moody is an artist based in New York. His low-tech art made with MSPaintbrush, photocopiers, and consumer printers has appeared at Derek Eller Gallery, UP&CO and in numerous group shows. His weblog at http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody, begun in February 2001, was recently recommended in the Art in America article "Art in the Blogosphere." His next solo show will be in May 2006 at artMoving Projects, Brooklyn, NY.
John Parker explores the extreme sonic possibilities afforded by contemporary means of sound production, fusing the controlled and the random into a volatile, ever-twisting whole. He has exhibited alongside the likes of DJ Spooky and Christian Marclay at galleries such as Andrew Kreps, Caren Golden, and vertexList and performed alongside Cave Precise, Denim Venom, and Society Cleaners at venues like CBGB’s and The Kitchen in New York City. John continues to compose and perform music with Man From Planet Risk as well as various side and solo projects, and he shows his sound installations in galleries throughout the world. His work can be heard and seen online at www.eyekhan.com.
In case you haven't heard of mirror neurons, they are very cool. Parts of our brains react the same way whether we are performing an action (say, for example, playing an electric guitar) or whether we are watching someone else perform the same action. Mirror neurons were charismatically and emphatically championed by neurologist Vilyanur S. Ramachandran at edge.org back at the turn of the century (ie: six years ago). A heated exchange followed with animal behaviourist Marc Hauser, anthropologist Milford H. Wolpoff and other experts. I don't know anything about this topic, so each expert completely won my allegiance, in turn. This kind of blow-hard scientific tit-for-tat makes for super entertaining reading! My favourite quote came about after everybody had been shooting off at the mouth about their animals-communicate-like-this and animals-behave-like-that theories. Milford H. Wolpoff reminded us tjat, "...we did not evolve from 'animals', but most directly from a common ancestor with chimpanzees..." Thanks for keeping it real, Milford!
Anyhow... mirror neurons are still big (bigger) news. Edge has an update here, in which Ramachandran, always forthcoming with the florid and entertaining prose, claims that mirror neurons may help us navigate the question of whether we should opt for our real brains over those other hypothetical ones, replicas suspended in vats (yes vats, à la Daniel C. Dennett...), that are programmed to think like "Einstein, Mark Spitz, Bill Gates, Hugh Heffner, and Gandhi, while at the same time preserving your own deeply personal memories and identity." But what if you had more than one brain replica in a vat? Say, five...
The question of whether "you" would continue in multiple parallel brain vats raises issues that come perilously close to the theological notion of souls, but I see no simple way out of the conundrum. Perhaps we need to remain open to the Upanishadic doctrine that the ordinary rules of numerosity and arithmetic, of "one vs. many", or indeed of two-valued, binary yes/no logic, simply doesn't apply to minds — the very notion of a separate "you " or "I" is an illusion, like the passage of time itself.That Ramachandran sure gives Oliver Sacks a run for his money in the Humorous Neurologist category!
We are all merely many reflections in a hall of mirrors of a single cosmic reality (Brahman or "paramatman"). If you find all this too much to swallow just consider the that as you grow older and memories start to fade you may have less in common with, and be less "informationally coupled", to your own youthful self, the chap you once were, than with someone who is now your close personal friend. This is especially true if you consider the barrier-dissolving nature of mirror neurons. There is certain grandeur in this view of life, this enlarged conception of reality, for it is the closest that we humans can come to taking a sip from the well of immortality. (But I fear my colleague Richard Dawkins may suspect me of spiritual leanings of "letting God in through the back door" for saying this.)