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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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guess I'm still a newbie. I had the admin wrong on this page so anyone could post, thinking that was required for comments to be enabled. Just got an anonymous post that probably should have been a comment (below), though I'm not sure to what thread. I've fixed it now, sorry everyone.
Ursula Franklin from The Real World of Technology Massey Lectures, Toronto: CBC Enterprises, 1990
Looking at technology as practice, indeed as formalized practice, has some quite interesting consequences. One is that it links technology directly to culture, because culture, after all, is a set of socially accepted practices and values. Well laid down and agreed upon practices also define the practitioners as a group of people who have something in common because of the way they are doing things.
. . . I sat in the back of a large meeting room, listening to a long and boring discussion. I began to knit. A young woman came over, sat down next to me, and whispered, "I'd like to talk to you. You knit just like my mother." Of course, her mother was also German, and there is a German way of knitting.
I think it is important to realize that technology defined as practice shows us the deep cultural link of technology, and it saves us from thinking that technology is the icing on the cake. Technology is part of the cake itself.
Like democracy, technology is a multifaceted entity. It includes activities as well as a body of knowledge, structures as well as the act of structuring. Our language itself is poorly suited to describe the complexity of technological interactions. The interconnectedness of many of those processes, the fact that they are so complexly interrelated, defies our normal push-me-pull-you, cause-and-consequence metaphors. How does one talk about something that is both fish and water, means as well as end?
clockwise from top: "Flutter Nutter" (detail), 2003, "Crushed" (detail), 2004, "Neapolitan Sunset" (detail) 2003
As part of the now disbanded collective, Bucky and Fluff's Craft Factory, Allyson Mitchell has been using this over-the-top artsy-crafty style for awhile, with a blowyourmind, sequins and macramé, girl-positive, glitter-glue and plastic toys, quantity over quality approach that's always been fun but pretty light fare. Now, in The Fluff Stands Alone, Mitchell has focussed that frenetic energy into a really solid body of work. This big, ambitious series of wall hangings and bedspreads reinvents the women of Playboy cartoons as fuzzy, happy, flocked and fun-furred beasts. Mitchell's sense of kittenish play is still here in spades, but the work has taken on a satisfying weight and presence. I resisted the tempation to rub my face on the art, but I'm sure others did not.
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1974 |
circa. 2003 |
Hey what gives? Here's the current outgoing message at the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation:
We have suspended the foundation's exhibition program and are currently generating books. There is nothing on exhibit at the foundation.If you know the skinny, please leave a message in the comments below!