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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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 Image by Michael Breslin of the UofT Varsity, taken from here |
The death of activist Tooker Gomberg is a huge loss. His inspirational drive, imagination, and natural leadership accomplished a great deal for environmental activism and social justice. The shallow coverage in today's Globe and Mail is indicative of the fact that Gomberg knew how to get under the mainstream media's skin. Tooker was all justice all the time, and his media "stunts" raised awarness about poverty, smog, cycling, and political representation, as well as massively important global environmental issues. He will be badly missed. |
In a current spate of A-bomb research, I watched both Dr. Strangelove and a documentary called Atomic Filmmakers, Behind the Scenes.
Dr. Strangelove is an irksome film. When I first saw it I was too young and too scared of the bomb to get the humour. This time I did not find myself laughing either, but at least I saw it as subversive rather than oppressive. When I was a child I wondered, "How could this be?" and I guess I still kind of wonder the same thing. I like the chilling P.O.V. shots on the ground when General Jack T. Ripper's stockaded base is invaded (on orders from the president) by a neighbouring military unit. Americans, shot by Americans, lie dying on the dusty ground. The footage reminds me of Kent State, and also the part in Catch-22 when Milo Minderbinder strafes his own base as part of some black market deal he made for 'the syndicate" (because what's good for the syndicate is good for us all). There are similarities to Catch-22 but the humour here is much colder and less humanistic. It's a different kind of war, I guess. Still, it's interesting that the technology (big knobs and switches on the airplane consoles, survival kits and bomber jackets, etc.) of Dr. Strangelove looks much more like WW II than like our present day remote control death networks. I am pretty sure that the overabundance of chewing gum in the film was hyper-ironic reference to a nostalgia for a more individualistic, Johnny-get-your-gun, kind of war.
The Atomic Filmmakers doc (1997) was about a bunch of guys who documented the A-bomb tests in Nevada and at Bikini Atoll. The film was highly unsubversive, the interviews were conducted passively, and the tone was true to the ethos of the era: there's a decent, American job to be done here: heck, them-there A-bombs ain't gonna document themselves!
One good anecdote was from a guy who sat with his cameras in the nose (gunner-bay, I guess) of a plane that followed the plane that dropped a bomb, so he was right above the blast when it went off. He had goggles to shield his eyes but they broke as he was pulling them on. He (in a state of panic, sure he'd go blind) put his hands across his tightly closed eyes. He didn't go blind, but he did see the bones of his fingers in the flash.
There was a whole secret film lab called Lookout Mountain. These guys documented everything: they made 6500 films! One them had an aunt and uncle killed at Nagasaki. He said they lived in the country and made the "unfortunate" decision to go into the city to market that day. He said that in one of the Nevada tests he filmed, pigs and monkeys were tied up in the bomb area with their eyes propped (what-the? Like in Clockwork Orange? whY? ) open. He said that made him think "This is how it would be for people who had a bomb dropped on them."
The film ended with a montage of incredibly magnificent footage of big blasts and mushroom clouds. I stared at the TV screen trying to understand what I was seeing, but it just kept looking like really nice pictures.
Yesterday, Jennifer McMackon's new blog, simpleposie, asked the question: "Who is your favourite artist?" I responded with the following: 1. Michael Balser, 2. Kristin Lucas, 3. Anne McGuire, 4. Andrew J. Paterson (listed here in alphabetical order). This list interests me in that it popped out easily, and the artists all have a lot in common: video, performance, and a playful-yet-dire, articulate approach to the languages of technology and media.
1. Michael Balser: A Canadian video artist, dead and sorely missed, whose work is full of wit, pop culture, on-the-edge-big-science, petty art world gossip and debate, science fiction, low-fi cable tv production, high-end broadcast quality tv production, and rattle-your-bones mortality woven in so tight together that you can't pull out any of the threads. (You can easily find Balser's titles here in V Tape's excellent catalogue.
Excerpt below from the beginning of Michael Balser's "2014. An odd essay ", published in Lola #3, 1998.
2. Kristin Lucas: A brilliant video, web, and performance artist who is not a cyberfeminist simply because there is nothing predictable, and barely anything explicable, about this woman's work. I love and respect the courage she has to put resources into her own surprising imagery, rather than fulfilling narrative or dogmatic expectations.Xanax, Zerit and Indinovir stood poised at the edge of intergalactic eternity, their enlarged crania jutting forward like three eliptical crixivans, collectively forming an image of magnetic resonance."Do you think this will work as animation or should we use live action with digital spaceships and shit?" Dave Bergmark was hunched over his GatesPowerMac 196000 super-computer (20,000 terabyte and 64,000 megahertz).
"Where do we deposit the testicular repligene?"
"Xanax has replaced the modular neopostplastic smegma simulator in the psychotomax."
Their crypto-pharmacologica-tech-talk was interrupted by the familiar sound of webmusak at 600 beats per minute, so fast that only Zerit, with his huge aural endowment, could detect the vibrations and react appropriately. He began the Dance of the Zadivudine Genomes. Very soon, mutant Transcriptors were appearing from the transparent, multifaceted, rotating trhee dimensional CoprLogos which filled the infinite space that the three superheros had previously occupied.
"We need more fucking memory," he screamed, pounding his fist onto the keyboard, doing more damage than good, I suspect ... (hmm ... I also suspect that he would not have a keyboard. Note ... think of a ridiculous post-space-age substitute for keyboard. Maybe a genetically controlled wand of some sort with a corporate name that sounds like a mood altering drug -- World Weary Wastetime presents the Wazax Wand 3000).
NB: if you want to read the rest of this most excellent article, contact me here and I'll try to figure out what to do about it.
Excerpts below from "My First Person is Tired of Shooting" a somewhat dated attempt at written dialogue-with-artwork that I produced for the catalogue of Kristin Lucas's show Temporary Housing for the Despondent Citizen at the OK Centre for Contemporary Art in Upper Austria, 2000.
The [surveillance] video picked up information about the money. Microscopic elements travelled back and forth between Nora's hands and the money all day long.There is good writing by Tom Moody about some of Kristin Lucas's more recent artwork here.
Please tell me a story. To hear something you have to say something. The foodcourt is like a TV show with no beginning middle or end. It's on all the channels all the time. At the airport the carpet is grey. You can lie down on it to sleep and people will walk around you as if you weren't even there. Say something. Trash talks.
Lawrence Weiner put a stick in a stream. But it was just an idea.
My first person is tired of shooting. I need better ammo. I need to find something and pick it up. I need something better to carry around with me.
I'm breaking up. I am here and here. You can have me. I am dissolving. It's all in your hands. You are dissolving. Quick find a peg, and another, and another.
The sunlight is very very bright and it is getting brighter. Things are getting lost in the lights and in the darks. We are losing information at the far ends of the scale.
3. Anne McGuire: I love this woman's work for its lowbudget yet whole-hearted dedication to a trope. It seems like bad theatre and maybe it is. There's a use of amateur actors that makes no apologies for its clunky style, yet dives into the language of representation with supreme confidence. It's irony and straight-ahead narrative fused together in a compact, somewhat painful, package.
McGuire's "I'm Crazy, You're Not Wrong" both broke me up and broke my heart. This flowsy-frumpy, wig-bearing bombshell perches, with much lady-like, druken lurching, on a high stool and carefully , tenderly, imparts to us her madness and complete abdication of agency in a sad-sack, crazy-ass torch song that seems as if she is making it up as she goes along. I was sold in an instant.
I very recently found out that Anne McGuire also did a backwards version of my nearly very favourite film ever, Andromeda Strain. There's normally a nice blurb here at Video Data Bank, but tonight the search function seems to be down. Check back later, either there or here.
4. Andrew J. Paterson: A brilliant Canadian performance and video artist whose cellular structure is coded for centre stage, yet who is at the same time both generous and keenly political. Click this for an earlier review on this blog of Paterson's recent Pleasuredome performance.
Excerpts below from a piece of ficto-criticism (time for a new term) that I wrote in response to Andrew J. Paterson's 2001 video, "Snowjob" for the catalogue to Pleasuredome's video curation Blueprint: moving images in the 21st century:
If Money were a space alien that took over the planet Earth, I would be one of its worker drones. To Money I would not be a person. I would be an Unidentified Animate Object. That wouldn't leave me many options, would it? But Money does not come from outer space.
Digimon are like cute, tiny money, and we kids are like their tiny worker drones. If Digimon were space aliens that took over the planet Earth, we would be their Unidentified Animate Objects -- slaves to the Digimon! But Digimon do not come from outer space.
So if Money does not come from outer space, and Digimon do not come from outer space (and neither do GAP, Imperial Oil, and the art market), how come we are all employed at pushing these things around from here to there? Maybe we are Money. We are Digimon. We are GAP and we are Imperial Oil and we are the art market. We make these things, and we make pictures of these things and show them to one another, in order that we may continue to make all of it some more.
"pictures r words r pictures r words r pictures r words r pictures r words ..." I'm losing track. I don't know where to go from here. I think its a snowjob.
Whoo-hoo! Art-blogger Tyler Green has visited Toronto and deemed, thanks to a show the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario), of all places, that "Canadians are not prudes." Read all about it here.
The Monday Report, CBC's somewhat lacklustre answer to The Daily Show, nevertheless had a great spot today spoofing those sanctimonious 'no pirating' ads with average guys who work in the movie business going on about their down-to-earth jobs. Unfortunately it's not on the website. Some of the best lines:
Charlie Nesman makes bad movies.
"I make a lot of sequels."
"What kind of movies do I like? I like a movie about...a monkey...that gets special powers...and has to play a sport. That's the kind of movie I like."
"I don't know why anyone would steal a movie...unless its to avoid listening to this ad that you have to see before every single movie, and you've just paid 11 dollars and then you still have to sit and listen to me whining and telling you you're a thief, nevermind the 9 dollars you just spent on popcorn."
I don't understand why people aren't madly raving about Splinter Cell the way they did about Tomb Raider (okay there's less boobs, but is that really so important to the game?). The environments are various and interesting, the graphics are gorgeous and the gameplay is smooth and engaging. The avatar is blank enough for ease of identification, yet sexy and sleek and he moves with a nice awkward grace. When I started the level on the oil rig, the place (graphic above) took my breath away. The blowing clouds, the ominous thick black water, the moon and stars, the oil rig itself in the distance. I spent quite awhile wandering around just looking, not quite ready yet to throw myself into the action. In a similar game moment, my friend Jim Munroe told me that he often playes Grand Theft Auto just wandering around looking at stuff. I knew he did this as a video project, but didn't understand why he would stray from the tasks of the game while playing on his own. Then the other day I was in the middle of a GTA mission down by the waterfront and I noticed how nice the sky was looking. So I stopped what I was doing to watch the sunrise. It looked damn pretty, a glowing ball rising over the water, the sky turning soft shades of pink and blue, and it was well worth taking the time out. These experiences of great rendering are much more complete and intense than I ever expected in my lifetime. It's disconcerting, for an old gal like me, to find my relaxed, internal thoughts straying towards such constructed, visual environments.