|
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 |
View current page
...more recent posts
more cyborg notes
I watched part of a kid's show the other day and didn't get the name of it. I've scanned the TV Guide and Google and can't come up with it. In the show, a boy and his friends have a pal named "Cyborg" who hangs out with them. Cyborg is a half-man half-machine (go figure) and very tame and normal except that he seems to be an adult and is hanging around with nine-year olds. Anyhow, Cyborg gets kidnapped by a dude whose name I didn't catch. This guy used to be half-man, half-robot, but he had removed his human parts. Dude plans to help Cyborg become superior, like himself. Cyborg, strapped down on an operating table, protests " If you take out my biological parts, you remove the best part of me!" Dude responds, "But all of your memories and emotions will be downloaded into your improved body." A playback montage ensues in which we see Cyborg's memories; lots of hanging out with the kids at picnics and flying kites and whatnot. Cyborg manages to free himself from the operating table and pushes a button that reverse the setup so Dude sees the flashback as if with Cyborg's own eyes. It's a big surprise, "I never knew the world was so beautiful through human eyes." Yes, according to this show we humans have very good eyeballs and they make our experience...superior to robots' experience! Dude is stricken and upset, realising that without any human parts he is actually inferior to Cyborg. But it all ends happily cause the kids help him out, and undertake to teach him how to be more human by letting him join them and Cyborg in the park to throw the football around. I'm not making any of this up.
There is an interesting thread here about Richard Serra and other things to do with minimalism.
Bicycling Tirana (dvd still), 2003. From Rainer Ganahl's website
I've only seen a few installations of Toronto's Images Festival so far. Rainer Ganahl's bicycle video, Bicycling Tirana at Paul Petro Contemporary Art (still up until April 24) is pretty great; pov at about chest height, cyclist riding into oncoming traffic, mostly with no hands. The mood is oddly calm and transcendent, even as the cars are coming straight for the camera. The other video, simply titled Bicycling also has a strange serenitiy. A cyclist, shot from above, dreamily, lazily, doubles a passenger round and round in a Manhattan intersection, unconcerned as cars whizz by. I recognise this particular cycling frame of mind, a kind of blissful remove from the anxieties of car-drivership, despite the constant proximity of the big metal beasts.
There are some confusing works on canvas, big paintings of website pages about a suicide bomber who used a bicycle, and a painting of the text of an email from a cyclist describing a traffic conflict with a car driver. These paintings are kind of pretty, but I think the labour of depicting the web in paint is a questionable use of time.
My favourite piece in the show is the mail art project, Use a Bicycle. Ganahl, who lives in New York, made his own postage stamps which say things like Al Queda, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Shock and Awe. He sent eight Twin Towers 9/11 souvenir postcards to the Toronto gallery, and they all arrived. In the message area of the card is the simple imperative assertion: use a bicycle. This juxtaposition of human-powered transportation against US conflict in the middle east is both audacious and obvious, a simple beautiful statement about the ramifications of various technologies. Rainer Ganahl is clearly in love with the bicycle, an attitude I comprehend. He has written a good bicycle-related artist statement that you can read here. It was this quote, however, from the Images Festival guide, that drew me into the show. "The bicycle is really -- next to the computer and the radio -- my most important instrument for making it through my life."
use a bicycle, mail art project with self-made stamps (detail), 2004. From Rainer Ganahl's website.
News flash: Catherine Obsorne is now online! More on this soon.
cyborg notes
I read in Edge* that Eye-Toy is working on an interface that will read facial expressions. Remember in the old days when AI advancements used to pose questions for ethical and philosophical debate?
Speaking of play, how about a tiny game that you ingest - taken in capsule form. A nanotech neurotransmitter that just stimulates the relevant brain bits. You can have it running in the background and turn your attention on and off of it at will. Come to think of it, the searchable i-tunes implant database will be pretty nice too. Volume control inside your head. Ears are just for wetware interface and avoiding physical impacts. I'm also waiting for the small muscle mod chip from Social Science™ that allows you to select and implement a variety of facial expressions so you don't have to leave your carapace gawping and drooling while you tend to important internal matters.
*sorry I can't find the quote online - read it in hard copy and then lent it to my friend
The pictures above are from Toronto's Alex Wilson Community Garden. Alex Wilson wrote a great, influential book called The Culture of Nature. When he died, this garden was made in his memory. It's right on the best graffitti alley in Toronto, which also happens to be my off-road route to work. Will post the occasional spring picture of this garden and alley because A: it's a beautiful thing, and B: there's another, very much alive, Alex Wilson on Digital Media Tree who spends a great deal of his time birdwatching in Central Park, one of the most cultured pieces of nature on the planet.
"We must build landscapes that heal, connect and empower, that make intelligible our relations with each other and the natural world: places that welcome and enclose, whose breaks and edges are never without meaning. We urgently need people living on the land, caring for it, working out an idea that includes human life and human livelihood. All of that calls for a new culture of nature, and it cannot come soon enough." Alex Wilson, 1953-1993