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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Sara Diamond is coming from Banff to take on the position of President of the Ontario College of Art and Design. Seems like a good time to re-read Morris Wolfe's hilarious little history book, OCA 1967-1972: Five Turbulent Years. Wolfe tells a bizarre tale of a Canadian school in which the administration attempts to get with the times, bringing in more experimental artists and practices and opening up classes, to the outrage of the staid student body. The story climaxes when Roy Ascott (a favourite teacher of Brian Eno at Ipswich school of art) is brought in and promptly cancels classes. Chaos ensues. Morris, who saw it all, has a dry sharp wit and doesn't shy away from painful details. An exemplary quote:
OCA students had always been rather docile when it came to protests. Although the story may well be apocryphal, I'm told that during J.E.H. MacDonald's tenure as Principal [1928-32], the students walked out, protesting some real or imagined slight, and congregated in Grange Park. At tea time, MacDonald came out with an offering of milk and cookies. The protest was over.
The cbc radio 3 website is closing up shop. I liked cbc radio 3, and I'm sad that this is their last issue. They've asked past contributors to send in a little blurb about "endings." You can find mine and others' on the table of contents page.
Here's what I am working on right now...
Experiment In Progress: Neutrinos They Are Very Small
Art Gallery of Sudbury
March 5, 10:00 to 5:00
Rebecca Diederichs
Gordon Hicks
Sally McKay
Curated by: Corinna Ghaznavi
Curator and Artists are present from 12:30 to 3:30 for demonstrations and discussion
3 artists and a curator visited the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. Taking the idea of neutrinos as a starting point, they began to consider the conceptual and practical approaches of art and science to construct worlds and make the imagined tangible.
The artists are available throughout the exhibition to discuss their resulting experiments and works in progress.
March 5 is a precursor to the resulting exhibition scheduled for next fall at the AGS.
“Neutrinos they are very small
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.”
Excerpt from "Neutrinos They Are Very Small"
by John Updike
Excerpt from Wired:
[Quadriplegic Matthew] Nagle turned the TV on and off and switched channels (trapped in his hospital room, he's become a daytime-TV addict). Then he opened and read the messages in his dummy email program. "Now I'm at the point where I can bring the cursor just about anywhere," he said. "I can make it hover off to the side, not doing anything. When I first realized I could control it I said, 'Holy shit! I like this.'"
What are you thinking about when you move the cursor? I asked.
"For a while I was thinking about moving the mouse with my hand," Nagle replied. "Now, I just imagine moving the cursor from place to place." In other words, Nagle's brain has assimilated the system. The cursor is as much a part of his self as his arms and legs were.
[...]
At a conference in 2002, Anthony Tether, the director of Darpa, envisioned the military outcome of BCI research. "Imagine 25 years from now where old guys like me put on a pair of glasses or a helmet and open our eyes," Tether said. "Somewhere there will be a robot that will open its eyes, and we will be able to see what the robot sees. We will be able to remotely look down on a cave and think to ourselves, 'Let's go down there and kick some butt.' And the robots will respond, controlled by our thoughts. Imagine a warrior with the intellect of a human and the immortality of a machine."