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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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On Saturday I went to a presentation by artists Kevin Krivel and David Warne, in collaboration with Greg Hermanovic, at Trinity Square Video. The trio had constructed a pretty cool new-media installation called New Creatures that shoots video portraits, stacking instances into one image so you can scroll through a captured motion in real time. One side captured head shots and the other captured full body movement. It was fun to play with and the images were sometime beautiful and sometimes creepy. Neato! Both Warne and Krivel come from architecture backgrounds, and Hermanovic is a special effects software developer. The collapse of art, architecture, and design opens doors for all kinds of thought and production, but it also seems to generate hyperbole. Here are some choice quotes from the presentation:
About a projection in an elevator: "We were exposing the verticalness of the shaft." About funky video footage synched to a musical beat in real time: "It's a synthesis of sound and vision." About an installation in which furniture was wired to trigger video projections when manipulated: "Objects continue to be places where there is a physical engagedness."Hermanovic's company, Derivative, makes a software product, called "Touch" that is genuinely very cool, allowing you to mix and manipulate video in real time. It's useful for vjs and concerts (Derivative did displays for last summer's Rush tour). But the package comes with a whole palette of ready-to-go clips that as Hermanovic said, are "pre-authored, and the user performs them." The imagery is catchy, fashionable, and vapid.
images available in Derivative's online media kit
During this presentation I started feeling inklings of despair at distopic visions of the art/culture sector meshing inextricably with commodity and product design. I was jolted from my nega-reverie by the phrase, "This one is for you Queen Street types." It was a pre-authored clip called "Toronto Appliances," featuring Queen Street storefronts, and one in particular that had just closed down near the Drake Hotel.
Toronto Appliances, pre-authored video by Derivative.
Back in 2003 the last issue of Lola publised a story about the then-under-construction hipster hot-spot, the Drake Hotel. (For those readers who don't know Toronto, the context is a formerly somewhat run-down area of town, populated by lower income tenants and lots of artists, which started filling up with galleries, which quickly led to condos, bistros, fancy knick-knack stores and tapas bars for people from other neighbourhhoods who drive fancy cars. You all know the story, cause it happens in every town.) Anyhow. In this issue of Lola a gallerist in the area was quoted about the development of the Drake, saying, "If they provide good service and good hospitality, it will attract people to the area and hopefully that will move out some of the used appliance stores." Ouch.
After the magazine came out, these posters appeared, calling the gallerist an "eleetist meanie." (Thanks to Tanya Read, who collected and scanned this copy.) I dunno who Meeky is, but I'm sure glad he/she made some fuss. I know that I tend to be a stick-in-the-mud. I know that urban demographic shifts are inevitable. I know that the institutions of fine art ride on the financial coat-tails of empty-headed culture-tainment. All this makes me crabby, complicit, and confused. I don't drive a fancy car, nor live in a fancy condo, but I do occasionally drink fancy drinks and eat fancy food in fancy bars with my both my fancy and my not-so-fancy friends. And, of course, I have my own art display up on Queen Street West right now. Its at Fly gallery, with whom I am more impressed every day. They remain a tiny bastion of level-headed art sanity, standing firm in the midst of the crazy high-brow/low-brow maelstrom that swirls around their block.
A little while ago I posted a picture from the Haida blockade on the Queen Charlotte Islands. There is a solidarity demonstration in Toronto this week. Here's the scoop for anyone who is interested:
Haida Solidarity Demo Against Weyerhauser
Support the Haida Nation Blockades
Thursday April 21, 5:30 p.m.
130 King St. West
Northeast corner of King and York Streets
(One block East of St. Andrew subway station)
Contact: David at dsone@ran.org
Check out: www.haidanation.ca
Come out and show that we stand with the Haida and their demands for self-determination, Native rights, ancient forests, and sustainable local economies.
While Weyerhaeuser holds their Annual Shareholder Meeting in Seattle, let's join people in Haida Gwaii, Seattle, Vancouver, New York and Winnipeg to help show investors and customers that Weyerhaeuser is an unethical and unsafe corporate criminal.
(continued...)
Schwarz is looking for recommendations on tunes from this collection of old Canadian gramaphone recordings from the National Library and Archives site. It's massive! who knew?
Ratzinger.
(no fucking comment)
(fuck)
Mary Midgley on metaphor (as used/abused by scientists):
To understand how metaphors can properly be used in scientific writing, we must get straight a fundamental point about the relation between metaphors and models. Every metaphor suggests a model; indeed, a model is itself a metaphor, but one which has been carefully pruned. Certain branches of it are safe; others are not, and it is the first business of somebody who proposes a new model to make this distinction clear. Once this is done, the unusable parts of the original metaphor must be sharply avoided; it is no longer legitimate to use them simply as stylistic devices. For instance, the familiar model of mechanisms in biology has long ago been pruned of its original implication that a mechanism needs an inventor or maker. Anyone writing about a ‘biological mechanism’ knows that he must keep such inventors out of his explanation. He must somehow manage to use the language of purpose and adaptation without this reference; figurative speculations about the inventor’s character and history will damage and confuse his reasoning. He may want to do theology, but if so, he must do it explicitly, not by loosely extending the language of ‘mechanisms'.Vilayanur S Ramachandran on metaphor (as related to synesthesia):
...one of the odd facts about synesthesia which been known for a long time and again been ignored, is the fact that synesthesia is much more common among artists, poets, novelists, you know flaky types! So now why is it much more common? Well one view is that - in fact according to one study it's seven times more common among artists poets and novelists and the reason is what do artists, poets and novelists all have in common? Just think about it. What they all have in common is they're very good at metaphor, namely linking seemingly unrelated concepts in their brain, such as if you say "out out brief candle", so it's life, why do you call it a candle? Is it because life is like a long white thing? Obviously not. You don't take the metaphor literally, although schizophrenics do and we won't go into that. So why do you that? Well it's brief like a candle, it can be snuffed out like a candle, it illumines like a candle very briefly. Your brain makes all the right links and Shakespeare of course was a master of doing this. Now imagine one further assumption - if this gene is expressed more diffusely instead of being just expressed in the fusiform or in the angular, if it's expressed in the fusiform you get a lower synesthete, in the angular gyrus TPO junction you get a higher synesthete. If it's expressed everywhere you get greater hyperconnectivity throughout the brain making you more prone to metaphor, links seemingly unrelated things because after all concepts are also represented in brain maps. This may be seem counter-intuitive but after all a number, there's nothing more abstract than a number. You can have five pigs, five donkeys, five chairs - it's fiveness - and that's represented in a fairly small region namely the angular gyrus so it's possible that concepts are also represented in brain maps and these people have excess connections so they can make these associations much more fluidly and effortlessly than all of us less-gifted people.
I had a stomach-dropping sensation when I walked into YYZ Artists' Outlet and first saw Christopher Flower's installation because the video of shaking beads looked JUST LIKE some of my video of shaking beads which has not yet been shown. Only his looks better. And he also has a cat in box. Arg. But I figure its a big world and there's room for more than one artist to make images relating to physics and philosophy using shaking beads and cats in boxes...right? heh. Anyhow, once I got over the professional jealousy hurdle I started to really enjoy the work. There are more things shaking than cats and beads, also bagels, beer bottles, soccer balls, goldfish, and other sundry items. The installation is called The Cave, which makes tons of sense, as these objects and the patterns they make are both everyday and mysterious, un-revealing like shadows on a wall. Three monitors display three different scenes, each always a container with something bouncing around inside. I don't know how he achieved the effect, as the boxes and bowls are static, while the stuff inside is clearly bouncing and jouncing as it is being vigorously shaken. As you stand there for awhile, the accumulative effect of watching these items zoom around under unseen forces gets pretty spooky. But nothing is really hidden, you can hear the sounds of shaking, and everything has a nice clunky table-top feel. Flower cites the influence of Der Lauf Der Dinge by the artist team Peter Fischli and David Weiss (nice little trailer available here). The connection makes lots of sense, as both works share the gawky-get-somehow-thrilling dichotomies of banal/sublime, mechanical/alchemical, science/magic, experiment/performance, all handled with clumsy/finesse and DIY/expertise. The show is on til May 21st. If you are the least bit nerdy, go see it.