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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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snocat remix by Rob Cruickshank. Thanks Rob!!
animatronic cat with super groovy soundtrack. (thanks to Gordon Hicks) Note: big quicktime file.
By Design: Historical and Contemporary Objects from Canadian Collections
Design Exchange, exhibition runs til December 31st
Excerpt: Art objects draw threads between personal experience and shared bodies of knowledge, but the connections are often ephemeral and oblique. Design objects, on the other hand, make direct reference to current events, business, manufacture and historical trends. "I don't like the words beautiful and ugly," says Michael Prokopow,"What we think about objects is irrelevant. These are pieces of history, evidence. We have to contend with them as cultural artefacts."
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There is an excellent essay by Ian Hacking in the excellent new issue of the UofT mag with the not so excellent name, Idea&s. Hacking writes about technology ushering us back into Cartesian ways of conceiving mind and body. He talks about a huge range of stuff including organ donation, Japanese attitudes to organ donation, genetics, Body Worlds, cyborgs and brain death. It's not online. Here's a couple of tidbits:
For quite some time, our popular culture has had a vision of creatures that are neither human nor machine, but some mix of the two. Yet the ethnographic facts about these fabulous beings are not what one might expect. They have a far more entrenched role in Japan than in the West. This fact is of curious interest in connection with brain death.
[...]
We think that a person who is maintained simply by machine and who has no consciousness is finished. We say, oddly, that the person has become a vegetable. We mean that there is nothing there but a mechanism. Hence, there is no longer a person there in the hospital bed. We are content to say, "brain dead, so dead indeed." Note how Cartesian we are. The soul, we think, has flown; now there is only a body kept going by chemistry and mechanics."
The Marvels of Chemistry
Speaking of petroleum, let's take a look at the photograph on this page. What's that? You don't see what petroleum has to do with it? Well, look again! Except for those objects made of metal — and of course, the people themselves— almost everything in the photograph is made of synthetic or man-made materials. What's more, most of those materials were originally derived from petroleum, and they are among the many marvels of chemistry.
(note: images and quote are excerpted from a clipping from an old Disney kid's book on science, featuring Donald Duck & his brood ... circa. 1965?)