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.
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