Michell Gay, Spampoet (2009)

computational media projection

Rob Bairos, On Further Reflection (2010)

A picture of the current iteration of the work:

Rob Bairos, On Further Refecltion (2010)

8.5” wide  x 19” deep x 14” tall

Ghostly animations from the last century emanating from a vintage
oscillscope. Imagery pre-processed with TouchDesigner and presented on
Dumont Laboratories “Cathode-Ray  Oscillograph”, circa late 1940s,
driven by an mp3 music player.

Rob Bairos studied Math and Computer Science at the University of
Waterloo in the early 1990s before joining Derivative where he
develops interactive graphics software.

Interest from his previous piece “Total Internal Reflection” led to a collaboration between Bairos and director Jared Raab, in the creation of the music video “What to Say” for the group Born Ruffians:

Nahed Mansour, Archiving Voice (2010)

single channel video, 4 min. 17 sec.

Nahed Mansour performs Arabic phonemes with increasing speed, strain and tension. Archiving Voice is quite powerful, and I would love to include it in my exhibition. I think it speaks beautifully to Simon Glass’ On the Tower of Babel, and it incorporates the notion of the Shibboleth that I’m using as a point of inspiration.

Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth (2007)

Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth (2007)

Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/dorissalcedo/default.shtm

Kristan Horton “Oracle04 V1″

»2000 Oracle04 V1« is a hypothetical machine that turns books on tape back into books. By Kristan Horton.

Douglas Coupland “Lost and Gained in Translation”

 

Douglas Coupland
Fight Club, 2005 and Less Than Zero, 2005

Fight Club and Less Than Zero are part of series shown together as Lost and Gained in Translation, a body of work that is concerned with the intersection of language, books and visual culture in mass media. Part of Coupland’s process was to use a web site search engine to translate texts out of and back into English. The results were photocopied onto every available colour of paper at a Kinko’s copy outlet and then arranged in large, text-based mosaics. Fight Club and Less Than Zero gestures toward both the mechanics and the outcomes of telling stories through a strong interest in design and typography.

http://www.belkin.ubc.ca/past/douglas-coupland-koerner

In Lost and Gained in Translation, Coupland investigates the new meaning of translation in a world of file sharing, search engine translations, and endless digital replication of text-based work. As the artist states, “Any paragraph pumped through massive translation ends up with a huge amount of chaff (strands of numbers, etc.). However, once removed, the remains are often a chilling reductive haiku of the initial text”. This is the impetus for his large translation pieces, based on a book project with Hans Obrist, called Do It. These pieces come across as intelligible word puzzles, a somewhat recognizable form of the original but different in an essentially mysterious way through the process of translation and re-translation.

http://www.coupland.com/2009/03/31/art-future-essay/

Venue Possibilities

http://interaccess.org/about/calls.php

Interaccess has a call for proposals.  Deadline Nov.22, 2010.

VMac Gallery 401 Richmond (managed by VTape)

Index G (50 Gladsone Ave.)

416.535.6957 mail@indexg.com

Although 70% exhibitions at INDEXG are curated shows, occasionally we welcome artists and curators to rent our galleries for exhibitions. we allocate the back gallery for rental exhibitions and interested parties are requested to send us proposals for consideration.

 

Meta Gallery 124 Ossington Ave. Toronto ON M6J 2Z5
•    e info@metagallery.com
•    t 416.955.0500
•    f 416.955.0992

http://www.mediancontemporary.com/contemporary/

OCADU Great Hall

Beaver Hall (on McCaul)

Senate Gallery

(this post will be updated as I get more info.)

Research Interests

My first assignment is due later this week.  It is an oral presentation where I must briefly synopsize 1 or 2 examples of past research work and discuss how they may lead to new investigations in Thesis.  Additionally, I am asked to present some artists, designers, or curatorial projects that are of interest to me.

I have several (somewhat divergent) interests.  Too many to include in a 10 min. presentation.  So, in the interest of organizing my thoughts, reviewing and surveying my past projects, and storing the ones I’m most proud of, I am uploading them here.  I will then whittle these down to a short powerpoint (to be posted later this week).

Mobile Technologies/Augmented Reality and the Museum/Gallery

I currently work in 3D Animation and Motion Graphics and have a fair amount of experience with interactive installations.  I have some experience programming and have sparingly dabbled in mobile devices and web design.  Naturally, I am interested in bringing some of my technical background into my thesis project.  Perhaps, I am am just thinking too practically, but I am drawn to the idea of realizing some kind of mobile/web based augmented museum experience.  Last year I took a course offered as a joint partnership between OCAD and the Art Gallery of Ontario about art in/as education (esp. in the museum setting).  The pedagogical theory introduced in that class will inform much of the project.

Past projects of mine within this line of inquiry:

r u part of the art? was a project I realized in 2008 for Toronto’s Nuit Blanche event.  Now, this is an art piece that had more to do with instruction and performance, but it utilizes mobile devices and SMS messaging as a delivery mechanism.  I’m really interested in how the ubiquity of mobile technologies reshape and reframe experience.

Once Upon a Map is a web based hyperlinked project that I did for my Future Cinema course this summer.  It was during the creation of this project that the idea of an augmented mobile project began to germinate in my mind.

Other curatorial projects that relate to this theme:

The London Museum released an iPhone app called Street Museum that uses GPS information to overlay archival photos of London through the camera view of the phone.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/london/hi/things_to_do/newsid_8700000/8700410.stm

Th Brooklyn Museum has also been doing some pretty net things with iPhone apps.  Theirs works like the Genius option in iTunes, except with their collection.  It’s like a choose your own adventure museum guide. http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/32437/choose-your-own-adventure-at-the-brooklyn-museum/ They also have a mobile website called Gallery Tag! that plays like an in museum scavenger hunt where gallery goers tag pieces in their collection. http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/bloggers/2010/03/25/gallery-tag/

Posthumanism

Past projects of mine within this line of inquiry:

The video below Aeshetic Prosthetics was a slideshow created for a CRCP course I took last year.  I’m interested in how technology is refashioning the human body, and the repulsion/attraction that this provokes.

The Eden Institute was a curatorial project that myself and fellow student LIam Wylie created for a Sculpture and Installation class last year.  We were asked to create a hypothetical exhibition for OCAD’s Professional Gallery (complete with curatorial essay and maquette) that included one work each of our own and two additional pieces from other artists.  Here is sample of the essay and some photos:

The Eden Institute: Artifacts from an Imagined Future

Welcome to The Eden Institute, where paradise is the future that was.

Donna Haraway wrote in her Cyborg Manifesto that “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (149).  Taking cue from this statement, The Eden Institute investigates a speculative future-past at the permeable boundaries between nature and technology, belief and science, myth and tool.  The artworks on display in The Eden Institute reclaim an imaginative realm once reserved for parable and fable.  In the modern industrial age these speculative fictions interrogate and tame scientific audacity, and serve to negotiate each new technology’s integration into the fabric of society.  Mythical impulses of chimeras and medicine pouches become alarmingly real in the face of advanced science. “Each new hybrid that arrives on the technological scene – test tube babies, Prozac, human genome sequencing – pushes us further into a no mans land between nature and culture, an ambiguous zone where science, language, religion and mythology overlap and interpenetrate” (Davis16). Is science the new belief system? Through it can we find redemption?  Does it hold the promise of paradise? Fulfillment of the spiritual self? Edens lost?

The Eden Institute .pdf

Afrofuturism

I took a Postmodernism course last year and I had an assignment to pick a cultural artifact that I think is postmodern and write about it.  I initially chose the synthesizer, but as I started investigating it, I felt that I was pulling at a thread that seemed to unravel into other realms and questions beyong the scope of a 500 word essay (in the end, I chose to pick another subject for that project).  I began to wonder why, in the hands of black musicians, science fiction and space alien tropes accompanied the musical subcultures that exploit synthesized music.  I have only begun to scratch the surface of Afrofuturism, but it seems that the main attraction of new technology to marginalized groups is that these technologies don’t carry the burden of colonial history.  Below, you will find a couple of papers I wrote on the subject:

Afrofuturism and the Funkification of the Cyborg

Let Us Compare Mythologies (pdf downdoad) is a review of the Wangechi Mutu Exhibition titled This You Call Civilization? at the Art Gallery of Ontario. I entered it in C Magazine’s New Critic Competition and won 2nd place!  Unfortunately they only had enough space for the winner, but I will be writing a review for the March issue, so stay tuned.

Artists that I’m interested in (who are not mentioned above):

Brendan Fernandes:

http://www.brendanfernandes.ca/

http://www.diazcontemporary.ca/Artists_Fernandes1.html

Brendan Fernandes, Dada Afrika I-IV, 2010

Brendan Fernandez, Foe, 2008. DVD video 4 min/39 sec

Brendan Fernandes, Neva There, 2008

Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965 – 1980

September 11 – November 28, 2010

Traffic: Conceptual Art in Canada 1965–1980 maps the diverse, centripetal and eccentric manifestations of Conceptualism as its premises were enacted, hybridized and inflected by the particular local and geographic needs and interests of urban arts communities. Presenting works in a diversity of media by over seventy Canadian artists, many of them internationally renowned, this is the first major exhibition documenting the many manifestations of Conceptual Art in Canada. http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/services/gallery/Blackwood_exhibitionTraffic.html

Title: Art is All Over Artist: Iain Baxter& Ingrid Baxter N.E. Thing Co. Ltd Date: 1971 Format: Collage Location: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC