Author: MK

Categories
Art & Culture My Projects

Launched: In-Site Toronto

An sample of Jeremy Bailey's artwork for In-Site Toronto.

In-Site Toronto is a series of newly commissioned work that will be presented on the portal pages of several wireless internet hotspots in the Wireless Toronto network until the end of 2010. Artists Dave Dyment, Swintak, Jeremy Bailey, Fedora Romita, Willy Le Maitre and Brian Joseph Davis have created works that will be automatically displayed when users log in to their Wireless Toronto user account at designated hotspots. The project was launched on March 31, 2010 in partnership with Spacing Magazine. The project was produced by media arts organisation Year Zero One, was curated by myself, and was produced with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. The downloadable, printable, shareable e-catalogues that are available at each hotspot were produced using bookleteer by Proboscis.

Now, go out, use your free Wireless Toronto account, and discover some art that relates to the place where you are and our contemporary digital age.


View In-Site Toronto in a larger map

Categories
Technology

About Eva Schindling


Eva with the Banff New Media Institute’s 3D printer.

It’s a little cheeky for me to title this post “About Eva Schindling“, because there are so many things that I don’t know about her, which makes it difficult for me to even scratch the surface of what she is “about”. I decided to forge ahead with this post when I realised that being intrigued by her was a good enough reason to write something.





Some of Eva’s circuit visualisations.

What I do know about Eva I have picked up by rubbing shoulders over the past month here at the Banff New Media Institute within the Banff Centre for the Arts. I’ve discovered that she analyses, visualises, and builds a wide range of things, often with visually arresting results (examples above). She works with and thinks about patterns, fluid dynamics, 3D printing, circuit design, coding, emergence, and complex systems. Despite her obvious technical virtuosity, she avoids a common trap of those with that high level of technical skill, which is to only engage with the surface of an issue. Instead, her project references show that there are many layers of thinking that go into each of her experiments.

On top of the fact that she’s thinking about the intersections between some interesting and timely areas, she’s also very charming company. I only wish I could stay here in Banff another month so that I could get to know her better!

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. This is my contribution.

Categories
Art & Culture My Lectures

Advocating for Free Culture

Recently, I gave a talk at transmediale as part of their Free Culture Incubator series. I’ve embedded the video below. I highlighted three case studies that I think exemplify how advocating for the arts successfully can make profound differences to how we experience urban spaces.

Firstly I mentioned BeautifulCity.ca, a campaign to introduce a billboard tax in the city of Toronto, with the tax money distributed to art and culture projects. They were very successful in winning the first battle, which was implementing the tax, but now they need people to speak up once more in favour of how the budget is actually allocated. Check out their Facebook event for more details on how you can help this terrific project.

I also mentioned Ile Sans Fil, the wireless community group that I used to work with, that built a grassroots infrastructure in Montreal that is wildly successful. They were also pioneers of using their infrastructure as a platform to distribute art and community content to their users. They have been so successful at building infrastructure and in their advocacy work that wireless internet infrastructure is now an issue in the Montreal municipal elections.

Last but not least, I mentioned Manchester Open Data City, a huge initiative by FutureEverything. FutureEverything is leading the advocacy around making Manchester the UK’s first open data city, by identifying data that can be made available, and looking at issues of data interoperability, quality and management. I’m programming the FutureEverything conference this year, and can tell you that Open Data and its implications for citizen participation and creativity will be a hot topic. Hope to see you in Manchester this May for FutureEverything!

Categories
Art & Culture

Unreliable Narrators


Paul McCarthy, Painter. Video, 1995.

I participated in a panel discussion at the National Galleries of Scotland just over a week ago, entitled: “Unreliable Narrators: Artists, Curators, Editors”. The other panelists were Colin Fraser, editor of Anon, a poetry journal that only accepts anonymous submissions, and Ryan Van Winkle, currently Reader in Residence at the Scottish Poetry Library. Daniel Herrmann, Curator of the Paolozzi Collection and Works on Paper at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art moderated.

Daniel Herrmann opened the panel by showing a clip from Paul McCarthy’s 1995 video, Painter, which is currently on view at the Dean Gallery. As the exhibition text states: “Painter is shown next to the Dean Gallery’s own ‘Paolozzi Studio’. This partial reconstruction is an educational stage-set, exhibiting the generous donation of Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005), and is one of our most popular and successful displays. By contrasting the Studio presentation with McCarthy’s critique, ‘Painter’ and The Studio casts a second glance at how museums present the making of art.”

We then discussed models of authorship and control. I presented the contemporary example of Bicycle Built for Two Thousand, a project by Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey. Koblin and Massey collected over two thousand human voice samples that were then assembled into the song Daisy Bell, which has historical significance as this was the song performed in the first example of computer voice synthesis. The participants were recruited through the Amazon Mechanical Turk, had no idea what they were participating in, and were paid $0.06 for their contribution. The nature of the contributions made via the Mechanical Turk service, while only possible on this scale in our contemporary networked age, also somewhat mirrors a traditional studio model where apprentices create building blocks that are refined and completed by masters. McCarthy’s video challenges image of the painter as lonely genius. The new networked possibilities for art are not so far from old models of participation (not collaboration), but reveal them and remind us of their timeless utility, while also firing a volley at the “lonely genius” stereotype.