Author: MK

It’s the first time that I’ve returned to Toronto after the “Wireless World” piece aired on CBC. I’ve stopped for a coffee on Queen, and I pop open my laptop to see if the hotspots I found and revealed to CBC viewers on TV are still there. They sure are, but they are now password-protected. Good on ya, linksys.

It’s good to see people implementing the sound advice in the Marketplace clip, which, briefly put, was to put a password on your wireless network if you don’t want to share your connection. Returning to this spot after the clip aired, I admit it may have been a little sweeter to see people renaming their networks “free for everybody” and “come on in” as a welcome mat to those endowed with wireless cards roaming the city. But the choice remains with the owner of the network, and no one is obliged to share the peanuts.

Over in Montréal. meanwhile, some good community-minded people are starting an initiative called “Île Sans Fil” that is opening wireless hotspots around the city, which are free to use. I met with one of the founders and I foresee good things happening with Île Sans Fil – not just free internet access, but exciting, cool, community and creatively oriented stuff. Keep your eye on them.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep walking down the street and see what I find so I can post this entry.

It’s the first time that I’ve returned to Toronto after the “Wireless World” piece aired on CBC. I’ve stopped for a coffee on Queen, and I pop open my laptop to see if the hotspots I found and revealed to CBC viewers on TV are still there. They sure are, but they are now password-protected. Good on ya, linksys.

It’s good to see people implementing the sound advice in the Marketplace clip, which, briefly put, was to put a password on your wireless network if you don’t want to share your connection. Returning to this spot after the clip aired, I admit it may have been a little sweeter to see people renaming their networks “free for everybody” and “come on in” as a welcome mat to those endowed with wireless cards roaming the city. But the choice remains with the owner of the network, and no one is obliged to share the peanuts.

Over in Montréal. meanwhile, some good community-minded people are starting an initiative called “Île Sans Fil” that is opening wireless hotspots around the city, which are free to use. I met with one of the founders and I foresee good things happening with Île Sans Fil – not just free internet access, but exciting, cool, community and creatively oriented stuff. Keep your eye on them.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep walking down the street and see what I find so I can post this entry.

(half the fun of blogging is making up these cheeky headlines, non?)

Next week I’m moderating a panel on DIY publishing and artist’s multiples. Our panelists will discuss the positive and negative aspects of this mode of practice. It’s going to be good. If you live in Toronto, go here for the who/what/when/where/why.

This all conveniently folds into the discussion that occurred in the comments for my recent post, “Just Add Water“, where we debated and mostly debunked the idea of the “hand of the artist”.

Multiples add an interesting trajectory to that discussion, because they straddle several boundaries. First, we might ask, what is a multiple? It seems generally accepted that multiples are art objects produced in quantities that you can’t count on your fingers, sometimes by hand, and other times with mechanical assistance. What separates them from common objects that come off the assembly line is that hand of the artist again, that touched them and made them special, either through modification or creation from scratch.

A multiple I really like, Jon Sasaki’s member’s tags (a common shoe tag, inscribed with the text, “I’VE PAID MY DUES”) is a good example of the use of common objects, slightly turned on its head by an artist, and then sold as a multiple. In this case, our hand of the artist is quite invisible, as I’m sure (but can’t verify – Jon are you out there?) that he made a phone call and had these ordered up. The mind of the artist, however, is prominent in this very witty commentary on belonging and its related costs, embodied in an object that is a common symbol. The related costs of owning this multiple, I might add, are much less than a shoe tag at your local gym will cost you.

Those are the kind of dues we can all afford to pay.

In less than 48 hours, I will be doing a VJ performance at the SAT in Montréal. If you are here, I hope you can make it. Check the details here.

I used to VJ a lot in warehouses and places like that, in Toronto when I was still doing my undergraduate at Ryerson University. It was fun, I was given carte blanche to do whatever I pleased, and the atmosphere was friendly.

I never saw it as a “high art” form – which may have had something to do with internal prejudices built up from art school. There’s a certain sensitivity towards what some call improvisation and others call “noodling”, and if it happens in a club setting then it definitely isn’t art.

But I’ve borrowed those techniques and incorporated them into other performances, so it’s definitely influenced my practice overall. As well, the VJ scene is taken pretty seriously here in Montréal, and has developed into a real community. What I’m seeing here has certainly come a long way from tripped-out visuals of flying mushrooms on a screen in the corner that no one pays attention to anyway.

So like any other art form, it is coming into maturity, and practitioners are developing styles and creating performance sets with “themes”, et cetera. One of the biggest questions, that can be asked of any other live art form, is why do it live? Would a canned video do? And in essence, in this case, the music is constructed live, and so VJs have an opportunity to build a dialogue with the music as it is created in parallel. A little less constructed than a “video art” piece, perhaps, but in the end, a valid art form that challenges you to build a coherent visual structure in the moment.

Hope to see you Wednesday.