Tag: culture

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Art & Culture My Lectures

Urban Media: Interventionist Digital Art in the City

Exiles of the Shattered Star by Kelly Richardson
Recently, I gave a talk at Pixel Gallery in Toronto on the subject of ‘urban media’. I also was on the national CBC radio programme “Here and Now” before the talk, discussing the concept of urban media.

I used several case studies to construct the argument that urban media takes many forms, and often invites logistical and conceptual challenges, but that the rewards are significant: exposure to a public that would not normally call themselves art patrons, and the possibilities of conceptual layers added to a work because of an urban context.

The talk was quite freeform, so instead of presenting my slides, here are the links to the projects I discussed:

The Geostash urban intervention project
The Meta-Parade performance projects
Snout, an urban sensing project by Proboscis
The Transmedia 2000 video billboard project
The Transmedia 2002 video billboard project
The Transmedia 29:59 video billboard project
Fernando Prats at Madrid Abierto

…and a couple of bonus links:
Otherworldly and Best of Transmedia, programmes I curated especially for urban screens.

Categories
Art & Culture My Projects

Schematic: New Media Art from Canada

I’m very pleased to announce that this Friday, November 7th, Schematic: New Media Art from Canada will be opening at [ s p a c e ] media arts in London, UK. I co-curated this exhibition and wrote the curatorial essay.

This show is the second part of a two part exhibition. The first part, Schematic: Eric Raymond was a solo exhibition of Montreal-based artist Eric Raymond at Canada House in Trafalgar Square. This second exhibition is a group show featuring work by Peter Flemming (his work, Canoe, is pictured above), Germaine Koh, Joe Mckay, Nicholas Stedman, and Norman White. This group of artists represents a wide range of practice: emerging and established, from cities across Canada, and treating technology as both a driver of the work and simply another tool.

This exhibition showcases the creativity and technological innovation of artists who also act as inventors and engineers, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes incidentally. The works explore our relationships with technology and also highlight the shifts in direction taking place across international new media practices.

Schematic is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, and the Canadian government (Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade).

The exhibition runs from 8 November – 20 December 2008. For information on how to get to the show and its opening hours, please visit the [ s p a c e ] website. Once the show has opened, I will post my curatorial essay here and post more information about the upcoming catalogue.

Categories
Art & Culture

Islands + Data Garbage + Real Reality vs. Virtual Reality

Categories
Art & Culture

Call To Action

I hereby interrupt my long blogular silence to join the chorus of concerned Canadians who are raising their voices against the Conservative government’s recent cuts to culture.

What’s truly dispiriting is reading the comments on the slew of news articles that have appeared. Small but determined groups of commenters slag off artists in the most vicious way, and dismiss solid evidence that culture spending generates income for Canada and enriches lives. It is also shocking, when navigating through the morass, to witness a near-total disbelief in these tried and tested systems of cultural support that often work as a hand up, not a hand out. (Need stats to support these opinions of mine? Go here and here.) Sage commenters have pointed out that if the Harper government were really interested in fiscal responsibility they would find other, far more significant and costly “boondoggles” to hack away at.

What can be done? As always, it is fine and good to be concerned but unless action is taken, the slash and burn will continue unabated. Guess what — surprise! — it’s not about fiscal responsibility, it’s all about appealing to voters. So get out those pencils and start writing passionate, personal letters to your MP. There are full details on how to do this and further background information at the Council for Canadians website, and additional insightful commentary from John Sobol at his blog.