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Interactive Futures

Wind buffeting a rocky landscape, sunlight dappling a valley, beads of water glinting on a violet petal, during Marten Berkman’s talk, we saw it all in the enchanting detail of 3D. His presentation gave me a great deal of food for thought regarding the relationship between media and nature, and it shone a light on a continuing struggle I have with digital art. His conviction that his work could establish an intimate relationship between an audience and the natural landscape he is hoping to safeguard was inspirational. However, as glad as I was to be able to hear him talk about the spirit and meaning behind his exhibit, without his explanation, I’m not sure I would have been so moved.

How does one establish a meaningful connection to a subject most will never experience? Certainly on way would be to create some sort of immersive, realistic experience, but another, which Berkman also explores is to acknowledge the disconnect between viewer and subject. Berkman’s exhibit examines the problem of how to create intimacy with a landscape you will never see for yourself. His work makes us reflect on the power of maintaining a self-conscious element in your art, and that turning the viewer’s attention to the act of viewing can be a powerful tool, particularly when, as Berkman is, you are interested in mediated relationships.

Our relationship with the natural world is nothing these days if not mediated. Berkman, like many others, ponders the effect of an overabundance of images of the nature and the fact that when we encounter nature, it is sometimes hard to fight the impulse to think, “wow, this looks just like a photograph.” I myself have had that reaction: upon reaching the summit of a mountain, for example, or when looking over vacation photos from a trip to Mexico and feeling they looked more like postcards than memories. Another aspect to consider is the extent to which images of nature are associated with commerce. For years, peaceful valleys, snow-capped mountains, and dew dripped flowers have been used to sell us everything from shampoo, to bottled water, to calendars, to cars. At one point in his talk, Berkman overlays an image of a flower with the image of a shampoo bottle and almost immediately the image was trivialised, it no longer appeared unique or beautiful, but trite and disposable.

We must ask ourselves, then, what is the effect of this over saturation? What s the effect of continually comparing reality to images that are manufactured with specific goals in mind; to sell, to romanticise, to shock, etc. Do we become desensitized? Do we devalue our actual experiences? To some extent I think we do and it is important to always be mindful of its subtle interference with our enjoyment.

We all desire to feel satisfied both intellectually and aesthetically by a piece of art. Many mediums have the ability do do this for me, however, I often find it hard to be fully invested in a digital work. Therefore, the one and only area in which I found Berkman’s piece, and some of the other presentations, to be less than satisfying was the visuals. A solid film, for example, presents stunning and engaging visuals at the same time as it reaches beyond the limits of the storyline to speak to something deeper and more permanent about the human condition. The latter is something I think each of the digital artists I saw on Friday did exceedingly well, the former is, in my opinion, up for some debate. Were I to encounter many of these works on their own I am not certain whether I would feel that their intent was met with equally engaging aesthetics. Some of it struck me as opaque or unapproachable without considerable explanation and is something with which I am not fully at ease. However, I have not been acquainted with digital art for very long, so it is entirely possible that the disconnect I feel is due to my lack of education and familiarity with subject.

Nevertheless, incredibly impressed with the quality of the presentations at Interactive Futures. It was fascinating to listen to fellow artists speak about their processes and passions. Marten Berkman stood out thanks to his deep passion for his subject matter, his humble attitude and ability to put forward his ecological agenda without being condescending or sentimental, and the important questions he raised concerning the role of digital media in environmentalism. For me, the true measure of a piece of art is whether or not it can get close enough to you to change you in some way, and the works I saw on Friday did just that. The conference has made me reflect on my own place within the realm of new media artists which is precisely what I came to Emily Carr to do!

PuSh it Real Good

Interactive theater junkies, mutlimedia freaks, and drama nerds, hark!

At the end of next January, before all the Olympic shenanigans begin, you should check out some of the offerings at PuSh Festival.

From interactive plays with game controllers, to an epic tale a la Edgar Allen Poe.

Project 5: Mapping & Mobility

Coming up with an “orange performance” was more challenging, but also more fun than I thought it would be. Case in point: Claudia and I spent a good half hour playing around in a toy store hunting for ideas before settling on a multi-stage piece that involved little plastic snakes, orange food colouring and the girl’s washroom.

Videos:
One
Two
Three
Four

Project 4: Google Earth – World MiX

To date, this was my favorite project. It was not any more creative than the others, but it gave us the chance to work with a technology whose implications haven’t yet been fully explored.

Pop Goes the World!
Inspiration: So much of my life involves music. I make it, write about it, am inspired by it, and am tuned into something nearly 24 hours a day, and I can’t think of a time in my life when it hasn’t been important. So to a large extent I think I understand the world, and the people in it through music and I wondered what a visual representation of that would be like.

Goals: To create a global map of my musical tastes in the hopes that this would teach me something about my connections to the world through my musical history.

Method: Search my music collection and upload a song from as many countries as I can identify and arrange them in the order in which I discovered them, starting from early childhood and working towards the present day. I did not try to catalog all of my music, rather to give as wide a range as I could.

What I Discovered: To my surprise, I discovered that my musical tastes have expanded, but not changed drastically over time. I still listen to the Simone Album my mother used to play for me when I was a child.

In sifting through my hard drives and CD collection I had to leave some groups out to keep the project more manageable, particularly when there was more than one artist for that country since this was not intended to be a complete catalog. That said, there are some rather large holes in my repertoire. For example, it’s hard to believe I could only find 3 or 4 artists from the entire African continent…Looking at the other selections it can’t be said that the reasons for this have anything to do with language or accessibility, so I have to start suspecting it reflects my level of engagement with that area of the world.

Problems: Not all of the images will display properly in the embedded widget below Please download the following and open up the kml in GoogleEarth to view it properly:

Unzip this folder in the same spot as the KML file: Albums.zip
Open this in Google Earth: MusicalChronologyv2.kml

Roadmap…

Childhood
Bob Marley – Nine Mile, Saint Ann, Jamaica – Redemption Song
David Bowie – Brixton, London, UK – Life On Mars
Nina Simone, Tryon North Carolina – Ne me quitte pas (If you go away) / Summertime

High School
Metallica, Los Angeles CA – Seek And Destroy
The Dead Milkmen, Philly PA, Punk Rock Girl
Djivan Gasparyan (Ջիվան Գասպարյան) – Solag, Armenia – 7th December 1988
Ennio Morricone – Rome, Italy – Canone Inverso
Tragically Hip – Kingston, Ont – Blow at High Dough
Peaches – Toronto Ont, – Boys Wanna Be Her
Amanda Palmer – Boston, MA – Bad Habit
Choir of All Saints, Melanesia – God Yu Tekkem Laef Blong Mi

CEGEP/Uni
Mohammed Rafi, Kotla Sultanpur India – Jaan Pehchaan Ho
Tibetan Monks – Tibet – Tibetan Overtone Chant
Throat Singing, Mongolia
Tom Waits – Pomona, California – Alice
Arcade Fire – Montreal, QC – (Antichrist Television Blues)
Sigur Ros – Reykjavík, Iceland – Glosoli
DJ Krush – Tokyo, Japan – Mosa
Batmobile – Rotterdam, Netherlands – Bambooland
Skinny Puppy – Vancouver BC – Warlock
Laibach – Trbovlje, Slovenia – Tanz Mit Laibach
Punto Omega – Argentina – Guerra en los Cielos
Mos Def – NYC, NY – Do it Now
Csókolom – Hungary, Romania – Amari Szi Amari
Ленинград – Saint Petersburg, Russia – Prolezxni

Work-A-Day World
Venetian Snares – Winnipeg, Manitoba Whiskydrunk
Tomas Jensen Et Les Faux-Monnayeurs, Paris France – Demain j’m'en vais au diable
Émilie Simon – Montpellier, France – Fleur de saison
Fattaru – Sweden – Mina Hundar
Ivy Queen – Añasco, Puerto Rico – Dile
Israel Kaʻanoʻi Kamakawiwoʻole – Honolulu, Hawai’i – Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Lila Downs – Tlaxiaco, Mexico – Burn It Blue
Mulatu Astatke – Jimma, Ethiopia Gubelye
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Australia – Red Right Hand
The Decemberists – Portland Oregon – Sons and Daughters
The Cramps – Akron Ohio – Bikini Girls With Machine Guns
Ali Farka Touré – Kanau, Mali – Beto
辻子紀子 (Tujiko Noriko) – Osaka, Japan – Narita Made
조영욱 (Jo Yeong-wook) – Korea – Cries and Whispers
Bon Iver, Eau Claire, Wisconsin – Skinny Love
Rae Spoon – Calgary, AB – Come On Forest Fire Burn The Disco Down
Android Lust – Bangladesh – India – Dragonfly
Antony and the Johnsons – Chichester, UK – Fistfull Of Love
Kate Bush – Bexleyheath, London, UK – Suspended in Gaffa
The Kills, nyc, NY – http://www.ecuad.ca/~cgoodwin-cobb/Pull A U.m4a>Pull a U
Son House – Riverton, Mississippi – Death Letter
Flight of the Conchords – Wellington, New Zealand – Foux Da Fafa
The Postal Service – Bremerton, Washington – Such Great Heights
Fettes Brottes – Germany – Bettina
The Unsettlers – Montreal, QC – He’s Out of Nails
Peder – Copenhagen, Denmark – Numb Cinema
The Presets – Sydney, Australia – This Boy’s In Love
K’Naan – Mogadishu, Somalia – In the beginning
עברי לידר (Ivri Lider) – Tel Aviv, Israel – Bo
Lord Kitchener – Arima, Trinidad – London is the Place for me

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Other Locations…

Women Are Heroes
French installation artist, JR has plastered the roofs and walls of a Kenyan slum with large-scale photographs of local women so that they would be visible on Google Earth. The perception of this area in the outside world is dominated by mass media and his goal was to inspire onlookers to explore an alternate view.
Photographs:
http://www.woostercollective.com/2009/02/jr_finishes_his_most_ambitious_project_y.html
Video of similar exhibition in Paris:
http://www.womenareheroes-paris.net/fr/2009/10/14/video-une-nuit-avec-jr/

The Glue Society
God’s Eye View
One innovative viral marketing company created photographs based on key biblical stories as they would have appeared on Google Earth. I find this interesting not only because it is rather cheeky (as a lot of Google Earth/Maps art is), but because it points to Google Earth as a tool capable of lending credibility and reality to a story. “If it shows up on Google Earth, it must be true!”
http://www.gluesociety.com
http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2007/december/the-bible-according-to-google-earth
http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2008/march/the-people-behind-those-biblical-google-earth-images

BMW Map Drawing Contest
More creative advertising! Though I certainly don’t approve of the auto industry as a whole, this campaign by BMW is pretty eye-catching. They’re running a contest to find the best GPS map art. Effectively turning the planet into a Giant Etch-o-Sketch.
http://gps.bmw-motorrad.com/

Source Map
A site focused on sustainability that allows you to map the carbon footprint of your actions and possessions. The aim is to make people aware of the impact each decision and purchase has on the environment.
http://www.sourcemap.org/beta/stage/

Project 3: Urban Intervention

BREAKING NEWS:
After spending about 20 minutes locked in a stall in the lower floor girl’s washroom in the NB, the eyes and posterboard were in place and ready to go. I was eager to come back the following day and collect the pages I hoped would be filled with bathroom graffiti. To my surprise and great disappointment, however, when I came back the next day, nearly everything had been stripped away! The paper was gone, and so were the majority of the 15 pairs of eyes. I like to think that this was the work of students, and that someone a) wanted some good posterboard and b) more than one person wanted a pair of vinyl eyes of their very own.

I’ll never know, of course, but I did learn a valuable lesson when it comes to installation art: accept the temporal nature of your piece.

~~~~~~~

I’m fascinated with the relationship between private and public space, so the perfect spot seemed to be the bathroom, an area where we expect complete privacy while surrounded by others.

I had several ideas for this project, but the one I’m likely to choose is the one below which I call The Eyes Have It.

I wanted to take the area where we are usually most isolated and bring a voyeuristic element to it, hence covering the stall walls with eyes. The goal is to make people acutely aware of themselves at a given point in time and therefore – I hope – that they’d be more willing to use of the notepad that is there for people to write on, scribble on, draw on, etc. and which links the person in the stall with the outside world (though anonymously).

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Option 2

We’re so used to seeing and obeying signs, it might be interesting to test what would happen if you confronted people with arbitrary commands. Will they make conscious or unconscious decisions based on these directives simply because we are so accustomed to responding to these signs? I.e will people use the washrooms with check marks or “green light?”

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Option 3

The Large Print Giveth and the Small Print Taketh Away…

Inspired by a Tom Waits song, so I’m pretty partial to the it :p The idea being that everything comes with fine print, and wouldn’t it be ridiculous if instead of telling us that “such-and-such cellphone deal isn’t applicable in your area,” the it related to something we’re entitled to do, something necessary.

Other messages might read:

“This sanitary paper is not for personal use.”

“Flush mechanism should be activated in extreme emergencies only.”

Project 1: Panorama

I’d initially started working with a city skyline. It was pretty, but a little dull as far as a concept goes. But there’s something about being in these massive stores that makes me uncomfortable – who needs 27 choices when buying peanut butter? I’d be happy with 26 – and that seemed like a more interesting subject.

This is the final version of my panorama, and I’m fairly happy with the way this turned out.

Title: Supermarket Rush

This is an alternate version I’m not going to submit, but rather like nonetheless. (I tried splicing this together with the first one, but unfortunately it didn’t work…).

Title: Supermarket Rush V2