Eyebeam Art + Technology Center is looking for a part time (3 days/week) Communications Director to start August 1. Eyebeam Art + Technology Center is the nation's leading center for art and technology, offering artists and creative technologists paid residences in its Chelsea facility, in addition to a wide range of public programs.  

We are looking for a creative self-starter who can work closely with our staff and artists to tell the Eyebeam story. The candidate should be able to engage with audiences through both traditional and social media. Great writing skills, a good design sense, an ability to think strategically, and a collaborative approach are essential.  

Other criteria include: 

Contact E-mail: 

calls/communications-director" target="_blank">read more

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Eye To Eyebeam is a series on Eyebeam's residents and fellows. It includes interviews, photos, and other news and is authored by Eyebeam intern Katherine DiPierro. These interactive posts offer visitors the opportunity to learn more about Eyebeam's diverse community of creative practitioners.

Each week, you'll see interviews profiling individual Eyebeamers. Artists who have already engaged in conversation about their projects include:

read more

Join us for a reading by renowned Canadian poet bill bissett, followed by a discussion of his work by publisher Karl Siegler and author Carl Peters.

Organized in conjunction with the exhibition textual vishyuns: image and text in the work of bill bissett at The Reach Art Gallery and Museum in Abbotsford, April 17-June 29.

bill bissett is a renowned Canadian performance poet, painter, and multi-media artist. His most recent book is hungree throat / a novel in meditaysyun (Talonbooks). textual vishyuns: image and text in the work of bill bissett (The Reach Gallery Museum, Abbotsford) is his first solo exhibition since 1984.

Carl Peters is the author of textual vishyuns: image and text in the work of bill bissett (Talonbooks) and the curator of the first major exhibition of bissett’s work since 1984 at The Reach Gallery Museum. His next book, Studies in Description: Reading Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, is forthcoming from Talonbooks. His teaching explores the connections between film and avant-garde poetics, art, and artists.

The former publisher at Talonbooks, Karl Siegler is currently a freelance writer, translator, and cultural policy advocate/consultant. A charter student of SFU, where he earned a BA [Hons], MA, and a Distinguished Alumni Award for Arts and Cultural Achievement, he is currently an Associate of its Centre for the Humanities.

Shama Khanna is a London, UK based curator and writer. At Western Front Khanna will continue to develop Flatness, an ongoing research project engaging with the screen based image and immaterial culture in relation to the internet. Originating as a thematic program at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Flatness currently operates across multiple platforms including flatness.eu which features contributions by artists, writers and technologists engaging with the possibilities and limitations of the web as a creative site and a space for viewing. While in residence Khanna will convene a reading and discussion group around a weekly screening series. Please check front.bc.ca for forthcoming details.

Vancouver-based artist/filmmaker Casey Wei will embark on a new body of work at Western Front during a research and production residency. Wei’s collagist practice traverses through the personal and historical narratives through the use of single channel video, appropriated moving imagery and text. Most recently Wei’s first feature length film, Vater und Sohn/Father and Son/ 父与子 takes the form of a video essay that is part travelogue, part documentary, tracing the complex history of the Father and Son comic strip from her own memories of growing up in Shanghai read against its origin in Nazi Germany and Maoist China.

Call for Proposals
DIGITAL LABOR: SWEATSHOPS, PICKET LINES, AND BARRICADES

To be held at The New School, a university in New York City
NOVEMBER 14-16, 2014
#dl14

The third in The New School's Politics of Digital Culture Conference Series
Sponsored by The New School and The Institute for Distributed Creativity

Digital Labor: The Internet as Invisible Sweatshop, Picket Line, and
Barricade brings together designers, labor organizers, theorists, social
entrepreneurs, historians, legal scholars, independent researchers,
cultural producers -- and perspectives from workers themselves -- to
discuss emerging forms of mutual aid and solidarity.

 Over the past decade, advancements in software development, digitization,
an increase in computer processing power, faster and cheaper bandwidth and
storage, and the introduction of a wide range of inexpensive,
wireless-enabled computing devices and mobile phones, set the global stage
for emerging forms of labor that help corporations to drive down labor
costs and ward off

Hi Chris,

Hmm, I didn't recall that Ian's article was referring specifically to the video game industry but had the impression it was alluding to all forms of user-generated sharing. Maybe I got that wrong.

But yes I do imagine his article was at least in part driven by the reaction against the blind utopianism you refer to, a response I can definitely understand even at this remove from silicon valley where the resulting disparity is less visible.

And yes this discussion has been going on for a while, and I've disagreed with Trebor in the past around here about whether or not contributing 'user-generated content' to facebook and other social networks constitutes exploitation, in part for the reasons I mentioned in my post. Which is maybe why I thought the argument was about freely contributing to any online community and not the most obviously problematic cases of 'real work' being replaced by freely given labour.

I still believe that given the enormous opportunity (and need) that exists to invent and t

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

The latest video project by Edgardo Aragón – a finalist in the 2013 AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize – tracks bison across North American, in Wood Buffalo National Park in the Northwest Territories, in Yellowstone National Park and near Chihuahua in Mexico, his home country. We talked to him about the project, made possible by his AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize residency.

AGO: Of the three places you visited for your project, which was the most surprising, in terms of defying your expectations? Why?
Edgardo Aragón: I was very surprised and still I am about Fort Smith. Given the conditions under which people live in this place, it could seem impossible that there’s life there, but life exists, along with one of the strangest lights that I will ever see in my life.

Since going to these places, has your plan for the project changed?
Whenever I plan a new project, I always expect that the circumstances change the nature of the project itself. In this case the change happened, without a doubt. Natural conditions modify the project a great deal, complementing and giving body to it in a way that a sketch could not. I’m satisfied.

Many animal species migrate – why did you choose to focus on bison?
I chose the bison for two reasons. The first is that it had a natural frontier that would shift according to the climate conditions, modifying substantially the life of the First Nations people who depended on the bison to survive. They would conform to the bison’s behaviour. That’s why the project is not, in fact, trying to create a portrait of bison so much as one of the invisible men that has ceased to live in harmony with it.

The second reason is that this animal species does’t migrate. After nearly becoming extinct at the hands of the white man, it has endured some sort of domestication. Today it is a species in the process of recuperation in Mexico and Canada. It is curious to note that in the U.S., where there are more reserves, the bison is not a protected species and is limited to its territories. This domestication is an aspect of extermination as well, of the animal and its animal nature and, of course, of what little spirit of the First Nations people remains.

Why did you decide to use video for this project instead of still images?
Video is a more organic tool, more malleable. You can move it in many directions to generate a specific discourse or an open one. I think I choose video because I like having elements that are closer to a sense of physical presence, closer to the movement of the apparatus, to the presence of a witness and specifically to the manipulation of time. Duration plays a fundamental role in establishing the dimensions of the theme. The sounds of the places or the absence of such sounds plays a fundamental role in the atmospheres that I’m trying to convey and generate in the project.

When you gave an interview to the Northern Journal, you said, “In a way, the real subject of the video project does not exist…It’s an invisible phantom.” Can you elaborate on that? What is the real subject?
The subject I am portraying is the human who lived with the presence of the bison. That way of life is poorly understood by Eurocentric cultures. That was what I was interested in discovering or portraying. I followed the path of the bison because it represents the way First Nations people lived. All the vacant spaces left around the bison are the spaces left by earlier lives – lives lived within the cultural shock generated by contact with Europe – and the near-extermination of the bison. The creation of reserves for the native people of the Americas were really the extermination of a spirit that generated a sense of life.

With the westernisation of North America a philosophy of life was destroyed – a loss which we have not been able to fully understand yet. This is why I like to think about this video as a portrait of an invisible human being, a portrait of a philosophy of life inherent to the creative and cultural spirit of a human being that disappeared many years ago. The presence of reserves for human and animal species is only one of its forms of annihilation. This is the central objective of the project.

All photos courtesy of the artist. Keep up with this year’s Aimia | AGO Photography Prize on Twitter and Facebook.

On April 10, 2014, see artwork by Katie Bethune-Leamen, Bruno Billio, Jorden Blue Doody & David James Doody, Randy Grskovic, Sean Martindale, Hazel Meyer, Talwst and Artistic Director Justin Broadbent created exclusively for MASSIVE 10, the 10th anniversary of the AGO’s Massive Party fundraiser. In addition to these artists, we’re pleased to announce a musical lineup that will keep guests dancing all night long, including DJ Filthy Gorgeous, DJ Soundbwoy, Johnny Hockin and Joseph Of Mercury / Joseph & The Mercurials. Guests will also be treated to a birthday fête at the Aimia Photo Booth by Melanie Cantwell Designs where they will receive a memento of the evening. Guests will also be invited to interact with the Absolut Vodka installation by MAKELAB.

Massive Party tickets have sold out for the past four years running, so get your tickets now!

Artists and project details

Justin Broadbent

Katie Bethune-Leamen

Bruno Billio

Photo: Jade Rude

Jorden & David Doody

Randy Grskovic

Sean_Martindale

Photo: Cindy Blazevic.

Hazel Meyer

Talwst

Melanie Cantwell

Justin Broadbent
Justin Broadbent is back for his second year as Massive Party’s Artistic Director after the hugely successful Massive Party GOLD in 2013. He is an accomplished Toronto-based multi-disciplinary artist. His portfolio includes works in video performance, poems, funny ideas, illustration, design, shirt design, music video direction and installation. Justin is also a self-taught photographer. As a video director, Justin has worked with bands such as Shad, Metric, Serena Ryder and Classified. He has been nominated for five MuchMusic Video Awards, including Rock Video of the Year and Hip Hop Video of the Year. Justin’s other awards include a Juno for Record Package of the Year and a CBC Bucky Award for Music Video of the Year. Justin makes a point of choosing layered projects that challenge his expectations. His work often centres around meaning-of-life topics, which he delivers with a glimmer of charm and wit. Justin’s work is inspired by the impossibility of a seed becoming a tree, thrift stores, clever lyrics and human perseverance. He spends his spare time outdoors, looking at the world as if for the first time and adding to his collection of porcelain cat figurines that adorn the mantle of his Toronto home. Justin also likes rappers Creemore and David Shrigley.

Katie Bethune-Leamen
Katie Bethune-Leamen works in installation, sculpture, video and drawing. She received a BFA from Concordia University (Montreal) and a MFA from the University of Guelph. Katie has exhibited across Canada, in Iceland, Japan, France, Australia, the USA, the Netherlands, England, Australia and other countries. Recent solo exhibitions include Shiny Object Person (Young Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario). Recent residencies include Fogo Island Arts (Fogo Island, NL) and SIM (Reykjavik, IS), with ones upcoming at the Illulissat Art Museum (Ilulissat, GD) and The American Museum of Natural History (NYC). In 2012 Rick Rhodes, editor of Canadian Art magazine, listed her as one of the “Top 3 of 2012.” Katie is the recipient of numerous grants and awards. Her writing has appeared in Canadian Art, C Magazine, Border Crossings and others.

At MASSIVE 10 Katie will be bringing 10 artists into the Gallery to participate in art creation throughout the evening. Guests won’t want to miss the chance to watch creativity live as artists interpret the same reference image in 10 different ways.

Bruno Billio
Bruno Billio is a Canadian artist working from an interdisciplinary background. At once an installation artist, a sculptor and a designer, Bruno creates challenging works informed by his command of each of these practices. He is currently living and working in Toronto, and has been the resident artist at the Gladstone Hotel on Queen West, in the fashionable art gallery district in Toronto, for the past few years. Bruno Billio’s artistic practice is informed by the active displacement and staging of the found object, a contemporary art strategy with a historically established lineage. The everyday is reinterpreted through its spatial and contextual re-appropriation by the artist, who presents himself by proxy as both an interventionist and an inventor. Bruno has exhibited internationally in Milan, London, Miami, New York and Los Angeles. Bruno was also Massive Party’s Artistic Director from 2010-12 – shaping the vision for Massive Party Speakeasy, Marchesa Luisa Casati’s Massive Party and #thefutureofartis.

Jorden Blue Doody & David James Doody
Jorden Blue & David James Doody are both graduates from the University of British Columbia in Critical and Creative Studies. Although each artist offers a uniquely individual approach to the discourse of visual arts, they share a common focus on the materialism of cultural codification. Their combined individual practices have been heavily influenced by world travel and the cross pollination of mass media, ritual and fetishistic cultures. Their practice moves freely between new media, sculpture, and painting.

“As a collaborative team for the past seven years, we believe that communication has been the foundation of our artistic relationship. A common thread that can be traced throughout our work is that of collage. By sampling freely from a multitude of different sources, we are able to access unlimited individual histories, societal contexts and cultural symbols. For us, collage is more than just cut and paste, it is an immediate sense of being; it is our way of participating in the re-contextualization of our unfolding culture.” Through their open processes of art-making they allow happenstance to regurgitate cultural intuition in an act of artistic survival.

Randy Grskovic
Randy Grskovic is an artist and curator living in Toronto, Ontario. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts, in Advanced Media communication, from the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Randy has shown his artwork and curated others in exhibitions across Canada at galleries including Equinox and Centre A in Vancouver, V-Tape in Toronto, L’oeil de Poison in Quebec City and Eastern Edge in St. John’s, NL. Randy is the former owner of experimental short-term galleries including The Age of Info(rmation), Cutty Contemporary and Good Luck Art Gallery.

For MASSIVE 10, Randy will be honouring the AGO on a milestone event, congratulating all the Massive Party attendees who help make programming at the gallery possible, as well as cheering on the artists who helped create MASSIVE 10. His piece will provide encouragement to all involved while highlighting the spectacle inherent in the event. Don’t miss out on receiving the recognition you deserve as a Massive Party attendee.

Sean Martindale
Sean Martindale is an emerging and internationally recognized interdisciplinary artist and designer currently based in Toronto, Canada. His interventions activate public and semi-public spaces to encourage engagement, often focused on ecological and social issues. Sean’s playful works question and suggest alternate possibilities for existing spaces, infrastructures and materials found in the urban environment. Frequently, Sean uses salvaged goods and live plants in unexpected ways that prompt conversations and interaction.

Sean’s projects have been featured on countless prominent sites online, as well as in traditional media such as print, radio, broadcast television and film. His practice has a global following and has been written about in countries all around the world, and in multiple languages. Sean was profiled for the first episode of the CBC’s Great Minds of Design, one of his lectures was filmed by TVO for their Big Ideas series, and his work was also included in the feature-length documentary This Space Available, released in 2011.

Hazel Meyer
Hazel Meyer is a visual artist and sports enthusiast based in Toronto. She draws pictures, text and comics, makes letterpress prints, screen-printed multiples, broadcasts and constructs physical environments that are used for performance, collaboration, workshops and amateur athletics. From the monumental to the modest her projects range from immersive installations, to small woven tags meant for an audience of one. Much like the tag line of The Litter Game, a collaborative project she started with Lucy Pawlak and Jim Skuldt in 2013, her practice is devoted to a forever shifting ratio of endurance, transgression and laughs, as ways of being in one’s body and the world. She holds an MFA from OCAD University (Toronto), a BFA from Concordia University (Montréal) and shows her work in galleries, artist-run centers and festivals inter/nationally.

Keep an eye out throughout MASSIVE 10 for Hazel’s presentation of NADIA! NADIA! The piece centres around the 1976 Montréal Olympic Games and 14 year old Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci who received what was then the first ever 10 to be awarded at the Olympics. The scoreboard used at the time had not been engineered for the four numbers that make up an Olympic 10 (10.00), so it was displayed as 1.00. This moment of utter physical prowess and domination is made even more radical by the inability of the technology to be able to represent it. This discord is the starting point for NADIA! NADIA!.

TALWST
His practice is a study in extremes. As a musical performer, TALWST (né Curtis Santiago) is larger-than-life. As a visual artist, he has spent the better part of six years building miniature dioramas, entire worlds that fit in the palm of your hand. TALWST creates exquisite landscapes inhabited by vivid characters—hand-painted and reconstructed Preiser’s figurines—freezing memories and moments inside reclaimed ring boxes. From 2007 to 2010, he apprenticed under Aboriginal artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. In the past six years, TALWST has had six solo exhibitions in Toronto, New York, Edmonton and Vancouver. As a recording artist, he’s collaborated with Grammy-winning producer Illangelo to release his fourth solo album, Alien Tentacle Sex, to international acclaim in 2012.

For MASSIVE 10, TALWST is scaling up and exploring interactivity and spectatorship in a one-night-only piece. Dynasty 10-0 plays off the Massive party theme, 10, and builds on previous artwork examining Canadiana, race and identity construction. For Dynasty 10-0, TALWST is incorporating new media, textiles and performance. Influenced more by Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival than participatory art, TALWST seeks to create the same spirit of role-play, interaction and fete. Instead of traditional Carnival characters he has cast actors to portray hockey players and coach dressing for the fictional team the Massives. The participation of event attendees will play a pivotal part in how this happening unfolds.

Melanie Cantwell
Melanie Cantwell is an interior decorator, stylist and set designer. Originally from Prince Edward Island, Melanie now resides in downtown Toronto and has a number of art and interior design-based projects on her list of accomplishments, ranging from residential clients and styling for a variety of design-based photo shoots. Melanie is currently the set decorator on the Steven and Chris show on CBC where she oversees the set styling and manages the look and aesthetic of each individual segment. Melanie studied fine arts and graduated with accreditations in advertising and marketing from Sheridan College and interior decorating from George Brown College.

At MASSIVE 10, see Melanie’s set design at the Aimia photo booth. Guests will be able to have their photos taken while wishing the AGO’s Massive Party a “Happy 10th Birthday” surrounded by sweet confections, balloons and other special touches befitting of this milestone celebration.

Filthy Gorgeous
Filthy Gorgeous is the seductive alias of Toronto born DJ, Kristin Leeder. After bursting onto the scene in 2007, Filthy Gorgeous forged an identity with sensual, rhythmic styles that immediately set her apart from her peers. With sets that draw on cutting edge dance music Filthy Gorgeous has become known for a sound that is both rich and complex. She has performed with and received praise from the world’s top international superstar musician/DJs such as Skrillex, Drake, Disclosure, Annie Mac, Nero, Flight Facilities, The Twelves, Tensnake, Theophiles London, Fred Falk and Alvin Risk.

From playing at local Toronto hot spot, The Hoxton, to sold out shows at The Fillmore Miami Beach, New York’s Webster Hall, a regular at various SOHO House locations and special events during Winter Music Conference (WMC), Filthy Gorgeous always leaves the crowd wanting more. A favourite amongst the fashion crowd she has developed long-lasting relationships and played events for some of the world’s leading Fashion and Lifestyle brands. Filthy Gorgeous continues to win fans by building her reputation as an exciting international DJ talent. Constantly evolving and never afraid to take risks, she has made it clear that Filthy Gorgeous is one to watch out for.

Johnny Hockin
Johnny Hockin is a Canadian DJ, musician and multimedia producer. He is a local Toronto fixture, using his wide-ranging taste and an eclectic repertoire to link classic soul, disco, rock, hip hop and electronic music into a sound uniquely his own. He consistently plays for high-end corporate clients and some of the city’s favourite rooms (from Soho House to Thomson to the Drake Hotel to L’Oreal Fashion Week).

He is also known to many Canadians as the former face of movies on MTV Canada, interviewing hundreds of filmmakers and stars. Over the course of 5 years, Ryan Gosling brooded with him, Nic Cage looked at him funny, George Clooney charmed him, Jason Bateman made fun of his name and Justin Timberlake sang to him. Werner Herzog follows him on twitter.

DJ Soundbwoy
Wake up world. Wake up to the aural mindtrip that is the Soundbwoy experience. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada – the city that comes alive when everyone else is asleep – Soundbwoy is the embodiment of what is needed to lead the next generation of music connoisseurs into a new dimension of existence. Unbound by convention, Soundbwoy offers those in attendance the ability to transcend the dance floor and travel on paths only found in dream sequences. He is far from mash up yet incapable of being categorized by any one genre; a musical everyman blessed with the gift of virtuosity behind the turntables. From soulful gems found through countless hours of crate digging to the most ominous of house anthems from the sun swept beaches of Ibiza, a Soundbwoy party is like travelling with a master storyteller crafting his latest fairytale while touching the deepest parts of your imagination. Feel the party transform into your personal looking glass and let Soundbwoy guide you through his universe like no one else can.
Wake up world.

Joseph & The Mercurials / Joseph Of Mercury
Born to the dying synthesized bells of the 80s. Reincarnated from the velvet gentleman of the 50s. Stark Dark & Echo Heavy. Influenced more by the haunting sounds of nature & cinema than by music itself, Joseph spins cavernous worlds of light & ocean, longing & romance… all with nothing more than his voice & the mournful call of a swooning guitar. Seduced by the beauty of fashion & design, enraptured in its drama & detail, Joseph cloaks himself in the colours of their world, as they are enveloped by the echoes of his sound. Each song has found its rightful place among the works of Victoria’s Secret, RW&Co., Members Only, Stockholm S/S/A/W, Fashion Magazine, & V Spain. As if by desire & fate. Desire is everything.

For more information about MASSIVE 10, visit massiveparty.ca.

Tessa Thomas and a Toulouse-Lautrec poster.

The Samuel H. Kress Foundation provides yearly grants to cultural heritage institutions to support a conservation training fellowship; only nine awards for Kress Conservation Fellowships were presented for the 2013/2014 year and the AGO is pleased that the foundation selected us to receive a grant. Maria Sullivan, manager of Conservation at the AGO, calls the fellowship for emerging conservators — administered by the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation — “a unique opportunity for the AGO and for conservation training in Canada.”

“Having a Kress Fellow here in the AGO Paper Conservation Lab is such a wonderful way to engage with our fabulous collection, with dynamic discussion and sharing of conservation principles and techniques within a large collecting institution,” says Joan Weir, the AGO’s conservator, Works on Paper.

Fabric lining on the verso of a poster, 'Le Photographe Sescau' by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Top edge with visible threads from poster lining. 'Le Photographe Sescau' by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

As our Samuel H. Kress Fellow in Conservation, Tessa Thomas’s work is focused on the conservation of Ross R. Scott and Donald R. Muller’s recent remarkable donation to the Gallery: more than 75 posters, prints and drawings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and artists in his circle. The poster revolution of the late 19th century transformed the city of Paris, created an obsession with colour lithography among leading artists and shaped the future of printmaking, poster design and advertising. More than a century later we are still captivated by images of the notorious celebrities of the Belle Époque and with the ambiance of the cabarets, cafés and dance halls.

To begin, Thomas completed a condition survey of the collection to identify the overall condition of works within the donation and to distinguish the unique characteristics of each work by visual examination. The initial survey gave insight into the broad spectrum of materials within the collection and provided interesting findings. For example, there are a few posters that have revenue stamps that denote which posters may have been displayed publicly when they were first printed in the late 19th century. Many of the posters show ink stamps, but one poster in the collection has a unique paper stamp, as seen below.

The range in size of the posters is also quite significant, with the largest posters measuring between 160 to 164 centimetres high by 115 to 122 centimetres wide. Any major conservation treatment of these works is sure to present unique challenges and require special considerations. As a result, the next step for the treatment of the collection will be to determine treatment priorities and develop a treatment methodology for the posters. Thomas’s research into the production of Belle Époque posters includes looking into the history and practice of the lining of posters, including past and present preservation techniques. Look out for more posts on her progress as the project continues.

About Tessa
Tessa Thomas is the current Samuel H. Kress Fellow in Conservation at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Tessa is a graduate of the Queen’s University Master of Art Conservation Program and was the recipient of the 2011 Emerging Conservator Award presented by the Canadian Association for Conservation of Cultural Property (CAC). Tessa specializes in the conservation of paper objects and brings with her experience in conservation and collections care from cultural heritage institutions in Canada and abroad, including The National Archives, London, England; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Royal Ontario Museum and the Archives of Ontario.

Curious about Conservation?
If you have a burning question about Conservation, leave a comment below. We’ll do our best to give you an answer in an upcoming Conservation Notes post.

Signature Partner of the AGO’s Conservation Program

Still struggling with the seasonal shopping? It doesn't all have to be trawling through Amazon or fighting the crowds at Churchill Square. Christmas is the perfect opportunity to support the arts and buy something truly special. Here are three of the best places in Brighton to buy creative Christmas gifts.

The post ART: Where to buy artist-made Christmas gifts in Brighton appeared first on Brighton Culture.

Anthem for Doomed Youth Wilfred Owen called his most famous poem. In 1917, when he wrote it, "doom" was no overstatement. Hundreds of thousands of healthy teenagers would not see the age at which they could vote, their names (but nothing else) to "live on" scratched on war memorials. Pointless immortality.

Literature has always echoed with the gloomy anthems of doomed youth, from Hamlet's first outburst about how weary, stale and unprofitable seem to him the uses of the world (if the prince of Denmark thought his condition unprofitable, he should have tried getting by in Elsinore with a jobseeker's allowance of whatever £57.35 is in kroner). Continue reading...

I have always taught my children to be honest. Which is ridiculous, really, when you think about it. My wife always says that the truth is over-rated. She may or may not be right, but it certainly is underused. Lies of one kind or another let's call them "loving lies" dominate family life. Here are just a few of them.

1. When you die you go to heaven Continue reading...

Steven Gerrard, Eden Hazard, Adam Lallana, Daniel Sturridge, Luis Suárez and Yaya Touré are the six players nominated for this year's Professional Footballers' Association's Players' Player of the Year award.

Continue reading...

I questioned the Russian president live on TV to get his answer on the record, not to whitewash him

Edward Snowden defends decision to question Putin Continue reading...

Managers often complain that they do not get a good view from the touchline but this time it could not have been better. Carlo Ancelotti called it "perfect". From where he stood, the Real Madrid coach watched in awe as barely metres away Gareth Bale started the sprint that ended with him scoring what he admitted was the "biggest" goal of his career: a 50-metre gallop that won the Copa del Rey for Real Madrid. Alongside Ancelotti was Madrid's assistant coach Paul Clement. "I'm not sure I have ever seen a goal like that," he said.

There was a moment at the start of the run when the nearest anyone from Barcelona got to Bale was their manager Tata Martino. The Welshman's first touch had been on the half way line and as he pushed it past Marc Bartra he was buffeted off the pitch but he did not stop. Instead he sped by like a racing car using the pit lane to overtake, screeching back on to the track in the lead. As he passed Martino and accelerated, sprinting in a long arc, he tore through Barcelona's technical area, where the turf slopes downwards away from the field. Continue reading...

Nami Yokoyama Exhibition
at Harmas Gallery (Kiyosumi, Ryogoku area)
(2014-03-15 - 2014-04-26)

The Nami Yokoyama was awarded the Toru Kuwakubo Prize at Petit Geisai #15 in 2011 and is featured as a young artist in the “Reaching for Realism” exhibition at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art. Focusing on still lifes, Yokoyama does not conceal her respect for modern Japanese artists. The simple and everyday nature of the motifs in their works resonates deeply with her, and she too has turned her attention to the commonplace, choosing bean sprouts as a subject of her art. Although only a single sprout spreads across the canvases of many of her works, these paintings stir strong and lingering emotions, as if projecting the life experiences of the viewer. In addition to her beansprout paintings, which display her growing compositional skills, this exhibition presents works with new motifs. This assembly of old and new works demonstrates Yokoyama’s steady progress an artist taking an earnest look at daily life in Japan.

POCORART Declares! 2014
at 3331 Arts Chiyoda (Chiyoda area)
(2014-04-05 - 2014-05-18)

54 artists who have featured in the 4 POCORART National Open Call Exhibitions to date, are especially selected for an exhibition which goes beyond the definitions of artist, people with disabilities and those without, going beyond age, background and experience, to return to a more central core of relations between people and art work. POCORART opens up a world beyond that of art brut and outsider art, revealing a pure form of art which transforms our perceptions of the everyday. [Related Events] POCORART Talk Show 1 Date: 4/5(Sun) 14:00-16:00 Speaker:Kenjiro Hosaka (Chief curator of The National Museum of Western Art) POCORART Talk Show 2 Date: 4/13(Sun) 14:00-16:00 Speakers: O Jun, Masato Kobayashi, Masato Nakamura For further details please refer to the official website.

Tsubaki-kai 2014— Shoshin (Beginner’s Mind)
at Shiseido Gallery (Ginza, Marunouchi area)
(2014-04-10 - 2014-05-25)

The Tsubaki-kai is a group show held at Shiseido Gallery every year since 1947. While its members change, the exhibition has continued for nearly 70 years. Last year’s joining members were Genpei Akasegawa, Naoya Hatakeyama, Rei Naito, Zon Ito, and Ryoko Aoki. With the March 11th, 2011 disaster prominently in their minds, these new members chose the exhibition subtitle “Shoshin”. According to the New Shinmeikai Kokugo Jiten (Sanseido), the phrase “shoshin” (beginner’s mind) refers to that purity of thought and feeling occurring when one first sets out to do something new. The 14th century Noh actor and playwright Zeami explained the expression “keep a beginner’s mind” as maintaining, throughout all the stages of life, that same spirit of challenge first experienced when first taking up a new endeavor. In the wake of such an unexpected disaster as the earthquake on March 11th in 2011, the process of picking up the pieces and moving forward has furnished these new Tsubaki-kai members with an opportunity to reconsider questions like what a beginner’s mind means, and what their reasons have been for creating things, and this mutual awareness among all of the members led them to select this as the theme for their coming exhibitions. Genpei Akasegawa presents dozens of pencil drawings of classic cameras, Naoya Hatakeyama displays two series of photographs capturing the artificial in natural environments, Rei Naito unveils “Color Beginning”, a new work expressing the origins of color with vivid overlapping hues, Zon Ito exhibits new drawings for “Architecture of Invisible Lands”, a work about the lives of living things that exist alongside human beings, and Ryoko Aoiki offers new watercolors of plants. [Related Event] Special Talk: Naoya Hatakeyama × Kiyokazu Washida (Philosopher, Director of Sendai Mediatheque,Professor at Otani University) Date & Time: May 9th, 2014 18:00 - 20:00 Venue: Shiseido Hanatsubaki Hall (Shiseido Ginza Building 3F) Capacity：150 guests (reservations required) Free Please see the official website for details.

Voices Calling from the Unusual: Hirano Keiichiro’s Selection of Western Art Masterpieces
at National Museum Of Western Art, Tokyo (Ueno, Yanaka area)
(2014-04-08 - 2014-06-15)

Since his debut novel in 1998, L’Eclipse, the major young writer Keiichiro Hirano has published a string of works reflecting his deep knowledge of Western culture, as well as displaying an visual experimentation with text through letter spacing and margins. Here Hirano takes on the role of guest curator and presents his artistic vision through a selection of works drawn primarily from the NMWA collection. Brought together under the title “Voices Calling from the Unusual”, the works here speak of Hirano’s personal artistic and visual sensibilities, with scenes of wonder and fascination, extending beyond the ordinary, accompanied by Hirano’s own analysis, bringing the visitor’s gaze to meet with that of his own.

“Balthus: A Retrospective”
at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (Ueno, Yanaka area)
(2014-04-19 - 2014-06-22)

Born as Balthasar Michel Klossowski de Rola, Balthus(1908-2001) is respected as one of the last great masters of the 20th century, put on par with Picasso. His silent landscapes which appear to be frozen in time and interior images inhabited by young girls, his ideal of beauty’s perfection, are filled with a mysterious tension which continues to enchant wide audiences. But with his work dispersed between collections across the globe, there have only been rare chances to see collections of his oeuvre in Japan, making this exhibition, the largest retrospective of his work since his death, of marked importance, showcasing 40 oil paintings amongst, sketches and other familiar objects. [Related Event] Family Day Every 3rd Saturday and following Sunday of the month is family day, with half price entry for families with children under 18 years old. Dates: 4/19(Sat), 4/20(Sun), 5/17(Sat), 5/18(Sun), 6/14(Sat), 6/15(Sun)

SICF15: Spiral Independent Creators Festival 15
at Spiral (Omotesando, Aoyama area)
(2014-05-03 - 2014-05-06)

This year golden week is set yet again to welcome a flood of over 100 creators upon Spiral Hall as part of the Spiral Independent Creators Festival (SICF). With a tide of unique creativity pouring across the numerous booths and grand prizes awarded by jury panel and audience votes, this show searches out the leading artists and designers of the future. Schedule A 3rd May (Sat)- 4th May (Sun) 11:00-19:00 B 5th May (Mon)- 6th May (Tues) 11:00-19:00 Venue: Spiral Hall (Spiral 3F)

Voting won’t begin until late summer, but the 2014 Aimia | AGO Photography Prize is well underway. Over the past few months, individuals around the world have been researching and discussing exciting new ideas and directions in fine art photography and putting forward the names of artists whose recent work has shown extraordinary potential. The nominators — a group of 13 curators, critics and artists — submit two artists each for inclusion on the long list, and then a three-person jury selects a short list of four. Later this year, the shortlisted artists’ work will be exhibited at the AGO and online, and the public vote will decide who wins the $50,000 CAD prize.

We’re happy to introduce you to this year’s jury, led by the AGO’s associate curator of photography, Sophie Hackett, and we hope you’ll follow along as the Prize develops in 2014. Keep an eye out for long-list and short-list announcements in the coming months, and follow the Aimia | AGO Photography Prize on Facebook and Twitter for more news.

This year’s jury:

Sophie Hackett is the Associate Curator, Photography, at the Art Gallery of Ontario and adjunct faculty in Ryerson University’s master’s program in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management. She has contributed to several Canadian art magazines, international journals and monographs, and she has curated or co-curated several exhibitions and public projects at the AGO, including Suzy Lake: Rhythm of a True Space (2008); Barbara Kruger: Untitled (It) (2010); “Where I was born…”: A Photograph, a Clue and the Discovery of Abel Boulineau (2011); Songs of the Future: Canadian Industrial Photographs, 1858 to Today (2011); Album: A Public Project (2012) and Light My Fire: Some Propositions about Portraits and Photography (2013-2014), a wide-ranging consideration of the photographic portrait, drawn from the AGO’s permanent collection. Upcoming projects include What It Means To be Seen: Photography and Queer Visibility and Fan the Flames: Queer Positions in Photography — both opening in June 2014. She is the lead juror for the 2014 AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize, a role she also held in 2010 and 2012.

Laurie Simmons (b.1949, USA) stages photographs and films with paper dolls, finger puppets, ventriloquist dummies and costumed dancers as “living objects,” animating a dollhouse world suffused with nostalgia and colored by an adult’s memories, longings, and regrets. Simmons’ work blends psychological, political, and conceptual approaches to art-making, transforming photography’s propensity to objectify people, especially women, into a sustained critique of the medium. She has received many awards, including the Roy Lichtenstein Residency in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome (2005), and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1997) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1984). She has had major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art; San Jose Museum of Art, California; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and she has participated in two Whitney Biennial exhibitions (1985, 1991) and was included in the 2013 Venice Biennial. Her work is represented in many noted collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

Okwui Enwezor is a Nigerian-born, German-based scholar, curator, and writer and has been director of Haus der Kunst since October 2011. He was adjunct curator at International Center of Photography, New York, and previously adjunct curator of Contemporary Art, at the Art Institute of Chicago. Enwezor has served as the artistic director of several leading biennials and international exhibitions and in December 2013 he was appointed as director of the Visual Arts Sector of the 56th Biennale di Venezia. Enwezor’s curatorial credits include exhibitions presented in museums and venues across the U.S., Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, including Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, PS1 / MoMA, New York and the National Gallery of Canada. Enwezor has received numerous awards and honors for his work including an honourary fellowship from the Royal College of Art, London (2010) and an award for Curatorial Excellence from Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture, Bard College (2009). He lives in Munich and New York.

This year’s nominators were:

• Grant Arnold, Audain Curator of British Columbia Art, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver
• Veronica Cordeiro, curator, Centro de Fotografía de Montevideo, Uruguay
• Moyra Davey, artist and nominee for the 2010 Aimia | AGO Photography Prize (then called the Grange Prize)
• Jon Davies, associate curator, Oakville Galleries
• Gary Dufour, adjunct associate professor, University of Western Australia and former chief curator/deputy director, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth
• Tamar Garb, Durning Lawrence Professor in the History of Art, University College, London, U.K.
• Gauri Gill, artist and winner of the 2011 Aimia | AGO Photography Prize (then called the Grange Prize)
• Marie-Josée Jean, head of the VOX Contemporary Image Centre, Montreal
• Mami Kataoka, chief curator, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo
• Beatrix Ruf, director/curator, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich
• Jonathan Shaughnessy, associate curator, Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
• Brian Sholis, associate curator of Photography at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati
• Kim Simon, curator, Gallery TPW, Toronto

More than 140,000 people visited The Great Upheaval: Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910-1918 at the Art Gallery of Ontario between November 30, 2013, and March 2, 2014. The exhibition was a rare opportunity to see works by a large group of outstanding artists — including Chagall, Kandinsky, Matisse, Modigliani, Mondrian and Picasso — from the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

The exhibition’s attendance ranks it close to other recent popular exhibitions at the Gallery: Ai Weiwei: According to What? and David Bowie is both drew crowds of about 145,000 each.

Thanks to everyone who helped bring it together, inside and outside the Gallery, especially to our friends at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, lead sponsor BMO Financial Group, generous supporters Gail & Mark Appel and Joan & Jerry Lozinski and hotel partner Eaton Chelsea Toronto. And to all 142,360 of you who visited the exhibition: we hope you’ll be back. Keep sharing your thoughts with us on Facebeook and at @agotoronto on Twitter and Instagram.

The Guggenheim exhibit at the @agotoronto was the best exhibit I've seen at the AGO yet! Definetly worth a visit if your in #Toronto #Art

— Jessica Lim (@jessica_m_lim) February 17, 2014

Very cool to see @agotoronto's Great Upheaval exhibition jam-packed today. Stunning collection and such a great way to spend a Sunday.

— ashley bursey (@ashbursey) February 9, 2014

The Great Upheaval: Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910-1918 was made possible by lead sponsor BMO Financial Group, generous supporters Gail & Mark Appel and Joan & Jerry Lozinski and hotel partner Eaton Chelsea Toronto.

Paul Graham,
Untitled (Smoking girl in orange light), 1996–98, from the series end of an age.
Chromogenic print, 179.5 x 133.7 cm.
Gift of Alison and Alan Schwartz, 2000. 2000/1348 © Paul Graham; courtesy Pace Gallery and Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.

Click to play:

Download 57.1MB MP3

Recorded: Oct. 17, 2013, at Jackman Hall, Art Gallery of Ontario
Duration: 1:23:13

Paul Graham is a British photographer based in New York. Lauded as “a profound force for renewal of the deep photographic tradition of engagement with the world,” he was awarded the 2012 Hasselblad award for major achievements in photography.

In conjunction with the exhibition Light My Fire: Some Propositions about Portraits and Photography

Generously supported by Penny Rubinoff

Yoshihito Ozawa “Voice”
at Claska 8F The 8th Gallery (Ebisu, Daikanyama area)
(2014-04-13 - 2014-04-19)

Examining the relationship between nature and humankind this photography exhibition also includes a cafe space and photo opportunity panel.

Eiki Mori “Intimacy”
at IMA Concept Store (Roppongi, Nogizaka area)
(2014-03-15 - 2014-04-20)

IMA Books presents nine works from Eiki Mori’s photo collection “Intimacy” in celebration of its acceptance of the 39th Kimura Ihei Award. [Related Event] Photography Workshop “Another Intimacy” Participants explore another kind of intimacy as they join to make fake couples and fake families especially for the camera. Photographer: Eiki Mori Date: April 19(Sat) 19:00- Admission: ￥6000

Yuki Toyama + Taiji Kawai “Piano and Forest Presents: Osorezan”
at G/P Gallery (Ebisu, Daikanyama area)
(2014-04-11 - 2014-04-20)

G/P Gallery is pleased to announce its next exhibition, “Osorezan”, presented by Piano and Forest, a publishing label founded by Yuki Toyama and Taiji Kawai in 2012. Toyama graduated with a degree in Visual Arts and was selected for the Hitotsubo Award in 2006. Her work has been featured in several solo exhibitions and group shows both in Japan and abroad. “Osorezan” is composed of photography by Toyama and text by Kawai. These works were first presented in planetary photo books before the “Osorezan Poster Edition” was published by Piano and Forest. How do the independent forms of photography and text share a single space? Is this even possible? This exhibition raises and attempts to answer these questions. The “Osorezan” planetary photo books, the “Osorezan Poster Edition”, and other related works will be on sale during the exhibition.

Yosuke Takeda “Stay Gold— Digital Flare”
at Kurenboh Chohouin Buddhist Temple Gallery (Ueno, Yanaka area)
(2014-03-26 - 2014-04-27)

“Stay Gold,” the title of this exhibition, comes from the 1983 Francis Ford Coppola film “The Outsiders.” Photographer Yusuke Takeda attempts to capture the light contained in moments precisely because they are difficult to preserve. “Digital Flare” is a new series produced with (allegedly) wrong techniques. It shows, in a simple way, that photography (straight photography) is not a record of reality. Takeda uses camera lenses from past decades to show the contrast between natural and artificial “remnants of light.” Open 10:00–4:00 on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday by appointment only (please email for reservations). Only one viewer may enter the space at a time. Last entry at 3:00.

”Young Portfolio Acquisitions 2013”
at Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts (Greater Tokyo area)
(2014-03-21 - 2014-06-29)

Unlike many other competitions this event allows artists under 35 to submit their work as many times as they wish and allows the possibility for their work to be selected for acquisition on numerous occasions. This contest seeks out the strength of expression and promise of future progress, with high originality which breaks out of established frames. Through the collection of young artists’ work this event aims to add further courage to emerging creatives and further disseminate their work through databases and publishing. This event was first initiated in 1995 and up until now has received over 100,000 entries from 74 countries around the world, creating a platform to engage with artists of numerous regions, perspectives and approaches which we will come to see blossom even further in the future.

Call My Name— The Dogs and Cats Living in the Nuclear Disaster Zone”" />
Yutaka Kamimura “Call My Name— The Dogs and Cats Living in the Nuclear Disaster Zone”
at Gallery ef (Ueno, Yanaka area)
(2014-04-23 - 2014-05-26)

The explosion at Fukushima Nuclear Reactor 1 in March, 2011 resulted in a high concentration of radioactive material falling on the village of Iitate, which lies within a 30–50 kilometer radius of the plant. After more than a month of confusion, the entire village was designated as an evacuation zone, and residency there for its more than six thousand former inhabitants is still restricted today. As pets are not permitted in the temporary evacuation housing, for three years now dogs and cats have been kept by virtually homeless owners in a place that has lost its assumption of a normal lifestyle. Cat photographer Yutaka Kamimura, who continues to feed these animals, presents a two-year documentation of life in photographs of dogs and cats that continue to survive against the backdrops of a beautiful mountain town and its season scenery and the cruelty of the nuclear disaster.

Award 2014" />
Days Japan International Photojournalism Award 2014
at Konica Minolta Plaza (Shinjuku area)
(2014-04-25 - 2014-05-08)

Since 2005 Konica Minolta Plaza has collaborated with the photo journalism magazine “Days Japan” to exhibit works divulging the true shape of the world through the eyes of photo journalists across the globe. This year more than 6,000 photos were submitted in the 10th annual competition. On display are the winners of the first, second, and third Grand Prizes, the Special Jury Prize, and a Public Prize. A special selection of Days Japan’s popular “Surprising Animal Photos” is also presented.

Today is International Migrants Day. Last week, I wrote about the failed deportation of Isa Muaza. Yesterday, Unity Centre Glasgow announced that another appeal by Muaza’s legal team had failed, and he was rescheduled for deportation, alongside a large number of others, on Tuesday night.

I heard at about 7pm that several detainees had been loaded onto vans at Harmondsworth Detention Centre and were on the move. I didn’t know where they were headed, but I knew that many previous flights had left from the private aviation area at Stansted Airport, a largely un-signposted collection of car parks and hangars on the western side of the airport. I arrived there at 8, just in time to see the first of several coaches and security vans, together with a police escort, arrive at the Inflite Jet Centre, a private customs and handling facility mostly used by private jets.

The coaches, five in all and probably from several different detention centres, arrived between 8 and 9, and were accompanied by silver vans bearing the logo of security company Tascor, formerly Reliance, who took over the role of deportation escorts from G4S in 2011 following the death of Jimmy Mubenga. Tascor has a page on its website called Our Values, where it boasts: “We steer clear of politics”. Most of the coaches were from WH Tours in Crawley, although one bore the bright yellow sun and jaunty typography of Just Go!

It is profoundly uncomfortable watching anonymous people of colour being loaded on and off vans and planes in the middle of the night under tight security. When you know a little of the background of the detainees, when you read their claims of torture and violence, their long battles to secure asylum, the institutional racism and homophobia, it’s terrible. But even without knowing these things, the manner in which it is done should tell you everything you need to know. The British Human Rights lawyer Gareth Peirce writes in Dispatches from the Dark Side, on UK complicity in torture, that “what is in fact the law precisely mirrors instinctive moral revulsion” but that “in this country, the government hardly needs such acceptance, since here the additional and crucial factor is that the public is unlikely to be given sufficient information to trigger revulsion.” Hence the night, the private terminals, charter flights, the hired coaches. All of this is deliberate: it is a policy of not being seen.

The detainees were kept on the coaches for some time, and there appeared to be some confusion about when they were going to depart. It’s standard practice in this situation to bring extra “reserve” deportees to the airport without warning, a practice condemned as inhumane by some MPs and the Inspector of Prisons. Before deportation, each detainee is issued with a plane ticket which gives the flight time – 22:20hrs in this case – and a flight number. As the flights are chartered, the flight number – here PVT091 – is internal, so it’s impossible to find out more details about it, except by going to the airport. The Home Office has been running deportation charter flights for some time, under as much secrecy as they can get away with, and refuses to disclose the companies involved in case it damages their commercial relationships. The ongoing deportation of Nigerians on charter flights is called “Operation Majestic”, but there are regular flights to many other countries, including “popular destinations” such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. Corporate Watch published a comprehensive report on what they call collective expulsion last month.

On the tarmac by the jet centre sat a Titan Airways 767. Titan Airways is based at Stansted, and describes itself as “the UK’s most prestigious charter airline.” Its fleet ranges from small business aircraft to widebodied airliners:

Since it’s foundation in 1988, Titan Airways has grown into the UK’s most prestigious charter airline, specialising in bespoke air charter, tour operator programmes and high end / corporate air travel as well as airline sub charter and aircraft leasing. It brings the very best standards of care and comfort to all its passengers. Once safely aboard, they can relax and enjoy our superb in-flight service and a wide choice of cuisine and fine wines to complete the experience. Titan’s modern, reliable aircraft can operate from all major international and regional airports day and night, 365 days a year.

It’s cold, and wet, and dark, and some of the deportees have been sitting on board coaches for hours, while Tascor guards mill about, smoke and chat. As it approached midnight, there was more activity around the plane, and it appeared that all the deportees were on board as the coaches left the terminal compound empty and parked up outside. (The next day, Unity tells me that two people were taken off the flight at the last minute, but those people estimated that around 80 Nigerians and Ghanaians were on board, including Isa Muaza, who was taken straight to hospital on arrival in Lagos, and a woman who married a British citizen two years ago, and was not expected to be deported).

You can watch flights taking off from the far side of the airport, from a muddy lane alongside the north end of the runway. On the way over to it, I was stopped by the Police, who had been told I had been seen around the private aviation area. They were happy that I was a ‘spotter’ looking for planes – and advised me to join Essex Police’s Plane Watch scheme – but also warned me that the private aviation section was a restricted area, and I shouldn’t go there.

At 00:27, the Titan Airways 767 roared down the Stansted runway and into the night. Moments before, its call-sign appeared on Flightradar: AWC48A. And from there, an aircraft registration number: G-POWD.

We can see G-POWD on approach to Lagos a little after 6am. Two hours later, it’s on the move again, making the hop westwards from Lagos to Accra, the capital of Ghana, where it makes another stop. And then at 11am it appears to lift off back in the direction of London – at time of writing, it is probably somewhere over North Africa.

When I got back to my car around 1, I had a flat battery, and had to wait for a repair man. When he arrived, and I explained what I was doing in this godforsaken place, he told me he’d been at the Inflite Terminal recently too, to jump-start a brand-new Tascor transporter van, whose driver told him these flights happen all the time, and nobody knows about it, not even most of the people who work at the airport. “Makes you think,” he said. “Makes you think.”

*

Photos are available at Flickr

For some time, I have been threatening to write about the Render Ghosts. I was asked to contribute something to Electronic Voice Phenomena, an online literature and art project by Mercy and Penned in the Margins, and so I wrote about my recent trip to New Mexico, in search of the Render Ghosts:

I first noticed the Render Ghosts on the hoardings surrounding a new development near Finsbury Square. On the balconies of some vast, virtual tower, two pixelated figures looked out over a darkened London, a perfect red-pink gradient sunset behind them. He had short dark hair and stubble, wore a black jacket and blue jeans. She had a cropped red bob, white jacket, and a purple knee-length skirt. I didn’t know who they were, but I started seeing them everywhere.

Read the full piece over at EVP.

I also have a short essay and illustrations in the wonderful new Visual Editions‘ book of writing and maps, Where You Are, which also includes contributions from Joe Dunthorne, Geoff Dyer, Olafur Eliasson, Sheila Heti, and more.

To ask “Where You Are” invites a series of responses: cartographic, historical, social, spiritual, situational; discursive or prescriptive. The GPS system is a monumental network that provides a permanent “You Are Here” sign hanging in the sky, its signal a constant, synchronised timecode. It suggests the possibility that one may never need be lost again; that future generations will grow up not knowing what it means to be truly lost.

The book is available to order now, but you can read the essay, and see the illustrations (much beautified by the designers at Bibliothèque), alongside all the other contributions on the Where You Are website.

The astute among you might notice a strong similarity between the diagrams in Where You Are and the piece I made for Container some months back:

This 3D-printed object is the same thing under discussion in Where You Are:

This is a model of the Global Positioning System (GPS), a constellation of 24 satellites, in six orbital groups of four satellites, each orbital plane at 55 degrees inclination, and 60 degrees right ascension to its neighbour, 20,200 kilometres above the surface of the earth; a machine we are all living inside.

I’d had the original model sitting on my desk for some time before Tim asked me for a contribution to Container. In trying to draw and understand the GPS system as an abstract machine, I’d modelled the constellation in Sketchup – it was a natural step to flip-flop this nest of intersecting cones of influence back into the physical realm again, so that I could roll it between my fingers, as Einar and I did with airfix models of the drones, before the shadows (Einar’s own thinking about GPS, with Timo and Jørn, led to the Satellite Lamps project.) I call this the “Close Encounters” method.

A while back, I started the Laaaaaaandsat tumblr, which automatically posts, several times a day, every image released by the USGS Landsat observation programme – an ongoing, comprehensive survey of the planet by another satellite, 700km above the earth’s surface.

The endless stream of off-kilter images – reoriented so North is ‘up’ – remains a endless source of pleasure. So when Aperture magazine asked for 200 words on “What Matters Now” in photography, I thought of this little robot cameraman in the sky. 200 words is not enough, but it’s in the new issue.

NASA’s Landsat is the longest-running program dedicated to photographing the Earth from space, and has created millions of images since its inception in 1969. The first satellite, Landsat 1, was launched on July 23, 1972, atop a Delta 900 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Its mission was to photograph the whole Earth using three cameras which see both visible light and the near-infrared, and a four-channel multispectral scanner. The scanner was the project’s greatest innovation as it reveals hidden details about the planet’s surface, producing data and imagery used for everything from disaster relief, to agriculture, to studying climate change.

In February of this year, the program continued with the launch of Landsat 8. This incarnation features a more powerful scanner which sees in the ultraviolet; the panchromatic; the shortwave, near-, and thermal-infrared; revealing the presence of dust and smoke, of chlorophyll, of sub-surface rock formations, and the shape of clouds. The satellite captures four hundred images every day, creating a complete picture of the planet every sixteen days. Every one of these images is in the public domain, allowing every one of us to use, benefit from, and marvel at this ever-growing, ever-changing automated portrait of our planet.

This week I was due to install another Drone Shadow, this one in Brisbane, Australia (that’s a planning mock-up, above). I had been invited by the Brisbane Writers Festival, and we had received permission from the Queensland State Library to install the work on their premises. Unfortunately, due to the actions of Arts Queensland, the department of the State Government with overall responsibility for the arts, it has been impossible to proceed with the work. The actions of Arts Queensland in this case have been both incredibly frustrating and boringly familiar: they have stalled, dissembled, obfuscated and lied, all in the service of silencing an artistic work and preventing a proper debate occurring, either about the work, or the government’s censorship of it. (For the record, there is a full account of my dealings with Arts Queensland available here.)

I’ve often been asked if I have got into any kind of trouble for creating the Drone Shadows before, and the answer has always been no. This is despite the fact that we have drawn them in Istanbul, during a period when the Turkish government was in negotiation to purchase Predator drones from the US, and in Washington DC – right next to the White House – at the height of the US drone war. But apparently the image – the bare outline – of a drone was too much for the government of Queensland.

In Istanbul we drew a Predator, in DC a Reaper. In Brisbane I proposed to draw a Global Hawk, the largest military unmanned aircraft currently in service. Late last year it was revealed that the United States flew secret Global Hawk spy missions from Air Force bases in Australia in 2001-2006. The programme was revealed by a group of amateur aviation historians who tracked the Global Hawks arriving and taking off. When they revealed details of the flights, they were visited by Australian defence security officials who demanded they not reveal details of the flights. An Australian senator who proposed to notify the public of the flights was silenced by the US Air Force, which demanded the flights remain classified.

Since then, Australia has been in prolonged negotiations with the US to purchase Global Hawks itself, announcing an AU$1 billion programme in 2004, rising to AU$3 billion in 2012. The latest election, which takes place quite coincidentally this Saturday, has led to further fierce debates over Australian defence and the drone program.

Australia’s domestic drone program is primarily aimed at “securing borders”, and its preference for maritime versions of the Global Hawk is due to the need for surveillance of immigration by sea. This program aims to ensure, in the words of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in July 2013, that “any asylum seeker who arrives in Australia by boat will have no chance of being settled in Australia as refugees”, by shifting the problem to neighbouring countries such as Papua New Guinea. There is also a long history of asylum claimants being housed at former Air Force bases – and a long history of government objection to artworks dealing with the subject: see for example the story of Escape from Woomera, a political computer game about a detention camp in a remote Australian Defence Force base in South Australia.

One of the many reasons given by Arts Queensland for their opposition to the installation of the Drone Shadow was the opening at the Queensland Museum next door of an exhibition of thousands-year-old artefacts from Afghanistan, to which members of the local Afghan community had been invited. Arts Queensland expressed their view (after several weeks of denying any such issue) that this community might be made uncomfortable by the work. The community was never consulted, and the Museum itself raised no objection. Arts Queensland called it a “raw issue”. Indeed it is.

Australia’s Defence Forces have been involved in the war in Afghanistan since 2001. This contribution has included ships, manned aircraft, ground troops – and, more recently, drones.

The Royal Australian Air Force has been using drones in Afghanistan since 2009, when it first started to deploy the Israeli-built Heron drone, a twin-hulled surveillance drone the size of a light aircraft. At a 2012 promotional event on Australia’s Gold Coast, a short drive from Brisbane, Australia’s most senior military drone commander stated that the drone program was “like crack cocaine, a drug, for our guys involved – [they] just can’t get enough of it.”

These drones are in fact still owned by the Israeli manufacturer, and leased via a Canadian company – as Australia’s ABC News put it: “Israeli-owned drones, leased by Canadians, flown by Australians, fighting a war against Islamist insurgents in Afghanistan”. The RAAF drone teams are trained by Canadian and Israeli civilians at Amberley in Queensland, on the outskirts of Brisbane. Before they deploy to the field, they spend hours test-flying the drones over a simulated Afghan village, constructed in 2011, on the Woomera test range, close by the notorious refugee detention centre. (Picture above: a Heron drone parked at Woomera Air Base, South Australia, via Google Earth.)

The RAAF’s Herons are nominally unarmed, but they are equipped with lasers which allow them to mark targets for incoming airstrikes or artillery – the networking of contemporary military forces means that the formal distinctions between the capabilities of different weapons systems are increasingly meaningless. The drones are a key part of the “kill chain”, the process by which targets are selected and attacked by the entire system, and the ADF also calls on US and British armed Reaper drones to support its ground troops in battle.

In describing the contours of Australia’s relationship with drones, we see how, once again, such relationships extend beyond the individual aircraft to encompass far wider issues including domestic politics, international relations, warfare, immigration and networked technologies.

Drones are avatars of the the political process: they are instantiations of a set of ideologies and beliefs, made visible by their reification in electromechanical systems. When we talk about drones, we are really talking about the politics that demand, shape, and deploy them, and the politics which are made possible by them. This politics reflects the drones themselves: it is a politics of violence, of obfuscation, of radical inequality of sight and action, and it is sustained by that obfuscation and that inequality.

No wonder then that politicians are afraid of even artistic representations of the drone. No wonder they cite feelings of “discomfort” at even mentioning them, although in projecting this discomfort onto an immigrant population – without consultation – they reveal even more clearly the complicity of the technology in war and social oppression.

The Drone Shadow is not just a picture of a drone. It is a diagram of a political system. Every time we draw one, we use it to cast light on the actors who would prefer that the reality of their intentions and actions remain hidden.

This is the nature of networked technology today: it is the product of an embedded politics which it simultaneously obscures, through its apparent sophistication, and renders startlingly visible, through its explicit form. That invisibility is the intention of power; rendering it visible is the intention of art.

In the present case, power in all its petty exercise has done its utmost to render such a debate invisible. That it has succeeded for the moment, with the barest minimum of opposition from the cultural institutions which should oppose such exercises at every step, is saddening. It is also, I have to believe, unlikely and impossible to remain the case for long.

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If you would like to draw your own Global Hawk shadow, you can download a schematic for the installation here.

Let us be clear: just as my work on the form of the book in the digital age was concerned not with the physical or digital object, but with people’s understanding and emotions concerning literature; just as my drone works are not about the objects themselves, but about the systems – technological, spatial, legal and political – which permit, shape and produce them, and about the wider implications of seeing and not seeing such technological, systematic, operations; so the New Aesthetic is concerned with everything that is not visible in these images and quotes, but that is inseparable from them, and without which they would not exist.

Much of the critical confusion around the New Aesthetic has clustered around the use of the term “aesthetic”, by which I meant simply, “what it looks like” – I wasn’t even really aware of how key the term aesthetics was to art historical and critical discourse. As a result of my use of this term, much of the critical reaction to it has only looked at the surface, and has – sometimes wilfully it feels – failed to engage with the underlying concerns of the New Aesthetic, its own critique and politics. This criticism still concerns itself only with images, despite the wealth of texts also included in the project, and the numerous recorded lectures I’ve given on the subject. The tumblr is just one aspect of, the sketchbook or playlist for, a wider project. In short, this form of criticism has been looking at the pixelated finger, not the moon.

There are two necessary understandings to counter this, I think. One is the important recognition that the New Aesthetic project is undertaken within its own medium: it is an attempt to “write” critically about the network in the vernacular of the network itself: in a tumblr, in blog posts, in YouTube videos of lectures, tweeted reports and messages, reblogs, likes, and comments. In this sense, from my perspective, it is as much work as criticism: it does not conform to the formal shapes – manifesto, essay, book – expected by critics and academics. As a result, it remains largely illegible to them, despite frequent public statements of the present kind.

But I think the deeper and more interesting aspect of this misreading of the New Aesthetic is that it directly mirrors what it is describing: the illegibility of technology itself to a non-technical audience. From the very first post about the New Aesthetic I have been talking about what these images reveal about the underlying systems that produce them, and/or the human viewpoint which frames them. It is impossible for me, with an academic background in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, with a practical background in literary editing and software programming, with a lifetime of interacting with the internet and other systems, not to look at these images and immediately start to think about not what they look like, but how they came to be and what they become: the processes of capture, storage, and distribution; the actions of filters, codecs, algorithms, processes, databases, and transfer protocols; the weight of datacenters, servers, satellites, cables, routers, switches, modems, infrastructures physical and virtual; and the biases and articulations of disposition and intent encoded in all of these things, and our comprehension of them.

And it’s worth bearing in mind too that many of the images are snapshots, or stills, in many forms, and not fully-formed objects. Whether a frame from an online video, or a screen capture of an online map (remember, digital maps are animations on pause), or fragments of code or spam; all of these are snippets, they are only momentary representations of ongoing processes – as indeed the New Aesthetic is intended to be. Each image is a link, hardcoded or imaginative, to other aspects of a far greater system, just as every web page and every essay, and every line of text written or quoted therein, is a link to other words, thoughts and ideas. Again, in this the New Aesthetic reproduces the structure and disposition of the network itself, as a form of critique.

Let’s look at some recent examples. Every satellite image posted is a meditation on the nature of mapping, that raises issues of perspective and power relationships, the privilege of the overhead view and the monopoly on technological agency which produces it. A photograph of Eric Schmidt wearing a flak jacket – as he does in his Twitter avatar – is a spur to investigate the circumstances of the photograph and the self-presentation of the corporation. It was taken on a visit to Iraq in 2009, when Google promised to digitise what remains of the National Museum’s collection, raising further questions about the digitisation and subsequent ownership of cultural patrimony, and of Google’s involvement in political activity and international diplomacy through its Google Ideas think-tank, which actively supports a programme of regime change in certain parts of the world. A photograph of the “Free Bradley Manning” contingent of the San Francisco pride parade in 2011 is an entrypoint to a consideration of intersectional politics, of the parallels between the political and the personal in an age when networks permit the sudden rupture of secure systems by individual conscious actions, when states can use such ruptures to justify ever greater clampdowns of freedom and transparency (both in the sense of information freedom, but also the ever-threatened right of the individual to remain opaque and illegible to the state), as well as the tendency of the media and popular protest to focus on the individuals (Manning, Assange, Snowden) and the technological front-ends to such disclosures (Wikileaks) rather than the deeper transfer networks, protocols, or even, god forbid, the actual substance of the information disclosed. A screenshot of a promotional video for the telepresence company Anybot which features a robot wearing a bow tie commanding a human employee to “work faster!” is in one frame a terrifying vision of labour futures, and an indictment of visions of automation that emerge from executive and engineering cultures which perceive the value extractable by technological innovation differently to the major currents of social advancement throughout the 20th Century. An Adobe-sponsored “prank” at a bus stop – 12 million views on Youtube – where a live artist inserts passersby into a digital advertisement speaks to our internalisation of surveillance culture and our corresponding expectations of the individualisation of technology, and its framing by corporations – where in the video are the passersby who felt shocked, violated or just plain creeped out by such an intervention? Are they edited out, or did they simply not exist, and if not, why the hell not? This individualisation effect is seen at every level of technology, from the dot which places each of us at the center of the digital map, up to the robot sensor networks which rely on a codified abstract of the world to guide them, rather than the truth on the ground: the map indeed becomes the territory. Powerpoint default styles which describe corporate visions are reproduced in the NSA prism slides and the US Army’s famous “death by powerpoint”, even as those corporate slides are infected by the absence of meaning best expressed in the war on abstract nouns. Endless views of protest, repression, revolt and schism are framed not through the lens of critique, but the lens of iPhones and iPads held aloft; photography, unable to see the network, photographs photography, but in the glitches and unicode characters of printed database commands and international shipping labels, an underlying structure is made visible, the horsemeat scandal of information systems. And so on and so forth; it’s not the writing that’s hard, it’s the thinking.

The New Aesthetic is not superficial, it is not concerned with beauty or surface texture. It is deeply engaged with the politics and politicisation of networked technology, and seeks to explore, catalogue, categorise, connect and interrogate these things. Where many seem to read only incoherence and illegibility, the New Aesthetic articulates the deep coherence and multiplicity of connections and influences of the network itself.

I believe that much of the weak commentary on the New Aesthetic is a direct result of a weak technological literacy in the arts, and the critical discourse that springs from it. It is also representative of a far wider critical and popular failure to engage fully with technology in its construction, operation and affect. Since at least the introduction of the VCR – perhaps the first truly domesticated computational object – it seems there has been a concerted, societal rejection of technical understanding, wherein the attitude that “I don’t understand this and therefore don’t like this and therefore I will not investigate this” is ascendant and lauded. This attitude manifests in the low-level Luddite response to almost every technical innovation; in the stigmatisation of geek culture and interests, academic and recreational; in the managerial culture of economic government – and in the elevation of sleek, black-box corporate-controlled objects, platforms and services, from the iPhone to the SUV, over open-source, hackable, comprehensible and shareable alternatives. This wilful anti-technicalism, which is a form of anti-intellectualism, mirrors the present cultural obsession with nostalgia, retro and vintage which was one of the spurs for the entire New Aesthetic project; it is boring, and we reject it.

But if we don’t move the debate to a deeper level, none of this will change. There is a justified and rising opposition to drone warfare (and in the last week, to issues around computational surveillance and intelligence), which may or may not produce lasting political change; but even if successful this will only change the images and objects employed, not the modes of thinking, coupled to technological mastery, which drive it. Without a concerted effort to raise the level of debate, we just loop over and over through the same fetishisations and reifications, while the real business of the world continues unexamined. Those who cannot understand technology are doomed to be consumed by it. (The idea that these ideas lack politics is especially laughable when you look at what’s happening in much of the art world, and most of the digital art world. A young, post-Iraq generation who have had all hope of political participation kettled out of them, and are then endlessly accused of apathy to boot. No wonder it’s all personal brands, car culture, glossy gifs and facebook performances.) Technology is political. Everything is political. If you cannot perceive the politics, the politics are being done to you.

I was recently asked if the New Aesthetic would coalesce into “something more serious”: a book, collection of essays, or a manifesto. While I would like to, and probably should, produce a book or book-like object at some point, it itself would not be “the New Aesthetic”, but a commentary upon some of the issues it raises. I strongly reject the notion that a manifesto is an appropriate or “more serious” (and thus worthy) way to address the issues under discussion here, as it would represent precisely the kind of premature codification of the subject that the New Aesthetic explicitly sets out to avoid. (While admitting, with respect to that statement, all the contradictions presented by this piece of writing: where the two accounts differ, trust the network and not this document.)

In part, this unwillingness to codify is a reproduction of the network’s own refusal to be pinned down, controlled, routed and channeled, which must be considered one of its core, inherent qualities. But it is also born of a sincere desire not to foreclose discussion: the New Aesthetic may be considered a work, a conversation, a performance, an experiment, and a number of other things (although, please, not a movement). This intention of keeping the field open was, and perhaps remains, naive. Nevertheless, I firmly believe it is the way it has to be. As such, the presentation of a so-called gaudy heap of images is an appeal to, and act of confidence in, the network itself, in the systems and people that comprise it, to follow their own ideas and intuitions, educate themselves and, outwith a hierarchical commentariat, come to their own conclusions. The onus is on the reader to explore further, just as and because the onus is on the individual in a truly networked politics. So why is it important to critique the critique as well? Because we live in a world shaped and defined by computation, and it is one of the jobs of the critic and the artist to draw attention to the world as it truly is.

Tets Ohnari “Tets Ohnari ∞ Egon Schiele”
at Dai-ichi Life Gallery (Ginza, Marunouchi area)
(2014-04-07 - 2014-05-07)

Winner of the VOCA 2012 award Tets Ohnari, currently based in Eastern Europe presents a solo exhibition of 3 chairs. The first chair was made by the artist Egon Schiele around 100 years ago and used during his artistic production. The second is a replica of the first created by Ohnari himself. Finally the third is a replica formed from the woodchips created in the process of making the second chair. These three chairs consolidate three sets of values, that of history, function and aesthetic, all within the same shape. [Image: Tets Ohnari “Chairs” 56×81×44cm]

Award Tokyo Marunouchi 2014”" />
“Art Award Tokyo Marunouchi 2014”
at Gyoko-dori Underground Gallery (Ginza, Marunouchi area)
(2014-04-26 - 2014-05-25)

The “Art Award Tokyo Marunouchi” (hereafter “a.a.t.m.”) is an exhibition of contemporary art which aims to discover and nurture new talent. Besides opening up careers of young artists, the “a.a.t.m.”, held at the Gyoko-dori Underground Gallery, which is directly linked to Tokyo Station and located between the Marunouchi Building and Shin Marunouchi Building, provides even wider encounters with art and encourages artists to achieve their full potential. With a total of 275 artists having been featured in the seven exhibitions held to date, many of these creators have taken this platform as a stepping stone from which to launch their careers nationally and internationally and this year brings a whole new line up placing a spotlight on the cutting edge artists of the next generation. [Related Events] Public Jury Review(open to the public) Date: 4/26(Sat) 10:30- Venue: Gyoko-dori Underground Gallery a.a.t.m Talk Date: 5/10(Sat) Venue: Marunouchi Cafe Seek For further information please refer to the official website.

One of my favorite movies, albeit one of those cheesy teen-angst films, was Empire Records. Released in 1995, Empire Records is about a group of coming-of-age, eccentric record store employees who devise a plan to save their beloved independent record store. What does all this have to do with art you ask?

Nestled in the heart of Shorline, WA is a new little locally owned and operated community gift & art store called Wallcotts Décor & More. Louise, the owner of Wallcotts, opened the gift store in September, 2013 with six art enthusiasts, passionate about collaborating with local art talent and connecting artists with the local community. In addition to selling the work of local artists, Wallcotts encourages learning through art workshops and art "parties".

But much like Empire Records, this little independent art shop needs your help. We here at SeattleArtists.com are completely dedicated to supporting the local neighborhood art scene in every shape and form, so we’re happy to pass on and share this information. Wallcotts has started a fundraising campaign to raise money to support their operations. "Wallcotts Builds A Mosaic" is both an online crowdsourcing campaign on Indiegogo as well as a "Meet the Artist" fundraiser event to be held on Sunday February 16th from 5:30pm to 7:30pm.

They are looking for both supporters to contribute to their Indiegogo fundraising campaign, as well as artists to be a part of an auction at the event. "We created this campaign and event to reach out to the art supporters and enthusiast to contribute to a dream that can enrich a community."  The event will have several artist stationed with their work on display throughout our store, available to speak about their work as well as sell to interested buyers. This event will be open to the public. We will also be conducting a silent auction which will of course include local art pieces as well as donations by local companies in the area. The donations collected from the auction will go towards keeping our dream alive and our doors open.

You can support Wallcotts’ Indiegogo campaign by visiting: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/wallcotts-builds-a-mosaic

The "Meet the Artist" Fundraiser Event will be Sunday Feb. 16th 530pm-730pm. To participate or attend the February event, please contact Wallcotts directly at:

Wallcotts Decor & More
18336 Aurora Ave.N Suite 105
Shoreline, WA 98133
(In Gateway Plaza with Menchie’s & Little Caesars)

Website: www.wallcotts.com
Email: louise@wallcotts.com
Phone: (206) 629-5170

Find ‘Art Interruptions’ in Beacon Hill and the Central Waterfront

Artworks on street and park infrastructure, furniture and trees bring surprise and humor, On view through Sept. 20

Temporary artworks eliciting moments of surprise, beauty and humor are dotted through Beacon Hill and the Central Waterfront via the Art Interruptions series produced by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture.  The artworks, intended to last for approximately six weeks, appear on city sidewalks and in parks offering a brief interruption in viewers’ days. Twelve artists have created temporary installations, most of which are on view through Sept. 20, though dates vary depending on the type of artwork. Projects range from a light-hearted photo cutout to traditional rangoli and flower mandalas made by local Indian artists in the Beacon Hill neighborhood and faux discarded banana peels to patterned handrails on the Waterfront.
The Art Interruptions program was launched in 2012 with a dozen projects spread between Greenwood Avenue North, and the Central Waterfront. The 2013 series complements a number of temporary projects produced by the City’s art department this summer including a visual art installation and interactive camera obscura project at Westlake Park and the ‘Alaskan Way Viaduct Observation and Demolition Unit‘ by Dane Youngren, which closes this weekend.

Administered in partnership with Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and Seattle Parks and Recreation, Art Interruptions is funded with SDOT 1% for Art funds and administered by the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture.

Beacon Hill Projects Beginning at Daejeon Park, heading south on 18th Avenue South, and ending at 12th Avenue South and Lucille Street.

Elizabeth Gahan

Elizabeth Gahan’s site-specific installation Climbing Crystals uses recycled corrugated plastic political signs to create an unexpected synthetic growth interrupting the serene Maplewood Park and surrounding residential neighborhood. Signs from the 2012 election season are re-envisioned and reconstructed into a cluster of hollow 3D, crystal-like forms that appear to emerge from the ground and climb the tree trunk.

Brian Gerich and Ian Horton

Brian Gerich and Ian Horton’s Blind Drift both contrasts and mimics environmental elements in the hillside at 18^th Avenue South and South Walker Street, and creates a gradient effect across the pedestrian path of the site. The artists worked closely with Steven Chavez as a consultant on the project.

Julia Haack

Julia Haack’s Arboreal Amulets is a grouping of sculptural constructions attached to a tree cluster at Daejeon Park, adjacent to the bike path and Sturgus Way South and just northwest of the Korean pavilion. The artwork is made from reclaimed lumber and latex paint and employs geometric, colorful patterns with cascading shapes.

Joanne Lepore and Breanne Gearheart

Joanne Lepore and Breanne Gearheart’s Portals uses stripped bicycle rims as way-finding and point-of-interest markers along the Beacon Hill Greenway. The rims are attached to trees, existing signage and in sculptural formations in right-of-way areas. These place markers not only indicate to cyclists that they are on the right path, but draw attention to the peculiarities of the environs. The artists chose the sites that were shifts in the bike path, opportunities to explore the Greenway and the Beacon Hill environs, or to demonstrate creative uses of rights-of-way and public land with a gardening/sustainability focus. A map with details, context, and links can be found online at http://tenaciousinstinct.com/projects/art-interruptions/.

Tour: The artists will also lead a bike tour of the Greenway route and all Art Interruptions artwork installations on the path, 4 to 6 p.m., Aug. 18. Bicyclists should meet at the I-90 bike trail to start the tour, which will end in Georgetown. Bring helmets and water.

Chris Papa

Take advantage of a light-hearted photo opportunity with Chris Papa’s Free Pile, a life-size, carnival photo cut-out. Equal parts painting and sculpture, the wood assembly draws attention to the “junk” we put out on our sidewalk that other people then proudly claim as their own. The photo cut-out is at the corner of Beacon Avenue South and Hanford Street, just outside Hello Bicycle.

Photos: Share photos of the cut-out on the Office of Arts & Culture’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/SeattleArts. Use hashtag #ArtInterruptions and #ChrisPapa.

Annie Penta

Annie Penta’s Visual Blessings: Women’s Art of India employs several local Indian rangoli artists to create South Indian Tamil Nadu chalk designs in various right-of-way locations twice weekly during early morning hours. Artists will also create intermittent athapoovidal (elaborate ground decorations) mandalas made from local flowers, plants and organic materials.

Rangoli chalk installation schedule:

• Thursday, Aug. 8: southwest corner of 18^th Avenue South and South State Street.
• Sunday, Aug. 11: 18^th Avenue South and South Plum Street.
• Thursday, Aug. 15: Four corners of intersection at 18^th Avenue South and South Hill Street.
• Sunday, Aug. 18: Four corners of intersection at 18^th Avenue South and South College Street, intersection of 18^th Avenue South and South Bayview Street.
• Thursday, Aug. 22: Southwest corner of 18^th Avenue South and South Waite Street.
• Sunday, Aug. 25: NE corner of 18^th Avenue South and South McClellan Street and if time allows, at the intersection of 18^th Avenue South and South Lander Street.
• Thursday, Aug. 29: In collaboration with artist Raji Raman, at the intersection of Beacon Avenue South and South Hanford Street.
• Sunday, Sept. 1: In collaboration with artist Raji Raman, at the intersection of 18^th Avenue South and South Stevens Street.
• Thursday, Sept. 5: At the intersection of South Hinds Street and Lafayette Avenue South. If time allows, at South Horton and Lafayette Avenue South.
• Sunday, Sept. 8: On north and south side of Spokane Street at Lafayette Avenue South.
• Thursday, Sept. 12: In collaboration with artist Rita Biswas, at the intersection of South Hanford Street and Lafayette Avenue South.
• Sunday, Sept. 18: In collaboration with artist Rita Biswas at the intersection of 16^th Avenue South and South Dakota Street.

Flower mandala installation

• Saturday, Aug. 10: On the north-facing hill of Jefferson Park at Lafayette Avenue South and Spokane Street.
• Saturday, Aug. 24: In collaboration with artist Anantha Ahluwalia, on the southeast hill of Jefferson Park at 16^th Avenue South and South Spokane Street. If it is windy, artists will relocate to intersection of Lafayette Avenue South and Spokane Street.
• Saturday, Sept. 7: In collaboration with artist Anita Bhatt, on the north side of Jefferson Park at 17^th Avenue South and Lafayette Avenue South. If it is windy, artists will relocate to at Lafayette Avenue South and Spokane Street.

Hollis Wong-Wear

Hollis Wong-Wear’s Neighborhood Boombox features recordings by Beacon Hill musicians, poets and performing artists of various disciplines that have been curated by Wong-Wear. Inspired visually by the boombox carried by Radio Raheem in the film Do the Right Thing, the presentation and placement of this installation will occur at several locations where local businesses will act as stewards of the mobile installation. The boombox will be outside during normal business hours for the hosting establishments. The first site for the boombox will be at The Station Café through Aug. 18. It will move to El Quetzal on Aug. 19. Recordings will be on cassette tapes as a playful throwback to a virtually obsolete technology. The music will be archived as several volumes in .mp3 format and can be accessed online after the project is complete. Follow the Office of Arts & Culture on Facebook at www.facebook.com/SeattleArts to learn more about the boombox whereabouts.

Central Waterfront Projects (On Alaskan Way between Piers 62/63 and Marion Street Ferry Terminal walkway, including the Pike Street Hill Climb)>

Christian French

Christian French’s Sightings is a series of photographs chronicling the travels of an old weather-beaten hubcap that looks like a UFO (or is it a UFO that looks like a hubcap?). Presented at the spot where each photograph was taken (Waterfront Park and Pier 62/63), the photographs echo scenic views or commentary on the landscape. Viewers have an opportunity to look back in time, seeing both the landscape in front of them as well as a vision of something now past, in this exercise in the overlay of humor and memory.

Jesse Link

Jesse Link’s Vertical Ascension is a free-standing sculpture comprised of four, large rectangular boxes stacked one on top of the other, reaching eight feet high. Each side has a painting on it depicting a sperm whale, a colossal squid, tall trees and a large wave raising a ship into the air. The sculpture will be at the base of the Pike Street Hillclimb.

Tim Marsden

Tim Marsden’s approach to art is to engage the public and create an awareness of our surroundings. In Clutter, he’s created everyday objects (i.e. unwanted newspapers, discarded banana peels, bricks and pallets) in a stylized fashion made from wood, metal, bricks and mixed media. Marsden’s art is placed in inconspicuous sites provoking double-takes and laughs from passers-by. Locations include the bike path on Alaskan Way and crossing the road at Pike Street and Union Ave.

Michiko Tanaka

Michiko Tanaka’s Yellow is a series of posters and postcards with photographs, text and graphic symbols found in unexpected places. The materials include inspirational posters with common scientific theories (energy and mass are equivalent and transmutable), her Grandmother’s sayings (you always worry about the wrong things), and five-by-seven-inch post cards (choice > good choice > bad choice > no regrets). Artworks are scattered under the Alaskan Viaduct, on the Marion Street Terminal walkway, in Waterfront Park and on a variety of traffic signal boxes.

Sam Trout

Sam Trout enjoys instigating the surprise of street art experiences. He will construct the installation Welcome…See you later using masking and vinyl tape in a geometric pattern along the handrail on the Marion Street Ferry Terminal Walkway (Marion Street between Alaskan Way and First Avenue). Trout chose blue and white colors to carry the nautical theme, and will employ assistants to learn from the art-making process.

Beacon Hill Photos: Laura Becker

Waterfront Photos: Juan Hernandez

Office of Arts & Culture | Making art work.

We envision a city driven by creativity that provides the opportunity for everyone to engage in diverse arts and cultural experiences. We are supported by the 16-member Seattle Arts Commission, citizen volunteers appointed by the mayor and City Council.

Film editing is all about making (mostly smooth) transitions from one shot to another. Here we briefly discuss the 6 frequently used transitions between shots:

1. CUT: The end of the first shot is attached to the beginning of the second shot. The most often used of all transitions, it creates an instantaneous change in one or more of the following: angle, distance, subject etc. In narrative films, normally only cuts are used within a scene.

2. MATCH CUT: A match cut (sometimes called a form cut) maintains continuity between two shots by matching objects with similar shapes or movements or both similar shapes and similar movements. One of the best known examples of a match cut is from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which a bone slowly tumbling end over end in the air is replaced by an orbiting spacecraft with a similar shape. Watch video below for reference:

3. JUMP CUT: A jump cut is a discontinuous transition between shots. For example, one shot shows a woman running on a beach towards the water, and the next shot shows her running away from the water. A jump cut is sometimes used to surprise or disorient viewers. It may also occur if the film print or video has missing footage. Many filmmakers and film schools associate a jump cut with bad editing.

4. FADE OUT, FADE IN: The first shot fades to darkness, (normally black); then the second shot fades in(by degree goes from darkness to illuminated image). The fade out, fade in can provide a short but meaningful pause between scenes and sequences. If this editing transition is doe slowly, it can serve as a leisurely transition.; if done rapidly, it is less noticeable or not noticeable at all. Perhaps because of the current popularity of fast pacing in films, this transition is used far less often than it used to be,

5. LAP DISSOLVE: The first shot fades out as the second shot fades in, overlaps the first, then replaces it entirely. Lap dissolves may be rapid and nearly imperceptible or slow and quite noticeable, creating a momentary superimposition of two images, sometimes suggesting similarities or even meaning.

6. WIPE: A wipe seems to push one shot off the screen as it replaces it with the next shot. The wipe, which comes with many variations, has been popular in science fiction, serials and action movies. but it has also been used in such diverse films as It Happened on Night, (1934), The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Seven Samurai (1954), Ed Wood (1994) and Battlefield Earth (2000).

Many other transitions are used but much less often than these six mentioned above. We will post more on video editing techniques on the Digital Filmmaking Blog in the coming days,

George Clooney will receive the Chairman's Award for his acting work in The Descendants and his directing of The Ides of March at the 2012 Palm Springs International Film Festival.

The award will be presented on January 7 at PSIFF's annual Awards Gala, a black-tie event that always hands out an array of awards to luminaries who figure to be in the Oscar race.

Like the awards given at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in late January, the Palm Springs event has become a valuable stop on the Oscar campaign trail. Previous recipients of the Chairman's Award include Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman and Ben Affleck.

Oscar-nominated actress Michelle Williams will also be rewarded for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in “My Week With Marilyn,” which is already generating Oscar buzz.

Williams, 31, will receive the Desert Palm Achievement Actress Award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival awards gala at the Palm Springs Convention Center. Previous recipients include Academy Award winners Natalie Portman, Marion Cotillard, Charlize Theron and Kate Winslet.

“My Week With Marilyn,” which opens Wednesday in limited distribution, premiered Oct. 9 at the New York International Film Festival. Directed by Simon Curtis, the film was presented Nov. 6 as part of the AFI Fest at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, where Monroe put her hand and footprints in cement in 1952.

The Palm Springs International Film Festival runs Jan. 5-16 2012 at various venues in Palm Springs

Sources: mydesert.com & Reuters

“We are excited to expand the reach and depth of our programming to support individual artists in the field,”

We give young filmmakers a topic and everything they need to create their own movie -- video, music, and sound effects. Then let them create the best short film they can using these materials. Because everyone's using the same "building blocks," contestants will be judged not by their budget but on their creativity and storytelling abilities.

Their first competition is called "The Marijuana Mash-Up." For this contest, they are asking contestants to “mash up” (that is, creatively condense and re-edit) an hour’s worth of hilariously dated drug education films from the 50s and 60s to create a short campaign commercial that convinces people to vote for or against legalizing marijuana. The contest is motivated by the California initiative that'll be on the ballot this fall, but young filmmakers across the country have passionate views on this issue, to say the least! Finalists will be named late in the summer and a winner just before the election.

2. Fleetflicks: FleetFlicks.com is trying to revive the short film as both art and entertainment. It's a place for filmmakers to expose their work to an international audience. The site hopes to spread the word to a diverse viewership and combat the stigma that the short film is only for crotch-punch and cat videos. The site has been up for a few months and has gathered a lot of followers, many of whom have uploaded their short films on the site.

3. Student Film Makers of India: SFMI is a site for student film from India where they can upload their films, make their profile and network with other film makers. The website has a decent design and has got quite a few members already who have uploaded their short films and animations there.

Hunter Drohojowska-Philp calls the mid-career artist's paintings transcendent

“Hannah Höch the Dadaist” is the way that this German artist is usually pigeon-holed in art history. And indeed she was a leading member of the movement in Berlin in the 1920s, full of the calls for artistic revolution, the rejection of all that had gone before, the hectic partying and the collage works which made this movement so energetic and so productive.

via uncp.edu

Somewhere towards the beginning of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will, in the middle of a long and tedious sequence of military men addressing the party congress on matters of public policy, Goebbels, in a suit, rises to the microphone to speak about propaganda. “May the bright flame of our enthusiasm never be extinguished,” he says, looking somewhat more comfortable in front of the crowd then you might imagine. “It alone gives the creative art of modern political propaganda its light and warmth. From the depths of the people it rose aloft. And into the depths of the people in must descend… It may be good to have power based on arms, but it is better and more joyful to win and to keep the hearts of the people.” It’s a telling moment, especially in light of Riefensthal’s insistence, for the remainder of her life, that Triumph was not and is not a propaganda film, but instead a work of ‘total art’ or of ‘cinema verite.’ Technically speaking, she is correct, insofar as Hitler had chosen her precisely for her pedigree as an artist, and she only agreed to make the film when he promised to keep Goebbels and his minions at the ministry entirely out of its production.

And yet, watching the film today, it is clearly not only a piece of propaganda, but the apogee of the genre. By turns horrifying and deadly dull, it is wholly without irony or self-reflection of any sort. Quite literally a masterpiece, it is responsible for creating an entire arsenal of cinematic techniques later employed by everybody from Josef Stalin to Barack Obama. In effect then, the distinction, between art and propaganda, which mattered so much to Reifenstahl in the films production, has in some sense vanished. Art not only became propaganda but perfected it, the distance she fought to maintain damning her all the more for preserving the unique power of her vision. Triumph plays at Anthology this Saturday at 6 and 8:30, its worth seeing, if you haven’t before; even if the technical achievements no longer impress, the relentlessness of thing remains striking and, god willing, singular.

Two Tyler students organized the “Call + Response” show.

The article Art students answer the call by Alexa Bricker appeared first on The Temple News.

Conrad Benner’s blog calls attention to Philly’s street art culture.

The article A View from the Top by Patricia Madej appeared first on The Temple News.

Local artists of any skill level could submit art to the gallery's Philadelphia Community Exhibit, which opens to the public today, Jan. 30.

The article 3rd Street Gallery’s Philadelphia Community Exhibit puts local talent on display by Cheyenne Shaffer appeared first on The Temple News.

Tokyo Type Directors Club Exhibition 2014
at Ginza Graphic Gallery (Ginza, Marunouchi area)
(2014-04-04 - 2014-04-28)

The Tokyo Type Directors Club Exhibition 2014 presents the results of the “Tokyo TDC Annual Awards 2014,” an international design competition sponsored by the Tokyo Type Directors Club. This year’s competition drew a total of 2,958 entries (1,960 from Japan and 998 from overseas). Following a rigorous screening process, the following prizes were awarded: 1 Grand Prize, 4 TDC Prizes, 3 Special Prizes, 1 RGB Prize, 1 Book Design Prize, and 1 Type Design Prize.

Kaoru Kasai “Hiroshima Appeals”
at Creation Gallery G8 (Ginza, Marunouchi area)
(2014-04-08 - 2014-05-15)

The Yusaku Kamekura Award was founded in 1999 in support of the development of graphic design and in its 16th year was awarded to Kaoru Kasai for his peace campaign posters “Hirohima Appeals 2013”. Well know for his commercial work with Suntory Oolong Tea and United Arrows, while also lending his hand to package design, film and theater advertising, Kasai brought his graphic powers to new heights in the “Hiroshima Appeals 2013” peace campaign poster series, distilling the very core of graphic design and deservedly winning him this prestigious award. [Image: Kaoru Kasai Peace Campaign Poster “Hiroshima Appeals 2013”

With paintings called “Arse Flowers in Bloom” and “Giants of Modernism (Carrot Head)”, it is easy to assume Ansel Krut’s work is light-hearted.

What to do when your trophy cabinet gets too full? If you are Cristiano Ronaldo, you build your own museum. As storage solutions go, it sounds extreme but Ronaldo, the world’s most expensive and highly paid footballer and arguably the world’s finest and vainest too, operates in extremes. Museu CR7, dedicated to the life and times of the Portuguese forward, 29, opened in his native Funchal, on the island of Madeira in December. It contains every trophy Ronaldo has ever won, from the tiny tarnished gold cup he received as top scorer for his local team Andorinha, aged eight, to the 2013 Fifa Ballon d’Or, awarded to him as the best player on the planet last month.

Pop Art didn’t exist when Richard Hamilton helped to organise the epoch-making London exhibition This Is Tomorrow, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956. But his section of the show was daring enough to celebrate images culled from advertising, comic books and film publicity. It outraged conservative English opinion at the time, and Hamilton also made a brilliantly witty, provocative collage called Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?.

Elizabeth Ogilvie lives in a converted cinema facing the sea in Kinghorn, Fife, an hour north of Edinburgh, Scotland. She and fellow artist Robert Callender, her late husband, brought the cinema while they were working in Leith. “Our work had outgrown the studio, which was a very low old stable block and we could not see how the final work would look before it was installed. We decided it will give the work the opportunity to flourish in this new environment.”

Cecile Richards talks about her mother, Ann Richards, and the new HBO film “All About Ann: Governor Richards of the Lone Star State.” The documentary chronicles Richards’ life—from growing up poor in rural Texas to her life as a sociable suburban housewife and mother of four to entering politics and becoming one of the most charismatic American political figures of the last 30 years. Richards was the first woman to be elected to that office in the state of Texas. 

Cecile Richards described how her mother’s keynote speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention changed her career: “We’d always known she was funny and she was in politics, but to have that opportunity to, sort of, as she would say, show what a woman can do when she’s given the chance – that’s really what the Democratic Convention did.”

From the very beginning of her public life, Ann Richards was open about her addiction. Her daughter explained, it was “not only because she wanted people to know who she was, but because she actually thought it might encourage other folks who were dealing with addiction to get treatment. And they did. I still, today, travel around the country and run into people who say, I got sober because of your mom.”

As governor, Richards appointed more women, openly gay people, and people of color than all of her predecessors combined. “She was all about not only about opening the door for herself, but holding it open and bringing everybody along with her that she could. And that to me is – that’s her legacy.”

“I think that everything she did was a little bit larger than life.”

“All About Ann” debuts on HBO April 28 at 9.  It will also premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 18.

Siblings can be our best friends or our worst enemies, and sometimes getting along with our brothers and sisters can be a huge challenge and can shake up the whole family. Philip Galanes, New York Times Social Q’s columnist (who has 2 brothers), offers his sage advice on how to deal with siblings—rivalries and all. 

Parents can play a major role in how siblings interact with one another, both as children and as adults. “Based on the letters that come in to me, I see that the more mothers and fathers try to intervene [between their kids], the weirder and the more complicated the competitiveness and anger gets.”

Several listeners called in about their estranged siblings. Galanes notes, “There are so few people who will know us like our brothers and sisters and it’s a sadness not to have them in our lives.” But that doesn’t mean that you should always pursue a relationship with a tricky sibling. “If they only represent pain and they only represent…feeling less than every time you’re with them, why subject yourself to it?” 

Whatever problem you’re facing with your brother or sister, Galanes says it helps to keep this in mind: “It’s never the family you wished for…and yet somehow we have to persist and live with them.”

Galanes is the author of Social Q's: How to Survive the Quirks, Quandaries and Quagmires of Today

The Gurus of How-To, Al Ubell and Larry Ubell, answer questions and give advice on how to repair and maintain your home or apartment. They'll offer tips on keeping your furnace in fine form, making sure your pipes don't freeze, and making sure you're home is heated and insulated efficiently.

Call 212-433-9692 with your questions or leave a comment below!

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

Photo courtesy José Teodoro

The latest video project by Edgardo Aragón – a finalist in the 2013 AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize – tracks bison across North American, in Wood Buffalo National Park in the Northwest Territories, in Yellowstone National Park and near Chihuahua in Mexico, his home country. We talked to him about the project, made possible by his AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize residency.

AGO: Of the three places you visited for your project, which was the most surprising, in terms of defying your expectations? Why?
Edgardo Aragón: I was very surprised and still I am about Fort Smith. Given the conditions under which people live in this place, it could seem impossible that there’s life there, but life exists, along with one of the strangest lights that I will ever see in my life.

Since going to these places, has your plan for the project changed?
Whenever I plan a new project, I always expect that the circumstances change the nature of the project itself. In this case the change happened, without a doubt. Natural conditions modify the project a great deal, complementing and giving body to it in a way that a sketch could not. I’m satisfied.

Many animal species migrate – why did you choose to focus on bison?
I chose the bison for two reasons. The first is that it had a natural frontier that would shift according to the climate conditions, modifying substantially the life of the First Nations people who depended on the bison to survive. They would conform to the bison’s behaviour. That’s why the project is not, in fact, trying to create a portrait of bison so much as one of the invisible men that has ceased to live in harmony with it.

The second reason is that this animal species does’t migrate. After nearly becoming extinct at the hands of the white man, it has endured some sort of domestication. Today it is a species in the process of recuperation in Mexico and Canada. It is curious to note that in the U.S., where there are more reserves, the bison is not a protected species and is limited to its territories. This domestication is an aspect of extermination as well, of the animal and its animal nature and, of course, of what little spirit of the First Nations people remains.

Why did you decide to use video for this project instead of still images?
Video is a more organic tool, more malleable. You can move it in many directions to generate a specific discourse or an open one. I think I choose video because I like having elements that are closer to a sense of physical presence, closer to the movement of the apparatus, to the presence of a witness and specifically to the manipulation of time. Duration plays a fundamental role in establishing the dimensions of the theme. The sounds of the places or the absence of such sounds plays a fundamental role in the atmospheres that I’m trying to convey and generate in the project.

When you gave an interview to the Northern Journal, you said, “In a way, the real subject of the video project does not exist…It’s an invisible phantom.” Can you elaborate on that? What is the real subject?
The subject I am portraying is the human who lived with the presence of the bison. That way of life is poorly understood by Eurocentric cultures. That was what I was interested in discovering or portraying. I followed the path of the bison because it represents the way First Nations people lived. All the vacant spaces left around the bison are the spaces left by earlier lives – lives lived within the cultural shock generated by contact with Europe – and the near-extermination of the bison. The creation of reserves for the native people of the Americas were really the extermination of a spirit that generated a sense of life.

With the westernisation of North America a philosophy of life was destroyed – a loss which we have not been able to fully understand yet. This is why I like to think about this video as a portrait of an invisible human being, a portrait of a philosophy of life inherent to the creative and cultural spirit of a human being that disappeared many years ago. The presence of reserves for human and animal species is only one of its forms of annihilation. This is the central objective of the project.

All photos courtesy of the artist. Keep up with this year’s Aimia | AGO Photography Prize on Twitter and Facebook.

On April 10, 2014, see artwork by Katie Bethune-Leamen, Bruno Billio, Jorden Blue Doody & David James Doody, Randy Grskovic, Sean Martindale, Hazel Meyer, Talwst and Artistic Director Justin Broadbent created exclusively for MASSIVE 10, the 10th anniversary of the AGO’s Massive Party fundraiser. In addition to these artists, we’re pleased to announce a musical lineup that will keep guests dancing all night long, including DJ Filthy Gorgeous, DJ Soundbwoy, Johnny Hockin and Joseph Of Mercury / Joseph & The Mercurials. Guests will also be treated to a birthday fête at the Aimia Photo Booth by Melanie Cantwell Designs where they will receive a memento of the evening. Guests will also be invited to interact with the Absolut Vodka installation by MAKELAB.

Massive Party tickets have sold out for the past four years running, so get your tickets now!

Artists and project details

Justin Broadbent

Katie Bethune-Leamen

Bruno Billio

Photo: Jade Rude

Jorden & David Doody

Randy Grskovic

Sean_Martindale

Photo: Cindy Blazevic.

Hazel Meyer

Talwst

Melanie Cantwell

Justin Broadbent
Justin Broadbent is back for his second year as Massive Party’s Artistic Director after the hugely successful Massive Party GOLD in 2013. He is an accomplished Toronto-based multi-disciplinary artist. His portfolio includes works in video performance, poems, funny ideas, illustration, design, shirt design, music video direction and installation. Justin is also a self-taught photographer. As a video director, Justin has worked with bands such as Shad, Metric, Serena Ryder and Classified. He has been nominated for five MuchMusic Video Awards, including Rock Video of the Year and Hip Hop Video of the Year. Justin’s other awards include a Juno for Record Package of the Year and a CBC Bucky Award for Music Video of the Year. Justin makes a point of choosing layered projects that challenge his expectations. His work often centres around meaning-of-life topics, which he delivers with a glimmer of charm and wit. Justin’s work is inspired by the impossibility of a seed becoming a tree, thrift stores, clever lyrics and human perseverance. He spends his spare time outdoors, looking at the world as if for the first time and adding to his collection of porcelain cat figurines that adorn the mantle of his Toronto home. Justin also likes rappers Creemore and David Shrigley.

Katie Bethune-Leamen
Katie Bethune-Leamen works in installation, sculpture, video and drawing. She received a BFA from Concordia University (Montreal) and a MFA from the University of Guelph. Katie has exhibited across Canada, in Iceland, Japan, France, Australia, the USA, the Netherlands, England, Australia and other countries. Recent solo exhibitions include Shiny Object Person (Young Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario). Recent residencies include Fogo Island Arts (Fogo Island, NL) and SIM (Reykjavik, IS), with ones upcoming at the Illulissat Art Museum (Ilulissat, GD) and The American Museum of Natural History (NYC). In 2012 Rick Rhodes, editor of Canadian Art magazine, listed her as one of the “Top 3 of 2012.” Katie is the recipient of numerous grants and awards. Her writing has appeared in Canadian Art, C Magazine, Border Crossings and others.

At MASSIVE 10 Katie will be bringing 10 artists into the Gallery to participate in art creation throughout the evening. Guests won’t want to miss the chance to watch creativity live as artists interpret the same reference image in 10 different ways.

Bruno Billio
Bruno Billio is a Canadian artist working from an interdisciplinary background. At once an installation artist, a sculptor and a designer, Bruno creates challenging works informed by his command of each of these practices. He is currently living and working in Toronto, and has been the resident artist at the Gladstone Hotel on Queen West, in the fashionable art gallery district in Toronto, for the past few years. Bruno Billio’s artistic practice is informed by the active displacement and staging of the found object, a contemporary art strategy with a historically established lineage. The everyday is reinterpreted through its spatial and contextual re-appropriation by the artist, who presents himself by proxy as both an interventionist and an inventor. Bruno has exhibited internationally in Milan, London, Miami, New York and Los Angeles. Bruno was also Massive Party’s Artistic Director from 2010-12 – shaping the vision for Massive Party Speakeasy, Marchesa Luisa Casati’s Massive Party and #thefutureofartis.

Jorden Blue Doody & David James Doody
Jorden Blue & David James Doody are both graduates from the University of British Columbia in Critical and Creative Studies. Although each artist offers a uniquely individual approach to the discourse of visual arts, they share a common focus on the materialism of cultural codification. Their combined individual practices have been heavily influenced by world travel and the cross pollination of mass media, ritual and fetishistic cultures. Their practice moves freely between new media, sculpture, and painting.

“As a collaborative team for the past seven years, we believe that communication has been the foundation of our artistic relationship. A common thread that can be traced throughout our work is that of collage. By sampling freely from a multitude of different sources, we are able to access unlimited individual histories, societal contexts and cultural symbols. For us, collage is more than just cut and paste, it is an immediate sense of being; it is our way of participating in the re-contextualization of our unfolding culture.” Through their open processes of art-making they allow happenstance to regurgitate cultural intuition in an act of artistic survival.

Randy Grskovic
Randy Grskovic is an artist and curator living in Toronto, Ontario. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts, in Advanced Media communication, from the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Randy has shown his artwork and curated others in exhibitions across Canada at galleries including Equinox and Centre A in Vancouver, V-Tape in Toronto, L’oeil de Poison in Quebec City and Eastern Edge in St. John’s, NL. Randy is the former owner of experimental short-term galleries including The Age of Info(rmation), Cutty Contemporary and Good Luck Art Gallery.

For MASSIVE 10, Randy will be honouring the AGO on a milestone event, congratulating all the Massive Party attendees who help make programming at the gallery possible, as well as cheering on the artists who helped create MASSIVE 10. His piece will provide encouragement to all involved while highlighting the spectacle inherent in the event. Don’t miss out on receiving the recognition you deserve as a Massive Party attendee.

Sean Martindale
Sean Martindale is an emerging and internationally recognized interdisciplinary artist and designer currently based in Toronto, Canada. His interventions activate public and semi-public spaces to encourage engagement, often focused on ecological and social issues. Sean’s playful works question and suggest alternate possibilities for existing spaces, infrastructures and materials found in the urban environment. Frequently, Sean uses salvaged goods and live plants in unexpected ways that prompt conversations and interaction.

Sean’s projects have been featured on countless prominent sites online, as well as in traditional media such as print, radio, broadcast television and film. His practice has a global following and has been written about in countries all around the world, and in multiple languages. Sean was profiled for the first episode of the CBC’s Great Minds of Design, one of his lectures was filmed by TVO for their Big Ideas series, and his work was also included in the feature-length documentary This Space Available, released in 2011.

Hazel Meyer
Hazel Meyer is a visual artist and sports enthusiast based in Toronto. She draws pictures, text and comics, makes letterpress prints, screen-printed multiples, broadcasts and constructs physical environments that are used for performance, collaboration, workshops and amateur athletics. From the monumental to the modest her projects range from immersive installations, to small woven tags meant for an audience of one. Much like the tag line of The Litter Game, a collaborative project she started with Lucy Pawlak and Jim Skuldt in 2013, her practice is devoted to a forever shifting ratio of endurance, transgression and laughs, as ways of being in one’s body and the world. She holds an MFA from OCAD University (Toronto), a BFA from Concordia University (Montréal) and shows her work in galleries, artist-run centers and festivals inter/nationally.

Keep an eye out throughout MASSIVE 10 for Hazel’s presentation of NADIA! NADIA! The piece centres around the 1976 Montréal Olympic Games and 14 year old Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci who received what was then the first ever 10 to be awarded at the Olympics. The scoreboard used at the time had not been engineered for the four numbers that make up an Olympic 10 (10.00), so it was displayed as 1.00. This moment of utter physical prowess and domination is made even more radical by the inability of the technology to be able to represent it. This discord is the starting point for NADIA! NADIA!.

TALWST
His practice is a study in extremes. As a musical performer, TALWST (né Curtis Santiago) is larger-than-life. As a visual artist, he has spent the better part of six years building miniature dioramas, entire worlds that fit in the palm of your hand. TALWST creates exquisite landscapes inhabited by vivid characters—hand-painted and reconstructed Preiser’s figurines—freezing memories and moments inside reclaimed ring boxes. From 2007 to 2010, he apprenticed under Aboriginal artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. In the past six years, TALWST has had six solo exhibitions in Toronto, New York, Edmonton and Vancouver. As a recording artist, he’s collaborated with Grammy-winning producer Illangelo to release his fourth solo album, Alien Tentacle Sex, to international acclaim in 2012.

For MASSIVE 10, TALWST is scaling up and exploring interactivity and spectatorship in a one-night-only piece. Dynasty 10-0 plays off the Massive party theme, 10, and builds on previous artwork examining Canadiana, race and identity construction. For Dynasty 10-0, TALWST is incorporating new media, textiles and performance. Influenced more by Trinidad and Tobago’s Carnival than participatory art, TALWST seeks to create the same spirit of role-play, interaction and fete. Instead of traditional Carnival characters he has cast actors to portray hockey players and coach dressing for the fictional team the Massives. The participation of event attendees will play a pivotal part in how this happening unfolds.

Melanie Cantwell
Melanie Cantwell is an interior decorator, stylist and set designer. Originally from Prince Edward Island, Melanie now resides in downtown Toronto and has a number of art and interior design-based projects on her list of accomplishments, ranging from residential clients and styling for a variety of design-based photo shoots. Melanie is currently the set decorator on the Steven and Chris show on CBC where she oversees the set styling and manages the look and aesthetic of each individual segment. Melanie studied fine arts and graduated with accreditations in advertising and marketing from Sheridan College and interior decorating from George Brown College.

At MASSIVE 10, see Melanie’s set design at the Aimia photo booth. Guests will be able to have their photos taken while wishing the AGO’s Massive Party a “Happy 10th Birthday” surrounded by sweet confections, balloons and other special touches befitting of this milestone celebration.

Filthy Gorgeous
Filthy Gorgeous is the seductive alias of Toronto born DJ, Kristin Leeder. After bursting onto the scene in 2007, Filthy Gorgeous forged an identity with sensual, rhythmic styles that immediately set her apart from her peers. With sets that draw on cutting edge dance music Filthy Gorgeous has become known for a sound that is both rich and complex. She has performed with and received praise from the world’s top international superstar musician/DJs such as Skrillex, Drake, Disclosure, Annie Mac, Nero, Flight Facilities, The Twelves, Tensnake, Theophiles London, Fred Falk and Alvin Risk.

From playing at local Toronto hot spot, The Hoxton, to sold out shows at The Fillmore Miami Beach, New York’s Webster Hall, a regular at various SOHO House locations and special events during Winter Music Conference (WMC), Filthy Gorgeous always leaves the crowd wanting more. A favourite amongst the fashion crowd she has developed long-lasting relationships and played events for some of the world’s leading Fashion and Lifestyle brands. Filthy Gorgeous continues to win fans by building her reputation as an exciting international DJ talent. Constantly evolving and never afraid to take risks, she has made it clear that Filthy Gorgeous is one to watch out for.

Johnny Hockin
Johnny Hockin is a Canadian DJ, musician and multimedia producer. He is a local Toronto fixture, using his wide-ranging taste and an eclectic repertoire to link classic soul, disco, rock, hip hop and electronic music into a sound uniquely his own. He consistently plays for high-end corporate clients and some of the city’s favourite rooms (from Soho House to Thomson to the Drake Hotel to L’Oreal Fashion Week).

He is also known to many Canadians as the former face of movies on MTV Canada, interviewing hundreds of filmmakers and stars. Over the course of 5 years, Ryan Gosling brooded with him, Nic Cage looked at him funny, George Clooney charmed him, Jason Bateman made fun of his name and Justin Timberlake sang to him. Werner Herzog follows him on twitter.

DJ Soundbwoy
Wake up world. Wake up to the aural mindtrip that is the Soundbwoy experience. Born and raised in Toronto, Canada – the city that comes alive when everyone else is asleep – Soundbwoy is the embodiment of what is needed to lead the next generation of music connoisseurs into a new dimension of existence. Unbound by convention, Soundbwoy offers those in attendance the ability to transcend the dance floor and travel on paths only found in dream sequences. He is far from mash up yet incapable of being categorized by any one genre; a musical everyman blessed with the gift of virtuosity behind the turntables. From soulful gems found through countless hours of crate digging to the most ominous of house anthems from the sun swept beaches of Ibiza, a Soundbwoy party is like travelling with a master storyteller crafting his latest fairytale while touching the deepest parts of your imagination. Feel the party transform into your personal looking glass and let Soundbwoy guide you through his universe like no one else can.
Wake up world.

Joseph & The Mercurials / Joseph Of Mercury
Born to the dying synthesized bells of the 80s. Reincarnated from the velvet gentleman of the 50s. Stark Dark & Echo Heavy. Influenced more by the haunting sounds of nature & cinema than by music itself, Joseph spins cavernous worlds of light & ocean, longing & romance… all with nothing more than his voice & the mournful call of a swooning guitar. Seduced by the beauty of fashion & design, enraptured in its drama & detail, Joseph cloaks himself in the colours of their world, as they are enveloped by the echoes of his sound. Each song has found its rightful place among the works of Victoria’s Secret, RW&Co., Members Only, Stockholm S/S/A/W, Fashion Magazine, & V Spain. As if by desire & fate. Desire is everything.

For more information about MASSIVE 10, visit massiveparty.ca.

Tessa Thomas and a Toulouse-Lautrec poster.

The Samuel H. Kress Foundation provides yearly grants to cultural heritage institutions to support a conservation training fellowship; only nine awards for Kress Conservation Fellowships were presented for the 2013/2014 year and the AGO is pleased that the foundation selected us to receive a grant. Maria Sullivan, manager of Conservation at the AGO, calls the fellowship for emerging conservators — administered by the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation — “a unique opportunity for the AGO and for conservation training in Canada.”

“Having a Kress Fellow here in the AGO Paper Conservation Lab is such a wonderful way to engage with our fabulous collection, with dynamic discussion and sharing of conservation principles and techniques within a large collecting institution,” says Joan Weir, the AGO’s conservator, Works on Paper.

Fabric lining on the verso of a poster, 'Le Photographe Sescau' by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Top edge with visible threads from poster lining. 'Le Photographe Sescau' by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

As our Samuel H. Kress Fellow in Conservation, Tessa Thomas’s work is focused on the conservation of Ross R. Scott and Donald R. Muller’s recent remarkable donation to the Gallery: more than 75 posters, prints and drawings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and artists in his circle. The poster revolution of the late 19th century transformed the city of Paris, created an obsession with colour lithography among leading artists and shaped the future of printmaking, poster design and advertising. More than a century later we are still captivated by images of the notorious celebrities of the Belle Époque and with the ambiance of the cabarets, cafés and dance halls.

To begin, Thomas completed a condition survey of the collection to identify the overall condition of works within the donation and to distinguish the unique characteristics of each work by visual examination. The initial survey gave insight into the broad spectrum of materials within the collection and provided interesting findings. For example, there are a few posters that have revenue stamps that denote which posters may have been displayed publicly when they were first printed in the late 19th century. Many of the posters show ink stamps, but one poster in the collection has a unique paper stamp, as seen below.

The range in size of the posters is also quite significant, with the largest posters measuring between 160 to 164 centimetres high by 115 to 122 centimetres wide. Any major conservation treatment of these works is sure to present unique challenges and require special considerations. As a result, the next step for the treatment of the collection will be to determine treatment priorities and develop a treatment methodology for the posters. Thomas’s research into the production of Belle Époque posters includes looking into the history and practice of the lining of posters, including past and present preservation techniques. Look out for more posts on her progress as the project continues.

About Tessa
Tessa Thomas is the current Samuel H. Kress Fellow in Conservation at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Tessa is a graduate of the Queen’s University Master of Art Conservation Program and was the recipient of the 2011 Emerging Conservator Award presented by the Canadian Association for Conservation of Cultural Property (CAC). Tessa specializes in the conservation of paper objects and brings with her experience in conservation and collections care from cultural heritage institutions in Canada and abroad, including The National Archives, London, England; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Royal Ontario Museum and the Archives of Ontario.

Curious about Conservation?
If you have a burning question about Conservation, leave a comment below. We’ll do our best to give you an answer in an upcoming Conservation Notes post.

Signature Partner of the AGO’s Conservation Program