Vague Terrain

Electricity is Magic Gallery - Call for Works

Greg J. Smith — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:01:25 PST

Culled from a press release that recently showed up in our inbox.

As we plan our 2012 Electricity is Magic season, we invite submissions from individual artists, collectives, or curators to submit proposals for the EiM Gallery. Our space is non-traditional, and as such, we have some unique parameters for artists to contend with. Our presentation spaces are as follows:

The Blue Wall. appx. 5m x 2.5m, appropriate for any wall-based works. These works should probably look good on blue.
The Scrim. appx. .7m x 1m, hole in a wall between two rooms, covered with a scrim. This space will be used primarily for video works. The Scrim is viewable from both sides, a fact which should be considered when proposing works.
The Dining Room. our dining room comes completely empty, and is appx. 4m x 3m. This space can be used for a large sculptural work, installations, performances, audio work, etc.
The Backyard. we have a small, unkempt, mostly concrete-covered backyard, which, legend has it, has a pond hidden somewhere underneath the concrete and planks of wood. There is a large brick wall at the back of the yard, and four steps leading down from the house. This space is appropriate for installations, performances, sculptures, etc.
The Basement. We have a large, poorly-lit, unfinished basement. This space is appropriate for installations, performances, sculptures, audio work, etc.

When applying, please include:

A description of the proposed piece(s), including proposed presentation space
Bio/C.V.
Appropriate links, including website, images, publications, etc.
If the work you are proposing a new piece, any appropriate diagrams, etc.
Dimensions, durations and technical requirements of the proposed piece.
If the work has been presented previously, please include details as to where and when.

Submissions are ongoing. Please apply via email to submissions@electricityismagic.com.

Vague Terrain 21: Electric Speed

Revised Projects — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 07:44:44 PST

Electric speed is curated by Kate Armstrong and Malcolm Levy for Revised Projects and the New Forms Media Society.

Our interest in working with the form of the urban screen for Electric Speed relates in one part to the catalyst of the McLuhan in Europe 2011 initiative¹ in which artists and curators have taken the centennial year of media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s birth as an opportunity to consider the transformative impacts of his ideas specifically in the context of media art. The other component that spurred the development of this exhibition was an interest in partnering with the Surrey Art Gallery to present work specifically geared to the unique context of the Surrey Urban Screen, as it is the largest urban screen in Canada and the only one that is devoted to the presentation of art.²

The variegated ways of approaching speed as a subject, mode, effect or relation that we see in these artists’ projects provide entry points for considering the impact of Marshall McLuhan’s thinking on the subject of accelerated culture. Most importantly, though, Electric Speed presents new works from a group of Canadian artists whose tactics and practices exist within and respond to the state of global media culture. Electric Speed will be exhibited at the Surrey Art Gallery from December 2, 2011 through March 31, 2012, before travelling to other urban screen venues internationally. With this exhibition, we’ve tried to investigate these themes as well as enable the production of vibrant work that responds to the pervasive, variable form of the urban screen, itself an important defining feature of the series.

If urban screens are defined as the “various kinds of dynamic digital displays and interfaces in urban space such as LED signs, plasma screens, projection boards, information terminals but also intelligent architectural surfaces”³, it becomes immediately clear how deeply they have infiltrated the urban environment, and it must be noted that the commercial aspects of this ubiquitous form are fundamental to their existence.

The urban screen as a form typically fluctuates, a bit uneasily, between two poles: Not purely commercial and rarely purely cultural, a common tactic of the urban screen is to deliver culture in interstitial spaces or timeslots, for example showing video or media art in the last minute of each hour or working with public transit authorities to show animation or experimental video on the television screens in trains or subways.

However variable or restricted these sites are, these tactics produce unique if not immense opportunities for delivering art in new ways and new spaces, for example allowing it to be shown simultaneously in 15 cities across the U.K.⁴, engaging huge audiences in major public squares⁵, reaching people such as commuters in situ, or allowing architectural surfaces to operate cinematically or socially so that groups of people can gather in public space to interact with a large-scale, shared image.

In response to these complex and multivalent conditions, an international network of artists, curators and theorists has emerged for the purpose of discussing and examining the role of the urban screen and to creating discourse among “artists, curators, cultural managers, architects, government institutions, screen operators as well as theoreticians” so as to rethink “the relationship between architecture and public space in the digital age”⁶ and to consider the implications of ongoing tensions between commercial and artistic concerns as well as the restrictions that arise from questions of ownership and control in relation to the public context. Whether through the cultural bureaucracy of a municipality⁷ or a multi-national corporation such as Clear Channel⁸, screens are regulated, and ultimately cause an examination of what is and is not public.

For us, the networked, global form of the public screen manifestly raises questions about simultaneity, relationships between public and private, issues of centralization and control, as well as causing an examination of the ways in which cultural and commercial spheres intersect - all issues that pierce through and overlay the theme of “electric speed”.

This project might be characterized as an invitation to the six artists - Melissa Mongiat and Mouna Andraos, Jeremy Bailey, Jillian Mcdonald, Jon Sasaki, and Will Gill - to test the formal qualities of the public screen as a medium, because on some level the urban screen implicitly suggests an investigation of the contemporary media environment itself. With all the opportunities and restrictions of the screen, and the attendant factors which are explored in these works as well as in these essays and interviews, it remains for us an active question: Do the formal and contextual constraints that lie at the heart of the urban screen prevent it from functioning as a meaningful cultural space? Or on the other hand, is it even possible to imagine a meaningful investigation of global urban culture or media that takes place anywhere but there?

Kate Armstrong & Malcolm Levy, Vancouver
January 2012

References

1. A primarily European project initiated by Stephen Kovats and Michelle Kasprzak to create “a conversation that spans art, communications, and technology.” http://www.mcluhan2011.eu
2. Architecturally the Surrey Urban Screen is in fact more of a façade than a screen, as it possesses a unique exterior with a set of illuminated, irregular windows that challenge it as a traditional projection surface.
3. Mirjam Struppek is the founder of the International Urban Screens Association, http://www.urbanscreens.org/about.html
4. The BBC Big Screens initiative is a collaboration between the BBC, LOCOG and UK local authorities in which screens become focal points in the city for sports, news, events and content arising from partnerships with arts organizations.
5. Initiatives to present cultural projects operate in connection with sites such as New York’s Times Square, the large-scale urban screen in Federation Square in Melbourne, and the Collegium Hungaricum in Berlin.
6. Mirjam Struppek, http://www.urbanscreens.org/about.html
7. Where public art must be in dialogue with community and the specific requirements and constraints presented by the site in question.
8. Clear Channel is a global media and entertainment company that owns and operates approximately one million screens in 45 countries across 5 continents.

CeC Call for Papers - Biotechnological Performance Practice

Marco Donnarumma — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:26:25 PST

eContact! extends an open call for contributions to an issue focussing on the use of the body in electroacoustic performance practice, coordinated by guest editor Marco Donnarumma. Performers, composers and others are encouraged to contribute their perspectives on the role or position of the body in experimental practices of musical performance.

Suggestions for contributions include, but are not limited to the following ideas:

Use of Mechanical Myography (MMG), Electromyography (EMG) and other similar biological signal measurements in performance
Scoring / notation of body-related performance
Sound Art dealing with the body and biological aspects of performance
Development of DIY, biological-based, Interactive Musical Systems (IMS)
The definition / augmentation of Self on stage by means of biotechnologies
Cognitive aspects of embodied interaction between the biological body and computer
Composer—Technology—Performer: definition of roles?
Live electronics vs. fixed media in biotechnological performance practice
Historical overviews and reflections
Critical perspectives on gesture-based “human-computer interaction”
The sound of fles…

We also welcome other contributions that engage in a discourse on the relation between biophysics and music. Feel free to propose other ideas!

Submission deadline: January 31st 2012
Publication: February 29th, 2012

Submission Guidelines can be found here. To state your interest in contributing or for further information, contact Guest Editor Marco Donnarumma via email.

Call for Project Proposals: Art Gallery of Hamilton

Neil Wiernik — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 08:01:43 PST

The Art Gallery of Hamilton invites artists to apply to create an interactive digital media work using new technologies, with the assistance of technical experts in the fields of software and video gaming. This project is made possible with the support of the Ministry of Tourism and Culture's Museums and Technology Fund grant, and partners at McMaster University and Silicon Knights.

We are seeking proposals that articulate an idea for an interactive digital artwork. Proposals will be evaluated for artistic merit and technical feasibility according to the skills of our partners in software engineering and gaming. Three selected artists will work with these experts and the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton during the artwork creation stage.

The artwork creation will take place in Hamilton using available equipment (see below) over approximately three months in early 2012. The resulting artworks will be presented in an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in winter 2013. Artists will be compensated with a project fee as well as exhibition fee in accordance with CARFAC recommendations. This opportunity is open to emerging, mid-career and senior artists who live in Ontario.

A key goal for this project is to provide technical skills training in these areas to artists who might normally hire a technician in order to realize a project. Artists with ideas, but not the technical skills or equipment to achieve them, are encouraged to apply.

Examples of artworks include, but are by no means limited to:

the creation of a navigable 3D digital world that allows a gallery visitor to move through a virtual space constructed by the artist;

a time-based artwork that uses multiple projectors to surround the viewer, and surround-sound technologies, to immerse a gallery visitor in an emotionally engaging story;

an artwork that incorporates video gaming strategies to engage viewers beyond exploration of 2D digital scenery;

an artwork whose main platform for dissemination and exhibition is an iPhone or other hand-held device;

an artwork that encourages multiple users to connect in an online environment.

Proposals must include the following:

An artist's statement that describes the concept of the proposed artwork (maximum 250 words);
A brief physical description of your proposed work (would it incorporate projection, sound, joystick, etc.)? Please list any specific equipment and software for the creation and display of this work, if known;
A list of any images or sound previously created that relate to proposed work; maximum 20 digital images (see #8 below);
Sketches or diagrams to illustrate your idea, if applicable;
A statement as to whether any part of this work been presented before. If it has, then include details as to where and when;
Artist CV or brief biography, including mailing address, phone and email;
A brief description of what technical areas you would need instruction or guidance on;
Past work samples: images (maximum 20), sound, and/or video (links to Youtube or Vimeo, etc. are acceptable). These may be submitted on a CD or DVD.

Artists will have access to the following material resources for the creation and presentation of the project: iMac computers with upgraded RAM, iPads, external hard drives and network attached storage, Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Creative Suite CS5.5, Wacom tablet, Mac minis, HD projectors, possibly 3D projectors.

Expertise from the fields of software engineers and gaming (programming, design or content) will be available to artists in the form of several consultations.

Please submit the materials listed in 1 through 7 above by email with the subject heading "Interactive Digital Media Art Incubator application" to the email address below in digital form (word document, pdf, jpg). Maximum image size: 100 kB each. Video files should be Quicktime, maximum 10 minutes total. Sound files should be MP3, maximum 10 minutes total.

Note: Image, video and sound files may be submitted on a CD or DVD by mail, but only if this is necessary due to large file sizes. Materials will not be returned unless a self-addressed stamped envelope is enclosed. Large digital files can also be sent via a program such as transferbigfiles.com to the email address below, along with a separate email that identifies the application contents. Email is the preferred submission method. Any mailed materials must be received by the deadline.

Deadline for proposals: Thursday, January 19th, 2012.

Successful applicants will be notified by February 8th, 2012.

Send applications and any questions about proposals to:
Melissa Bennett
Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Hamilton
melissa@artgalleryofhamilton.com

S= (KN+KT)R: Cam Matamoros, Four Years Later

Mél Hogan — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:59:17 PST

'Every school-day for 3 weeks i got up and made a 3 minute recording of where i thought i would be in 4 years when i finish my degree. an attempt to create routine, an anchor/reference point for the present and stability and hope for the future. then i edited out everything that wasn't an adjective or an adverb' – Cam Matamoros

This is a piece I would like to one day take on as a proper curator; for years I’ve been wanting to programme works that deal with the role of the document within art, or more specifically how the video document becomes art. But since I’m not there yet, I’ve taken to writing about video and interviewing video artists who directly or indirectly have aspects of this ‘documentation’ in their work. I’ve written about Matamoros’s work before for my own pleasure (large bits of which I recycle in this intro), but this is the first time I’ve been able to ask Matamoros to elaborate on the work from a creator’s point of view.

I wanted to write about In Four Years (adjectives and adverbs) because it’s a video I saw a long time ago and one that has stayed with me since. This affective quality and its connection to memory (mine, the video’s, and the narrative’s) are simultaneously about formal choices and process, and the performance of process itself. This is what Matamoros executes perfectly without trying (and without trying to achieve any particular outcome it seems).
Ritualistically, Matamoros testifies to the camera, beginning with “in four years” followed by an intimate but mantra-like listing of potential future incarnations and possibilities. Facing if not confronting the camera with an unrehearsed vent forward – the authenticity may have proven to be increasingly difficult to sustain over the course of the three weeks the piece was shot, as the ritual itself settles into a pattern of confessions that are expected and, once assembled, constitute a conversation between then present but now past selves. Silences, yawns, hesitation and contemplation are key in marking the passage of time, adding to the lighting and outfits that suggest perpetual change.

My take on Matamoros’s video is that it is essentially about documenting anticipation, but always falling back into the moment of being recorded. The very process of imagining the future by recording one’s current ideas about the future makes more of a statement about present fears and hopes than it says about the potential for what might be or could be. And I think I get why Matamoros would “edit out” everything but adjectives and adverbs - these are the words that give meaning: they specify, qualify, and limit our judgments on things. Nothing else is needed. If I love this video it’s because it’s incredibly smart and gentle in its subtleties.

And with that, Matamoros and I begin our conversation…

Mél Hogan: How does editing (out everything but adjectives and adverbs) alter, enhance, thwart, or prevent the process of remembering?

Cam Matamoros: You ask about editing language and the effect that has on remembering, but to my mind, I was not engaged in a process of remembering, but rather trying to describe a future, to produce a better self through imagining what I would or could be like in four years. When I was shooting In Four Years (adjectives and adverbs), I was trying to produce a future and describe a present. I was trying to know where I was in that moment and how I would get somewhere better. In fact, this was a work that, at the outset, had for its only goal to be a work that was not about memory or about transience. It was meant to not be about aimless drifting or unknowability. I felt that all my past work had been about those subjects and that I would be forever caught in such ill-described, liminal space, if my work did not look (or especially act) toward the future. It was an attempt at doing something that I felt I had no idea how to do—establish stability and a deliberate trajectory for and within myself.

In editing the video, I prioritized the goal of describing the present. To follow through in the most literal terms possible, I eliminated from my monologues any word that was not a descriptive one. So, I kept only adjectives, adverbs and moments where I did not speak. Part of what I think is the humour of this piece is that I so clearly and almost immediately fail at the goals I have intended (hope, betterment, achievement, stability).

MH: Part of the humour in In Four Years is also seemingly made manifest through the unrehearsed and visually unpolished aesthetic. It’s a testimonial. It’s a documentary. It’s raw and real. It ‘looks’ archival. So tell me about the aesthetics of failure, (or maybe the failure of aesthetics?) and how they appear to go against the goals set out in your piece.

CM: I am terrified by failure, but fascinated by it at the same time. I am also terrified of success, which leaves me in a very ambivalent place every time I embark on a new project.

I guess it’s true, the goals I set out in the video have, in a certain way, a lot to do with success and achieving a certain polish that is markedly absent from my “current” state (i.e. during the taping of the video). I think that has to do with the fact that what the video is really about the effort of moving toward goals—and how far away I am from those goals at the time of recording.

Everything was an effort for me at that time, especially waking up and getting out of bed. The video is a document of my desire to be something and somewhere other than what/who and where I was and as a document, it does much more to describe the actuality of that present self than it does anything to support or illustrate what I imagined those goals to look like once they were manifested.

Something that stands out to me now is how ill defined so much of my future successes were. The word “good” comes back a lot, which is utterly useless for telling anyone anything about what goodness would look like, or how it would be evaluated in all the different contexts I seem to be imagining myself achieving it. Some of my goals are absurd, some seem so small, but I think in some way, they all appear unattainable because of my physical state in the video. I think the humour comes partly from that; there’s something ridiculous about hoping and intending and appearing to strive (or not at all striving but just talking about striving at some later date) despite the fact that the odds may be stacked against you… Or even that you are stacking the odds against yourself while you are dreaming of overcoming them… Maybe it is about self-defeat.

One comment that someone made that struck me as relevant to all this is the fact that what I kept are descriptive words but no action words. There are no verbs other than “be,” And being is not a very clear action one can undertake to do. That comment made me feel a bit like a character in a Beckett play. These clowns who always talk about getting out of their nowhere but they never move.

It is definitely unrehearsed, and uses my own consumer-grade video camera and ambient light. It is a testimonial, a documentary, and a record of an effort. Aesthetically it is about the effort more than the finish. The video is a document of a process and was created through a set of rules designed to reflect, conceptually, the ideas I was interested in when I was making it. I wanted it to be only as mediated as the process required, and for the process to be as transparent as possible.

MH: Did this desire to be unrehearsed change as you progressed? In other words, did it become increasingly difficult to not ‘act’ for the camera once you got more comfortable in the testimonial process?

CM: I think there are moments where I forget myself and other moments where I am conscious that an audience will later watch what I am saying. I knew while I was recording that the footage would not be used raw and there was the possibility that it might not be used at all, so most of the time I really considered myself to be talking directly to myself through the camera, making video material. I can see moments when I am maybe ‘acting’ more, but there is a way in which acting is exactly part of the intention. Part of the plan is basically a “fake it ‘til you make it” strategy.

Since I do not know how to become or even what or who exactly I want to become, I am practicing listing accomplishments in some organized, routine way, so that they might manifest later by my simple concentration on them or so that a clear path toward them might appear by my regular recitation of them.

This is also part of the strategy in my later video, Undertone Undertone, where I try to become Vito Acconci by being exactly like him and exactly re-making his video Undertone. There are a lot of differences there, since I know exactly what I want to become and exactly how I am to go about it, so it is rehearsed and costumed, and is in part, also about “anxieties of influence” kinds of things, and about loving that video and wanting to redeploy it.

MH: At what point does the audience—their reaction, interpretation—factor in to your creative process, if at all? How is your awareness of being watched different before/during/after making work? And does knowing that your video has been watched more then a thousand times on YouTube change your idea of audience? Who was your intended audience?

CM: More than a thousand times? Wow. I originally put that video up on YouTube just as a way to show it to friends or family who were living far away from where I was and who would likely never go to an art gallery or film/video festival. I never expected it to circulate much beyond that.

My intended audience when I made the work was a gallery audience. Individuals or small groups engaged with a projection or small screen. However, the first venues I found for it were festivals where it was playing to cinema-seated audiences. The funny thing is, I’ve heard about people’s responses to it in these contexts, but for the longest time I had never been at one of my own screenings. I’ve been to one now, but still don’t have a sense really of how it is received. People tell me that audiences laugh and respond well to the humour. That feedback has made me realize that it works quite well as something to be seen by a large audience, seated in the dark, anonymously sharing the experience, rather than standing in a white cube.

As for a YouTube audience, I guess in many ways the gallery audience I originally imagined might be similar: Individuals or small groups… but rather than in the gallery, they are anonymously sharing the experience with a thousand others, dispersed across their personal gateways to the internet. Maybe it is effective as something based on YouTube? It might share something, I suppose with the sort of video blog confessional style that I think exists there.

The idea of audience was most important to me in the editing process. The recording process was basically a way to produce the material that I would then use to make the work. I needed to have something to work with, but I didn’t know what that was going to be or how I would use it. I knew, at the outset, that I wanted to make work that had something to do with creating stability and a future but I also knew that I had no idea how to do that, so I developed a formula and stuck to it.

The formula was something like this:
Legend:
Stability: S
Knowing where you are now: KN
Knowing where you want to be after a measurable and concrete amount of time: KT
Routine movement toward that future: R
S= (KN+KT)R
(RxKT)+self reflection=KN
So first I had to find the value of KN through the second formula in order to solve the first.

That approach is as absurd and abstract as so many of my goals, but it set up a way for me to act toward something, which was by making the recordings I made. I knew that the recordings on their own could not possibly be interesting or engaging for an audience, so after I had made them, the next challenge was to make something of that fodder, to distil some kind of essence from it. I wanted to be able to make rules that were not at all about the aesthetic but rather about the effort of trying to know something about myself. Words hold the promise of telling us something but they also, always, inevitably fail at communicating quite what we mean. I think what I wanted to do for an audience besides describe something about myself, was engage in the questions of what it means to want and especially to say what one wants. What is the action of wanting and how can it ever be possible to name what one wants? Doesn’t language always fail us? But don’t we always look to it for an anchor, for a way to know what was intended? Can I always know what I intended? Is language always a betrayal? Can it ever offer something concrete? What I maybe didn’t realize was that I thought I was framing wanting as an active, practical thing, but ultimately I defeated my own purpose, creating a video where my performance of intending to be something or someone just deteriorates and is exposed as non-action when it stays in the realm of strictly description.

I think I am getting off-track here. I’m going to stop there.

MH: You made this video in 2007, projecting, as the title suggest, where you’d be in four years. It’s been four years, so the question is: did you fare up to your expectations?

CM: This is the first question everyone asks. Everyone is curious about how well I met or missed my expectations. Of course this is a natural question, given the format of the work. It sets up suspense in a way. I’m not sure about how important it is to answer it though. Actually, I wonder if answering it closes down something in the work that otherwise makes it durable in the memory of the audience? What do you think? I’m curious, too, to know what people remember of my goals and projections. It’s been a while since I watched the video, so I myself don’t remember what I anticipated, wanted, or tried to manifest. Truthfully, quite a few things in my life are “good, really good, good enough, or pretty good” fewer things now are “messy, a mess, really messy,” but some things still are. I didn’t know what graduating “with honours” meant at the time that I shot the video so I didn’t know that I couldn’t achieve that since I didn’t do a programme that had an honours option. I did however graduate in April “with great distinction” which I think is about what I was aiming for with that statement. I think there are goals in the video that I’m still working on. I would still like to be able to describe some part of my practice or recognition in terms of “all over the world,” for sure.

MH: What role does video as a medium play for you personally and as an artist in terms of recording, remembering, and facing yourself in the future?

CM: Video is something I think about as a kind of space, as another kind of embodiment, as an interface. I think of video as a very physical medium. Maybe, I mean that I think of video-performance as a very physical medium. I think that, for me, to interact with the camera in one moment and project the results to an audience in a later moment feels much more intimate to me than to be present in the same room. There is a closeness that is possible through the way that video can frame and enlarge (on a big screen) or contain (on a small one) that is not possible when we are all on the same scale. Also, I think maybe all of my video performances are about being and becoming through time, about projection into the future. Time and projection are obviously two fundamental technological factors of the video medium… and there is so much time and technology between the moment when I physically interact with the camera and the one where the video is played in public, but I am interested in how the screen can feel like thin skin, how video can create haptic experiences.

As an artist, I really like video that is about what video is and does. It can reorganize time and it can ask questions about how we interact with screens. I’m still really hung up on video art from the 70s, like that of Lisa Steele and Vito Acconci, where you have a very intimate set-up of the artist in front of the camera asking you in some way or another to touch them. These works are loaded with questions of intimacy, of truth and believability, of whether it is the audience or the artwork that is captive… There are some really important critiques of screen-based culture embedded in these tender and seemingly personal works and I feel like those works are still some of the most well articulated and nuanced critiques of screen-based communications/consumption that have been made.

Untitled Landscapes, still

MH: What are you working on and what are some of the common threads that tie your work together, such as in Untitled Landscapes? What’s next?

CM: I’m working on a couple of projects right now. I’m continuing to develop Untitled Landscapes. I’ve edited the images and changed how they will be displayed, and, of course, there are always more and more of them. I’m also working on a video exploring the video projection surface (tv screen or projection screen) as a kind of skin between my audience and myself. Video is for me a very tactile and intimate medium, and I’m working through that along with language and culturally constructed ideas about intimacy, love, and co-dependence. Finally, I’m trying to finish a project I started with my family a few years ago where each of my parents and 3 brothers created a document where they in some way perform their impression of me. These projects are all in some way related to the idea that a subject is produced and becomes a self not in a void or under any pure circumstances, but in ways that are inextricably defined by linguistic, social, cultural and geographic environments. We become ourselves through being like or unlike other people and things around us. We do our best to express ourselves by using words that are enough like or enough unlike other words available to us. Being and saying are always approximate and temporary. I think this is a thing I am constantly expressing.

My videos are partly about becoming a knowable self through language, through media, and through social situatedness. They are also about desire, which I think is an implicit vehicle in any process of becoming. I ask myself who or what I want to be and then I try to show how I am/not, or might/not be like that. I struggle with simultaneous and equal terror of and desperation for both success and failure. I think my video works really grow out of that ambivalence.

Another thought is that through all my work there is an interest in the surface (screen or print or frame) as an interface between the image and the viewer and an interest in the process of looking and what looking does to an artwork and to a viewer who looks at it. I think that there is perhaps more of a link within my video works than between those works and others. For example, the works that I would consider more as ‘drawing,’ for lack of a better word, I think deal with different approaches and interests than I do in video work.

Drawing, like the Untitled Landscapes series and some other things I’ve been playing with using folded, reflective mylar shapes or paper cutting, or papier maché, is a very new medium for me and it is very consistently and clearly about exploring landscape and what it means to represent landscape. There is a side of it that is interested in sparse, simple, straight-up beauty, the kind of romantic, dreamy feeling I have sometimes had while looking out the window of a late-winter train at 5pm. The lavender-tinged sky over Ontario farmland is wide and streaked with sun-tinted clouds. The long yellow-brown grass shows in strips through the bright snow, which is white, but also reflects the colour of the sky. I think seeing a length of unbroken horizon does something special to the eyes and triggers something in the imagination. I am interested in how representing this on a small scale might stimulate a larger-scale feeling in one’s imagination. Sown in this imagination stimulus is also a critical question for me. I do love that dreamy, romantic feeling, but I also feel wary of it. There is nothing simple about Ontario farmland at any time of day. The same is true of any landscape. I think of Don Delillo’s “most photographed barn in America” from white noise. We learn to look and read images just like we learn to read words. Sight and understanding are shaped by habit, by precedent, and by anticipation.

In a comment reflecting on the making of Semiotics of the Kitchen, Martha Rosler said she was concerned with “something like the notion of ‘language speaking the subject,’ and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.” I think a lot of video art from that time is concerned with how the mechanisms of television constitute a language that is capable of starting to “speak the subject.” I relate to this concern. The magic that I find in work by Lisa Steele and Vito Acconci, and even Rosler, though she is more heavy-handed, is the creation of this intimate context through the video screen. There is a feeling of a private conversation between the artist and the viewer while at the same time, there is always the clear and present knowledge on the part of the viewer that they really are engaged with a series of machines. A television and vcr, for example, but also the machines of verbal language, body language, gendered expectations for behaviour, camera framing and angles. In fact what is emphasized is the invisible social apparatuses that make up what we think of as the content of the more visible, technological apparatus.

I am interested in this kind of simile as a critical strategy. I wouldn’t claim to be there yet, but it’s something I strive toward. And I don’t think its somewhere you can get just by thinking it through. I think you have to feel your way there, partly. It’s instinct and it’s careful consideration, mood, impulse and criticism. It’s in the joke. I hope the work I make is funny.

VIDEODROME 2012 – Call for Submissions

Neil Wiernik — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 09:55:25 PST

Call for Submissions: VIDEODROME 2012 at The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art
Now accepting submissions of A/V works under 5 mins.
Deadline: April 1st 2012

VIDEODROME is Toronto's foremost event for Visual Music and A/V culture since 2004. Visual Music is video and audio composition made from video edits, simultaneously video AND music where picture matches sound, cut for cut, beat for beat, rhythmic media work where sound and image are equally dominant. See examples here.

Based on the Cronenberg concept, VIDEODROME is an exercise in televisionary excess and sensory overload, video screening as party and vice-versa, in the words of dropFRAMEvideo: “bridging the gaps between the sofa, the club, and the gallery.”

Works must be complete and received by April 1st by post at 193 Augusta, Toronto, ON, M5T 2L4 Or posted to a file-sharing service such as SENDSPACE. Proposals for live performances or installations will also be considered.

VIDEODROME is administrated by Jubal Brown, dropFRAMEvideo, and Apocalypse Tomorrow.

VIDEODROME 2012
Spring 2012, at The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto

More info on last years event here.

Electric Fields 2011 – Swim Sound

Greg J. Smith — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 18:21:21 PST

[photo: Adam Tinworth]

Our peers at Artengine are gearing up for the 2011 installment of their Electric Fields festival and this year the event is focusing on exploring the relationship between sound and space. Beginning next Wednesday, Electric Fields will repurpose a public pool, a basilica church, civil service buildings, the Grand Hall at the Museum of Civilization and downtown Ottawa as sites of performance and deep listening. Vague Terrain was invited to advise on one of these exciting projects and this dialogue helped set the stage for Swim Sound, a collaboration that will see media artist Rob Cruickshank team up with musican Jesse Stewart for a one-of-a-kind musical performance at the Champagne Bath (a historic public pool). Cruickshank & Stewart's performance will blend electronic and jazz tropes via a drum kit staged on a platform in the pool, a watergong, hydrophones and a custom built synthesiser to leverage the unique acoustic qualities of this space. Artengine/Vague Terrain critical blogging resident Jaenine Parker wrote a preview of the performance earlier this week and the below excerpt gives a good overview of the artists' plans:

'Stewart’s large transparent drum kit will be staged on a platform in the pool, to appear as if it is floating on water. Throughout the performance Stewart will switch from playing his drum kit to dipping other percussive instruments, like gongs, into the pool. “The addition of water, lowers the pitch” explains Stewart. People swimming underwater will hear these warped acoustic sounds, which will be picked up by underwater microphones, called hydrophones, floating below the surface of the pool. The hydrophones have been specially created by Cruickshank to transport the sound in the pool back through speakers into the space. Performing outside of the pool, Cruickshank, will be relaying and electronically processing the sounds he collects from the microphones, live. His performance will also blend in his own synthesized creations to the sampled sound he will process.'

This will most certainly be an engaging performance. Swim Sound takes place on Friday November 25th at 10PM – tickets are $10 and full details are available here. Be sure to check out the rest of the Electric Fields programming as it appears both adventurous and promising (the Polytectures soundwalk seems particularly compelling).

2012 Subtle Technologies Festival – Call for Submissions

Greg J. Smith — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 07:50:27 PST

In 2012, Subtle Technologies celebrates our 15th anniversary with our annual Festival. For 15 years Subtle Technologies has been bringing people together to promote wonder, incite creativity and spark innovation across disciplines. Our symposium, performances, workshops, screenings, exhibitions and networking sessions provide a forum to explore ideas and pose questions at the intersection of art, science and technology. Subtle Technologies is known internationally for presenting work by artists and scientists at the leading edge of their respective disciplines.

Our 2012 festival takes place from May 24 to May 27 2012 at various venues throughout Toronto. Our annual open call accepts submissions that bridge art, science and technology. This year we are also accepting submissions for a themed session which explores work inspired by biology, as outlined below. For both streams we are soliciting proposals from all disciplines and also welcome topics that explore ways of knowing that are outside of the western framework.

We are interested in receiving submissions from individuals as well as interdisciplinary teams and collaborative projects. We would like to present successful stories from artists and scientists working together. We are equally interested in hearing about the issues that inhibit disciplines from collaborating. What approaches can we take to foster inter-cultural exchanges when it comes to science or technology based work? How do we make scientific systems more accessible to artists as tools for creating new work?

Possible areas to be explored in this year’s Festival from either an artistic or scientific approach include: Acoustics, alternative energy, artificial intelligence, astronomy, bioengineering, bioethics, chemistry, complexity, computer science, consciousness, environmental science, ethnobotany, funding strategies for interdisciplinary collaboration, hacking and DIY culture, imaging techniques and systems, interactive systems, indigenous science, mathematics, nanotechnology, network theory, neuroscience, pharmacology, psychology, physics, robotics, science and society, systems theory, virtual worlds.

In 2012 Subtle Technologies is also presenting a special session at our symposium that focuses on work inspired by, utilizing or hacking biological systems. This special session will include work by artists who are using live tissues, bacteria and other biological process in their work. We are also interested in submissions exploring enhancements or modifications to the human body through transhumanism. Projects which use concepts of biomimicry, genetic engineering and synthetic biology will also be considered for this special session. We are interested in both technical and ethical issues surrounding this work.

The above topics are only suggested ones for inclusion in the Festival. Other relevant topics within the realm of art, science and technology will be considered.

Online submission form

BioArt in Ottawa: An interview with Andrew Pelling

Jaenine Parkinson — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:15:15 PDT

Vague Terrain & Artengine's critical blogging resident Jaenine Parkinson talks to Andrew Pelling about two collaborative art works that bridge art and science, which he was involved in presenting at the Open Ottawa Libra conference held at Arts Court on Wednesday September 28, 2011. Andrew Pelling is Canada Research Chair and Assistant Professor in the Departments of Physics and Biology at University of Ottawa. He heads up Pelling Lab, a laboratory for Biophysical Manipulation, housed in the University’s new Center for Interdisciplinary Nano-physics.

[Andrew Pelling and Daniel Modulevsky Organ Re-Purposing Bioreactors / 2011]

Jaenine Parkinson: Could you explain to me exactly what was going on in the two pieces you had at Open Ottawa Libre? Maybe we can start with the tissue culture piece, that you made with your student Dan Modulevsky? From what I gathered, it looked like, there were two bits of steak? And you were, someone said, sucking the cells out of them?

Andrew Pelling: Yes, we were extracting the cells out to leave behind what we call an extra-cellular matrix. It’s like a scaffold that cells grow on, it’s made out of collagen—a protein. There are cells in tissue that make the collagen and then there are other cells that make muscle and nerves, and things like that. We have been developing this process to remove all the cells and just leave behind the matrix. Which is great because, one, for a practical reason, to make the matrix in a lab is unbelievably expensive.

[Andrew Pelling and Daniel Modulevsky Organ Re-Purposing Bioreactors, detail]

JP: Oh, it seems like a highly detailed process; so you can actually synthesize it?

AP: You can, absolutely, but it is incredibly expensive. I’m not sure why. It’s not actually very hard. I don’t know what it is that makes it so costly. There are a lot of proprietary products out there you can just buy to synthesize it from pure collagen. But, for what ever reason it is very expensive; to make a large piece.

[Decellularized steak]

JP: So it’s use is primarily for recreating new tissue, with different cells in it?

AP: It is part of a huge push called regenerative medicine. Because you can take stem cells and coax them into being anything, like heart cells. But then you’ve just got a blob of heart cells and you need a structure. One way to build that would be to make it artificially, to create these collagen scaffolds in the shape of a heart, and put your cells onto it. That’s one approach and it is expensive. But it is very controlled. So, a few years ago a group took some hearts and got rid of the cells (decellularization) and there you have this scaffold of a heart. Of course, now you have to kill one animal to make a heart to put into another animal, so I’m not sure if it really makes much sense. It is also not very interesting to me personally, it’s kind of a standard thing that can do with this technology.

What we got interested in started with the little bit of animal work that’s going on here. In many cases you will study one part, in our case we were studying the aorta and heart disease, but the rest of the animal gets tossed, and it is quite wasteful I think. So I started thinking, well what else can we do to get more value out of this life that we have just ended? I just felt very guilty about that whole thing. And we started thinking about what about hacking the organs that are in there. Sort of bio-hacking.

JP: When you use the term bio-hacking what do you mean?

AP: Very much like you would in technology where you hack a piece of technology to repurpose it, use it for unintended purposes. So like Protype D with their printers. So, I thought, why can’t we do that with these organs? Can we take muscle and get rid of the cells and create an new structure that doesn’t currently exist in nature? Can we create little pumps that join to little arms and start putting them together to make monstrosities or tools and devices that would be bio-compatible? It is just something nobody is doing, so it just really attracts me. It’s so weird, but we have the technology. It is so, easy to get rid of cells and put whatever cell we want in. So, we can take a heart and put kidney cells into it; so it’s this heart-kidney. You just need a couple of electrodes to make it pump. You could exploit some of the biology of these kidney cells, to, say, pump and filter at the same time, or who knows. We do a lot of work with micro-fluidics and micro, miniaturized technologies. We spend a lot of times making these things synthetically, well could we make them organically? Then if it is all biological it will be easier to put into something as a device, rather than a new organ.

JP: And always the ethics comes up…

AP: Absolutely.

JP: What is it like working within the University framework? What sort of controls do they have in place around this type of work?

AP: Yes the University has good ethical guidelines, especially in terms of how you handle an animal, or bio-hazardous stuff. But, a lot of our work doesn’t actually involve animals. There are things called cell-lines which are immortalized cells. That just grow, and grow and grow and grow and don’t need a lot.

JP: I was reading your blog, plasticbiology.net there is one from a cervical cancer victim who died in 1951.

AP: That’s a really famous one: HeLa.

JP: It seems bizarre to me that this woman, Henrietta Lacks, died from a horrible disease, in 1951, and a part of her is still living. It is kind of amazing and horrifying at the same time…

AP: It is completely crazy when you sit down and really think about it. There is more of her biomass now then there ever was. Every lab in the world has HeLa cells. I’m sure this has been thought about by other people, but it is such a bizarre phenomenon. What’s even more strange is that it is so easy to genetically modify these things. To create new cells that would have never have existed. It’s bizarre how much power we have.

JP: Then there is this sort of fear/fascination blend to it, and many people just don’t want to go there because we don’t have the ethics yet to deal with it.

AP: Well, there are a tremendous amount of ethical guidelines. You have to get certified to do animal work and there are rules and regulations to minimize suffering. Although, it is interesting, because Canada does things a lot differently from the UK, where I used to work. I think maybe North Americans are a bit more squeamish. Some of the rules that are in place aren’t actually better for the animal, I think, but they just don’t look as horrific.

JP: But do ethics come into it when you are thinking about these projects?

AP: I’m not an ethicist, I think there are big issues there and sometimes I purposefully say stuff just to provoke ethical questions.

JP: I suppose half the attraction is to play with that boundary line?

AP: Absolutely, that is definitely part of what interests me, is that pushing, always. But, at the same time I would have a really hard time growing mice for the sole purpose of bio-hacking. We have these mice already and what we are working on already is a collaboration with a medic who has discovered a protein that minimizes, and maybe, perhaps could cure heart disease. So, there is real reason to do this work and there is real merit behind it. And what really bothered me at the end, is this ethical thing, we have this entire mouse, minus a heart, that’s just getting incinerated. There must be something we can do with this.

JP: Is this where the science stops and the art kicks in? Because, you don’t have an artistic background, do you?

AP: Well I did go to an art school when I was younger, and that’s where I learnt to love math. Some people get confused by me sometimes, some people call me an artist, some people call me a scientist. I like to think of it more as just being a creative person. And I don’t think there actually is much of a difference. I think it is more a medium you work in.

JP: Except with science there is more of a focus on purpose, where as exploration is more the purpose in art.

AP: In science there is more of a push for technologies, applications and profit. I like to keep my lab more in the field of pure exploration, curiosity driven. But it is getting harder. Although there are still grants for that – my main operating grant is called the Discovery Grant – its mainly for that fundamental research. It’s a federal grant, most science Professors have access to it. Although, I like to push those boundaries a little further than most. The Discovery Grant is much more open ended, but pot of money is much smaller than with industrial grants.

JP: So where are you going to next with this tissue culture project?

AP: The work we are doing with decellularization is a slightly different twist on regenerative medicine, where it’s not so much about making transplant products, but about making devices and things you can use. Integrating them with micro-fluidics or biosensors, or who knows. We can either spend years and years developing our own mechanical or micro-mechanical device that pumps or we can use something that already there. These aren’t trivial issues, but this is another way of thinking. Specifically, it’s not a way not many people are looking at right now, and that is why it is interesting. It’s more just stepping into the dark and seeing what happens.

[Andrew Pelling and Donna Legault Darkfields / 2011]

JP: So the work that you did with artist Donna Legault, that is completely different.

AP: Yeah, that was interesting, because we just got shoved in a room and we didn’t even know each other.

JP: Oh, how did that happen?

AP: Julie DuPont, who is the Cultural Planner for the City of Ottawa, was organizing Open Ottawa Libra and she arranged a meeting between a few of us at PrototypeD. We were just going to see their space. We ended up talking about Open Ottawa and some themes for it and all of a sudden we were planning a whole bunch of stuff for this event. Donna and I met there I guess because one of my previous art-sci things was this cell sounds project and we were just introducing ourselves and I talked about that. Then it turns out she is a sound artist, so there was this connection. We came up with some crazy ideas about using sound to manipulate cells. I don’t know if any of that will ever turn into something. But she came to the lab one weekend and we tried a few things out. She has these base shakers, and she has been working with infra-sound, low frequency sound, feeling and visualizing sound. We put some beakers on top of these base shakers, which vibrate to create little standing waves. It became about visualizing sound with water. The other consideration was capturing the waves, you actually have to have the lights at a certain angle, to scatter up into the camera. We were making sound visible, but also making these waves visible.

[Andrew Pelling and Donna Legault Darkfields, detail]

JP: So could you explain a little about the cell-sound work you had done previously?

AP: That was called Dark Side of the Cell (2004) www.darksideofcell.info and that was with an artist I have been working with for years Anne Niemetz She and I met in UCLA, we were both graduates. Our advisors were organizing this huge art-sci exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) which was this year long, 10,000 square foot exhibition about the interface between nanoscience and art. Since I was working on these cell sounds and she is a sound artist, our advisors kind of pushed us together and asked us to do the sound design for the whole exhibit. Again, we started talking, and she was doing an MFA so we developed this piece called Dark Side of the Cell. I was using this device called an atomic force microscope. It is sort of like a record player needle on the end of an arm, you can use it to image atoms and image cells. So I was using it to feel how cells move. Which was, at the time, completely bizarre stuff to do in the field. And I discovered in particular yeast cells these small low amplitude oscillations in the cell wall; high frequency, about a thousand kilohertz. They were very transient, they would come and go. The digital data looks like sound waves, like a .wav file. That inspired my advisor and I to convert this to sound, so we could listen to these cells. So I had that going, then I met Anne and we developed this Dark Side of the Cell installation. Which is a concert of pure cell audio, untouched, unaltered, just the volume has been changed, and we organised it into themes, for this immersive sound environment. We had big cell sculptures and projected onto them images of the cells you are actually listening to. The show got a surprising amount of press, and Anne and I have been working ever since on different things. It’s a little harder now that she is in New Zealand.

[Andrew Pelling and Anne Niemetz Dark Side of the Cell (2004) installation detail]

JP: Didn’t you met up with her recently in Perth?

AP: Yes, she and I went to SymbioticA, which is this bio art center in Western Australia. I’ve known Oran Catts and Ionat Zurr from the Tissue Culture and Art Project for a while now. That trip inspired my Lego project. I did it in preparation for going out there. Again it was triggered by a feeling of guilt. When you work in a lab as a student you don’t really think about where a lot of the things come from, or are wasted. But when you are the guy running the lab and buying these materials you see that there is a tremendous amount of waste – and plastic – bio materials and animals. We have a culture of mass production and we have a huge mechanism in our society for it. And none of it its recycled, it’s all incinerated, because you are worried about biohazards. And these are legitimate concerns. But there is a huge amount of waste, and it doesn’t really get talked about. So I thought, why don’t I think of a way to push a debate. Not necessarily to answer any questions, but just to bring it to the front. And that was the Lego project. It is this idea that even living things are plastic in our lab. We can totally manipulate them; get them to do whatever we want.

[Andrew Pelling Semi-Living LEGO Minifigs / 2011]

JP: And cells are like these little Lego building blocks anyway.

AP: Exactly, so I took these HeLa cells and inserted a jellyfish gene – again, because I could – to make it glow. So you have this human-jellyfish organism now. It’s just this Frankenstein. But again, you just buy the products off the shelf, it’s all plastic, you don’t have to do anything special, I could teach anybody to do it in an hour. It is kind of scary. We do it every day. It is just this tool we use. And then I thought, how can I represent it – and Lego figures were the answer.

JP: It also brings it a bit closer to home, turning this jelly-like blob into a skin, and referencing the fact that there are human cells being used. Because that is the scariest thing, for many, because not only can you change our food and animals, but you can change us as well.

AP: Of course, in reality, could we do it to a human? Probably. It would be a lot harder, probably. But conceptually it is all there.

JP: And then there is the whole ‘slippery slope’ argument. If you take one step, why not take the second and third.

AP: And it is all commercially available. If you have enough money you can do it. Anyone can do it. Especially with that whole DIY bio thing right now.

[Andrew Pelling Semi-Living LEGO Minifigs, detail]

JP: So did you present your Lego work at SymboticA?

AP: I showed some pictures and just discussed it. Of course, at SymboticA these are issues they have discussed at length, because that is what they think about all the time.

JP: Did you see anything interesting while you were there? What other problems were people considering?

AP: Well the other aspect of our work is that we try and build mechanical devices to manipulate cells. Stretch them and pull them and poke them, to see what happens. And what shocked me was when I showed up at SymboticA one of there students was building exactly what we were in the middle of building and he had done it ten times better than us actually. It was amazing, here are a bunch of artists building the same device for the same purposes. It was so strange. Our project came from our work with the heart. If you think about the aorta it is constantly expanding when your heart pumps, there is a pressure on the veins and arteries, and they expand. So the cells in those walls are being stretched and compressed and undergo different types of stress and strain.

JP: And you just wanted to see what the upper threshold is?

AP: I just really wanted to image, video record, how they respond. It is amazing, these are just such simple perturbations but when we look at the data carefully the responses are unbelievably complex. We are sort of at a stage where we don’t even have enough physics to describe what is going on there. We don’t have the models. We have some models that sort of work, but what we are finding again and again is that when biology does these things, these physical things, it doesn’t behave the way we expect it to. And you would never have discovered that if you weren’t really looking. For many years people weren’t looking and they derived a lot of physical equations that are very elegant. But they have no basis in describing a real cell. That is why we just look.

For eons science has just been about understanding how cells work in normal environments and circumstances. There are still a lot of questions to be answered, and a lot of knowledge there. But what has been interesting me much more now is what happens when we put them in very extreme conditions that have nothing to do with normality or make completely new types of cells and new types of ‘organs’. Let’s attach a lung to, I don’t know, a piece of steak, and see what happens.

JP: Yeah, I remember Stelarc grew an ear on the back of a mouse and it was really controversial.

AP: That is really part of the inspiration. Along with Steve Mann in Toronto with his electronic surveillance and integration between bodies and electronics. So could we start pushing our science away from just try to understand how things normally behave. What I am more interested in now is how they behave under really extreme, artificial conditions. Which is really interesting, especially if the future is this integration between technology and biology. I bet there are a lot of responses, the potential of cells, that we don’t even know exist.

JP: Do you think you would be doing this type of work if you didn’t have access to all your equipment?

AP: Well that is what is so cool about the DIY bio movement. In a lab a company could sell us a piece of equipment for say, $12000-15000 dollars, but it is really a couple of hundred dollars worth of parts. We have built our own equipment out of garbage and some of it is even more accurate than what we have bought. So you could do it. The general public can do it. For instance, our centrifuge, would cost $10,000, and I just read an article the other day of someone constructing one from a salad spinner and a drill.

JP: What about opening up these labs for other artists to come and work in? Does that happen?

AP: It does, Anne Niemetz has worked here, twice now. And I am hoping Oran Catts and Ionat Zurr will come over sometime as a residency. There is no formal mechanism but everything we are doing is so in the middle of art and science anyway, it all fits. So really all you need is some safety training.

What we are working on in the lab at the moment is miniaturization, to create micro-fluidic devices. We have developed one to stretch cells using vacuum. When we apply a vacuum to one of the chambers they shrink, and that allows us to pull on the cells. And each is individually controlled. We are experimenting a lot with this type of silicone technology, because we can integrate electrodes.

The other project we are working on uses two lasers, that we point at each other. Then we have a fluidic channel that a cell floats down. And when it hits these two lasers, the lasers can hold it. So very Star-trec, tractor beam. Then by manipulating the power of the laser we can start stretching the cell. I don’t know exactly what we are going to do with this. But it is amazing to see that it is possible. The idea that we are toying with is that if you manipulate these cells, is to find out if you stretch a lot of cells and collect them afterwards, and grow them will they grow differently? If we do that with stem cells, do we get a different response? We will see, I guess.

We are also working with micro tumors that will grow in chambers of these micro-fluidic devices, so we can study how they behave under different mechanical situations. Because, when cancer is spread the first thing that forms is these micro-tumors, a tiny collection cells. And they are very sensitive to the mechanics of their environment. But exactly how, and what is going on and why, we don’t know. This is one way we can study them.

Usually how I develop a new project is that I just have some image in my head of a cell in a particular environment. I have no idea why it is there, or how it got there. But, let’s make this! Let’s just figure out how to do this. It doesn’t ever start with a particular question or scientific hypothesis.

JP: There seems to be dove-tailing end-goals here. What you are doing could have some application to medical science or it could be…

AP: Complete madness. Well I’m not a medic and I don’t like to say my research is about advancing medicine, because I have no business talking about medicine. A lot of scientists do this because it helps them get funding. But really have no business talking about medicine.

JP: But a lot of medicine is just an elaborate, educated guessing game.

AP: Absolutely, I have always said, we will develop the concepts and it is up to the medics to develop the applications. And actually decide if my findings do have applications or not.

JP: So do you have any presentations of your work coming up?

AP: I’m giving a bio-hacking talk at Concordia, Montreal on 1 November, which is open to the public. I don’t know if you know Tagny Duff, she is an artist and she had a residency at SimbioticA and I think she has almost got her own tissue culture lab set up there. Called, Fluxmedia, I think. It is a centre for bio-art and bio-ethics. Show some videos, of how cells move, which is quite incredible.

We use a silicone mould stamps, and the cells grow around it. When we pull it out we are left with a shape. We are studying how they fill that space back in. These angle of the mould has such huge effect on the rate, and which cells start moving and when and how they are communicating. It is called wound healing. The traditional paradigm for this is you make a line, a scratch, and you’d time how long it takes for the cells to heal. I thought, well what happens if you make two scratches? What happens if you start changing the angle here? What we see is there is a collective behavior going on here. The cells at the edges move as a unit. Depending on how steep we make the angle, we get different dynamics. If we make a really steep cut some cells don’t move and others do all the work. How that is happening and how they are communicating isn’t really clear.

JP: It is amazing, because this would happen in your body too?

AP: Yes, especially if you got cut. For fifty years people would just make a straight line, it was just never questioned. But there is anecdotal evidence of surgeons making jagged, zigzag cuts and them healing better. I came up with this idea because I was talking with two of my students suggesting that they try it. And just even convincing them to do it was so hard. Because, why would you want to do it? It is always done with a line, so we have to do it with a line. Why would we do it any other way?

JP: To see what happens.

AP: Just shift your mindset.

Vague Terrain 20: Ambient

admin — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:12:53 PDT

[Little Oak Animal / video sketch screen capture]

In recent years there has been increased discourse surrounding ‘ambient’ technologies and awareness. The latter half of the 20th century has seen the public and private spheres become increasingly mediated and our notions of environment, awareness and presence have been irrevocably altered. ‘Ambience’ is also a term connected to musical composition – from Erik Satie’s passive “Furniture Music” to Brian Eno’s late 1970s experiments in process-based work this creative milieu has formed the foundation for entire genres and working methodologies. Vague Terrain 20: Ambient aspires to peel back the veneer of contemporary environments and art practices to explore place, atmosphere and performance.

David Kristian is a landmark figure in the history of Canadian electronic and ambient music. His work In your sleep is music intended to breath and evolve on its own, it simultaneously occupies lived space while making space more livable. Little Oak Animal presents a series of audiovisual works that can perhaps be best described as digital naturalism: where digital audio meets an organic photographic process. Scott M2, better known as one half of the ambient duo dreamSTATE and organizer of the world renowned Ambient Ping music series presents an audiovisual work titled Cloud Painting which draws heavily on Eno-inspired image and sound paintings. Andrea-Jane Cornell is a sound artist who explores the phenomenological dimensions of sound in an intuitive and iterative way; her piece Basin / Bassin is representative of this working methodology and documents the process through which the piece was created.

To round out this issue of Vague Terrain we’ve commissioned a series of texts that explore ambience in relation to various disciplines and creative practices. Game designer Michel McBride–Charpentier carefully considers the intersection of soundscape studies and level design in ‘City 17’ within Valve’s classic first-person shooter Half-Life 2. Veteran music and sound art writer Marc Weidenbaum has penned a sprawling meditation on ‘non-musical’ sound and the practice of criticism as noted during his annual vacation from recorded music. Jim Bizzocchi discusses his artistic practice of ambient video and explores connections between cinema, video art, music, generative art and painting. Leonardo Rosado, founder of the experimental music label FeedbackLoop, discusses what it is like to curate within the ambiguous and amorphous ‘genre’ of ambient music. Interaction designer Andrew Lovett-Baron weighs in with survey of recent developments in interface and sensor design in order to demonstrate how our expectations of objects and environments are about to be radically transformed. Finally, media and performance artist Michelle Teran sits down with Vague Terrain’s Greg J. Smith to discuss how her work playfully problematizes our everyday experience and perception of the city.

We present this work to you as a survey of approaches for considering time, space and duration.

Corina MacDonald, Neil Wiernik and Greg J. Smith, Montreal & Toronto
October 2011