Moving!

The Commission GEDEON Commission will no longer be using this blog server for its work. Everything has been migrated to the new website at www.gedeoncommission.ca. To see only the posts associated with this blog simply access the "New Media Excursions" category on the main page.

Hope to see you there!

     And yes, another year begins in earnest.

     I am hoping to explore new territory as well as show paths that go from one land to the other. I know that I am getting known as the "time guy" but in the end, it is in the use of duration, speed, wave or undulation that seems to be what is being brought forward in acute ways within the complex of activity of the human/computer~interface.

     And what of the new landscape created by data pathways? Has it been represented? Should it be? Much is made of the use of affect in New Media, it is articulated as a "fait accompli" of the medium. Brian Massumi, whose writing I very much appreciate, seems to be looking very closely at what is the coming-to-being of sensation and experience. Though the potential is obviously out there, it seems like the artwork that stays at the forefront is the work that uses clever sensorial hooks and technologies that seem to be reviewed in the journals. The look towards them is always fairly similar, using what I perceive to be the Whiteadian position. I still wonder how exact Einstein was in his calculations; much of this thinking seems to build from the concept of relativity and tends to use it as a given, a proof, a theorem. All well and good, but what if it is wrong and instead of the apple falling on Newton's head, it was rather Newton who fell upward into the apple?

Response... kind of

Just read an interesting post at ArtWords (http://xplsv.blogspot.com/2011/12/rafael-lozano-hemmers-recorders.html?showComment=1324513212403#c5997972311010712949) which got me thinking about participatory media and the convergence of life and culture (they might be the same thing but let us assume for the moment they are not).

Though the following video does not necessarily present an "art piece" is it not, to a certain extent, a cultural expression that takes its cue from present society and the Long Now? And is this not art?

L(ook)istening, find(oud)ing

As we search, we see things, things that need to stay in the back of our minds and either fester or evolve into the perfect kind of mutation.

Twisted Bodies Carry Electricity from The Wire Magazine on Vimeo.

The concept of using the body to move electrons is not new, but one can continue to wonder what effect those electrons have on the surfaces and connections they caress and provoke. And what of those electrons pushed into motion by "foreign"bodies. Are we witnessing a new form of parasitism, or is it rather symbiosis? And exactly when do we come up for air?

I am constantly going back to "Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Electronic Culture: History, Theory, and Practice)" by Siegfried Zielinski. In this great look at the history of the electronic-human relationship the reader visits with searchers who, for one reason or another, were not pushed to the front pages of the history books. It is the confluence of showmanship, electricity and affect.

Das Flut

The Flood at the Clinic Studio - October 2010

Making works ::: Working makes

At the studio tonight, just being here and looking at the stuff that I have been puking out for the last little while. Sometimes it really feels like that... You get a wonky feeling in the gut, it feels like a beast from "Alien" trying to pop out of you. You hold it back, it hurts but there is work to be done; work is an overstatement, it is more like continuing to jump through the hoops hoping that you will wake up to a job in the morning... anyway

Back to making work, kinda. I am here, trying to get a sense of the overall picture. I know that I am fascinated with ideas around scale and measurement. Firstly because it can fit absolutely any imagery or concept a person can think up. This makes things easy in a way. But the idea of measurement is more prominently linked to the idea of convention. A convention is something that everybody seems to agree on so it becomes true by default. The best example of this is 1+1=2, believe it or not, this has never been truly proven; it has been showed that defining the term 1 is impossible.

Historically, measurements were established quite arbitrarily. The architect Louis Etienne Boulée established a measurement called a boulée. A boulée was the distance between the tip of his extended index finger to his elbow, everyone of his buildings (there were only six) were built with this dimension as its basis.

This was a planned monument to Isaac Newton. It was never built.





With this in mind; what the heck is an inch or a centimeter? They are nothing but something a whole bunch of people called experts agree on. Everything we do, everything we make is based on the ideas of so-called experts. This is what I am getting at in the big picture. How do we decide who the experts are and why is what they say able to become the default of how we describe the world?

I have this job, it is called being a "professor". What am I professing? As far as I am concerned, if I can teach people to doubt, to question, to refute in an intelligent and researched way, I have been successful. But at the same time, this means that I am asking my students to understand that I am a pro at B.S. and this means that I have to be ready to defend and discuss every single word that I say. THAT is work, that is me doing my job.

Studio work

At the studio today, hard to believe that this is actually part of my job. I always feel like I am playing hooky or something when I come get some work done. Today, I am finalizing some work for a small showing of work around an upcoming talk by Gwynne Dyer (http://www.gwynnedyer.com/) from his book "Climate Wars".

The work was chosen because of my tendency to photograph landscapes under reclamation. Reclamation landscapes is the term used by several landscape photographers who are interested in how the land eventually consumes and erases human passage. As usual, my contrarian manner of looking at things makes me turn this question into something else. For me it is more about our inability to see past a few dozen years into the future and think that if it exists after I am dead than it has existed long enough. We are such shortsighted animals.

The Clock of the Long Now is an interesting experiment in altering perceptions about duration (I tend to use duration instead of time, according to Henri Bergson it is a more accurate description of how we use the word). http://www.longnow.org/ Instead of writing 2009 we shoudl write 02009, that little zero will remind us of how recent of an apparition we are and of how short an influence we will exert on the planet. Chances are we will cause a whole bunch of harm, but in the scheme of things the planet will live on.

Still thinking of the title, images should be viewed in a horizontal line about 12 cm from each other.