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Evan Roth’s Art & Hacking Class

http://vimeo.com/37927700

Danielle, Michelle and I were over in Detroit at the recent INITIATE panel discussion and Evan Roth made a presentation on the early stages of some of this work. It’s awesome to see where it went — hopefully we’ll have a chance to head over and check out the show. Here’s the details from Roths’ site…

Welcome To Detroit
Works by Evan Roth
Curated by Gregory Tom

Eastern Michigan University’s University Gallery
900 Oakwood Street, 2nd Floor
Ypsilanti, MI 48197

Reception @ EMU’s University Gallery October 14, 4:30pm – 7:00pm

March 8, 2012: It is no secret that Detroit’s creative community has been attracting media attention of late. What started as photos of “Ruin Porn” and “$100 Dollar Houses” led to a flood of additional articles on creative activity in Detroit.

Evan Roth’s exhibition, Welcome to Detroit, will feature nearly all-new work, much of it made during his residency. The work follows his core conceptual framework of appropriating popular culture and combining it with a hacker’s philosophy to highlight how small shifts in visualization can allow us to see our environment with new eyes, whether online, at home, in the city or at the airport. His work acts as both a mirror and vault to contemporary society, creating work that reflects and withstands a world of rapid advancements in computing power, changing screen resolution and repainted city walls.

For Welcome to Detroit, Evan mines everything from the spray paint can, to hip-hop music, to airplane shopping magazines and flight safety cards, resulting in a show that moves freely across media, but always with a sense of pop cultural pranksterism. From individual art objects to video pieces to documentation, the work is designed to simultaneously serve as a record of activity and creative output, while also underscoring important issues concerning copyright, public space, and our offline and online identities.

Additional information on Evan Roth can be found at http://evan-roth.com/about/.

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Heartbreaking by Lois Andison

'Heartbreaking' from olgakorpergallery.com

This one goes out to Josh.

Heartbreaking, a kinetic sculpture by Lois Andison, is a device that gradually works its way through every possible word that can be spelled with the letters H,E,A,R,T,B,R,E,A,K,I,N,G (in that order). Terrence Dick over at Akimbo called it, “the closest thing I’ve seen that’s come to a perfect marriage of word and art.”

'Heartbreaking' from olgakorpergallery.com

Lois Andison was born in Smiths Falls, Ontario. She currently lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. Her kinetic sculptures/installations investigate the intersection of technology, nature and the body. Using movement to initiate an exchange with the viewer, Andison’s work poetically explores social and technological concerns through the construction of the hybrid art object.

'Heartbreaking' from olgakorpergallery.com

She has a number of other interesting data-driven types of works available to view on Olga Korper Gallery.

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Simon Rabyniuk on the division of practice and real life

movement (time spent) Maps : part III - 1 by Cara Spooner

This is part of an ongoing set of one-question emails sent to people we know, or would like to get to know, about things that interest us and inform our collective practice. They’ll be featured on the site weekly, usually on Fridays. These questions are more about unfolding ideas than about the people we’re asking, but we do ask those kinds of questions too.

We’re pleased to continue this project with a question for SRSI and Homework alumnus and one half of the Department of Unusual Certainties, a Toronto-based research and design collective, Simon Rabyniuk.

Where does practice end and real life begin?

There is no division between practice and life. My first reading of this question situates it as something about the experience of the individual, and because of the context I’m receiving it in, something about the experience of the individual artist. Although I think it becomes a more interesting question dealt with in broader terms.

What is practice? For an individual a practice is a personal commitment to an action (i.e. the practice of active listening). I would propose that a fundamental quality of a practice is a conscious intent expressed through the process of trial, reflection, and learning; while routine may be part of one’s practice, intent keeps it from becoming route behaviour. For an artist I would propose that commitment be understood as a lifestyle of exploration in the production of material or embodied relationships. I would also propose that there is a distinction between the singular and plural use of the term. An individual can have many personal practices, while they have a professional practice.



movement (time spent) Maps : part III 5 – by Cara Spooner

 

What is real life? Life is form changing through time. Enacted on a sensing being, this change in form becomes a sequence of experiences. Organized as memories these sequences form a narrative and a sense of identity. This definition fails to articulate the social character of a human’ life. Somehow ‘real life’ is different then that. Real life is nested in the colloquial, the work/leisure/boredom cycle, desire, and responsibilities. A day in one’s real life is bisected into what you sell, and what you keep for yourself.

Real life somehow refers to artists having jobs beyond their practice as an artist. The question “Where does practice end and real life begin?” perhaps asks if when an artist’s time is not going towards making things do their practice and real life become separate things within them? Again, I would propose they do not. There are many prominent examples of artists who use their art practice to reflect on and respond to the experience of their present situation. Two examples that may represent a spectrum of approaches are Michelle Allard and Adrian Piper. Allard explores the formal constructive properties of the office supplies she uses in her day job. Piper explores the reaction raced/classed bodies produce in social spaces. One’s experience, including their real life, becomes a source to parse through in ones practice as an artist.

Simon Rabyniuk is a Toronto-based visual artist and member of Department of Unusual Certainties. His work often draws upon performance, video, drawing, and sculpture to explore cities and their systems.

He has presented work across Canada including as part of Hammering Away, Workers Arts and Heritage Centre (Hamilton), Meet us on the Commons, Art Gallery of Mississauga, 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art (Toronto), the Harbourfront Centre’s Hatch Emerging Performance Series, at Ryerson University’s Modernity Unbound Symposium, and as part of Broken City Labs’ Storefront Residency for Social Innovation(Windsor). In 2011 he recieved support from the Ontario Arts Council through their Emerging Artist Grant .

Cara Spooner has been involved in performance related projects as a dancer, choreographer, designer and curator. She has presented work at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche, XPACE Cultural Centre, The Harbourfront Centre’s HATCH Emerging Performance Project, Pleasure Dome, The Mississauga Art Gallery, The Festival of New Dance, Badass Dance Fun and Stromereien 11. caraspooner.com

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The Tales of a Timeline / Les Fables d’une Chronologie

Just  little reminder if you’re in the Hamilton area…

Vous invite à participer à : « Les Fables d’une Chronologie – L’atelier des Histoires de Hamilton »

Développé de la recherche amassée des archives et de questionnaires présentés aux habitants de Hamilton, l’atelier Les Fables d’une Chronologie engagera ces participants à créer collectivement une histoire vaste du passé, présent et future en pensant aux statuts économique, industriel, social, culturel et politique de cette ville.  Cette histoire fera partie de la publication pour Deux Contes d’une Ville, qui sera disponible à la fin de l’exposition.

L’atelier prendra place le Vendredi 9 mars 2012, à 3:30pm, dans la cuisine communautaire, au Marché Fermier d’Hamilton (35 boul. York, Hamilton). L’ouverture officielle de l’exposition aura lieu plus tard le même soir de 6:30 à 8:00pm à Hamilton Artists Inc. (155 rue James N. Hamilton).

Envoyez votre réservation à irene@hamiltonartistsinc.on.ca pour cet atelier.

 

The Tales of a Timeline: Hamilton’s Stories Workshop

Drawing from a range of archival research and post-it note surveys with residents of Hamilton, The Tales of a Timeline workshop will ask participants to collectively write a sprawling story of Hamilton’s past, present, and future through economic, industrial, social, cultural, and political lenses. This story will then be featured in the forthcoming publication as part of the Two Tales of a City project.

Join us for the workshop starting at 3:30pm at the Community Kitchen of the Hamilton Farmer’s Market (35 York Boulevard, Hamilton) on Friday, March 9th, 2012.   RSVP to irene@hamiltonartistsinc.on.ca for the workshop.

Join us for the official opening of Two Tales of a City, later on that evening, from 6:30-8pm at Hamilton Artists Inc. (155 James St. N., Hamilton).

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iPhone/mobile app dev diagraming

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m getting a lot closer to completing a mobile app. I’ve abandoned objective-c and native app development in favour of what I actually know how to do — namely php, html, css, and a bit of javascript.

Access to phone hardware to make this app do what it needs to do will be accomplished through phonegap.

I’m aiming to try to wrap up a working version of this in the next 10 days or so, baring any major issues I could very likely run into. I’m anxious to share this!!!

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Wrapping up Production for Hamilton: a quick look at some recent work

As we wrap up production on our upcoming installation, Two Tales of a City, at Hamilton Artists Inc., our Friday night meeting was shifted to Lebel where we set out to coat the bunting with some scotch guard and just started laying everything out.

Rosina braved the quick spray

The rest of the crew helped moved things around — the bunting is all connected and somewhere around 100 feet long.

Touch ups on the reverse side of the bunting.

Some details of some of the transfers. Michelle was at Jodi’s helping to do some of the few remaining cut-outs for the letters that we’ll be placing over the fabric square.s

Josh being detail-oriented.

The bunting are 18″ long.

Some of the pile.

More details. We’ll be shooting photographs of these today before boxing them up.

And the crew trying to get some perspective on the work.

We also spent some time pulling together some installation instructions and doing a preliminary collection of possible texts that will rotate throughout the run of the installation on the fabric banner. We’re really excited to see this go up in Hamilton next week. If you’re in town, come by our workshop on March 9th!

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Border Town Design Jam

photo courtesy of http://dividedcities.com/

One of our dear friends (and Homework presenter), Tim Maly, from the great city of Toronto is hosting an event continuing off of the work he did with the Border Town Design Studio last year.

Here’s the details, if you’re in the area (and here’s more detailed information):

BORDER TOWN DESIGN JAM

From Friday March 2, 2012 to Saturday March 3, teams of clever people will get together to solve a User Experience problem relating to border towns. Would you like to be one of them?

Border Town Design Jam (#btdj)
Using border towns as a point of entry, we’ll approach political geography as a design problem. This design jam will take place over 1 day (and a half), from March 2 to 3, 2012. Tickets are now available on Eventbrite. This event is presented in collaboration with ThingTank Lab.

Interested in seeing and hearing the results of this jam? We’re opening up our final show and tell to the general public – get your free tickets to attend here!

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Topic
The topic and design challenge will be revealed at the kickoff party on Friday March 2, 2012, 6PM. However, here’s a hint:  ”Everyone must pass”

About Design Jams
Design Jams are one-or-two-day design sessions, during which people team up to solve engaging User Experience (UX) challenges. Learn more about Design Jams. 

Who should attend Design Jams
Anyone really – Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) & Design Students, Interaction Designers, UX Researchers, Information Architects, UI Designers, Web Designers, Graphic Designers, Hardware Hackers, Policy Nerds, Developers + more… The day aims to improve collaboration skills and help attendees learn and practice various UX techniques including but not limited to Research, Brainstorming, Sketching, Wireframing and Prototyping.

What happens at a Design Jam?
Attendees sign up in advance. Upon arrival they assign themselves to teams based on the skills they could contribute and what they’d like to learn. Teams are then presented a design challenge that they tackle by doing research, sketching, guerrilla testing and other UX techniques. They are encouraged to share their process and ideas halfway through enabling them to get feedback from other teams as well as other mentors in attendance during the day. The day concludes with final presentations to the entire group. Outcomes could take the form of sketches, storyboards, a video or even a prototype – whatever communicates the idea best.

What happens to the ideas we come up with?
All output materials will be shared on the Border Town and ThingTank Lab websites, and teams will be asked to compose a blog post about their design process and ideas.

Licensing
To facilitate the free exchange of ideas, all outputs, visualizations and other contributions made during the day must be contributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. This basically means anyone can use ideas generated at the Design Jam, as long as they credit the original authors.

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Organizers
Feel free to contact any of the following with questions and queries.

From Border Town design studio (@dividedcities)
Emily Horne @birdlord & Tim Maly @doingitwrong

From ThingTank Lab (@thingtankTO)
Marie-Eve Belanger @wrongposture

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Upcoming Show: Two Tales of a City / Deux Contes d’une Ville

Two Tales of a City

March 9th – May 4th, 2012

Workshop & Opening: Friday March 9, 3:30pm @ Hamilton Farmer’s Market & 6:30-8pm @ Hamilton Artists Inc.

161 James Street N. Hamilton L8R 2K9

 

Two Tales of a City aims to examine a range of social, economic, cultural, and political dualities tracked throughout Hamilton’s past, present, and future. Gathered from archival research, interviews, and pop-up surveys and timelines, Two Tales of a City will present competing, intertwining, and parallel narratives of Hamilton through a large-scale fabric banner, oversized bunting, a workshop, and forthcoming publication.

The fabric banner installed along the side of HAI’s new building will feature a rotating series of call-and-response dualities over a six week period, while the oversized bunting will span 135 feet hung across the roofline and act as a timeline of collapsed and thriving industries, experiences, struggles, and victories of the city.

While created by drawing on stories, experiences, and data from Francophone and Anglophone communities in Hamilton, the project will culminate in a re-distribution of the timeline bunting to the community by allowing gallery visitors to take pieces with them at the close of the exhibition.

Featuring documentation of the projects, essays, and a collectively written story, the publication will be created from activities at the upcoming workshop, and will be available in print at the close of the installation, April 27, 2012. The Tales of a Timeline: Hamilton’s Stories Workshop will take place on Friday, March 8th at 3:30pm at Hamilton Farmer’s Market, with the exhibition officially opening later that night from 6:30-8:00pm at HAI.

Please contribute to the exhibition by filling in this fill-in-the-blank form and telling us your story about Hamilton!

 

 

Deux Contes d’une Ville

9 Mars – 4 Mai, 2012

Ouverture Vendredi le 9 mars de 6;30-8pm, & Les Fables d’une Chronologie : Histoires de Hamilton Marché Fermier d’Hamilton (35 boul. York, Hamilton), dans la cuisine communautaire à 3:30pm

Hamilton Artists Inc.

161 rue James N. Hamilton L8R 2K9

Ouvert ce vendredi « Artcrawl » le 9 mars jusqu’à 11pm.

 

Deux Contes d’une Ville vise à examiner une gamme de dualités sociales, économiques, culturelles et politiques soulignant le passé, le présent et le futur de la Ville de Hamilton. À partir de la recherche amassée des archives et de l’histoire chronologique de la ville, d’interviews et de questionnaires, Deux contes d’une ville nous présente des narrations de Hamilton en conflit, entremêlées et parallèles en utilisant une bannière à grande échelle, une série de fanions surdimensionnés, un atelier et une publication rétrospective vers la fin de l’exposition.

La bannière de tissu installée sur du côté du nouvel édifice de « Hamilton Artists Inc. » affiche une série de phrases contenant des dualités, extraite du questionnaire. Cette bannière changera au cours de la durée de l’exposition, soit huit semaines. La série de fanions géants mesure 135 pieds de longueur et est suspendue au long du toit. Ces fanions représentent l’histoire chronologique des industries disparues et celles toujours existantes et des expériences, défis et victoires de la ville.

Créer à partir des histories, expériences et de l’information accumulée au sujet des communautés francophone et anglophone de la Ville de Hamilton, le projet culmine avec la redistribution des fanions à la communauté en permettant aux visiteurs de la galerie d’en prendre des échantillons, à la fin de l’exposition.

Mettant en vedette la documentation du projet, des ouvrages littéraires et une histoire écrite collectivement, la publication sera créée des activités de l’atelier à venir et sera disponible vers la fin de l’installation, vers le 27 avril.

L’atelier : « Les Fables d’une Chronologie : Histoires de Hamilton »,  prendra place Vendredi le 9 mars, 2012 au Marché Fermier d’Hamilton (35 boul. York, Hamilton), dans la cuisine communautaire à 3:30pm, avec l’ouverture officielle de l’exposition plus tard le même soir de 6:30 à 8:00pm à « Hamilton Artists Inc. » (161 rue James N. Hamilton).

S’il vous plaît contribuer à l’exposition en remplissant ce formulaire fill-in-the-blank et nous dire votre histoire sur Hamilton!

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Hamilton: Deux Contes d’une Ville – Formulaire

Deux Contes d’une Ville (9 Mars – 4 Mai, 2012  à Hamilton Artists Inc. ) vise à examiner une gamme de dualités sociales, économiques, culturelles et politiques soulignant le passé, le présent et le futur de la Ville de Hamilton. À partir de la recherche amassée des archives et de l’histoire chronologique de la ville, d’interviews et de questionnaires, Deux contes d’une ville nous présente des narrations de Hamilton en conflit, entremêlées et parallèles en utilisant une bannière à grande échelle, une série de fanions surdimensionnés, un atelier et une publication rétrospective vers la fin de l’exposition.

S’il vous plaît contribuer à l’exposition en remplissant le formulaire ci-dessous et contez nous vos histoires de Hamilton.

[gravityform id=”9″ name=”Hamilton Madlibs” title=”false” description=”false”]
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Hamilton: Two Tales of a City Fill-in-the-blanks (English)

Two Tales of a City (March 9th – May 4th, 2012 at Hamilton Artists Inc.) aims to examine a range of social, economic, cultural, and political dualities tracked throughout Hamilton’s past, present, and future. Gathered from archival research, interviews, and pop-up surveys and timelines, Two Tales of a City will present competing, intertwining, and parallel narratives of Hamilton through a large-scale fabric banner, oversized bunting, a workshop, and forthcoming publication.

Please contribute to the exhibition by filling in the form below and telling us your story about Hamilton!

Or, do it in French!

[gravityform id=”8″ name=”Hamilton Madlibs” title=”false” description=”false”]