wakarahen / ganbaresugi

“AVATARA, the online, in-world, avatar documentary Jeremy Turner, Flick Harrison and Donato Mancini made in 2003 for Centre A is now included in the Ubu Web film & video archive. Thanks to Kenneth Goldsmith for posting our work.”

CREDITS

Directed and written by: Donato Mancini and Jeremy Turner
Editing and technical advising: Flick Harrison 
Interviewer: Jeremy Turner 
Photography: Donato Mancini 
Production: Centre A, 536 Arts, Donato Mancini
Sound: Flick Harrison
Music: Jeremy Turner
OnLive! / Digitalspace Traveler Main Creators: Dave Collins and Steve DiPaola
536 Productions, 2003

http://www.ubu.com/film/mancini_avatara.html

A choreographed rumble, a world tea party and a procession of performing circles are among the public art works coming to downtown Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Part of the Olympic and Paralympic Public Art program, the art in Bright Light will be taking place outdoors and indoors in venues around the Carrall Street Greenway, the $5 million bikeway and pedestrian route meant to link north False Creek with Burrard Inlet and complete a loop around downtown and Stanley Park. The greenway is scheduled to open in mid-December.

The $300,000 Bright Light program of 14 events and exhibitions is funded by the city of Vancouver. Although it’ll be part of the many festive activities and events in Vancouver during the 2010 Olympics, it isn’t part of the Cultural Olympiad, the official arts and cultural celebration organized and paid for by Vanoc.

The kickoff for Bright Light takes place Jan. 17 at Centre A, which is on the Carrall Greenway at Hastings. In the world of art, that’s a historically significant day because it marks Art’s Birthday.

On that day in 1963 the French artist Robert Filliou proposed that art was officially born a million years earlier when someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water.

Whether the event actually occurred doesn’t matter. What is important, Filliou believed, is thinking of art as a permanent creation.

Filliou was part of the ’60s Fl uxus art movement, which believed in erasing the boundaries between life and art. Fluxus artists had a trickster-like attitude to art that included challenging all art conventions, including turning art into objects for the marketplace.

Filliou visited Vancouver several times and found a natural home among the avant-garde artists at the Western Front.

One memorable Fluxus-inspired performance occurred in 1974 when Mr. Peanut ran for mayor under the slogan: ‘Elect a nut for mayor.’ He lost but generated lots of headlines for his cheeky take on the political process. Since then, Art’s Birthday has been kept alive through the Eternal Network, a loose affiliation of international artist-run centres that includes the Western Front.

In keeping with the Fluxus spirit, all Bright Light events and performances are free. After the launch mid-January, Bright Light runs from Feb. 12 to March 21. All the highlights below take place during that period unless otherwise indicated.

- Brawl will be a large-scale performance artwork by the Vancouver artist collective Norma. It’s being described as a choreographed, dramatically lit rumble in Andy Livingstone Park from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 24.

- Centre A will be the host of the latest incarnation of the World Tea Party curated by Bryan Mulvihill. Video projections of concurrent tea parties in other cities will be projected on the gallery’s exterior while, across the street in Pigeon Park, passersby can enjoy lively discussions and aromatic teas from a roving tea cart.

- For anyone with the winter blahs, the artist collective Instant Coffee will be presenting Light Bar, a full-spectrum light bar installation and venue for light therapy, light lectures, light shows, light reading and light rock at 33 West Cordova St. /Blood Alley.

- The Procession of Performing Circles is designed as a ceremonial parade through the Downtown Eastside, on March 7 from 7 to 9 p.m.

Curated by Glenn Lewis, the event will include works from choreographers Margaret Dragu, Colleen Lanki and Karen Jamieson as well as performances by Jamieson’s Carnegie Centre troupe, Leaky Heaven Circus, Vancouver Carnival Band and Vancouver Morris Men.

- After the annual Spring Equinox Smudge Ceremony at Main & Hastings, the focus shifts north to Crab Park for the Nighthawk Aboriginal Arts & Music Festival with the Git Hayetsk dancers & drummers, on March 21 from 2 to 9 p.m.

cameronr:

okayfine:

Norma’s the other collective I work with… we’re doing a public performance with Artspeak during the Olympics as part of the Bright Light program. This is the first thing we’ve done in a while that won’t involve drinking!

I’m helping on the press side of things for Bright Light, so it’s nice to see it out there.

Hour-long doc on CRASS? Nice.

Bookmarked for later.

baltimorehorseshowwinner:

standardgrey:

baltimorehorseshowwinner:

standardgrey:

That’ll keep ya busy.

There’s sharity and then there’s ridiculous.

jesus, how’d you come across this? actually, this reminds me of this article that is currently making the rounds—also adding deep web/internet into more casual lexicon/awareness.

that being said—this doesn’t surprise me—have seen similar pages, usually pillaged and taken down shortly after initial rounds…

Found it on exp etc.

This article is intense.

“”The deep web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined world wide web,” he wrote. “The deep web is the fastest growing category of new information on the internet … The value of deep web content is immeasurable … internet searches are searching only 0.03% … of the [total web] pages available.”

In the eight years since, use of the internet has been utterly transformed in many ways, but improvements in search technology by Google, Kosmix and others have only begun to plumb the deep web. “A hidden web [search] engine that’s going to have everything – that’s not quite practical,” says Professor Juliana Freire of the University of Utah, who is leading a deep web search project called Deep Peep. “It’s not actually feasible to index the whole deep web. There’s just too much data.”

That’s some heavy Carl Sagan shit.

Adding to the research file for the Ryoji Ikeda/Ratser-Noton/”materiality of data” thing I’m working on. Thanks for the tip!

you’re welcome, weird though, i was just on expetc today getting a few things, didn’t come accross this.

WRT the article, it is heavy. there was also just a an article published how despite google’s attempt at academic inclusion, scholar and books fall incredibly short of their design. more often than not, i just go straight to jstor and grove. also to illustrate the whole deep web thing are google’s inability to categorize the sheer volume of info/images/data found on sites that rely on old newsgroup/bbs/message board architecture…

That’ll keep ya busy.

There’s sharity and then there’s ridiculous.

towerofsleep:

We seem to be on the edge of a paradigm shift. Orchestras are struggling to stay alive, rock has been relegated to the underground, jazz has stopped evolving and become a dead art, the music industry itself has been subsumed by corporate culture and composers are at their wit’s end trying to find something that’s hip but still appeals to an audience mired in a 19th-century sensibility.

For more than half a century we’ve seen incredible advances in sound technology but very little if any advance in the quality of music. In this case the paradigm shift may not be a shift but a dead stop. Is it that people just don’t want to hear anything new? Or is it that composers and musicians have simply swallowed the pomo line that nothing else new can be done, which ironically is really just the “old, old story.”

Certainly music itself is not dead. We’ll continue to hear something approximating it blaring in shopping malls, fast food stops, clothing stores and wherever else it will mesmerize the consumer into excitedly pulling out their credit card or debit card or whatever might be coming.

There’s no question that in music, like politics, the bigger the audience gets the more the “message” has to be watered down. Muzak’s been around for a long time now but maybe people just can’t tell the difference anymore. Maybe even the composers and songwriters can’t tell the difference either. Especially when it’s paying for a beach house in Malibu and a condo in New York.

Of course, we could all just listen to all of our old albums, CD’s and mp3’s. In fact, nowadays that’s where the industry makes most of its money. We could also just watch old movies and old TV shows. There are a lot of them now. Why bother making any new ones? Why bother doing anything new at all? Why bother having any change or progress at all as long as we’ve got “growth”? I’m just wondering if this is in fact the new paradigm. I’m just wondering if in fact the new music is just the old music again. And, if that in fact it would actually just be the end of music.

If you thought Simon Reynolds was making a sweeping judgment…

Wow, what a load of bollocks. Who cares if it’s old/new? What about challenging, engaging, catchy, pleasant, unpleasant, etc? There is always the possibility of hearing something you’ve never ever heard before, a new sound, a new combination, even if you have to go backwards and into Google Blogsearch to find it.  If we’ve reached the “end of music” there’s still tons of genres and sounds to be (re)discovered.

Bandying about “The end of…” as a stand-in for being bored, or unwilling to listen is played out, old hat, pointless. I’m calling for the end of “The end of…” proclamations. Please and thank you; there’s no crisis other than the ones you create.

file under: Vancouver is Awesome!!!

How many pay bumps did municipal pencil pushers receive in the last year? And how much? And how many Parks Board jobs got created in closed-door meetings? For how much per annum?

Just curious.

criticalculture:

While traveling to Vancouver, BC, Canada on Weds., Nov. 25th, to speak at the Vancouver Public Library at a benefit for community radio stations, Amy Goodman and her two colleagues were detained by Canadian authorities. Amy was questioned extensively about the speech she intended to give; their car was gone through by armed border guards, and their papers and laptop computers were scoured. They were detained for well over an hour, and were made an hour late for her speech.

The armed interrogators were particularly interested in whether she would be speaking about the upcoming Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

Ahhhh, good morning.

We need Talk 1410 Back.

file under : Vancouver is Awesome