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patricia rodriguez & noir / live video
2007-12-12 03:32:00
[des cailloux et du carbone / nuit avant 2007 / photo: erin lewis] I have been meaning to post a recap of one of my favourite aspects of the Nuit Avant event we co-curated with the Music Gallery earlier this fall. The show allowed Vague Terrain to invite two of our peers, Patricia Rodriguez and Noir (aka Rachel Vulliens) to collaborate on a live video performance alongside CONTACT Contemporary Music and Des Cailloux et Du Carbone. The collaboration proved to yield some very interesting work as both Patricia and Rachel have rather distinct relationships with film, software and live video. A personal favourite moment of the evening took place during CONTACT's performance of Two Pages, a Philip Glass composition from 1968. During this extended performance, the duo manipulated footage of a passing subway which was shot from the side. In the clip, a train would enter the right of the frame, speeding towards the other side. Before the train could really get anywhere, the loop would almos...
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bodies and code / detroit digital
2007-12-07 07:41:00
[albert kahn / the packard plant - 2005 / photo: patrick austin] Over the past few days, I've been spending some time with Detroit Digital : On Tourists in the Apocalypse, an essay by Marcel O'Gorman that was published on Ctheory last week. The writing project adds another link in the chain of texts which delineate the history of the Motor City as a discourse of automation, urban void and locked grooves. The essay discusses some strategies for reconsidering Detroit through techno, translation into code and as a destination for urban exploration. The text makes a point of giving credit where it is due, and afro-futurists Kodwo Eshun and Paul D. Miller are deftly (if rather predictably) brought into the mix. Where the text excels though is in a fantastic juxtaposition of the lyrics from bluesman Joe Lee Carter's Please Mr. Foreman to those of Disconnect, a track released in 2003 by Richie Hawtin under his Plastikman pseudonym. Please Mr. Foreman documents Joe Lee Carter's first-ha...
More About: Code , Bodies , Bodie

turbulence fundraising drive
2007-12-04 05:15:00
I recently learned that the online arts portal Turbulence is in a bit of a financial jam. Turbulence is the new media division of the New Radio and Performing Arts a NYC/Boston based media art funding organization. Like Rhizome and Eyebeam, Turbulence is near and dear to my heart as an organization that has introduced me to countless fantastic artists and projects. Many of my earliest experiences with online digital art were through Turbulence-commissioned work and I consider the organization's two blogs, Networked_Performance and Networked_Music_Review, to be absolutely essential art/technology news feeds. Turbulence co-directors Jo-Anne Green and Helen Thorington need to raise $25,000 in donations this month - you can pitch in via this fundraising microsite. These curators really need to be commended for the work they've done over the years. I'm in the midst of juggling my xmas finances but look forward to pitching in to support the development of, and discourse surrounding pro...
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high flight / new microblog
2007-11-28 03:42:00
The world most certainly does not need another blog, but I've launched one anyways. High Flight is a new joint project authored by my girlfriend Jordan and I. As if my twitter and jaiku accounts weren't enough bite-sized web presence, this project is now also underway. I envision High Flight as an outlet for us to archive interesting images, links and video that we come across in our travels online. We're hosting the site through tumblr which is a fantastic platform for no nonsense micro-publishing. We've been having a lot of fun with the site over the last month so please swing by to check it out. We also have another project in the works (one that doesn't involve content regurgitation), and I'll be posting about that in a few weeks.

vague terrain 08: process
2007-11-26 04:18:00
[vague terrain / selected projects / 2005-2007] This weekend we launched vague terrain 08: process, the newest issue of the digital arts quarterly curated by Neil Wiernik and myself. This edition of the journal features a series of interviews with Chris Messina (of barcamp), software artist Daniel Shiffman, McKenzie Wark of Gamer Theory fame, filmmaker Peter Mettler, musician Tara Rodgers and installation artists Thomson & Craighead. In curating the issue we set out to talk shop with a wide range of artists involved in a range of contemporary creative practices. McKenzie Wark was kind enough to take some time to talk to me about his recent work. One of the projects he's working on at the moment is a new reading of the Situationist International, which will be published next year. I really enjoy McKenzie's conception of what it means to be a writer right now, and what can come out of exploring contemporary means of production and distribution. I'm going to publish the intervie...
More About: Process , Vague

david cohn interview
2007-11-24 21:02:00
I first came into contact with David Cohn through Jay Rosen's newassignment.net, an experiment in crowdsourced journalism. I had originally sought to interview Jay for my thesis research, but ended up talking to David instead. This ended up working out quite well as David provided me with an engaging view into the world of contemporary journalism and the potential for a sweeping reconfiguration of the profession in light of connectivity, social media and new business models. David was kind enough to indulge me with another interview and it fits perfectly into the evolving series of posts I'm assembling on journalism, space and media. What follows are some great insights on distributed journalism, social bookmarking, and the economy of information on the net today. -- You recently completed graduate studies at the journalism school endowed by Joseph Pulitzer while actively participating in many facets of contemporary net culture. How has your understanding of emerging trends in onl...
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natural abstraction / josh keyes
2007-11-21 03:41:00
[josh keyes / interlock #1 / 2007] Have I mentioned how much I love my ffffound! account lately? The community of image-hunters using the bookmarking site continue to serve up tasty new leads to all manner of fantastic art and design. Yesterday, while perusing the ffffound! image stream I stumbled across the work of Josh Keyes and have subsequently been enthralled by his work. [josh keyes / weight / 2006] Keyes' drawings and paintings are a fantastic blend of surreal naturalism that explore hypothetical collisions of wildlife and urban scenes in impossible, combinatory space. This work references a wide range of precedents including architectural representation and visual encyclopedias accented with a dash of semiology. Keyes describes the goal of his creative practice as to: ...create work that asks questions about the implications of urban sprawl and its impact on the environment. I am interested in creating psychological narratives set in closed systems that express the behavio...
More About: Natural , Ural

recode(d)
2007-11-20 08:51:00
[cory arcangel / japanese driving game / 2005] My friend and peer Robin Armstrong recently curated a great collection of video as part of the Vtape curatorial incubator program. Robin has showcased four pieces by Cory Arcangel, Claude Lelouch, Jim Munroe and Tasman Richardson. This work spans film, machinima and archived hacks as part of a show entitled Recode, which explores the subversion of gameplay. The work of these artists has been used to frame a discussion of the tension between gaming (as an act of escape) and the routines that come with play. The intro to the statement for the show reads: Embedded within the act of play in video games is an implied set of desires and expectations, in other words, that which entices a player to want to play the game in the first place. The non-everyday world of the game which invites the participation of a player, defines itself in opposition to the real world of the everyday. The events and situations that make up the action of a game are ...

front page aesthetics
2007-11-18 18:41:00
If I haven't already made it clear, I am fascinated by newspapers. This interest extends beyond the discussions about the evolving business model of the industry and crowdsourced reporting that I often write about. What is so captivating about newspapers is that, as artifacts, they represent the crystallization of global flows of information. Every edition of a newspaper is a time capsule comprised of hundreds of stories stitched together into a composite narrative. There is something uncanny about the way that stories from around the world are distributed across the columns, pages, and sections of paper space. Marshall McLuhan quipped that if you removed the dateline from a paper it would read as an "exotic and fascinating surrealist poem." [nancy chunn / new york times front page / april 22, 1996] In 1996 the American artist Nancy Chunn conducted an extremely thorough exploration of the aesthetic possibilities of the front page. For the entire year she used the front page of the...
More About: Page , Front , Front Page

pixel gallery / the touch show
2007-11-15 03:02:00
[chris sugrue / delicate boundaries / 2007] Good news for the Toronto digital art and design community. This weekend Pixel Gallery will open its doors and provide the big smoke with a new venue for technology-related art. Saturday night marks the launch of the Touch Show , an exhibit showcasing a variety of interactive media art. The show will include work by Chris Sugrue, Zachery Lieberman, Nanika, Greg Hermanovic, Craig Swann and the ubiquitous Graffiti Research Lab. The statement for the show describes the exhibit as: ...designed to bring people together to interact with art, design and technology. They will invent, play and experiment with the idea of touch and how it relates to social interaction. That said, I expect to be entertained. Of the projects on display, I'm particularly eager to see Chris Sugrue's Delicate Boundaries which looks like an interesting meditation on the divide between screen space and the body of the viewer. The Pixel Gallery has been nomadically active ...

further adventures in point-and-click
2007-11-13 09:20:00
Thanks to a handful of referrals from my girlfriend Jordan, I've been exploring several top notch point-and-click games. Since my original enthusiastic post in September, I've taken a little time to familiarize myself with this world of indie gaming and I'm consistently impressed by the imagination and artistry that goes into these titles. What follows are brief reviews and links to three fun projects that we've found. Kim Köster is a Berlin based painter who revels in using bleak industrial architecture as a canvas on which to render a variety of surreal creatures. 99 Rooms (pictured above) is a flash-based piece that invites the viewer to wander through a sequence of rooms that Köster has enriched through his painting. Unlike other escape the room titles, the emphasis in 99 Rooms is not so much about solving puzzles but absorbing the stark ambiance in each of the scenes. The paintings that drive this photo-based work are complemented with a clean unobtrusive interface and exce...
More About: Click , Adventures , Point , Point and Click , Ventures

we put the net in network
2007-11-09 07:23:00
About a month ago, I posted about my desire to get a handle on the origins of network culture. I'm quite interested in how this paradigm has manifested itself in the field of information visualization, but also on how it has driven mass culture and entered the popular lexicon. What is the backstory behind the network (as an abstract entity) and what types of metaphors do we use to represent connectivity? Both of these questions are quite important and lead into an interesting discussion about history and language. An obvious point of entry into the network is etymology. The lineage of the word stretches back about 500 years to an appearance in the Geneva Bible. It has been used to describe reticulate structures in plants and animals, rivers and canals, railway systems and, over, the past century broadcasting and connectivity. Network divides into two root words, and in turn two discussions, addressing geometry and labour. The word 'net' was first recorded in English in the ninth ...

brinkmann does toronto
2007-11-03 23:54:00
After hosting a collaboration between Robert Henke and Peter Mettler this past May [see previous post], Pusher is back next Friday with an event showcasing Cologne's Thomas Brinkmann. There have been a number of interesting shows in Toronto this fall but this performance by Brinkmann promises to be something special. While Brinkmann delivered a standout performance at Mutek 2006, he hasn't played Toronto since 2000. Since then, Brinkmann has expanded his practice in several directions ranging from his sample-driven reconstruction of funk and soul with his soul center project to his 2005 Lucky Hands album, which creates a middle ground between his earlier "female series" on Max Ernst and a contemporary pop minimalism. Another artist sharing the spotlight at Pusher is Markus Heckmann. Markus is a developer at Toronto's Derivative where he works on Touch, a tangible interface for mixing video. Markus will be presenting his Wüstenarchitekten live video project which explores the spa...

blogger skins
2007-11-03 03:25:00
Considering all the chatter about interoperability and social presence this week, it is worth drawing attention to project I recently discovered. Brooklyn-based new media artist and curator Marcin Ramocki recently launched a web-based piece called Blogger Skins . The project uses Google's image search to create photo-mosaics representing the web presence of a number of prominent art bloggers including Tom Moody, Paddy Johnson, James Wagner, Joy Garnett and Régine Debatty (whose "skin" is on the left). On the surface, the project is a bit of a one-liner, but I think it is a fun exercise in speculating the nature of presence, personality and influence across a distributed network of sites and communities. The project statement elaborates on the contemporary notion of identity: We have entered the era of identity superstructures: complex sets of search engine outcomes based on our activities, popularity, name itself, purposeful efforts and a whole bunch of random data fluctuation. We a...

ways of seeing (digital space)
2007-10-30 08:57:00
This week I took some students to tour the finalist entries from the first annual Architecture & Design competition in Second Life. It was encouraging to see work which broadly embraced the possibilities of digital space rather than championing stylistic throwbacks. On the less original end of the spectrum, I always get unnerved when I encounter perfect modernist villas in Second Life. When exploring Second Life life there are moments when you find yourself in neighbourhoods that bear an uncanny resemblance to Malibu (see the metaverse for a great springboard into contemporary conversation about simulation). Specifically, I'd like to make some observations about digital space and the conventions with which we represent it. I've spent the better part of the last several years thinking about the implications of rendering space, structure, relationships and ideas on paper and with pixels. I'm starting to wonder about what connections can be identified between the drawing board a...
More About: Space , Digital

kate milberry interview
2007-10-28 06:21:00
[detail of relief sculpture on a los angeles times parking structure] Kate Milberry is a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. In 1994 Kate co-founded ROOM, a culture and community news monthly magazine based in Windsor, Ontario. The publication was on the verge of becoming a weekly, but the project was terminated and Kate decided to pursue her interest in independent media in the academic realm. I came into contact with Kate last year as my growing interest in citizen journalism began to drive my thesis research. My sister Karen urged me to interview Kate about the intersection of media and politics and the following transcript documents an email exchange that took place last winter. -- What inspired you to research the intersection of technology, activism and participatory media? My interest in technology and activism arose indirectly out of my experience with ROOM. Covering two major demos - the Organization of American States meeting in Windsor in 2000, and t...
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call for work / rise of the vj
2007-10-26 04:26:00
[carrie gates / still from a 2007 mix session] I'm excited to announce that we have enlisted Saskatoon-based multimedia artist Carrie Gates to guest-curate the ninth issue of Vague Terrain. The issue, entitled Rise of the VJ, will probe the current explosion in video performance and live cinema. I had the pleasure of meeting her for the first time this past summer. Beyond enjoying her art, I've always been super-impressed with her work ethic and capacity for engaging numerous artists across many disciplines. An excerpt from her call for work for the issue: There has been a distinct upswing of activity in the realm of audiovisual culture over the last few years. Specifically, the role of the VJ has become noticeably more prominent in audiovisual collaboration, whether it takes place in galleries, electronic music festivals, nightclubs, noise shows, academic institutions, public intervention art, online, or other places altogether. This growing focus on the live mixed projected im...
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vectors / difference
2007-10-25 01:44:00
The most recent issue of Vectors , the "Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular" launched last week. The issue explores the theme of difference across several disciplines and as per the multimedia journals mandate, the interface for each project emerges from collaborations between scholars, designers and programmers. The above image is a screen capture from Killer Entertainments produced by Jennifer Terry and designer Raegan Kelly. The project catalogues a selection of combat videos shot by soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. The interface frames this video within a critical context and several theoretical "annotations" are accessible to enable a variety of readings of the material. As much as I appreciate being able to access video like this on LiveLeak, it is nice to see it engaged in a more serious manner. Nation on the Move is a collaboration between Minoo Moallem and designer Erik Loyer. The project explores the socioeconomics of Persian carpet production. The f...
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catalogtree interview
2007-10-19 08:23:00
[catalogtree / desalination diagram / 2007] In August, I came across the work of Catalogtree, a multidisciplinary design studio based in the city of Arnhem in the Netherlands. I was immediately won over by Catalogtree's clear, regimented graphic design and their ability to break down complex data sets into suites of info-snapshots had me foaming at the mouth. After I published an enthusiastic post to Serial Consign I got in touch with designers Joris Maltha and Daniel Gross who were kind enough to provide a window into their creative practice. -- Could you talk a little about the formation of Catalogtree? What is the story behind the moniker for the studio? We met at the Werkplaats Typografie (a 2-year graphic design masters program in Arnhem, NL) in 1999. We shared a great interest in generative systems and media independent design and worked on some web-sites together. We started Catalogtree.net as a webspace we shared with some friends. It's a technical term for filing structur...
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street type
2007-10-18 05:29:00
[jordan hale / sabasa / 2007] Last February my partner and I took a trip to Los Angeles. The voyage was by no means a vacation, but I did manage to do my fair share of show-and-tell as she had never been to the city before. Jordan is a graphic designer and typesetter and once she got a look at the signage of downtown L.A. we ended up photo-wandering extensively. For those that haven't had the good fortune of seeing downtown Los Angeles, it is a treasure trove of texture, grit and history. Much like Detroit, large portions of the downtown core were never redeveloped; original art deco architecture abounds. The city centre is now in an exciting (and contested) state of flux as the demographics and economy of the area is changing rapidly as downtown is suddenly nurturing a population of local residents again. Jordan recently started contributing to Villatype, a blog dedicated to street type (or the typography of the public domain). Her first post is a selection of highlights from our ...
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a thank you post
2007-10-17 04:44:00
As a relatively new blogger, the last eight months has taught me a lot about finding my peers online. I'd like to draw attention to a few key aggregators to which Serial Consign is deeply indebted to. The following are great resources that frequently republish material posted here at Serial Consign. I highly recommend checking these sites out as they are excellently curated blends of art and design content. Design Corner is a design feed aggregator that has curated an incredible selection of design blogs with a focus on product, graphic and interactive design. The blog also features a research section which is where you'll find content from this site reblogged. The roster of blogs being republished at Design Corner includes some personal favourites like DesignNotes and Information Aesthetics. I also have Design Corner to thank for introducing me to Vestal Design's blog and the architecture resource CubeMe. Art-Feed is a similar site to Design Corner, but aimed at the art crowd. T...
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architecture for newsprint
2007-10-16 06:52:00
[from left: walter gropius & adolf meyer, eliel saarinen, john mead howells and raymond hood / chicago tribune tower competition entries / 1934] Through my thesis research I developed a keen interest in the evolution of the the newspaper administration facility over the 20th century. There is a definite tendency for newspaper headquarters to have an iconic presence in the downtown core in modern cities, one only need look to New York, Chicago or Los Angeles to see this. The elevations of these structures provided a key surface through which to advertise the newspaper as a protagonist in the city. Quite often the newspapers' banner is writ large on the side of the building. Given these observations about the newspaper and the city, how is this relationship changing during the retooling of the news industry? In this age of distributed creativity, does the newspaper need to assert a visible presence in the city? This post is a brief genealogy of newspaper administration facilities...
More About: Architecture , Architect

man with a database
2007-10-13 10:13:00
[stenberg brothers / man with a movie camera poster / 1929] I have recently been preoccupied with the implications of the database as a critical paradigm. Database culture has fundamentally changed traditional conceptions of the archive and by now we are quite familiar with the idea that information is distributed across a networks of interrelated nodes rather than simply "filed". Once you fragment data, narratives and ultimately perception, the manner in which the user interacts with the archive is irrevocably different than more traditional modes of organizing information. This has been one of the key areas of investigation in new media over the last few decades. We can see this in discussions about interactive narrative, mashup applications and even information visualization. Any discussion of the database as an abstract machine inevitably becomes an examination of interface. Lev Manovich's text The Language of New Media identifies the database as the "symbolic form" of the comp...

long weekend linkage
2007-10-08 07:25:00
[formalplay / slf prtr8] It is Thanksgiving weekend in Canada, which means productivity has been less than optimal. I have completed one of two turkey dinners, and considering the amount of wine my family likes to drink when feasting the likelihood of an intelligent post showing up here anytime before Wednesday is quite low. That said, a handful of great links and sites have come my way over the last few weeks and I'd like to mention the following: Create Digital Music is an incredible resource for an ongoing exploration of contemporary software and hardware tools. Many recent posts have been dedicated to exploring emerging interface technology as exemplified by the monome and tenori-on. I've really been enjoying the stream of content from this blog over the last few months and I just discovered that the site also hosts an active user forum. On the topic of emerging interface technologies, I just came across formalplay, a multidisciplinary design practice that has been exploring t...
More About: Weekend , Linkage , Long

sebastian meissner interview
2007-10-05 16:47:00
The creative practice of Sebastian Meissner is scattered across numerous pseudonyms and disciplines. I am a huge fan of his work as Random Inc., Autopoieses, and Klimek and I never even suspected these projects were all crafted by the same musician until 2004. I began a dialog with Meissner earlier this year when he was gracious enough to allow me to use the track "Sand" to score a short video piece. As we chatted back and forth, I learned about his photographic and video work (see post) and I became increasingly curious about the atmospheric and spatial qualities that run through his body of work. Sebastian was kind enough to take a considerable amount of time to provide a thorough contextualization of his body of work which addresses his aesthetics, nuanced perspective on Israel and experiences as an electronic musician in Europe over the last 15 years. He also has shed some light on his forthcoming Klimek album (due out on the NYC based Anticipate imprint later this fall). -- A g...
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design float: design news portal
2007-10-04 03:51:00
[design float interface] Given my mild obsession with the distribution of information online, I still have hopes to find some sort of utility for sites like digg. Despite the never-ending stream of links to "news" about the next release of Guitar Hero and lists breaking down the minutia of geek couture, I can't help but be enamored with the idea of a democratic arena for news and information. Why should a few editors decide what stories lead? Why not trust the crowd to choose what content should make the front page? In principle, digg is great. In reality, the (recently rejigged) interface, user culture and a few policies that blatantly contradict the underlying philosophy of the site leave much to be desired. My major gripe with digg is its archaic system for classifying content. If a proposed submission happens to fall into one of their extremely broad categories (i.e. "technology" or "design"), odds are your link will get lost in the maelstrom of content. Submitting a design or...
More About: News , Design , Portal , Design News

espaceSONO
2007-10-03 05:12:00
[audio.lab listening station / courtesy of saibotuk] Tobias c. van Veen, one of my favourite artists from the Canadian electronic music community, has just curated an exciting show at the SAT in Montreal. The exhibit, entitled espaceSONO, raises several interesting questions about the archiving, display and performance of sound-based work. The show brings together the work of more than 40 artists to provide a global, diverse range of aesthetics and methodologies. Tobias has a knack for (wonderfully) problematising the curation of sound and music, and this shines through in an excerpt from the statement contextualizing the exhibit: espaceSONO :: audio.lab is a laboratory for audio environments. We offer a few hypotheses in how to engage sound with your body. Sound that is not music. Thus the vague concept of ?sound-art' being applied here: sound-art as ?not-music.' The exhibit consists of a series of listening sites that range from the familiar (a bed and a tent) to the abstract (a...
More About: Spaces

mapping crime
2007-10-02 09:46:00
A good start towards a provocative data mashup application is the combination of maps and demographics. These types of projects generally operate through the superimposition of statistical information and geospatial data culled from readily available databases of satellite photography. These tools have provided us with a number of new means of perceiving, understanding and annotating the city around us. I'd like to take this opportunity to discuss two web applications that create an interface around urban mapping and the demographic information associated with law enforcement. These applications, entitled Chicago Crime and Oakland Crimespotting, are a springboard into a fascinating discussion about perception, demographics and the city. As a student of the drawing board, I have already expressed my fascination with the documentation of crime scenes. I find it incredible how the origin of a complex chain of events can be reverse-engineered out of the site of an act of violence - hou...
More About: Mapping , Rime

the evolution of the front page
2007-09-29 19:00:00
[los angeles times front page for june 6th 1968 & analytic diagram] It seems that my first post on my thesis research made some waves. Much to my chagrin, some of my teaser diagrams of latimes.com were plugged on O'Reilly Radar, and Public Journalism Network and Writes Like She Talks both expressed some interest in the work. A little encouragement from the technology and journalism cognoscenti was just the inspiration I needed to start reworking my thesis research for (serial) publication here on my blog. I am happy to report that the first step of this is complete and a I have now archived the infospace diagram in my portfolio. Infospace visualizes the structure and format of the Los Angeles Times print and web presence from 1881-2006 and 1996-2006 respectively. The illustrations map the distribution of editorial, image, and advertising content across the front page and tracks changes in the layout, structure, and hierarchy of information. I found this portion of my research f...
More About: Evolution , Page , Front , Front Page

white line light / nuit blanche
2007-09-27 23:58:00
[carsten nicolai & olaf bender / white line light / 2002] This Saturday night is the second Nuit Blanche here in Toronto and the all night arts event promises to be incredible. There are a number of exhibits and happenings that have piqued my interest but the project I am bent on investigating is White Line Light , an installation by Carsten Nicolai and Olaf Bender, two of the musicians behind the Raster-Noton imprint. White Line Light explores fluorescent lighting as a means of reading sound and space. The brightness of the slender lighting rig modulates in sync with accompanying equally sparse audio. The official release for the installation describes it as follows: The sound and light work of Carsten Nicolai and Olaf Bender explores the limitations of what we can see and hear. Taking this as a point of departure, white line light uses electricity as a conduit to identify, define and lend shape to the invisible and inaudible phenomena found in our midst, at the same time creati...