This last weekend I was at the Humanities Computing Summer Institute organized by Ray Siemens at the University of Victoria. I heard a great lecture by John Willinski at UBC on the Public Knowledge Project. This project is developing an open source e-journal tool that allows you to manage the review process and publication. They also have a conference tool. This is worth supporting!
Continue reading John Willinski: Public Knowledge Project
Chris Ashley: Look, See
sally mckay suggested this artist’s blog, Look, See. What I like about Look, See (among other things) are the html art – simple works written with tables with coloured cells. (See his discussion of these at Visual Problems and Solutions.
Continue reading Chris Ashley: Look, See
Matt Sharpe: Who is Jesse?
Who is Jesse Abbingale? is a blog-like hypertext fiction work by a student of mine here at McMaster. He nicely uses the online narrative of a blog to tell a story with some graphical pages woven in. Check it out!
Canada Day
July 1st was Canada Day and we went to a Military Tattoo at Dundurn Castle here in Hamilton, Ontario. Tattoos are left over from the Empire – marching bagpipe bands and highland dancers. It was, after all, the colonies like Canada that benefited most from the British Empire. Tattoos and jubilees are a passing type of performance, enjoy them while they last.
Click here to see a selection of pictures.
OCAD’s new building; sponsor a view
OCAD’s Virtual Building – explore, pick, and donate! allows you to page around the floating zebra box (the Sharp Centre for Design) that they have built and sponsor a window. Now you may ask, “Who would donate $2,000 to sponsor a hole?” but don’t think of it as a whole – think of it as a view, a looking out by someone floating up there. They won’t see the building from your view, they will see through your generosity!
Continue reading OCAD’s new building; sponsor a view
sally mckay
sally mckay has a blog about “toronto art and other stuff” including her own short mixes. I came across this looking for stuff on Eddo Stern after giving up on blogging the bland news release from the AGO (or their pretencious pamphlet). Included on her site are some neat images and mix animations. What does one call these extremely short image animations/video clips – so short the animated parts are texture, not narrative?
Eddo Stern at the AGO
Eddo Stern at AGO – N. Post June 19/04 is an article on the show currently on at the Art Gallery of Ontario on recent work by Eddo Stern. Stern’s work, like Fort Paladin: America’s Army, 2003, combines modified computers and projections from computer games. Fort Paladin has a castle built around a screen and tower system unit. There is a keyboard with actuators controlled by another computer typing away beneath the screen (or castle gateway) showing a violent first person shooter (is the game projected controlled by the keyboard?) To quote from the pamphlet in the exhibit room,
Keywords: Tolkien, Christ, Your Empire and Your Desktop
Fort Paladin is a medieval computer castle automaton trained to kill and master the US Army’s inforamous recruitment/training game, America’s Army, using electro-mechanics and a custom-written expert system.
Supreme Court rules on online music
The Globe and Mail has a story on how the Music industry takes hit in court. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that ISPs are just conduits and therefore cannot be monitor or pay for music downloading by individuals.
A quote from the Globe article on page A1,
"The capacity of the Internet to disseminate works of the arts and intellect is one of the great innovations of the information age," Mr. Justice Ian Binnie said for the majority.
Pictures from the air
Pictures taken from Airplanes is a site by Susanne Z. Riehemann with pictures like my Air Screens (but better I think.) She also has other photos, including some beautiful wilderness ones.
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Color Music: LaserPiano
laserpiano.com is a site that sells a LaserPiano for color music performances. The site has good links to information about colour music, its history and synesthesia. I remain a bit mystified as to exactly how the LaserPiano works and what you get. The LaserPiano makes explicit how color music has become entertainment – from light shows to music to planetariums that coreograph visual productions to music.
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