Artists exploring the medium of video games: Works by Wafaa Bilal, Mohammed Mohsen and Harun Farocki
by Michael Lithgow on February 23, 2013
Let’s face it: shooting stuff is fun – in video, that is; but it can also be ethically complicated. Gallery 101’s current exhibition Blown Up: Gaming and War, brings to the conventions of video gaming the complexities of art, activism and critical commentary. I am not exactly a typical gamer (don’t own a console), but virtually re-connecting with my inner warrior and social critic at the same time, as I did last week at Gallery 101, was something of a treat.
Video games have come a long way from the simple pleasures of the arcade, and especially in the world of art. The structures of commitment and involvement created by games offer fertile ground for artists exploring kinds of human experience well beyond the zero-sum shoot-em-ups of most commercial game play. The installations in this show are fun. They’re weird. They’re confounding. And they leave burrs in the imagination as readily as the gratifications of conventional games wash mindlessly away.
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While I might be more likely to pick up a book entitled The Psychological Implications of Holiday-Motivated Materialism, I’m not so sure about a five-year-old.
You can check out all eight tweaked titles at War On Idiocy, who have also posted this fine little cultural jamming gem.
Via Kottke.
Penguin Books is releasing new editions of George Orwell’s best known books on January 21 to commemorate the inaugural “Orwell Day” — an annual event to celebrate the author and his influence on media and modern discourse.
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In the spirit of the holidays, we’d like to share with you this lovely collection of Soviet greeting cards. Enjoy! (There’s more where that come from if you check out this link.)
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Is this gender-neutral toy catalog just a holiday publicity stunt?
by Rob Maguire on December 6, 2012
Designing a toy catalog — or most any mass-market consumer catalog for that matter — is usually an exercise deeply rooted in the status quo. Top-Toy, the largest toy retailer in Northern European and licensee of the Toys “R” US chain in that region, is gently disrupting some of society’s norms with their new gender-neutral toy catalog for the Swedish market.
Featuring girls aiming their toys guns and boys walking tiny, synthetic dogs past a picket fence, some of the catalog imagery is certainly unlike what one is used to seeing from major toy retailers.
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Since 1991, nearly 14,000 peer-reviewed scientific articles have been published on the topic of climate change. Of those, a mere 24 reject human-caused global warming.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that climate change is, in fact, real, there is still a need for highly effective communications tools to educate the public on the dire importance of reducing carbon emissions, thanks to the many fossil fuel-addicted governments, corporations and industry groups who’ve spent billions on clouding the issue.
Enter Carbon Visuals. The UK-based business is “dedicated to communicating carbon data more effectively.” Using 3D imagery and graphs, Carbon Visuals seeks to influence by drawing attention to emissions in ways that people can easily understand the quantities at play, which are often meaningless without a point of reference.
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The Mine Kafon, by Afghan designer Massoud Hassani, is designed to be blown across dangerous terrain by the wind, triggering mines as it passes over them. A single unit, which costs about $50 to make, could remove several mines, as each explosion will only destroy a few of the Mine Kafon’s limbs.
“Made from bamboo and biodegradable plastics, the Mine Kafon also has a GPS chip integrated in it,” explains Hassani. “You can follow its movement on the website and see were it went, where are the safest paths to walk on and how many land mines are destroyed in that area. On paper, Afghanistan is said to have 10 million land mines. In truth there are far, far more. Every destroyed land mine means a saved life and every life counts.”
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The Center for Urban Pedagogy has brought the principle of public-access television to the world of design with a project intended to provide impactful design to community advocates and empower people in their own neighbourhoods.
Public Access Design creates collaborations between designers and community organizations to create visual tools that “help ordinary residents better understand and participate in democratic processes, creating real social change.”
Project proposals from the community will evaluated by a jury, who select projects based on “whether it would benefit from a visual explanation, whether the scope is achievable given the time frame, and whether there is a credible distribution plan and a clear constituency with a need for the tool,” explains CUP Program Manager Clara Amenyo.
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Ricardo Dominguez (center), with Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0. (Photo by Kinsee Morlan.)
It’s a staging that feels, if not inappropriate, then at least a little unconventional:
I’m seated in front of my laptop in the living room of my East Vancouver home, trying (and mostly failing) to ward off the September cold creeping up through the floorboards. On my screen, streamed in from a home office in San Diego, California, is Ricardo Dominguez, one of North America’s most wildly experimental and most deeply politicized media artists.
My microphone malfunctions, my Internet connection wavers, and my flimsy earbuds crackle. But all the same, Dominguez’ cavernous baritone vibrates across the pixelated static that separates us, asserting his “presence” with a startling authority.
It’s a timbre well suited to the impressive silhouette that Dominguez has cut upon the North American political landscape. Since the 1980s, Dominguez and his many collaborators have steadfastly challenged prevailing discourses of virtuality with a tremendous array of mind-bending media art projects that deploy a radical poetics of collective action and futurity to reckon with the politics of neoliberalism, globalization, and migration.
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The ongoing dialogue around the design of the Eisenhower Memorial
by Amanda McCuaig on July 18, 2012
I caught wind of a different kind of political art and politics of art this past weekend while reading the latest issue of Vanity Fair. As anyone who’s done any kind of planning in teams can imagine, building a monument can be a mighty task. As it turns out, the recent efforts to create a monument to US President Dwight D. Eisenhower have reached “fever pitch” levels of debate.
Legendary architect (and did you know he was Toronto-born?) Frank Gehry was selected by the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission in 2009 to create the memorial. Since unveiling the first proposed design, two of Eisenhower’s granddaughters have raised criticism about what they’ve seen – that the only statue of Eisenhower was of him as a child and didn’t represent him as the president and military leader, that parts of it resembled billboards and missle silos, that its modern iron work resembled fences around concentration camps.
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Let’s face it: shooting stuff is fun – in video, that is; but it can also be ethically complicated. Gallery 101’s current exhibition Blown Up: Gaming and War, brings to the conventions of video gaming the complexities of art, activism and critical commentary. I am not exactly a typical gamer (don’t own a console), but virtually re-connecting with my inner warrior and social critic at the same time, as I did last week at Gallery 101, was something of a treat.
