Montreal artist Isabelle Hayeur was contacted by the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad about a year and a half ago, after curator Marlene Madison visited her studio in Montreal.
Her piece, Fire with Fire, is a three story tall video installation projected from the windows of Vancouver’s W2 culture + Media House at 112 West Hastings Street. The neighbourhood of choice is nationally known for being the poorest postal code in the country, plagued with a history of missing women and drug problems, and Hayeur’s work links both to the distant and recent troubles the area has faced.
“I was inspired by The Vancouver Great Fire that destroyed most of the newly incorporated city on 13 June 1886,” explained Hayeur. “I also refer to the architectural conditions of the neighbourhood since the late 80s—to its urban decay after the closure of the Woodward department store. The artwork was motivated as well by the human distress and the poverty of this ‘intense’ area of town.”
This is a guest post by Kalli Paakspuu, who along with Suzette Araujo and Tahir Mahmood created the “World Without Water” installation currently on display at the Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver.
A restorative and favorite space after life’s trials is the transitional space of a bathroom vanity where the intensity of living can be washed away. We refresh, rehearse, rework and realign an inner to an outer world through cleansing before a mirror. In our interactive installation World Without Water, the act of facing a mirror becomes a physical interaction in culture jamming.
Originally produced at the Canadian Film Centre as a prototype, World Without Water uses the participant’s physical interaction with a bathroom vanity to connect with global education on water consciousness. The sink and vanity mirror are reformed into an interventive site of environmental activism. This new media experience is featured at CODE Live One in the Cultural Olympiad in Vancouver from February 4 to 28, 2010.
By turning the tap we stream into the mirror a global view of the absence and abundance of fresh water. If both taps are turned the user is invited into an associational play with the “hot” (absence) and “cold” (abundance) images uploaded by professional and amateur photographers and made available through a flow sensor that controls a live photo stream from Flickr. Educational and entertaining, the user washes while simultaneously building a narrative out of images of water from places as diverse as Eurasia, Africa and the Badlands of North America
Sent to us from Art By Chance: Ultra Short Film Festival:
IT’S TIME TO MOVE! ART BY CHANCE is the brand new “Ultra Short Film Festival” that will be aired in May 2010 all around the world. Films will meet with us unexpected, non-theatrical venues around the world on digital advertising screens located inside metros, busses, railways, public transport.
ART BY CHANCE present urban dwellers with stimulating content thus colouring the time slices that are usually considered dead.
UNIQUE SHORT FILM FORM AS WELL AS THE SCREENING
ART BY CHANCE opens to movies of all kinds; fiction, animation, documentary and video art with the exception of training and advertising films. Enthusiastic and creative international film makers will be preparing 30 seconds long, films*, on “Time”. Participants also submit online from www.artbychance.org
IN THE SUMMER OF 2009 MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WERE CAUGHT BY A SHORT FILM Last year festival aired May-June-July 2009 in 13 countries and in over 70 cities around the world for the first time and was viewed by more than 1 billion people worldwide.
ALL THE WORLD’S WAITING TO SEE YOUR SHORT FILM!
ART BY CHANCE is currently partnering with many digital advertising network operators throughout the world. With these partnerships ART BY CHANCE realize a revolutionary event allowing art to meet millions of people around the world. The best festival entries will be selected by an international jury and will be screened. ART BY CHANCE films took place on 7907 screens in 20 different networks.
LARGEST AUDIENCE EVER REACHED BY A PUBLIC ART EVENT
ART BY CHANCE is going to allow film makers to share their work with a large audience. Viewers around the world will have the opportunity to watch the best festival movies free of charge and within the course of their daily routine. This is the largest audience ever reached by a short film festival. Reaching so many people can only be possible by taking the screenings outside the theatres where the urban people can see it without an effort.
Seems like an opportunity to insert some political into the public.
As politicians, bureaucrats and environmentalists head to Copenhagen for the UN Climate Change Conference, international culture vultures will descend upon four Danish art institutions to engage with environmental issues from a more colourful perspective.
Rethink: Contemporary Art & Climate Change is an art exposition featuring 26 international artists whose work creates new ways for the public to grasp complicated climate change issues. Although many artists have been producing work inspired by the topic for years — Quebec’s ATSA is one of my favourites — the role art can play in educating the public and inducing behavioural change is now attracting widespread interest.
The amazing Eyebeam Art & Technology Center has announced an open call for their Winter/Spring residencies and fellowships. Residencies provide a 5-month opportunity for production and presentation of projects querying art, technology and culture. Fellowships are an 11-month opportunity to spearhead new research, lead group research inquiries, and develop innovative technology with support over a longer period of time.
Deadline for applications is December 14, 2009 and the start date for the next round of Residents and Fellows is March 1, 2010. Go to the Eyebeam website for details on how to apply.
Eyebeam was founded in 1996 as a non-profit art center dedicated to creating audiences for media and technology arts, and advocating and demonstrating new media as a significant genre of cultural production. Eyebeam provides a space where artists have access to state-of-the-art tools for digital research and experimentation and where artists from all over the world can come together, collaborate, learn and share and create. Eyebeam challenges convention, celebrates the hack, educates the next generation, encourages collaboration, freely offers its contributions to the community, and invites the public to share in a spirit of openness: open source, open content and open distribution.
One of Canada’s preeminent video and sound art festivals Signal & Noise is calling for submissions.
Signal & Noise will showcase a spectrum of single and multi-channel audio & video works, live performances and immersive installations. Signal & Noise is an intimate forum for creative exchange between local, national and international artists. The event will take place in Vancouver May 27-29, 2010.
Every country has its dirty stories. In Canada, we could point to the continuing theft of land and resources from First Nations; the environmental devastation and human cost of the Alberta tar sands; or the Highway of Tears (to name a few).
In the case of Turkey, a particularly dirty story from their recent past is the 1980 coup that saw hundreds of thousands of detentions, and widespread human rights abuses including torture, lengthy jail terms, and executions for political dissidents and civilians. It is not a popular memory.
This month, the exhibition “Dirty Stories” opened at the BM SUMA Art Center in Istanbul’s Karaköy district. The show presents 30 artists working in a range of media to excavate and transform the memory of Turkey’s dirty war into some kind of new and contemporary understanding. As we’re fond of saying on our war memorials in Canada – “Lest We Forget”, indeed.
As politicians, bureaucrats and environmentalists head to Copenhagen for the UN Climate Change Conference, international culture vultures will descend upon four Danish art institutions to engage with environmental issues from a more colourful perspective.
The amazing Eyebeam Art & Technology Center has announced an open call for their Winter/Spring residencies and fellowships. Residencies provide a 5-month opportunity for production and presentation of projects querying art, technology and culture. Fellowships are an 11-month opportunity to spearhead new research, lead group research inquiries, and develop innovative technology with support over a longer period of time.
One of Canada’s preeminent video and sound art festivals Signal & Noise is calling for submissions.
Every country has its dirty stories. In Canada, we could point to the continuing theft of land and resources from First Nations; the environmental devastation and human cost of the Alberta tar sands; or the Highway of Tears (to name a few).
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