"Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The “expert” is the man who stays put."

Who are we writing for?

Question de jour…

I’ll keep ya posted.

edmontonwriters:

Who Are We Writing For? takes place this weekend at Latitude 53, the Art Gallery of Alberta, and dc3 Art Projects in downtown Edmonton, including Andrew Forster’s public talk at Latitude 53 on Friday at 7, where you can meet the workshop participants as well as a discussion with John Shelling,…

Michael Wolf

I recently visited the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto during CONTACT festival and Michael Wolf’s work was among the stand-outs for me. 

‘tokyo compression’ by michael wolf
images © michael wolf

The series, ‘tokyo compression’, by german-born hong kong-based photographer michael wolf is a collection of images featuring commuters through the lens of foggy subway windows. 

Jon Rafman

Totally digging Jon Rafman’s work lately. 

Google streetview, surveillance and magic. rad.

This guy is fantastic.

latitude53:

Yusuke Shibata is getting ready for his workshop on May 12th by eating a lot of pizza and making plans—here’s what he sent us this week:

What have we been surrounded by?

Street skateboarding tricks indicate it appropriately. The street skateboarders focus on the unrealistic scenes and the back scenes we receive blindly because they are taken for granted. It is the recovery of the tactile reality; you can feel and get the blind scenes just only by attacking the structures existing as materials you see but actually don’t realize.

In this workshop featuring the skateboarders’ approach to their cities, you can visualize the area by performing tricks with the pizza boxes to the blindly accepted and unconscious scenes.

I will have a lecture first and then, go out the street on a video shoot in the workshop. If there are a lot of participants join, I’ll divide them into groups so I would like you to bring your video camera if you have. Also, I strongly recommend putting on comfortable clothes(skateboards clothing is welcome!).

Let’s do pizza box great tricks in downtown Edmonton!

Watch Yusuke’s video that we posted earlier to get a little bit more of an idea—we’re definitely looking forward to this one!

"How does one talk in one medium (concepts) about the practices of another (percepts)?"

mnemata:

“A house is a machine for living in” ~Le Corbusier

(image: Esther Stocker). 

lionskeleton:

Martin Creed

Investigation: Grimes, Oblivion & Spectacle

If you follow The Ritournelle, you may be aware of my fondness for Ms. Claire Boucher, a.k.a. Grimes. I could list the reasons for this fondness, including her cyber/cyborg-post-internet-k.pop-hip.hop-AphexTwin influences, but instead, here, I want to take a little looksy at her video for the killer song Oblivion.

Cue video.

WATCH!

I’ve been looking at “youth culture” for a class and this video made me think of many things. What, you ask? Well, let’s get into it…

As a youth, the prospect of oblivion, the condition of being forgotten or unknown, can offer both welcome respite and immense fear. Some youth go to extreme efforts to “blend in” or “stand out” to either embrace or rebel against being lost in oblivion. The politics of “seeing and being seen” are underscored in the world of youth, where spectacle and performativity are often central practices of identity formation. In the music video for Oblivion, “cyborg-pop” musician Grimes and director Emily Kai Bock approach some of these ideas through the lens of the camera. Let’s take a closer look at this video as it relates to the concepts of spectacle and performing identity! Hooray!

Read More