DROP OUT. HANG OUT. SPACE OUT.
Daniel Joseph. Interdisciplinary as ****. Toronto PhD Student in Communication & Culture @ Ryerson/York.
Twitter
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2012-01-29
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2012-01-28
http://perpetua.tumblr.com/post/16633079214/why-is-pop-music-the-only-art-form-that-still
“Why is pop music the only art form that still inspires such arrantly stupid discussion? The debates that surround authenticity have no relationship to popular music as it’s been practiced for more than a century. Artists write material, alone or with assistance, revise it, and then present a final work created with the help of professionals who are trained for specific and relevant production tasks. This makes popular music similar to film, television, visual art, books, dance, and related areas like food and fashion. And yet no movie review begins, “Meryl Streep, despite not being a Prime Minister, is reasonably convincing in ‘The Iron Lady.’ ””
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Lana Del Rey’s Image on “Born to Die” : The New Yorker
Sasha Frere-Jones gets the January 2012 award for accuracy!
A commenter wrote in reply to this: “Agree with the sentiment, but actors *act*; musicians create music. We’re not implicitly invited to suspend disbelief with the latter.” This is just so wrong, because the role of the musician is not necessarily to create music so much as execute it. It feels absurd to have to point this out, but going back centuries, songwriters are not necessarily synonymous with performers. That is a fairly recent thing — Bob Dylan and the Beatles are largely responsible for the expectation that pop musicians write their own material. But regardless of that expectation, the majority of musicians do not specialize in performing their own material - even within bands who do focus on originals. And for that matter, it is exceptionally rare for actors to perform material that they have written. What matters is execution, and how a performer inhabits a role. Sasha’s point is that the overwhelming majority of creative endeavors are the product of collaboration with specialists, so it is absurd that music - a medium that all but requires people to come together to make anything happen – would be considered an exception.I’ve been arguing since the very inception of Del Rey that the obsession with “revealing” the “real” Del Rey as a fraud or a product of corporate domination is just the result of what Lacan calls the “passion for the real”. It’s this weird impulse to vill the void for the objective truth in the self by lashing outwards and looking for objective truth in human practice. In general I feel that ‘indie’ music, as a musical ethic evolved out of this impulse, to create objectively ‘true’ music, music written by performers that was ‘honest’ and ‘true’ to the creator’s singular, individual artistic intent. Basically, indie music is the realization of the individualistic enlightenment project: “Liberalism: the indie band”.
Perpetua’s point about the historical inaccuracy of this expectation about musicians is great, and gives us grounds to go back and say “No! Lana Del Rey is not a simulacrum! You will not find the kernel of objective truth in refuting her reality! She is a singer! She is a musician! For better or worse!”
Source: newyorker.com
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2012-01-27
Source: jhnbrssndn
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Matt Damoncraft
“Matt Damon approves this item.”
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2012-01-26
Source: sabrinascott.ca
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The Margaritaville laid back state of mind is inherently social, and this game has captured the spirit of that lifestyle … With Margaritaville Online, fans across the globe can party together any time and any place.
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Jimmy Buffett, so next gen (via brianfeldman)
The future of videogames doesn’t promise a utopia of perfected democracy or ideal play, instead it offers us a thousand Margaritaville Onlines, and, god willing, a Cheeseburger in Paradise Online.
(via barthel)
Source: venturebeat.com
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2012-01-25
This is a pretty video of Toronto streetcars over the course of a day.
Spadina (the pinkish vertical line at centre-right) goes all wonky at the tail end of the morning rush hour. It’s frustrating on the ground but bunched streetcars bouncing back and forth look kind of cartoonish when rendered this way.
(via fuckyeahtoronto)
Source: torontoist.com
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The amount of data that will get accumulated over the course of a person’s life will be huge. So the team experimented with chopping that all up into specific years. A Facebook hackathon project called Memories, for example, which was accidentally released to the user base briefly last year, did that very thing. Users navigated between various buckets of content by clicking on years.
But that didn’t achieve the effect Facebook wanted. That’s not how we remember our life, Felton says. We don’t remember it in chunks. We remember it as a stream. ‘I felt strongly that your life should be shown in one long continuum,’ Felton says.—
“Designers Behind Facebook’s Timeline: 5 Keys to Creating a UI With Soul.”
I think this is a very ideological way of thinking through the question of memory (obviously). Streams work well to tell stories, which is what Facebook is trying to have us do, but per Walter Benjamin, I believe the opposite: “History breaks down into images, not into stories.”
(via marathonpacks)
Source: marathonpacks
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2012-01-22
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D-Pad: Directions in play/art/design.
Having recently moved to Toronto to pursue graduate studies, mrghosty (curator/media artist skot deeming) continues his work of video game culture art events, beginning at Interaccess with the launch of the D-Pad series.
Designed to be part social event, part art event, part pop-up arcade, D-Pad will bring together works from a variety of disciplines that share a common theme/topic; video games. Whether it’s hardware, software, iconography, D-Pad will feature works by artists running the gamut of games, art, and performance. While it is important to note those that create games which facilitate play, it’s also crucial to acknowledge how game culture has facilitated new works by those playing WITH the games and their technology. While D-Pad’s focus will largely be works by local artists, each event will feature the work of an artist from outside the region.
Doors Open at 8:30, with performances getting under way at 9:30, cover is $5 at the door, and the event will be licensed, with the gallery serving beer and wine.
Performances by:
- bossFYTE (audio visual performance featuring modified video game hardware)
- Mandelbrut (a/v performance featuring modified Vectrex game consoles)
- Oxyvulu (live chipmusic)
- mrghosty (chipmusic DJ set)
Art, Installations, and Games by:
- Emilie and Jim Mcginley of TO Jam/Bigpants (3D game `the Depths to which I sink`, and selected games from the TO Jam catalogue)
- Clint Enns (gameboy ROM and Machinima remakes of Andy Warhol’s Empire)
- Tim Mcdonald (Gauntlet Series 1; a series of paintings based on the classic video game Gauntlet)
- Damian Sommer (co-operative game Friendship in Four Colours)
- Dames Making Games (selected games from the emerging game creators collective, whose purpose is to promote the works of female game makers in Toronto and beyond)
Featured Guest Artists:
- Devine Lu Linvega and Renaud Bedard (MTL): Rain+Bow - a bullet hell shooter highly influenced by Japanese pop culture, lasting 90 seconds long. If you can survive that long.
- Kenton Sheely (NYC): Cities in Flux - Abstract interactive generative art created through modifying the game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
This looks really cool!
