We Make The City! We Are The City! is a love letter to the city and a call to action. We are moving the festival into the public terrain because we believe it to be fertile and exciting grounds for diversion and discourse, but we are also asking the citizens to redefine how they see themselves, and thus the city around them. The city is not a fully formed structure delivered to you for consumption, but a constant evolving project in which you participate. You are the city around you and the city is you.
We Make The City!
May 30th, 20134 days of magic in the dark/ ELEKTRA & the BIAN
May 14th, 2012What ELEKTRA has left me with is a sense of warning. New media can be harnessed by creatives and technologists and then pushed to new potential, but overall I’m uncomfortable, in some instances, with using it to produce aggressive works. The world is volatile and I feel the artists role within this situation is to reveal truths and to decode data in order for the public to see it in new ways. If we relay aggression in our work we may perpetuate existing problems and ultimately have difficulty with accessibility to our work.
Elektra – Day 1
May 3rd, 2012This year the Elektra festival has expanded beyond its usual 6 day scale into a month long digital art bienniale with work everywhere around the core of the city and at all kinds of scales. We will post a number of reflections on the projects we experience here on the blog, and I wanted to start with quick mention of the first work I saw yesterday.
Firuz Daud on Ottawa International Animation Festival 2010
November 20th, 2010I must apologize that this article is late to the point of irrelevance. Over the last month I’ve been traveling a lot. I had this romantic idea that I could pull out my computer in transit and write in all these weird places, but I fond that typing on the go gave me motion sickness. […]
A note on EF’s print design(er/s)
November 8th, 2010Some closing remarks on Electric Fields 2010 will come later but for now, just a quick note to tip my hat et lever mon verre to Simon Guibord. When he isn’t working at Daïmon, running a record label or playing in If Then Do and Kingdom Shore, it seems he is churning out some very […]
More Lumens = Better Art – Night 3 recap
November 6th, 2010Most consumer grade LCD projectors hover somewhere 2600 lumens in terms of brightness. What do you do when an 18 000 lumen projector aimed at at 12’x22′ screen? Have a kick ass event? Sure. What do you do when moments before the event starts, this monolithic projector hanging so carefully from the ceiling reads off […]
Pitch a tent in Meaford this long weekend
July 27th, 2010This is the Meaford I know. Nestled quaintly on the Southern shore of Georgian Bay, Meaford for me means farming, it means my grandparents homestead, rolling hillsides, markets and lazy summer afternoons. It hadn’t (until recently) meant anything related to new media or electronic arts. That is, however, until I discovered Electric Eclectics ; festival of […]
The Subtle Technologies Festival and the Ghettoblast Sound System
July 6th, 2010This post comes from the Ghetto Blast Sound System crew members Kerry Campbell and Michael Caffrey. Kerry and Michael also make up the core of our GRL Ottawa group. Ghetto Blast has developed a mobile off-the-grid sound system that they use for free parties in the woods and urban sound interventions. In June we sent Ghetto Blast down to Subtle Technologies, a conference and festival centered on the cross section of art and technology, as the theme for this years edition was sustainability.
OpenFrameworks Lab in The Netherlands
June 23rd, 2010I recently returned from a great 5 day workshop at Graphic Design Festival Breda (GDFB), in The Netherlands. The workshop focused on the intersection of graphic design and technology, namely using the openFrameworks C++ library, and was led by Zachary Lieberman and Todd Vanderlin. The GDFB festival is a 3 week long event that takes […]
Mutek at 210 frames per second
June 12th, 2010My visit to this year’s edition of Mutek was not as Artengine’s AD, but as a band member of Ottawa group If Then Do. It was great to see the festival from that angle, and they do a great job at taking care of the details for artists. Kudos to the Mutek team! (…and as I […]