Art IN Basel

June 25th, 2012

Every June in the city of Basel, nestled in a corner of Switzerland that kisses both France and Germany, an explosion of art occurs. From Volta, Art Basel, Liste and various local shows, there is an overwhelming number of artworks. I was naïve in thinking two days was enough time to see all I wanted. […]

4 days of magic in the dark/ ELEKTRA & the BIAN

May 14th, 2012

What 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 Highlight #2

May 4th, 2012

A full day of presentations, vernisages and performances certainly leaves one feeling overloaded, but not so much that I am not looking forward to another day full of information and art. I will choose just one highlight from yesterday and leave the others to digest more fully. Yan Breuleux presented La Tempête during the AV presentation […]

Elektra – Day 1

May 3rd, 2012

This 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.

Transmediale – Days 5 + 6

February 7th, 2011

Self-Projector One of the pieces that I had missed earlier on in the festival that I was really glad I finally got around to seeing was a self-reflexive projector – sitting on a tripod and surrounded by mirrors, it reprojected a grid of its own dimensions back onto its own body. Unfortunately, I forgot the […]

Transmediale – Days 3 + 4

February 5th, 2011

The daytime schedule has really ramped up at the festival, thanks in part to Open Design City’s insistence on putting the open back into the open zone, filling up all the empty space and slots by turning the festival into a large barcamp. To the festival’s credit, they have seemed to embrace this. Their’s been […]

Transmediale – Days 1 + 2

February 3rd, 2011

OK, get ready for the daily rushes! Apologies in advance, still no pictures 🙂 … im writing this from my phone … maybe i’ll  save the pictures until the post-festival-post. Some quick notes: Much of the talk the last few days has been the general agreement on the underwhelming aspect of the opening remarks, as […]

Agent Scott at Transmediale

February 2nd, 2011

Jesse Scott here. As some of you know, I’ve recently relocated to Berlin, and I’m fortunate enough to have two pieces in Transmediale this year, so it was with pleasure when Ryan asked if I can give some news and reviews from the front lines (*ahem*) of the genre formerly known as New Media…

Back from Firmament expedition

November 1st, 2010

What a great trip. It is one of those things for which some benefits are immediately quantifiable, but for which many will show themselves a few years into the future. On a very basic level, seeing how other countries regard contemporary art and how they situate it within their respective societies is interesiting and, in […]

Swedes have it going on

October 24th, 2010

The staff at the Digital Art Centre here in Stockholm aplogize for their temporary location and look forward to a shiny new building in which art, industry and the community work together to mutually benefit from technological innovation.  And of course their City is fully behind the iniative.  In Ottawa we can only dream of […]