All Murakami, All the Times!

All Murakami, all the time. I first saw Murakami in the Superflat show at the Henry in Seattle several years ago. We got the big Murakami book and now I see there is wonderful coverage of the Murakami show in NY – including a feature in the Times Magazine. For a taste, here’s the slide show from the NYTimes, and their video of the opening.

Mediaprobes

In the mid-90′s, James K-M and I worked on three interactive artworks called Mediaprobes. They’ve been viewed in various exhibitions world-wide. Below is their description and a still image from each. (Originally programmed in Director, they need to be redone in another format so they can be seen without being delivered on a disk.)
MediaProbes compress concepts together to form an entirely new type of
multimedia icon. The relationships between concepts from Marshall McLuhan,
Barrington Nevitt, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis are juxtaposed with
experimental animated text and image along with narration and interactive
events.
MediaProbes reverse our normal concept of interactivity. Instead of the viewer
interacting with the presentation, MediaProbes present sensory interactivity,
sending complex signals back to the viewer, whose limited interaction by
mouseclick is rewarded by the “probeclick” sent back by the synaesthetic icon to
the brain.

Disparate ideas are forced into compressed interrelationship and much
like a chemical reaction they become fused in a new form of iconic expression.
Found images and sounds in the communication environment are combined with
intentional imagery and text selections in a very controlled setting. Working with
the minimum of input creates a reversal effect, which is formed by this forcing
together of ideas originally expressed in different media. The only appropriate
response for the viewer is a momentary internal synaesthetic shortcircuit, an
empty moment of “unlearning”.

MEDIAPROBE #1 (1.5 MIN.):
One quote from McLuhan is illustrated with appropriated audio and treated video. The flowing vertical text on one side of the main screen is one of ten thunders from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, which usher in a new development for humanity. The opposite vertical text is McLuhan/Nevitt’s analysis of the meaning of each thunder.

MEDIAPROBE #2 (2 MIN.):

The Artist is Older than the Fish, a quote from Wyndham Lewis, is placed over text from McLuhan, in which he describes the TV viewer as a skin diver. This fragmented text appears at intervals throughout the presentation, while video shot through a rear-view mirror is the central visual image. Audio involves three simultaneous tracks on the topic of out of body experience.

MEDIAPROBE #3 (7 MIN.):
A quote from Barrington Nevitt: “The perceptive artist learns how to repeat and
magnify his errors in order to create his own distinctive style for sharing new
truth”. Behind each chair is the image of an animal. Music is a treated midi-file
from the rhythm section for The Girl from Ipanema, and carries on throughout the piece. The blue buttons, when clicked, reveal quicktime sequences of futurist
narrative by Carol Sill or sound poems by James K-M.

(Download a free pdf excerpt from my book Documentary Print. Click on the title to receive the entire SRF Interim Report Document on Living in the Future.)

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Eric McLuhan on Second Life TV

Here’s a remarkable interview with Eric on Second Life TV, a great media fusion! Connect to play it here.

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Goodbye to Electric Living?

I finally bid farewell to our boutique production company Electric Living Productions, Ltd. Through it, James and I produced Electric Living in Canada, an interactive project which involved interviews with media theorists and digital artists about the future of interactive media and the evolving new language.

We interviewed over 100 people in Europe, New York and across Canada, used about 90 of the interviews in the project and created something that is a remarkable historical archive, and an art work in itself.

We applied several times for funding to update the project but had no luck, so made the decision to pull the plug. We still have DVD-ROMs of the project, Agence TOPO in Montreal is still representing it, and our website is still up, for now. It just didn’t make sense to keep going with the company which was no longer active in production.

Of course I still just love the name “Electric Living” and want to keep using it. It’s based on a 1985 quote from Barrington Nevitt, an associate of Marshall McLuhan: “…our present hangups are due to the incompatibility of sequential thinking with the simultaneities of electric living.” (from ABC of Prophecy: Understanding the Environment)

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Writing Proposals and Applications

Just taking a break from writing a proposal for funding for an interactive project – again. This time of year is always deadline time, and I find myself caught once again in the spell of writing another truly wonderful proposal for a project which will be extremely useful and valuable, plus creative with lasting impact. And of course I have to get over the feeling that I have done this many times before, with some success but also with some that have not hit the mark. Sometimes it is the sheer volume of applicants, something I experienced when assessing projects, so I know that when the letter says: there were so many qualified applicants to choose from, I know that it is partially true.

So I write on, and again create a budget according to the template required, then take the creative force of the concept and reduce it to what I hope will be acceptable proposal-language. This one is to Telefilm Canada, for their Canada New Media Fund. Watch this space for the response to this.

Last year at their deadline time, I applied with two production proposals, both of which were not accepted. Should I not have put in two? I felt that if they had only one deadline per year, it would be fine. One was a co-production with an Alberta company, a development of my own New Media Literacy Series. The other, based on the remarkable exhibition, The Blackfoot and the Jews, is still in process. After working like a madwoman last year to complete these two proposals, and just making the deadline time (there had been a delay in the Alberta group which forced me to make last minute changes), I received the thanks but no thanks letters later that month.

It was then that I decided to put my energies into AlphaGlyph, with diversification. I had lost heart, felt I was working for nothing. Yet here I am today, writing another proposal, and this time it is through my Alpha Glyph company.

What comes up for me when doing this is a complex of thoughts – how can I show to the world, or at least to the evaluators, what I have to offer? Not only my McLuhan study, which has given me keys to media understanding that will last a lifetime (no matter what the change in technology), but also my years of experience at VFS in instruction and administration. Not to mention the rest of my background. I'll go into these and more next post, must get back to the work at hand.

When Life Collides with History

I am using this blog to integrate a realistic version of my own history, and life, with comments and writing along the way. Many aspects – all in one place.
I’m inspired as I have been working on the Shamcher blog and website, here at http://www.shamcher.wordpress.com, and although there are some areas that need to be adjusted, the project seems to be coming along nicely. It makes me happy to see his work compiled, and I like using wordpress for content management. Fantastic. His effect on my life was profoundly transformational, and I am happy to be engaged in this work now. I also put together the little site, http://www.shamcher.org, which still needs major work.
Today, I am running a small business which helps people self-publish books, Alpha Glyph Publications Ltd. I’m very excited about the potential for self-publishing now that docutek technology is becoming more common, and see it as a wonderful revolution in personal and corporate expression.

Before that, I was co-producer and partner with my husband, James K-M, in Electric Living Productions, a New Media company. We produced a comprehensive DVD-ROM called Electric Living in Canada, in which we interviewed over 90 digital artists and media theorists about the direction and evolution of (then) new interactive technologies.