I love the naive sense of hope in the future that it implies, a happy space candy kind of vision that is very difficult to feel in light of current global conditions

The new and improved version, after much soldering and heartache, and ripping out of conductive threads …

See video on vimeo:

Barking Mad – Suzi Webster & Jordan Benwick from Jordan B on Vimeo.

So – electromode, part of the Vancouver 2010 cultural olympiad: all the famous canadian artists, and then …

us.

thanks to Valerie from Montreal we will be showing alongside some wonderful Canadian wearables artists like Joey Berzowska from hexagram, Montreal, and Ying Gao who makes origami look like simplistic child’s play.

For more wearables musings, see electricdream

“This side of the shell there is only silence; if you look at it at arm’s lenght you will never guess what is enclosed in it, a sea, a whole world of sound, past and present and who knows future, and if you listen very carefully, holding it close to your ear, you can hear it all.  Not just from the other side of the world, but the other side of everything, the other side of silence itself.”

“A builder of random, fragile universes, Michel Blazy likes to manipulate materials, to attempt to control their disappearance and transformation, or on the contrary to be completely dependent on them. The micro events to which the adventure gives rise are crucial to the unfolding journey: instances of intentional or accidental germination, of the desiccation and decline of materials, of microscopic molds and rots, of the deterioration of surfaces, of the degeneration, transmutation or decrepitude of forms – all these febrile energies of living matter are claimed by the artist as operations crucial to the elaboration of the work.“  from the  programme du Palais de Tokyo.

My father died a month ago, after a difficult 5 months of brain injury, coma, a stroke, further brain damage, and a few bouts with MRSA. This has been one of the most difficult situations I have ever had to cope with, and the experience still feels largely undigested.

Now that my dad is gone, I have been thinking a lot about memory. Specifically – all that i have left of him now are memories, padded with photographs, words, stories. Suddenly I am distrusting my memory, it seems so ephemeral, like trying to catch bits of a dream in the morning, and not very persistant at all.

This feeling, coupled with being in Johannesburg with very little internet access and a great sense of dislocation from the world and the web, has made me think a lot about how I am locating some of my memory more and more online. I don’t just mean having firefox remember logins for me, I mean that it seems so much easier to just google something than it is to hold that information at the forefront of my brain. I’ve let my phone remember all contact numbers for a few years now.  I’ve thought about dystopian situations where humans have to rely exclusively on their machines in order to remember anything at all – even our own names …

Kevin Kelly of Wired said in 2005 that  “…What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows – about us and about what we want to know. … The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won’t feel like themselves – as if they’ve had a lobotomy.”

I assume that by Machine, Kelly meant the web?

Clocks, calendars, timetables and guidebooks assure us: there is order to things. You can tell the time, organise your days, plan your weeks, cultivate your garden, plot your travels. Reality rules!

In Dr Clock’s absurd world, on the contrary, things are not always what the seem. Logic leads to surprise, paradox reigns with looking-glass rules, things slide quickly from the sublime to the ridiculous. It’s a world turned upside down and back to front. And it all makes perfect sense.

I highly recommend this book!

For a more thoughtful investigation of Neto’s practise in terms of art and design, see his interview on designboom.    Similar but different to Oursler’s  Thoughtforms.