Art projects past: the YPF 24-hour Art Party

It feels like a long time in the past now, but about five or so years ago, I and a group of friends, the Young People's Foundation collective, performed our second major installation: the 24-Hour Art Party, also known as Days are Numbered + Aftermath. (Our first was really just a big party and fundraiser with a relatively small exhibition—does anyone have photos of that?) The object of the event was to create a work of art (approximately 7" x 7") every 24 minutes for 24 hours, producing a total of 60 pieces per artist. (13 or 14 of us participated.) It was awesome. At the end of the 24 hours, Galerie Accidentelle (at Spencer's and Mandy's boutique, Lemon Lime) was covered from floor to ceiling in art.

Well, I don't consider myself much of an illustrator, painter, or collage artist; I'm not visually creative enough to put together that many individual pieces in that amount of time. So I decided to make music instead, and here is a mix of my many pieces. (I did create a piece for every 24-minute period. Mostly I wrote out lyrics or thoughts on the process.)


The next day, Josh and I mixed it down from 60 tracks, and I dropped off a CD and discman at the gallery so viewers could look and listen. And now, finally, so can the whole world. Let me know what you think!

Track one Track two Track three Track four Track five Track six Track seven Track eight Track nine Track ten Track eleven Track twelve Track thirteen Track fourteen Track fifteen Track sixteen Track seventeen Track eighteen Track nineteen Track twenty Track twenty-one Track twenty-two

Read on..!

The Interior Design Show and Come Up To My Room

I visited the Interior Design show a couple of years back when my friends at Furni Creations were exhibiting this bad boy, among other things. Danijela and I had just bought our house (we hadn't moved in yet), and we toured the exhibition with some interest. I remember enjoying the special installations and the showcase of fancy new stuff, but high-end bathrooms, kitchens, fireplaces, and all the rest were not really in our future then. That remains true today, and at this year's IDS, again the most interesting stuff was Studio North (the new design showcase), the prototypes, the student design showcase, and the installation Five Small Rooms.

It's not all great, but a lot of it is very interesting. Nothing was as thought-provoking as Radiant Dark, but IDS isn't an art or high-concept show; it's for consumers. Usually, the things I like most demonstrate attention to materials and processes that minimize the end product's environmental impact, but not always. In this case, few designers exhibited such focus. You can read about the things I found most interesting at Toronto Craft Alert.

Come Up To MY Room is the most conceptual of the TIDF events that I attended this year, and also the most remarkable. If you don't know what CUTMR is, the organizers invite artists to create installations in the second floor rooms and hallways at the Gladstone Hotel. The results are always intriguing and there are always a couple of installations that look and feel really great—in which the artists create great experiences. The artists have to work within a couple of significant limitations; for example, the rooms are small and oddly shaped, and the walls must remain white. I think the best pieces take full advantage of the room's conditions, including its shape and its lighting.

Maybe because the installations are enclosed—separate from reality—they often have the feeling of fantasy. I guess in a sense that's always the artist's intention: to create the feeling of something that's not real or hyper-real. It helps, too, that at CUTMR the viewers get to move from room to room and fantasy to fantasy, becoming more and more disoriented as the place gets busier and busier. You just need a fussy rabbit to lead you around and you'd feel perfectly lost in Wonderland. You can read my thoughts on some of the rooms on Toronto Craft Alert. Read on..!

Radiant Dark design show

I like furniture, and I like art, and I appreciate quality, durability, and design. I also appreciate cheap, but while it's possible to find all of the former qualities together, it's not possible to find the former with the last one. This is actually a major ethical quandary I face (not just with furniture): should I buy a more expensive product of higher quality when there is always a cheaper and lower-quality alternative?

Am I capable of incorporating long-term economics into purchasing decisions? Is there any point?

With all products, the issue is disposability: this is a feature of the vast majority of consumer goods today. The opposite is sustainability or durability, and it is the theme of this year's Radiant Dark design show.

See my full write-up, with pics by Danijela, at Toronto Craft Alert. Read on..!

Gravity Wave Gambol CD release at Téranga, November 6, 2009

The Gravity Wave always put on a quirky and high-energy show, mainly thanks to the group's core duo, Finlay Braithwaite and Ken Farrell. Their songs are always original, and in performance they revel in the strangeness of the music they're playing. Ken is an engaging singer who unself-consciously throws in a rap or toast as necessary, and Finlay embodies his bass lines in his movement, occasionally interjecting with a hoot or a quip.

They always surprise in some way or another. Like: I think every time I've seen The Gravity Wave play, they've consisted of different members (besides Ken and Finlay). I saw just the two of them rock the Boat a couple of years ago. Then I saw their previous CD release at the Great Hall, and there were seven or eight of them. At Téranga there were four of them, including a DJ scratching along and a drummer. I'm not too fond of the record-scratching-as-instrument thing, but with the already eclectic mix of sounds these guys create, it worked.

The band played mostly new songs, like "Yo-Yo" and "Great One", along with a couple of fan favourites; and everyone had a good time—I could tell because of the jumping, dancing, and yelling—and I don't think it was because Ken was giving away Gravity Wave-branded shopping bags.

Sometimes I'm impressed that people enjoy The Gravity Wave's music. It isn't always easy to digest as pop music; although I consider that far from a bad thing. I'd like to say that it takes a sophisticated ear to get it, but I think the boys in the band have just achieved a balance of pop and avant-garde elements, as well as a healthy measure of dance beats, irony, and nostalgic cultural references. It's a balance that generally works, but stays far away from more mainstream artists whom you might describe similarly. At the same time, I won't deny that their fans seem to fall within a certain age group that can't help but appreciate that sort of thing.

I would say it's clear that their goal—whether explicit or otherwise—is to deconstruct pop. However, I think it's also clear that they're not creating a simple (or complex) pastiche of musics, but rather a new pop music that doesn't recognize the boundaries of the old. I'm going to run with that a bit.

So much of current music—especially the stuff based around sampling and mash-ups, but really anything that displays its influences with excess pride—weakly rehashes the old, what's come before. It's not always bad, and certainly I don't want to denigrate the institution of influence. There is nothing wrong with sampling and mashing up songs in order to create something new. The problem is that the result is rarely actually new. It's usually boring and overly simple. The fact that people like this music confounds me and the music itself sometimes angers me!

The worst offenders in my mind are those producers who just take the music form an older song, add new lyrics, maybe a revised melody, and some additional effects, and call the thing a new song. The best are those who use older songs and samples as though they were themselves instruments or notes, and craft songs like songwriters. I'm sure you can think of some from each group off the top of your head.

My point is that most of the pastiche music of today that might appear innovative on the surface is far from it, and certainly has not escaped the traditional boundaries of pop. But some has looked over the fence and imagined what's on the other side. Maybe some pop musicians and producers have even gone over. I think Ken and Finlay of The Gravity Wave have at least had a glimpse of what lies beyond.

I'm going to make up a coincidence now: I've been reading "Goodbye 20th Century", a biography of Sonic Youth, and seeing The Gravity Wave perform, I immediately thought of the culture of experimentation that informed Sonic Youth's early work, along with the desire to create something that was really new, but which a general audience still might like. Sonic Youth did not start as a pop band, and they never became one, although they did manage to find a few hooks along the way. What Sonic Youth did—whether they wanted to or not—was expand the boundaries of popular music so that they eventually found themselves within the realm of pop. (I'm prepared to agree to disagree on that.)

At the moment, pop music is so bloated and distended (in more ways than one) that it's basically amorphous now, and shows no signs of contracting to a state where anyone could come up with an acceptable definition. I don't think it could be any other way. Some will disagree, but I say the sole criterion of Pop Music is popularity, and if some strange and esoteric band or artist become popular, it's only fair to pull aside the velvet rope and let that artist in. Of course, what happens once you get in to the club might leave you wanting. For one, an artist can hardly be both popular and esoteric.

Anyway, The Gravity Wave aren't there yet. They still seem to me more like an experiment than a long-term ambition. For instance, I prefer to watch a band play instruments rather than listen to prerecorded backing tracks. I'm sure there are many others who don't consider that a hurdle on the path to stardom.

Regardless, it's a pleasure to watch The Gravity Wave, and I look forward to seeing them transform from experimental indie darlings into serious pop stars.

Oh, and by the way, you can grab Gambol on CD from Fuzzy Logic Records (look under "Shop") or as a digital download from Zunior.com. Read on..!

iTunes should not exist

I had a nerdy inspiration one night last week as I was falling asleep. I can't explain why at all, except maybe that I am perpetually looking for a music organizer with certain specifications that I can't find in any existing application. (More on that after.)

The inspiration was this: iTunes, and most other music player/organizers (e.g., WinAmp, doubleTwist, Windows Media Player) add an unnecessary layer to users' daily computing activities. Everything that they do can (or could with little programming or scripting) be done via folder actions in a file manager (i.e., OSX's "Finder" and Windows' "Windows Explorer"). The only difference is that dedicated music players make it all look so pretty. (That's mild sarcasm, by the way.)

Okay, so I'm probably getting ahead of myself. File managers could easily perform all of the basic and most (if not all) of the advanced functions of any given music player. It's just that the developers of these programs would have to integrate some of these advanced functions into the file manager rather than separating them as they are now. One might argue that including these advanced functions is unnecessary since not all people will use them, but this is completely a non-issue. OSX and Windows both come with music players pre-installed, and few people will ever remove them.

Let me clarify. The basic functions of the average music player include:

• Playing music
  
• Organizing music
  

These actions are of course more diverse than I want to make them appear. The first might mean playing audio from a CD, MP3s or other audio files, podcasts, streaming radio, shuffling, crossfading (or other effects), and so on; and organizing music includes sorting in various ways, searching your collection quickly, creating playlists, updating song information, &c. Also, people use iTunes and the like to fill their portable music players, to buy music, to rip and burn audio discs, to convert audio files to different formats, to look at visual accompaniments (visualizations), and even to share musical recommendations and files.

If you know a moderate amount about today's operating systems, you recognize that the file manager can already do pretty much all of these things without any added software. In fact, you might even have done some of these things yourself via your file manager: if you navigate to a folder containing music in OSX, and select a file, a "preview" window appears in which you can listen to the song and view some file-related information, along with the song's cover art, if available. It's much quicker than opening iTunes, but inefficient for listening to many songs. Still, the functionality is right there in Finder. Searching, too, is built into file managers: switch to your file manager, press Cmd/Ctrl-F, start typing the name of the song, artist, or album you want, and presto, all the songs with your criteria are on display, hopefully including the object of your search.

What else? Ripping and burning functions have been part of file managers for years; and only iPod users are forced to use iTunes to load music to their players (although with exceptions)—as far as I know, other music players allow users to drag and drop files from their file manager.

In fact, in some ways, file managers are more versatile than iTunes and the like. For example (and this is my desired specification I alluded to above), file managers commonly allow users to arrange their windows in much more diverse ways. I want to be able to look at my music in two side-by-side windows. Is that too much to ask! (As far as I can tell from this miniscule screenshot, WinAmp includes this feature; but the program isn's available for OSX. If anyone wants to offer step-by-step instructions on installing it with Wine, please let me know!)

Anyway, here's my vision for this infinitesimal fraction of the future:

A file manager "Music" window setting (like the "Filmstrip" folder option in Windows XP) that, when selected, would display the contents of a folder like a music management application. This new setting would be accompanied by a "Music" (or "Media") menu incorporating the features listed above. In other words, I don't want to click and open iTunes to get at my music (time-consuming, inefficient). I just want to open a folder that looks basically like iTunes and that will do all of the same things (quick, efficient).

I suppose there are reasons why this hasn't taken place yet; but I suspect that it's just status quo and marketing thinking. It's far easier to market a distinct application with a name than one that's simply there, doing its thing mostly invisible to the user—even if that program is free, which most music applications are. Also, if Microsoft and Apple maintain separate programs like iTunes and Windows Media Player, they can say they are adding clear value to their operating systems with these programs. Not so easy to say when there's no program to talk about.

Somebody tell me I'm wrong. Read on..!