"Electric Tenement" reacting to Tweets @ OpenOttawaLibre 2011

On Sept. 28 2011 I was fortunate to partake in OpenOttawaLibre 2011, an “unconference” that brought together a diverse group of “creatives” from the business, technology, and art sectors in Ottawa. Although the agenda of the day wasn’t entirely clear until the event started – in true “unconference” style – the day was actually a facilitated discussion workshop featuring multiple streams of interest, all derived from the central question:

what do we need to do to create a place that sparks opportunity for creative thinkers to collaborate and innovate for a better Ottawa?

From a general networking perspective, OOL11 proved to be a productive opportunity to meet new people and organizations with overlapping interests and mandates in the city – one particular example standing out being the desire expressed by many groups and individuals to have an Ottawa-based electronic arts festival. Although Ottawa is a relatively small city, it never ceases to amaze me how isolated different groups with similar agendas seem to be here; OOL11 provided a great meeting ground for such groups to discover one another. The enthusiasm generated at the event was also contagious, and served as a valuable reminder of the creative potential in Ottawa; I wish there were more events like OOL11 to help bring a unified focus to our efforts.

From a personal perspective, I was happy to bring new exposure to Artengine’s Electric Fields festival to a targeted, interested audience, as well as meeting a new group of potential collaborators from The City of Ottawa’s Community Arts Program, The Ottawa Art Gallery, and Apartment 613.

I was further fortunate enough to be one of 4 artists invited to showcase technical artwork. I chose to show Electric Tenement (the working name for the lighting tower debuted at Urbana 2011), programmed to react to tweets tagged #OOL11 (shown in the opening photo, above).

Guerilla Magazine wrote a feature on the piece and its role at OOL11 here.

Many thanks to Julie Dupont and Caleb Abbott at The City of Ottawa for all their hard work!  Make sure to check out the OOL11 webpage for more info and ongoing discussions.

"Mountain of Gold" by The Latest Artists (photo by Ming Wu)

Background

Chinatown Remixed is an annual, art festival in Ottawa’s Chinatown district.  For one month each spring, the merchants and restaurants of Chinatown welcome artists’ exhibitions and performances.

Having exhibited lighting installations back in the 2010 and 2009 festivals, Deb and I wanted to try something different from, and more spontaneous than our usual “plan and execute” lighting approach.

After a conversation with one of the primary organizers, Don Kwan of Shanghai Resto, we did indeed come up with something different for the 2011 edition (May 15 – June 15).

Read on for all the details . . .

Project

Speaking w/ Don about the festival, the neighborhood, and the community that lives there, we learned about the gold mountain, and decided to do a performance art piece called Mountain of Gold, creating a mountain of golden garbage, with the idea that such a mountain would be attractive from afar, but not as expected up close.

Here’s the official artist statement that accompanied the piece:

The idea that North America offers a “Mountain of Gold” is an ideology held by many Chinese immigrants.

These newcomers believe that their adopted homeland will offer a vast array of exciting potential and opportunities.

Sadly, for many, this idealized Mountain of Gold, ends up lackluster — gleaning instead with unfulfilled promises and dreams.

To symbolize this metaphorical mountain, The Latest Artists offer a performance piece in which a mountain of golden garbage was generated into a large, heaping pile over the course of the Chinatown Remixed opening day festivities.

Shredded bills, symbolic of lost and wasted money, contributed to the large garbage pile.

The piece also intends to elicit questions about the wastefulness of art and general societal resources.

We were situated perfectly in an alleyway, which we promptly tarped before starting work on the foot of our mountain.

Over the course the afternoon, our mountain steadily grew with the help of enthused passers-by:

Until we had a beautiful mountain of gold (and ran out of garbage to add):

Reactions

Personally, I’d expected the gold spray paint to run off the garbage bags, creating a gross, streaming, golden mess, but instead the paint stuck wonderfully to the clear garbage bags, and the golden heap ended up becoming a highly aesthetic object.  It also really jumped out from a afar, playing perfectly into the golden mountain premis:

I’d also expected the general public to be disgusted by the spectacle, calling attention to the material waste and pollution generated by painting a garbage heap with golden spray paint.

Instead, people were eager to jump in and help paint the trash bags and shred bills.  Photographers aplenty were attracted to our glimmering garbage pile, and it made for a great photo op of the day:

The bling factor even attracted China Doll for a photo shoot:

Peter Simpson of the Ottawa Citizen lamented the fact that our mountain only stood for an afternoon before it was dismantled and pushed to the curb (only a few metres away). [ UPDATE: Peter praises  Mountain of Gold here. ]

Who would have guessed that a pile of pretty golden garbage would be so enjoyable?  Well, given the current state of pop culture, perhaps it’s not that surprising after all

Cube Gallery is pleased to announce that our wildly popular Great BIG Smalls Show is back for a sixth year of offering unique gifts of original art from across Canada. Small pieces – perfect for Christmas gift-giving – are already arriving from New York, Powell River B.C., Barry’s Bay Ont., Montreal, Toronto and the Ottawa-Gatineau region.  This annual juried show boasts nearly 60 artists and more than 300 works of art.  Plan to arrive on the first day for what has become one of Cube’s most anticipated annual events and to fully appreciate the astonishing scope of artistic talent on display.  Original art for the discerning kids and adults on your Christmas list – the gift that appreciates and will be appreciated for a lifetime.

I had a sneak peak at some of the work while dropping of a series of new light boxes the other night and it looks like this is going to be a great show!

As for the light boxes, Deb and I have collaborated on a new series of animated, graphic light boxes that we’re really excited about.

With so many artists involved in the show, it’s sure to be a really fun opening with an interesting and eclectic crowd.

See you Thursday eve.!

During the Electric Fields biennial festival of electronic art and music in Ottawa, Karsh Masson Gallery hosted the Prototype exhibition, which focused on the iterative processes behind electronic-based art.

Unfortunately I don’t have as many photos of the exhibit as I’d like, as the whole experience was a bit of a whirlwind, with two days dedicated to installation and only four full days of exhibition.

Since DOTKLOK is still in the prototype/development stage, it made for a perfect candidate for the exhibition.  Alongside a working beta model, I hung a series of photos illustrating the various stages of the clock up to the present, along with a time line documenting DOTKLOK’s progress to date:

Since I consider them “works in progress” which I adapt to the context at hand, I also installed my cold cathode pieces, Flaven and Mantelpiece, in the gallery windows, which provided some extra “flash” to the show in an attempt to grab attention from passers by.

Also in the exhibit was nichola feldman-kiss‘ robotic eye, a video showcase of Gordon Monahan’s speaker swinging technology, and Catherine Richards‘ 3D video experiment, Swim Test:

Of particular interest to me was Donna Legault’s work, which makes use of numerous woofers connected to amplifiers controlled by Pure Data to translate the ambient sound in the exhibition space to “infrasound:” low-frequency signals that rattle the woofers in a more visual manner than aural.  For the Prototype exhibition, Donna was experimenting with inputs from touch sensors located at either side of her installation, transposing the electrical energy picked up from gallery visitors into signals which visibly rocked a “pool” of woofers:

Upon realizing the obvious overlap occurring from Donna’s practice of transforming sound to movement and my regular practice of using movement to trigger lighting, some sort of collaboration was inevitable.

Taking the ethos of the Prototype show to heart, we spent some time in the studio the night before the exhibit opened to get a working proof of concept up and running:

In a short time, we were able to merge our two practices: Donna’s portion listening to the ambient noise in the room with a microphone and sending the transposed infrasound to the speaker, and my part using a light sensor to detect the movement of the speaker cone and modulate the color and brightness of an LED strip.

The result was repeatable enough that we installed it the next day as an impromptu addition to the show:

Perhaps not such an interesting result on its own — and I do wish I’d had a chance to get some better documentation prior to the show’s tear down — but an encouraging combination of electronic practices absent of any electrical connection between the two systems.  I look forward to seeing what we come up with in a larger, more directed context when the opportunity arises!

TWITTER ACTIVATED LIGHT BOXES ON DISPLAY AT ORIENTAL CHARM GIFT SHOP [ 653 SOMERSET ST. W., OTTAWA ] FROM MAY 8 – JUNE 8 2010

Ottawa (Ontario) – You won’t want to miss it! Ottawa’s second annual Chinatown Remixed event is happening Saturday, May 8, from 2-5 p.m.

Walk the streets of Somerset West as you take in dazzling contemporary local art, mixed in with Chinatown’s traditional shops and restaurants.

One of the highlights of this year’s festival is an interactive lighting display by The Latest Artists — Ottawa’s dynamic artistic duo, Andrew and Deborah O’Malley.

The Latest Artists have created Twitter-enabled light boxes. These unique pieces feature custom-built circuits and hand-made acrylic frames.

Using a mobile phone, audiences will be able to interact with the art by sending messages to Twitter (using the hash tag #CTRM).

Thanks to creative custom software, audience messages will be instantly displayed as text scrolling across the lightbox screens. Strobe lights, placed near the boxes, will flash when the message appears, altering audiences their Tweet is coming through.

When no one is sending a Tweet, the light boxes will display scrolling fortune cookie messages, lucky numbers, and animated geometric patterns. Previous Tweets will also be saved and randomly displayed, serving as an archive of audience experiences over the month-long event.

Giving audiences the ability to comment and connect through lighting art with Twitter is a novel interactive experience, providing global reach to the local Chinatown Remixed event.

The Latest Artists’ twitter-enabled light boxes will be on display at the Oriental Charm Gift Shop (located at 653 Somerset Street West) from May 8 – June 8, 2010.

Dawghaus Studios put a video together of the event featuring some of our music, video, and performance — along with Spacing-related content, too, of course

On Friday evening, Artengine’s new media Nite Ride exhibition opened, and I got to enjoy the first ride of the night, listening to Tim Hecker’s custom 5.1 channel surround soundtrack to a drive through the Gatineau Hills.

Guerilla mag has a great video from opening night that gives you a much better sense of the project than my prose:

Unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to go on the next ride for Marla Hlady’s work, but I’ll be back during the week, as Nite Ride runs until Oct. 31.

We had to leave the Nite Ride opening early as Deb and I had to set up for our DJ/VJ performance as The Latest Artists at Lotus Lounge in Ottawa later that night. We were booked by Exposure Fridays for their Halloween-themed party, and were excited to share another bill w/ Kevan Fraser.

With only an hour set time, we went straight to business with dark, rolling, minimal-tech tunes accompanied by synced, abstract and spooky-themed video — our specialty Not sure if we’ll get any documentation from this one, though, but we received lots of great feedback after our set.

Again we had to leave early to prepare for another commitment the next morning:

The Conjunction Collective’s exhibition, Civilization and its Discontents, opening on Saturday eve. in Toronto, for which I still needed to install my light portion of the show.

The organisers gave me free reign of the gallery basement for my lighting work, so I reprogrammed and refurbished a handful of pieces to display in the space.

Installation went really smooth thanks to dedicated assistance from Deb and my good friend, Dan. The opening party was a blast, and I received lots of positive feedback about my lighting work, which was really encouraging to hear from a Toronto crowd since it was my first lighting exhibition there.

Deb got lots of great documentation that I’ll share soon, but in the meantime, I invite you to check out this photo set by co-organiser, Jen Lee.