art-action

QR matters

I am trying to get a handle on materialism.

In the midst of QR_U (an open school) which is essentially a virtual and event-driven --a no-thing-- project, I keep thinking about the relationship of art and things. It's a bit like an irrepresible itch. Big things and little things. My things and other things that I can't seem not to notice. Even things that are not present. Maybe the absent things are the most interesting, come to think of it.

QR_U is a collaborative project that began when Emily Carr University MAA Candidate Elisa Yon asked Heidi May, Adam Stenhouse, and me to help her to launch something that would reflect the Emily Carr community of students and faculty during the upcoming W/HERE Symposium. Early in the design of this project that aimed to produce  an open school within (and without) a school, we looked to QR code technology as a way to invite exhibition participants to actively use the virtual school from the gallery, and for the gallery to be marked by the activity on line.

The QR code has some appeal as a printed thing. The tools needed to create it are free and easy (http://qrcode.kaywa.com/) but the tools to use it are far less so. To access the meaning behind the symbol, you need an internet-enabled smart phone or ipod upon which to load the free QR code reader app. Like the bar code scanners at retail check-out, the scanner on the phone will work to focus on the ancoring black squares until it registers about 60% of the image at which point it will bleep and begin to process the link to the url or other message hidden within the arrangement of tiny squares.

Is the QR code a thing? does it signify a thing? does it make things happen? Those are the questions that the wall-sized QR codes that we hand painted into the QR_U exhibition space might be asking. The codes simply are a link between data and the material world. At QR_U their over-sized reproductions become the stage for an accumulation of ideas in the form of questions, responses and unofficial conversations that are enbaled through the events (open classes) in the exhibition and through the pages of running dialogue in the virtual school at qruopenschool.ca.

Adam Rothstein, in "City of QR Codes," Rhizome, September 15 2011, lets the appearance of QR codes on the streeetscape seduce him into a more and more attentive awareness of the marks and scars that the city wears in its undersurfaces and crevices. He is disappointed by our lack of imagination for the potential of this technology to hold enormous quantities of data, when all we use it for is to direct the user to a URL that could have just as easily been typed into the toolbar. He asks, why do things need to re-declare themselves? Why do we continually use technology to brand, re-brand and re-iterate? He is much more intrigued by the possiblity of becoming the scanner --what would it be like to decode everything, every scar on the surface of the street?

In class at QR_U today, we scanned and drew things. Dr Monique Fouquet and Heidi May's class reviewed how Emily Carr students have been taught creative processes and colour theory through various means like correspondence courses, TV and video education, and now internet-based courses. After that discussion, Matthew Isherwood (UBC Curriculum Studies MA Student) led us through a learning experiment: two still life drawings - first, we drew from a 'digital surrogate' then the actual thing was set in front of us to do again. I have not had many drawing classes, so it all seemed to be a lot of attention put onto a simple concept. Clearly, the two dimentional surrogate was much easier to draw, since it had already been compressed into a flat thing. When the actual thing--a chipped and stained hippie bean pot--came out of Matthew's bag it looked very strange -- much smaller and more irregular than our eyes and minds had formulated it, after the predictability of the digital photo.

With the second phase of the experiment, I can assure you that I really sweated to make that strange thing into a flat image... Thinking back on it now, it was something like Rothstein's experience of scanning not just the QR code markers but the neglected cracks and surfaces of the city. I started feeling a stirring --a love for that strange thing in front of me. An untranslatable bean pot -- frustrating and desirable, in the way it makes obvious my lack of technology to store it with a scan and a bleep.

In Late Late Summer

I should have dug this recipe out a month ago, but what a late summer it has been in Vancouver. These first three figs will not make it into a cake, but here's hoping that they signal the ripening of a few more (I am still sceptical). If you are luckier, here is recipe that is inspired by my Russian Mennonite grandmothers and by the plethora of fig trees planted by Greek and Italian families in Vancouver, BC Canada.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FIG PLATZ, Lois Klassen - From Flavours of Vancouver: Dishes From Around the World, Sheila Peacock and Joan Cross, ed., Douglas & McIntyre and CBC, 2005.

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar, divided

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup butter, cold & cubed

2 large eggs

1 tsp vanilla extract

3/4 cup milk

2 tsp orange or lemon zest

ripe fresh figs (about 20), cut in half (top to bottom)

PREHEAT oven to 350' Prepare a 10x15 in jelly-roll pan by greasing and flouring it lightly (or use a non-stick pan).

In a large bowl mix flour, baking powder, 1 cup of the sugar and alt. Cut in butter until the pieces are size of small peas. Set 1 cup of the crumbled mixture aside for the topping. In a small bowl, mix eggs, vanilla and milk. Stir the wet ingredients into the crumb mixture. Stir in the zest. Spread mixture in the pan.

Arrange the figs with the open side up in rows. They should be close together but not touching, so that the cake can be cut into individual pieces after baking. Make the topping by mixing the reserved crumb mixture with the remaining 1/2 cup sugar. Sprinkle the topping evenly over the fruit.

Bake for 40-45 minutes, or until browned and a toothpick comes out clean. Once cool, it can be served with ice cream or yogurt sweetened with a little brown sugar. I have drizzled a tiny bit of brandy into the centre of each fig before baking, with pretty good success, but it is not necessary.

The green figs that grow in my back yard have a surprising effect when they are baked - they produce a smoky flavour that does not come out otherwise. They also turn a beautiful deep purple and seem to moisten the rest of the cake perfectly - not soggy, like platz made from other fruit seems to get on day two. This cake looks fantastic on the plate and holds its shape for a few days.

 

 

 

How to Spot a Wolf - Recognizing and Preventing Elder Financial Abuse

  

June 15 2011 is World Elder Financial Abuse Awareness Day. It is a fitting occasion for the inaugural screening of the video, How to Spot A Wolf - Recognizing and Preventing Elder Financial Abuse.

The video is a community video project produced and directed by The Elder Financial Abuse Dialogue Group (North Shore Neighbouhood House), and Lois Klassen.

The video formed part of my creative research project on dialogical art forms and was largely funded by the SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship as well as the Emily Carr University President's Research Fund and many in-kind supporters (Emily Carr University, North Shore Neighbouhood House at John Braithwaite Community Centre, Finding Home™ Initiative, VIVO Media Arts Centre, and more).

Join us for the launch at John Braithwaite Community Centre in North Vancouver on Wednesday, June 15 at 1pm. Elder Financial Abuse Awareness Day at JBCC -  Flyer

I am also planning to screen this video along with Word Finding in or around Emily Carr University near the end of the summer or in fall. These two videos were produced in tandem as alternate approaches to the community video process. Stay tuned for details on the screening and discussion of both works.

Valediction

 

Thank you Dr. Cartiere (Dean, Faculty of Graduate Studies, Emily Carr University of Art + Design)

Distinguished and honoured guests,
my fellow 2011 graduates,
faculty and staff,
and all of the loved ones who are here to celebrate with us
and those who are not able to be here today.

I want to personally acknowledge the support of my own family, who are far away from Vancouver and also my relations who have come before. During a recent project at Emily Carr, I was led to discover photos from my grandmother’s college graduation in 1938. Until finding the photos I did not know that any of my grandparents had attended, let alone graduated from, a post secondary institution.

Found in the midst of course work that dealt with a materialist sense of time, those photos made me aware of how we live concurrently in the past, present and future - through the things and stories that we encounter.

Even the place of our studies is permeated with the legacy of those who have gone before us.  I acknowledge that in this place to which most of us have arrived from someplace else, we are guests.

Vancouver is indeed a very old gathering place, and it is recognized as the unceeded traditional territory of the Coast Salish people. This is the source of confusion for international students and even Canadians from outside of British Columbia since, unlike the rest of the country, the aboriginal claim to most of BC has not yet been relinquished through treaties.

So owing to these gracious and hospitable people, histories and places, my task here is to speak a farewell to Emily Carr University on behalf of the graduating masters students.

Do you remember just over a year ago, during our Seminar in Research, we decided to host a group exhibition and a writing symposium under the title Killer Texts?

Leading up to the somewhat unlikely quote that inspired our exhibition, Avital Ronell in the book Crack Wars describes a moment in Flaubert’s Madam Bovary as the first declaration of war on unregulated drugs. In the book the apothecary wants to write the names of everyone who has been drunk on the door of the town hall.

Ronell writes:
“The drunk, like the adulterous Emma, liberates uncontrolled signs into a public sphere... Like the work which contains them, they become killer texts, triggering a chain reaction of uncontrolled mimetic caliber. Thus even translators of such a text are endangered by the effects of contagion.” (98)

In our exhibition we were considering the integration of art and text. Art and design are maybe like the public drunk or the adulterous Emma --they get circulated in public, as texts. People who read or encounter our ideas risk becoming infected by them.

In some ways, Avital Ronell uses drug addiction to capture our morbid attention, so that we think about public-ness. Does the liberation of radical and dangerous “signs” or unanticipated new ideas indicate a public sphere?

Much of these graduate studies have been an education in the production of unanticipated ideas, and in how to place them in public. From Dr. Burnett’s challenge in one of our first classes, to make something go viral, to the thesis project which challenged us to produce new knowledges within existing discourses, we were given the assignment to put ideas into the world.

And so, we took the first steps.

Besides Killer Texts, we presented at most of Emily Carr’s conferences.

We showed our work in Emily Carr exhibition spaces, on its exterior surfaces, and in a new exhibition venue, 1612 Gallery, where thanks to Helgi Kristiansson’s research project, solo and group experiments by us as well as and other graduate students from Vancouver and Europe were shown.

Our work was also seen throughout the lower mainland at:
the surrey art gallery’s e-mixers
Elissa Cristall Gallery
UBCs Norm Theatre
on Translink
the PNE Container Art Exhibition
and more

Further within Canada, we distributed our ideas to:
Banff Centre Residencies
Pecha Kucha Victoria
Nuit Blanch in Toronto
and the Western Canada Communication Graduate Student’s Conference in Nelson, BC with SFU and University of Calgary

Internationally, we presented Emily Carr-generated ideas at:
the Cross Border Relations Conference at the University of Washington
the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas
Raleigh First Night in North Carolina
Society of Photographic Education in Atlanta, Georgia
Hub M3 at the University of Salford, UK
Lancaster University
Spike Island in Bristol, UK
the WAAG Society in Amsterdam
Kei University in Tokyo
and the Saudi Aramco Future Centre in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

Originating from Europe, the Middle East, Australia, Iceland, the United States, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta and BC - we are a group of people who have already begun to make art and design projects go viral in subtle and persuasive ways.

On behalf of the 4th graduating masters class, I want to end with a message to the relatively young faculty of graduate studies:
may this program be infused with a sense of simultaneous time - in which the histories and experiences of the region, the university, the instructors and most importantly the students are treasured and integrated within current practice and future planning
and, may the production of new and unexpected ideas, designs, artworks and texts through the people who study and teach in the MAA program, become viral within local and global publics.

With enormous pride, I say thank you and farewell to the MAA program at Emily Carr.

To my fellow students, may this be both a well remembered past and the beginning of a long and satisfying life work as artists, film makers, designers, writers, dancers, performers, and more. I will miss you all.

Congratulations on our collective achievements - now and in the future!

Lois Klassen
Emily Carr University of Art + Design Convocation
Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
May 7 2011

Degree Exhibition

The end of 2 years of studies at Emily Carr University.

In the exhibition of the Master of Applied Art students in the University's Charles H. Scott Gallery, I am exhibiting a new video work called Word Finding.

This gallery-based piece is a reflection on a community-based video project that I am currently completing with participants of the Elder Financial Abuse Dialogue project in North Vancouver, and students from the Film and Video program at Emily Carr University.

It looks something like this:

I am very grateful to Bette, Iara, Glenys, and Claire for being so willing to get involved in a community video project. The entire project will be screened on June 15, 2011 - World Elder Abuse Awareness Day at the John Braithwaite Community Centre in North Vancouver.

These are some of the words that the participants have found to address the issue of elder financial abuse:

financial abuse

seldom stops by itself

you need to take some action

much to my disbelieving ears

I heard my own voice

saying I do believe

you are trying to scam me

I am a feminist & social worker

who has worked in the field

of family violence for 25 years . . . .

A FURTIVE CONUNDRUM: PRACTICING THE FURTIVE

1612 GALLERY

1612 West 3^rd, Vancouver

 

OPENING APRIL 7, 7-9 PM, performance at 8pm

Gallery open between 12 and 6pm, April 8-10 and 14-16

 

A group exhibition featuring the works of 14 Vancouver-based and international artists

CURATED by Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte and Ryan Mathieson

 

A Furtive Conundrum: Practicing the Furtive is a group exhibition that concerns itself with the reifications and translations of stealth and visibility in creative practices. This exhibit showcases works that investigate a change in social structures of space through barely perceptible actions. These pieces might be considered furtive, that is, they operate on the level of camouflage and demonstrate the potential to seep into an environment. Exhibiting these works potentially counteracts their ‘unframed’ nature. This exhibition seeks speculative ways of negotiating this conundrum while paradoxically drawing attention to the very qualities that are required for a work to be qualified as ‘furtive’.

 

WORKS by Dylan Cree , Kevin Day, Angela Ferreira and Natalie Schneck, Sara French, Lois Klassen, Jainy Lastoria, Vitor Munhoz, Jacquelyn Ross, Karen Spencer, Yi Xin Tong, Casey Wei

 

PERFORMANCE by Anthony Schrag, Thursday April 7, 8pm

Liminal Positions

I'm really proud to be a part of this student writing symposium at Emily Carr.

 

Download Liminal Positions Schedule

PECHA KUCHA - VICTORIA

If you are in Victoria on February 10 - please come!

Nato Thompson - cannonizing geo-poetic projects

At his opening address to Cartographic Exploits on Friday evening, Nato Thompson ran through artist's projects and ideas that are now well circulated. Most of them are examples of what Creative Time imagines as "geo-poetic" interventions within the not-so public space.

I took notes and later found on-line documentation for all of them. If you are looking for resources, here is a list of now cannonized work in the category of Spatial Practices feel free to copy this: Download NATO THOMPSON

More FANCY DANCING

FANCY DANCING is hosting some weekend closing events. Everyone is invited:

Saturday (Nov 13), 1-4pm - Comforter Art-Action Sewing Circle

- Make a patchwork blanket from recycled fabric. Bring scissors. Everything else is provided or learned on the spot. Finished blankets are distributed to NGOs or shelters.

Saturday (Nov 13), 7pm - VHS Movie Night with Sara French

- bring your pillow or folk festival lawn chair. Sara will bring a selection of VHS tapes from the ECU library. Popcorn provided. Bring drinks.

Sunday (Nov 14), 3pm - FANCY DANCING with pow wow dancer and ECU student, Adrienne Greyeyes! This performance will close the exhibition, so don't miss it!

And, on the same theme -

Thursday (Nov 18), 3:50pm (ECU, 301B) - Lois Klassen will discuss Fancy Dancing as well as the use of memorabilia and memory of events in the panel "Staging interations, obsessive copying and restless adaptations in emergent practices: Josh Hite, Lois Klassen, Holly Schmidt and Erdam Tasdelen" as part of AHIS333 Interdisciplinary Forum.

Hope you can join us! Spread the word.

Michelle Sound Perich & Lois Klassen

FANCY DANCING is open every day until Sunday, Nov 14  from 1-4pm.