Confuse Us

Elevated Bike Lanes

2009-12-08T20:53:00.003-05:00

Toronto’s transit is dominated by the axis of its subway system, which largely follows two of the longest streets in the city: Yonge and Bloor-Danforth. This infrastructure has resulted in development that has progressed in a similarly linear fashion, creating a dense population of commuters who live along the subway lines. The elevated bike lane proposal is designed to address the vulnerability of the current system by offering a supplementary means of transportation that is accessible at any time. These lightweight covered lanes would allow cyclists to travel across the city unimpeded by traffic lights or precipitation. The design also makes use of solar paneling to power the street lighting, which is integrated into the supporting columns. In a still experimental phase, a titanium-coated fine mesh canopy would stretch over the entire street and extend over most of the sidewalks as well. This canopy would use a thermally-activated wicking system to prevent snow from accumulating on the street, eliminating the need for fossil fuel intensive snow removal machinery and eventually allow these thoroughfares to become restricted to emission-free vehicle usage. With improved transportation options and a better pedestrian experience, the Yonge Street and Bloor Street corridors could accommodate further growth and perhaps enhance linear dynamism as a defining characteristic of the city.

Vertical Park in Downtown Toronto

2009-10-04T20:49:00.001-04:00

From Vertical Park

When news broke out that a high profile condo tower at the intersection of Yonge and Bloor in Toronto would not be constructed, suggestions began popping up for public space alternatives. Being one of the most valuable pieces of property in the city has made the idea of it becoming solely a public square somewhat unlikely. Architecture critic Christopher Hume suggested the possibility of a public private venture, which led me to envision a vertical park for the site that would be attached to a mixed use residential tower. The main feature of the design is a one mile, gently curving gradient that winds its way up to a height of 66 metres, affording panoramic vistas of the downtown. The structure would make use of its southern exposure for passive solar heating, allowing the green space to be enjoyed year round with minimal energy expenditure. I created the model using Google’s free SketchUp software, it can be downloaded from the 3D warehouse and viewed in Google Earth (to hide the former buildings at the site simply right click on them).

Maple Leaf Community Gardens

2009-08-13T20:43:00.002-04:00

From Maple Leaf Gardens

A brief proposal for the transformation of Maple Leaf Gardens: This presently dormant Toronto landmark could be brought to life by adapting a couple of its key structural features, namely the concrete stands and vaulted roof. By refitting the existing metal framed roof with transparent insulated panelling, the interior would fill with light, opening up the possibilities for indoor plant life and public space. The removal of most of the seating from the stands leaves a terrace structure suitable for compact vegetable gardening, with water supplied via a gravity dispensed rainwater collection system. The produce grown within the building would provide a steady supply to a flagship restaurant located in the upper box seating areas. Being in the food business, the current owners could still consider a linear variation on the supermarket in the lobby areas of the building. The flat central surface could serve as a public park with modular landscaping that could be moved to make way for an ice rink during the winter. To conserve energy the building would make use of natural ventilation and passive solar heating in tandem with a geothermal system.

Annual New Toronto Works Show

2009-03-16T22:22:00.003-04:00

The Annual New Toronto Works Show at Pleasure Dome featured a variety of new film and video works by Toronto artists. The music video, In Every Dream Home a Heartache by Kids On TV and Johannes Zits proved to be a particularly furtive collaboration. Performed with a disarming camp sincerity, their cover of the Roxy Music song remained true to the original while becoming something decidedly queer. Utilizing a condo advertising aesthetic inhabited by vapid silhouettes emblazoned with gay porn, the video painted a hilarious and pointed critique of consumerism and conformity. Andrew Zukerman and Winston Hacking put together a killer short called Tex Mex Wolfman. An intense two minutes of radioactively psychedelic hemorrhaging ad infinitum and nauseum but really fast, which we are obviously still recovering from. There were many other good ones too, like Aram Collier's The Others, a handsome tribute to the exotically indigenous Lou Diamond Phillips. Overall: wicked awesome.

Noise

2008-11-05T20:41:00.000-05:00

The idea with this podcast was to create a rough sketch for adapting Jacques Attali’s book Noise to an audio recording. I read a few excerpts from the first chapter of Noise and layered that over a soundtrack of various open source recordings. While written over two decades ago, the book seems to be as relevant as ever, in his idea of the four stages of music, the final one of which (composition) uncannily predicts the mash-ups and self generating music that have emerged recently. There’s a great wealth of material here about ‘the political economy of music’ that would be fantastic to hear in full as an audio book with a well crafted soundtrack or as a sound art piece. I wonder if someone has already done it before?

Video Art in the Digital Age

2008-10-19T20:38:00.000-04:00

The idea of a digital age co-op, which was briefly put forth in the concluding chapter of Wikinomics is something that media artists in particular ought to think about. In the later half of the twentieth century, co-ops played a key role in establishing media arts communities around the world. In the 1960's, places like the Filmmaker's Co-op in New York and the London Filmmaker's Co-op (now LUX) provided artists with affordable access to filmmaking equipment. In the 1970's, similar artist run initiatives emerged for video production such as the Experimental Television Center in New York and Trinity Square Video in Toronto. Video became an attractive medium for many visual artists because it provided greater flexibility for dissemination and the possibility to reach a larger audience. Since the 1970s, video art distribution centres have popped up across the world, amassing libraries of works, many of which only exist within the collection of a particular centre. For instance if we wanted to see the entire catalog of George Kuchar's work, our only option would be to go to the Video Art Databank in Chicago. In today's era of digital reproduction and file sharing, artists' videos remain some of the least accessible media. Herein lies somewhat of a contradiction, while the distribution centres originally served to help disseminate the artist's videos, today it seems as though they have become protectors of the works. But who or what are they protecting the works from? Would piracy pose a threat to these artists revenues? It seems that self preservation on the part of the institutions themselves could be another factor at play here. Some artists intend their videos to be ephemeral and are content to let them fade into obscurity, while other artists create work specifically for a future audience. Some artists would say the best way to experience their work is sitting down in your own home where you can pause and rewind at will. One can assume that artists who have submitted their videos to a distributing organization did so with the idea of preservation and dissemination in mind. Nowadays the most effective way to preserve and disseminate something is via file sharing. So are the video art distributors serving the artist's best interests? Or, are they helping to reinforce the idea (that many would say is antithetical to the medium of video) of art as an elite institution? Will they have to more actively engage in collaborative principles such as openness, peering, sharing to stay relevant? Today, an increasing number of artists are turning to the internet to produce or disseminate their work, realizing that they don't need gallery shows to become successful. Some galleries have recognized this trend and instead of fighting it, have decided to encourage it. Take Saatchi Online for example, the website of an established private gallery in London that allows any artist to post works on their website and sell them free of commission, it seems as though everyone benefits from this situation. It is possible that a digital age co-op for disseminating video art could develop out of a collaborative effort with existing media arts distributors, or one could also emerge through artists' own self organizing. Whatever the case, options for practicing media artists are plentiful online and particularly for those who are committed to not distinguishing their work as either lo or hi-brow art.

Benjamin Smoke

2008-08-05T11:52:00.003-04:00

A brilliant slice of unseen Americana. Directors Jem Cohen and Petter Sillen's sensitive portrayal of their musician subject, Benjamin does justice to his unique persona.

WALL-E

2008-08-05T11:28:00.003-04:00

Once upon a time we were going to animate a scenario about robots mining through former landfill sites for recyclable materials. But then we didn't because we thought people would be less inclined to recycle if they realized this could happen. Thankfully, Pixar solved our dilemma with this dystopian sci-fi parable.

The Benny Goodman Story

2008-08-05T11:07:00.004-04:00

A flawless film, as smooth as the music itself. How dreamy is Steve Allen?

Zizek!

2008-07-26T11:54:00.003-04:00

Zizek makes cultural theory fun. Director Astra Taylor's coolness is a nice pairing with Zizek's perpetually excited demeanor. He's really quite endearing and he knows about love and desire, but don't hug him or he will feel patronized. We liked his apartment and how he kept it organized.

Encounters At The End Of The World

2008-07-21T15:17:00.004-04:00

Herzog at his funniest. The seal music scene was unbelievable - in the sense that we don't really believe they actually sound like that. Which isn't to say we don't think sonar technology should be terminated for its devastating affect on sea mammal communications.

Covets Not Rarities

2008-06-15T21:01:00.003-04:00

Covets Not Rarities is a series of photographed artworks. Usually the art consists of a painting displayed outdoors, which is then given away. These paintings were inspired by vintage wallpaper and photographed outside an apartment building of the same era.

From Covets Not Rarities

Hogtown Homos

2008-05-21T22:26:00.005-04:00

Highlights from the program of local shorts at the Inside Out festival... There was a number of Kent Monkman fans in the audience, including ourselves. His new film Robin's Hood is a bit of a curve ball. As in his previous works, Monkman adopts the silent era treatment for a camp critique of colonialism. But whereas there is a reversal of power in those films that is easy to laugh with, doing so in this one implicates the audience in a unsettling but poignant way. Lesley Loksi Chan's Compost Mon Amour is a smart blend of humour and pathos. The stylish DIY aesthetic complements the blurring of fact and fiction nicely.

Cry Baby

2008-05-21T09:17:00.004-04:00

Ceaselessly hilarious. No one does camp like John Waters. The soundtrack rules. In researching what ever happened to Kim "Hatchet Face" McKeen, we found out about the David Lynch TV series On The Air.

I'm Not There

2008-05-20T19:28:00.003-04:00

We always liked Bob Dylan, in theory. Having several actors play the role helped to make his music more palatable and provided a more complex understanding of the man. Was he really so nettlesome? In a film that seems constructed of anomolies - the one that stood out strangely was the Richard Gere as Billy the Kid as Bob Dylan.

Goff in the Desert

2008-05-19T12:54:00.007-04:00

One of our favourite architects, Bruce Goff gets his due in this documentary, which captures dozens of the eccentric buildings he designed from the 1930s to 1970s. Of director Heinz Emigholz's growing body of architectural surveys, this one offers some of his most compelling meditations on space. Goff's consistently unorthodox constructions are matched by Emigholz's persistently skewed camera angles, an almost sublime marriage of subject and filmmaker. Shot compositions sometimes verge on becoming fetishized abstractions but are rescued by elements of chance in the soundtrack and the unpredictable way in which the structures have been customized by their owners. The 'making of' documentary reveals a curious range of inhabitants. Emigholz's documentaries illustrate 'the fate of modernism': buildings as living, changing entities rather than the idealized purity of designs in their original state.

Black Mags

2008-05-16T11:34:00.006-04:00

Who needs a car? The Cool Kids understand the real urban experience is all about bicycles. We dig the nods to old school b-ball, and the bass line is sick.

Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job

2008-05-15T09:43:00.006-04:00

Season One. So called degenerate humour offers key insights into our collective fears and tensions, providing a psychological portrait of our society, which is of course our main interest in this material. Preventing fluids from escaping orifices proved to be difficult at times in our spectatorship.

General Idea: Art, AIDS and the Fin de Siècle

2008-05-03T17:32:00.003-04:00

A doc about the legendary artist collective General Idea. Some of their ideas about art were ahead of their time, some were precisely of their time. Its easy to forget how AIDS devastated so many lives only a short time ago, and moving to see how these artists transformed their experiences into art. Director Annette Mangaard had a veritable archive of video art to work with and did a nice job of tying it together with more recent interviews for this portrait.

Wesley Willis's Joy Rides

2008-05-02T22:32:00.003-04:00

Apparently we were some of the few attendees at the Bloor who didn't know who Wesley Willis was before this well attended late night screening. Shamefully, we had been missing out on the larger than life persona of Mr. Willis, a talented artist and exuberant musical performer. Gut-bustingly funny, heart-breakingly sweet.

Full Battle Rattle

2008-05-01T12:01:00.005-04:00

An observational doc about a US military training camp in the Mojave desert that recreates an Iraqi village. Complete with nomadic insurgents and real Iraqis playing Iraqis, who are actually some of the few refugees who have been able to enter the US. It was somewhat surprising to see the diplomacy with which the troops approached the villagers. Of course, this is on American soil and the subjects are obviously conscious of the cameras, the clever editing conveys underlying sentiments with subtlety.

The Fall

2008-04-30T10:46:00.004-04:00

An experimental doc capturing the zeitgeist of NYC in 1969. Student protests, political theatre, performance art, all rolled up into a wonderful ball of confusion. Ralph Ortiz's chicken cleaning a piano performance is harrowing. Plenty of director Peter Whitehead inserting himself into the film, including some groovy make-out scenes. Sorry we missed the screening at the Bloor of his other film, Tonight Let's All Make Love in London.

Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle

2008-04-29T11:17:00.006-04:00

Finally saw this for the first time. It seemed vaguely sexist, Neil Patrick Harris snorting drugs off of a hooker's butt may or may not have helped. Overall, it was a good trip, with strong performances from John Cho and Kal Penn. We're looking forward to the Guantanamo Bay sequel.

The Infinite Border

2008-04-29T10:54:00.003-04:00

A Mexican doc about the hundreds of hopeful immigrants to the US as they journey by cargo train from Central America to their destination. Beautiful, gritty portraits shot in hi-def video. We liked hearing some of them complain about Bush before even getting to the states.

Betrayal (Nerakhoon)

2008-04-28T12:01:00.005-04:00

An amazing doc spanning over two decades in the life of a Laotian family. Director Ellen Kuras put together a beautiful film with just enough political history to remind us what happened in Laos. With the abundance of verité style video documentaries being made, this atmospheric piece of cinema seems like a completely fresh idea. Superb.

Kids + Money / Emoticons

2008-04-23T18:21:00.006-04:00

Watched Kids + Money, a doc about the shopping habits of tweens in Los Angeles, it was good. Concluded that kids + not so much money may produce better results. Watched Emoticons, the new Heddy Honigmann doc about the online lives of teens in the Netherlands. It mostly focused on the positive aspects of various teenage loners finding connections that without the internet they may not have. The instant messaging screen shots and webcamming worked in nicely with the verité approach, but what was up with that Norah Jones song?

Steypa

2008-04-23T17:31:00.006-04:00

A doc about the arts scene in Iceland. We were kind of hoping for Heima part 2, but unfortunately much of it was shot in other countries and the art was largely flaky. Probably partly an editorial problem, maybe an issue of translation too. It was preceded by a short impressionistic film from Brazil called Drexnica about someone going blind, which was nicely done.

Images Festival

2008-04-22T19:27:00.007-04:00

Highlights: We were looking forward to witnessing Daniel Barrow's new performance Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry and our hopes were filled - with bittersweet emptiness. Mr. Barrow enchanted the audience with his frank yet surreal storytelling and wonderful drawings animated live via overhead projector. The only problem was it all happened a bit too quickly to fully digest, this was the premiere so hopefully he'll extend it a bit in future performances. The Valerie Project was a live musical accompaniment to the Czech new wave film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders - totally psychedelic in a creepy kind of way, with exquisite live score by Espers and friends. You don't have to smoke anything before hand. Hail the New Puritan by Charles Atlas was an interesting document of the mid 80s London arts scene focusing on a contemporary dance group. While there were a few scenes where we were expecting to hear the theme music from Fame, it mostly retained an entirely fresh feel, especially the aerobics avec cigarettes and Leigh Bowery's apartment. Other highlights included Christine Negus's akward anecdotal piece Blue Water, Pavel Medvedev's beautiful doc On The Third Planet From the Sun, Sadie Benning's Play Pause and Zhenchen Liu's CG assisted look at gentrification in Shanghai, Under Construction.

Pink Pooh

2006-07-07T20:30:00.001-04:00

A music video about the descriptive power of the base component, which eliminates a corpus of utterance tokens upon which conformity has been defined by the paired utterance test.

Victoria Day in Caledonia

2006-06-06T20:26:00.000-04:00

A music video about the standoff over the land claim dispute at the Six Nations Reserve near Caledonia, Ontario. May 22nd, 2006 (Victoria Day)

Knitted Pickles

2006-05-06T20:24:00.000-04:00

Set on a New Zealand eco-village, this music video is explores organic agriculture, animal husbandry and sustainable living.

The Bus Routes

2006-02-06T20:16:00.001-05:00

A music video about a traffic control system that utilizes satellite GPS technology. Unbeknownst to me, similar systems were already being developed and implemented in a few different cities. The song was written in 2003 and video made in 2006.

Graphic Design Forecast

2005-12-08T22:13:00.001-05:00

Haptic Muser is predicting a bold comeback for border art in 2006. Sure to be popular are borders that employ ambiguous facial features, such as in Kernst's 'facelift' below. Are they eyes or are they mouths? We don't know, but we love it.

The Bus Routes

2005-11-23T02:53:00.001-05:00

We wrote this song a couple years ago, its called the Bus Routes... The Bus Routes are synchronized, because they're connected to satellites. On top of each one is a GPS detector, that's what tells the traffic lights turn green faster. On every major street, they have their own lanes, so the cars better get out of the way. When you ride the bus you can read a book. As things pass by the window, just take a look. The city you live in is full of people, when they get on the bus it makes the seats full. But that's okay, at least they're not drivin', each one alone in their own seperate car. If that was the case no one would get very far. That's why we're gonna make it so that... (repeat)

The Seductive Critique

2005-10-10T20:02:00.001-04:00

This debut release from Kernst contains an assortment of sci-fi glitch-pop music. It’s mostly easy listening with a splash of phantasmagorical bewilderment. It will hopefully be released as a DVD of music videos sometime in the near future. Download it for free from Archive.org

Feeding The Pigs

2005-08-05T20:00:00.002-04:00

From Old Movies

Feeding the Pigs is an experimental documentary that chronicles the evolution of a family farm. It’s an autobiographical rumination on ecological agriculture, the rural landscape, livestock, vegetarianism and food. This video is composed of vernacular ephemera edited into triadic sequences to suggest the lyrical rhythms of a Pindaric ode. (47 minutes, video) Check back for a link to download this video.

Rainbows of Mass Deconstruction

2003-01-10T19:56:00.000-05:00

A short piece of visual music that explores abstraction in architectural visualization technology. Presenting a somewhat nebulous, lo-res contrast to the usually slick and persuasive domain of design. Inspired by Neil Leach’s essay, The Anaesthetics of Architecture. Soundtrack made by Kernst available for download at archive.org. (2003, 5 min. computer animation)

Hope is a Meadow

1999-03-06T12:00:00.000-05:00

Visual Music circa 1999 by Kernst