Babel - previous works of interest shown at WPG

PLAN B - Minerva Cuevas: Not Impressed by Civilization
November 12, 2005 to January 19, 2006
This installation and performance was presented to the public on October 29, 2005 by the Walter Phillips Gallery as part of MS:T 3 Mountain Standard Time Performative Arts Festival. This event was sponsored by MS:T 3 through the Calgary Regional Arts Foundation, the Alberta Lottery Fund, and the Canada Council for Arts. Additional assistance was provided by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

Database Imaginary
Database Imaginary explores artwork and emerging cultural forms by artists who use databases to comment on their uses and to imagine unknown uses. The exhibition contains 23 projects by 33 visual artists from around the world including Hans Haacke, Antonio Muntadas, Edward Poitras, Lisa Jevbratt, and Thomson & Craighead, working in all media, from wooden sculpture to interactive mobile phone-generated field guides.

Giddy-Up
June 5 - August 15, 2004
In Giddy-Up!, Andrew Hunter tells the story of a young boy, Andy, from Southern Ontario who yearns to visit Banff, to ride the trails, sleep under the stars, and be a "real" cowboy.

Quoting Commercialism
February 16 - March 31, 2002
Quoting Commercialism endeavours to reveal how, and to what extent, four artists from different cultural backgrounds construct their individual personas and exert their identities within a multicultural, consumerist society. Work by Canadian artists inclusde Shinobu Akimoto (Toronto), Greg A. Hill (Ottawa), Mitch Robertson (Toronto) and Jan Wade (Vancouver).
Curator: Chris Reid

Billy's Vision
October 13 - November 25, 2001
Billy's Vision, a fictional narrative merging art and curatorial practice, popular culture, music, and literature, the exhibition tells the tale of a mysterious drifter who first appeared in the 1930s near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
A project by: Andrew Hunter


Beck & Al Hansen: Playing With Matches
August 13 - October 3, 1999
Curator: Wayne Baerwaldt
Organised by Plug In

Language Games
May 15-June 29, 1997
Nancy Paterson, Diller+Scofidio, Beth Stryker, Sawad Brooks, Christa Erickson, Harwood / Mongrel
Curators: Sara Diamond and Catherine Crowston

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Babel - Corporate Mentality book

Calling for a reassessment of the function of art in late-capitalist society, Corporate Mentality focuses on the complex and ambiguous ways artistic production inhabits corporate processes, abandoning the autonomy of the artwork, in order to elaborate resistant approaches to a world increasingly determined by commercial strategies and market concerns. Click on the image here to go to co-editor Aleksandra Mir's website where you can download the entire book in PDF format. Awesome.

Interview with Aleksandra Mir

Thanks to Gregory Elgstrand at YYZ Artists' Outlet for putting me on to this book.

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Babel - double helix

Since I arrived here I have been fussing over Banff's identity, particularly with respect to the relationship between the arts programs and the business management programs. One thing led to another and somehow I have ended up creating a double helix type structure, which leads me to think the question I am really wanting to ask is what is Banff's DNA.

"Brand DNA" is a fashionable new term in the advertising world and the form of DNA has been the subject of artworks by many artists, as have the issues of genetic modifation.

Not too surprisingly, DNA strands measure 34 angstroms long by 21 angstroms wide for each full rotation of its double helix spiral. 34 and 21, of course, are numbers in the Fibonacci series and their ratio, 1.6190476 closely approximates the Golden Mean: Phi, 1.6180339.

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Babel - reading facial expressions

Maybe there is a supra-language common to all people. This may explain why, despite having been scattered (in the Biblical sense) to all parts of the world, people still manage to do things together. So maybe if we all just stopped talking... Paul Ekman is the guru of face language. Here's an excerpt from a short interview with him:

JF - More than 100 years ago, Charles Darwin proposed that human facial expressions are universal. Anthropologists like Margaret Mead thought the opposite. What do you think?
PE - Initially, back in 1965, I thought Margaret Mead was probably right. But I decided to get the evidence to settle the argument. I showed pictures of facial expressions to people in the U.S., Japan, Argentina, Chile and Brazil and found that they judged the expressions in the same way. But this was not conclusive because all these people could have learned the meaning of expressions by watching Charlie Chaplin and John Wayne. I needed visually isolated people unexposed to the modern world and the media. I found them in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. They not only judged the expressions in the same way, but their posed expressions, which I recorded with a movie camera, were readily understandable to people in the West.

The rest of the interview: A Conversation With Paul Ekman: The 43 Facial Muscles That Reveal (Judy Foreman, NYT, August 5, 2003)
Artnatomia's Flash application for setting facial expression
Malcolm Gladwell on reading facial expression
Wikipedia on the Facial Action Coding System developed by Ekman

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Babel - names

Noah
Shem
Ham
Japheth
Ham
Cush
Egypt
Put
Canaan
Seba
Havilah
Sabtah
Raamah
Sabteca
Sheba
Dedan
Nimrod

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modern-day versions of Babel

You tell me if this doesn't sound like the Borg:
"...And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which [they] had built. And the LORD said, 'Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.' ..." (Genesis 11)

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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VACATION AND VOCATION IS O.

Browsing the library at the Banff Centre, a title proverbially leaps off the shelf at me. "To Hell with Culture" by Herbert Read. "Read" ha ha. "Culture," hmmmm. "Hell," now we're getting somewhere. Read was a publisher and poet, to which I can relate personally. He was also a critic, anarchist (libertarian socialist) and his work (over 1000 published volumes, gasp) was influenced by "imagism," defined by Wikipedia as a movement that favoured "clear, sharp language." Somewhere indeed.

And he was into Eric Gill, who said:

"That state is a state of Slavery in which a man does what he likes to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is required of him. This state can only exist when what a man likes to do is to please himself.

"That state is a state of Freedom in which a man does what he likes to do in his working time and in his spare time that which is required of him. That state can only exist when what a man likes to do is to please God."
— from Art Nonsense and Other Essays (1929)

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Babel, Babble, Rabble at The Banff Centre

I am again a resident in a special program (the last time being at the Canadian Film Centre's new media lab in 2000). I'm feeling pretty good. I have some clear ideas about what I want to accomplish, for a change, and more prepared than usual to discuss things that are difficult for me in the creative process. And... the mountains are beautiful, the weather's great and my son's going to come and visit me in a few weeks, which will be great fun. The only real question is whether to get the loaded pintail he's been pressuring me to get. At 54 years, I'm feeling a little flabby. On the other hand, could be just what the Dr. ordered.

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