Babel - corporate identity and The Banff Centre

On the flight out to Banff I was thinking about what kind of experience I was going to have, why I was coming. In particular, I was curious about the idea of a "residency". What is an "artist-in-residence?" I mean, are you going on "retreat" for a reclusive experience where you can concentrate totally on "your work" or are you going somewhere to work "as an artist" in the sense of performing artistically within a specific context. By inclination, I lean (like Mt. Rundle) toward the latter. Theoretically, I subscribe to the view that art is always contextual in the sense of operating with and against the conditions in which it is produced.

There was the circumstance of the place, Banff, a vacation destination in the middle of a most picturesque mountain landscape. Without concluding anything, I puzzled over the idea that the experience would be part "vacation" and part work or "vocation," part spa holiday, part intensive work experience. These things don't reconcile easily, and their contradiction has informed pretty much everything I have done here.

In the margins of the book I was reading on the flight out, "rhythm science" by Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky), I wrote a slogan for my forthcoming experience "THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VACATION AND VOCATION IS O."

During the residency, I continued to write slogans while also playing around with the logo. I should say that I didn't have any intention here to seriously engage in a design process - art is not design - but to (seriously) reflect on the situation, to mirror back the conditions in which I found myself.

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Babel - Elysium - Elysian Fields

Elysium. In Greek mythology, the abode of the blessed, paradise. Situated at the end of the world it is here that those chosen by the gods are sent to.

Virgil's Elysium knows perpetual spring and shady groves, with its own sun and lit by its own stars: solemque suum, sua sidera norunt (Aeneid, 6.541).

The Elysian fields, or sometimes Elysian plains, were the final resting place of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous....The Elysian Fields lay on the western margin of the earth, by the encircling stream of Oceanus, and there the mortal relatives of the king of the gods were transported, without tasting death, to enjoy an immortality of bliss (Odyssey 4.563). [Wikipedia]

In Christianity, Elysium is equated with heaven.

Elysian Fields is also part of the 14th fairway on the Old Course in St. Andrews, Scotland, a street in the Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City where several of the city's best hotels and restaurants are located and in Paris the famous Champs Élysées.

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