Thanks and congratulations to everyone for being part of the Remedios Terrarium.We all owe special thanks to Josee-Anne for managing the production of RT from beginning to end, including Touch2, the Vernissage, and finally the Roundtable last evening. Marielle Nitoslawska and Nicolas Reeves were quite enthusiastic about the exhibition. And Tim Clark sent compliments on the Roundtable, a cheering complement to Alain Thibault’s Bravo for the Vernissage.more detailed thanks anon…

Here’s a thank you letter from Lynn Beavis:

Now through April 1
Clean-up the lab. Please take away real garbage, and personal stuff to make space around areas in which you’ve been working. We’ll re-zone the lab for fresh work through the next seasons.

Wednesday April 1, 5-7 PM:
(Proposed)Roundtable discussion for peer artists and researchers

Thursday April 3, 8 PM:
Second performance / video shoot of Touch, audience by invitation-only

Friday April 4 – Last Day of Show
One projector comes down; strike Cells; Jitter / Sound finale
We’ll celebrate at shows by Desh @ NFB, and JS+Jerome.

April 5-6, 8 PM:
Strike sound (Saturday) and video gear.

Monday April 7, 8 PM:
Return equipment.

Just a few links about the vernissage/exhibition of RT… for historical purposes. Please add any other links that you come across, especially those who will be created during and after the exhibit.

The Concordia Journal 

The Concordian

Concordia News

Elektra Blog

Montreal Mirror (this links will die)

The Suburban

Rats Deville

Canadian Art News (this link will die)

Concordia Art History Calendar

CIAM

Voir

Hexagram

I’ve simplified the event topology to a bare minimum that still has a chance of flow in two dimensions, and has a beginning, muddle, end. Let’s call it the VISIT4 topology, since it’s got only 4 states: NIGHT, DAY(=DAYDREAM=DESERT), GLASS, FIRESTORM.

We media folks met and talked about the experiential aspect of these states last week. Basically, the room leaves its NIGHT activity as the clock shows it’s Gallery business hours (9 - 19h?).

NIGHT is time for the Gallery to dance (danse macabre, sibelius’ valse triste, hiphop, etc. according to the season) as you like. It would be interesting to suggest autonomous life, autonomous intentionality, locked behind glass.

DAY is when the clock shows Gallery is open for business and there’s a minimal activity in the room. (We can set the threshhold just below one-body’s-worth of activity by calibration under the Gallery’s conditions, or we can use the surveillance camera trained on the receptionist desk to see when someone is near the receptionist area.) It could be interesting to characterize DAY state as when no visitor is there in the Gallery, but it’s open, and showing its dreams. What those “dreams” are is up to the creators to interpret. We did speak about playing back processed, previously recorded material.

As visitors infuse the Gallery, the room gets “wetter” (derives more energy from visitors). As it gets wetter, more weather happens: i.e. the state tends away from DAY and toward the mixture between GLASS - FIRESTORM .

GLASS is viscuous, liquid, continuous. In this state, horizon is distinct from sky: the projections on walls are distinct from projection on the ceiling. The visitor may be able to “write” on the surfaces — only one attractor (that associated with the biggest blob?), permits writing, e.g using a scattering of dust.

FIRESTORM is violent; sparky, atoms in void. Maybe nervous in the sense that the dynamics are quite sensitive to perturbations from sensors. Eg. motion from camera input drives the particles very hard, bc the particles’ masses are low, or attractors’ gravitational masses are high.

In terms of physical configuration, what distinguishes GLASS from FIRESTORM could be how people are positioned and / or moving near the sculptural elements in the room: the Cells, the Sensate Tapestry, possibly the Suitcase in the other, hidden room.

I don’t know what activity should tend to correlate with GLASS & FIRESTORM in the most tangible or compelling way. My first cut guess would be to sense whether people (a person) are gathered close to a (any) sculptural element. For example, people “touching” (within threshhod of our sensors) any part of the Cell structure or Tapestry could send the system into FIRESTORM.

This we’ll have to work out in situ, in vivo, of course.

Hi Soo, Kiani, Josée-Anne,

What do you think of this as the beginning: The idea would be that Touch2 picks up where Touch1 ends, in an indirect way, In fact we could project the Desh’s video onto the Atrium wall right up to the point where we see Kiani’ facing the camera, fading.

What if the way we open Touch2 is to have Soo, the one who emerges from the womb (in Touch1) emerge from the Atrium wall in the following way. I imagined that the emergent dancer (Soo) would, initially be covered in a very large film of tissue paper wheatpasted to the wall, so that her body is behind of a continuous sheet of very thin translucent fibrous material following the contours of her body and blending into the rest of the wall. (Josee-Anne, Harry gave precise ideas of how to make this. He and I think it is eminently buildable. We will always make it breathable, and as comfy as possible! Of course we have to see what Soo and Kiani think
Soo’s initial pose could be a frozen moment of a movement of escape, emergence. Kiani initially would be offstage (ready to enter from the blackbox gallery). Desh’s video could be projected over Soo’s body-as-part-of-wall-as-screen.

At a given moment, (say the end of the video), Soo would emerge out of the tissue paper wall, bursting through the layers of tissue paper,
(EXFOLIATION is one of the themes of Remedios.)

The sound could be quite strong bc paper is stiff. I imagined with Harry that we could prepare this as a “costume” in the form of a sandwich of a cardboard back and tissue paper at least 8′ x 8′…. It is important not to read as clothing, but as “wall”. The edges of this would have to be dressed to make flush with the actual wall.

Obviously we would pre-assemble of sandwich, complete with pre-drilled holes in the wall for attachment of the sandwich to the wall, and store the assembly somewhere in the Gallery together fast-drying plaster-water mix ready for rapid assembly minimum time before showtime. That time is the time of comfortable wear for the Dancer, of course. We must figure out a way to rapidly assembly, and dress the set+costume, before — but not much before — the vernissage starts.

After this event, we could paint over the eruption “scar” so that it simultaneously remains as evidence of the event, and can hold projected image, so subsequent Jitter imagery would pick up the traces of the physical peeling layers of the exfoliation. (Thanks to Harry.)

Cheers,
Xin Wei

On 19-Feb-08, at 3:43 AM, Josée-Anne wrote:

I saw Kiani on Sunday and we talked about it. That’s cool! She’s interested.

I need to check with the Gallery director tomorrow and see if we can cut into on of the Gallery’s walls.

JS, we would probably want to to project Desh’s film first and at the end (shortly before the dancers emerge from the wall) move-on to the one of the patches that you have been using to do it. Would that be something possible?

XW I’m back at the drawing board on this. Now trying to put together the paper and what I showed you before… did you have sketches for this as well? Or an event design.

Talk with Harry re specific construction ideas, and bring back notes. Then we can enroll production help. I would say Marine Antony.

I’m also wondering, Soo, if you think the movement should be centered on/close-to the floor or not. (Vertical crack - like the Remedios paintings or Horizontal-on the floor to accommodate Touch-like movements…)

Whatever the movement — Touch, as Soo and Kiani know, is concerned with the ethical medium in-between bodies.
See the forwarded email re Aristophanes below.
Touch2 indirectly (NOT literally) follows after the emergence event in Touch1.

Could we schedule a meeting towards the end of the week, as things get better defined.

Thanks.
Bye.

On Feb 19, 2008 3:00 AM, SOO <chohansoo@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Jo,

Yeah!

I asked Kiani and she would be available as well for the event. If you want, we can set a schedule to talk about it more specific.

Soo

On Feb 17, 2008 9:36 PM, Josée-Anne <joseeanne@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
I’d like to work with the Touch team (and possibly JS) on costumes and a temporary installation for the video-movement performance event Touch2. If there is time/interest.

I thought that Touch2 was part of the vernissage event? any updates regarding this? What do people think, together, separate, beginning, middle, end…

On the calendar we have the opening on Monday the 17th. What about the other event(s)?

Reminder: 3 Weeks before setup, 4 Weeks before opening.

On Feb 16, 2008 10:30 AM, x w <shaxinwei@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,

Among those of you who are not already committed to one of the
productions, would one of you be able to take charge of managing the
events: the vernissage, the possible performances (Touch2 and Sebald3) ?

Xin Wei

Begin forwarded message:
From: x w <shaxinwei@gmail.com>
Date: January 27, 2008 1:07:05 PM EST (CA)
To: sutton Timothy <tim@synthist.net>, Jean-Sébastien Rousseau <jsrousseau@gmail.com>, Morgan Sutherland <morgan@morgansutherland.net>, Ludwig Manahan <vjmoots@gmail.com>, Soo-yeon Cho <chohansoo@gmail.com>, Marine Antony <marine.antony@gmail.com>, desh Fernando <nacando@gmail.com>
Subject: Aristophanes on love; and going beyond Aristophanes

Hi Touch Folks,

People have made excellent work preparing for the shoot. So we’re almost there. This is a good moment to take stock of where we are in spirit….

In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes presented a history of sexed love, based on Zeus splitting the atom of round, primeval man. In the beginning, man-woman were powerful, spherical creatures, with four legs and four arms. But for their arrogance, Zeus split them into halves that Apollo healed and shaped into the sexed bodies we have today. Doomed to seek our other halves.

I’m augmenting this myth by de-emphasizing the human organisms and foregrounding the medium of tissue and the liquid plenum of the world. So the effects we’ll see from the live video process will make palpable the

0. the single composite body (only light, some moments of delay)
1, the bodies internal forces (textures — only within the bodies)
2. the forces between the bodies (with bodies in black silhouette)
3. the forces suffusing everything - the bodies as well as the space exterior to the bodies.

How the visual dynamics work is up to JS. The staging of the different swirling video textures as the event unfolds step by step, should suggest that:

1. ethical relations are mediated by tissue (substance, not formal grammar of a moving part of body);
2. the very fabric of space itself is a medium (not just body tissue).

So the “womb” is merely a context for a dramatic event of “birth” but we don’t have to over emphasize the womb (too clichéd, and too over-coded with expectations). But the birth event itself is the moment at which the sound connotes to much huger space, and more clarified voices — as Tim has been suggesting — and when the video textures display the delayed forces / tensions built up from the earlier activity between the two separated halves — Soo and Kiani.

Compliments to all of you,
Xin Wei

514-817-3505

Here’s a 5-state topology for a VISIT by a visitor
/rt/state/visit/nightlife n
/rt/state/visit/daydream n
/rt/state/visit/firestorm n
/rt/state/visit/glass n
/rt/state/visit/desert n

it’s up on the TML cupboards. you’ll see it when you come into the lab. there are dry-erase markers in a little plastic box on the computer at the right (’james’), which will totally do the trick. please make use of the calendar for whatever RT due-dates and mile-stones you see fit.