Great Lakes Visionary League

ABC3D by Marion Bataille

2008-11-16T18:29:00.002-05:00

VIDEO of the week: Touch the RADIO!

2008-11-11T14:26:00.001-05:00

Language: Touch the Radio Dance

Thanks again Speculator. "Listen to the radio, touch the radio, DANCE!" Sometimes I still can't get over how this sounds like now.

Thanks for breaking the silence Ontario!

i've missed you

2008-11-09T23:09:00.004-05:00

after a bit of an unintentional hiatus on my part...

some beautiful work in kitsch:

would Mary Engel hate us if we did this to ourselves for the photoshoot? or just make a bunch for amy's mom?

Cold Colour

2008-10-28T19:47:00.003-04:00

It's beautiful out there.

East Village Radio

2008-10-25T18:58:00.000-04:00

They were originally 88.1 FM illegally; it's highly competitive business to buy into the FM market, especially in NYC. When they were called on it (2003) they switched to an internet station, great. I'm glad this music has found a home on the internet.

Maybe this is why I want to live in New York? I mean, don't get me wrong, Toronto is radical and magic and sweet and exciting, but excuse me storefront for an internet radio station! We've got a long way to go.

Before I go on, check out Short Bus Radio with Speculator Monday afternoons 2-4pm. He's a master aficionado of electronic, if y'all are into that sorta thing. You can also browse his four most recent sets because it's the internet!

ok so I asked William Burnett (host of Short Bus Radio) for the playlist I linked to in my previous post 'lovefingers' and am obsessed with right now, turns out the song i can't get out of my head is done by Daniel Wang called Pistol Oderso. Thank god and thank you William. This lead me to another blog called 'Oh Heavenly Dog' by Chevy Chasr which has another bunch of great posts on it. Digress.

There is a great article on EVR in the gothamist from this past September on EVR.

Can we start one!?

E

Virtual, Musical:

2008-10-24T08:47:00.000-04:00

Lovefingers.org

Another musical link. I love the way people spend time on the interweb.

I highly recommend the shortbus set, it gets my juices flowing.

enjoy. E

Architectural Collage

2008-10-22T13:58:00.000-04:00

Here's a collage made by our friend Tyler Rozicki pursuing his architectural education out at Dalhousie in Halifax. Check out his Brick Blog and feast your eyes on this amazing image from a recent paper he handed in.

Diorama-rama

2008-10-22T13:26:00.000-04:00

I thought I would do the legwork for you there Ontario. I took the liberty of trolling BoingBoing.net for diorama pictures. There's LOTS:

Walter Potter Antique Dioramas (Scroll Down)

Scarily Realistic 1930s Dioramas

Car and Garage Dioramas

Fucking Cool Pop Novel Dioramas

The Diorama Diaries

Brooklyn Diorama Club

Death in the Dollhouse Diorama

Creepy Skeleton Gore Diorama

Fashion Shoot in New York Museum of Natural History Dioramas

Searching for Dioramas

2008-10-20T23:28:00.000-04:00

Laura Plansker dioramas.

BluBlu

2008-10-17T20:06:00.000-04:00

This is Blu, He is an amazing street artist from Bologna ( I think ), who I have been following for years since seeing my first wall piece on the mean streets of Tuscany. His work is always amazing to see in person because of its sheer scale often taller than 80ft.! A big source of inspiration for me.! His continuous line videos are rad as well.

blublu.org

HIPGNOSIS

2008-10-15T11:13:00.001-04:00

Seed in Futureclaw magazine, morning of October 15th, 10:37 am, pg. 39/208.

I suppose it's not the lack of sleep, coffee overdose or generally thick margin of stress present in my existence at the moment; because I'm floored. Absolutely; had no idea that there was one controlling force behind so many influential illustrations; that I also find incredible and super interesting. ok, digress.
So here they are, Hipgnosis.
Wikipedia tells me they were an art design (like the label, art-design) group formed in the early 70's, founding member graduated from RCA, dissolved in 1983 although one of the members still works it out. Check out Storm Thorgerson's work.

Their approach is based mainly in conceptual photography; creating iconic, ironic, political, satirical, surreal images. They either print as is or alter the state or layers of the visual matter to meet the needs of the client. This Technical Ecstasy cover (above), for example, is a painting of a photograph, that was then cut and illustrated over.

I love the graphic diagonal rainbow rain; straight forward visually interesting, she kinda looks like Annie Lennox. Will it rain-bows in the future?
The group steered clear from having their clients show up in the illustrations. They based visual staging and theatrics on song lyrics and album titles that were playing with language or commonly accepted ideas, convention.
I appreciate the apparent yet not overdone and completely necessary, understood and thoughtful use of irony in the images. The cover of the Led Zeppelin album Presence in 1978; a well to do European family sit down in a restaurant or possibly in their own dining room, outside the yachts are moored and they contemplate a very insidious sculpture with smiles and reticence.

Right, enough praise. I've got to same something for the next meeting.
See you all soon. Erie

Whirlpeople'

2008-10-13T17:26:00.000-04:00

enojy

In Response to Chair Porn: Nature Porn

2008-10-10T17:10:00.000-04:00

Two examples of nature porn to start everyone's Thanksgiving weekend.

The first is a "video" for a song by Fleet Foxes- a band less mathematically-inclined than the one in Erie's post, but (i think) more suitable for a weekend surrounded by bright squash and multi-colored leaves.

The video is nothing more than a montage of pretty/cheesy nature shots (ooooh! mountains!).

The second is a link to a post written on Pruned, maybe...um....2 years ago? Its pretty weird and amazing and doesn't quite seem real, but since it is, here you are.....

http://pruned.blogspot.com/2007/03/giant-crystal-caves-of-naica.html

Hanna Weislander

2008-10-09T17:25:00.000-04:00

While perusing an issue of the Walrus, not so recently, I came across the illustrations of this illustrious Swede. I continue to admire her. Sometimes she is very detailed in her compositions and other times she uses only a few key lines to construct her subjects. Her practice seems to have bridged a lot of disciplines and applications for illustration, which I think is the way to use your skill.
Hanna you make me want to illustrate.

You can see her stuff here:

Spectrum Orchestra

2008-10-09T16:50:00.000-04:00

I thought I'd start my blog string on this humble page of visionaries with something inspiring, or at least, that very much inspires me. I watched this performance in Spain this summer. It was in the 'lab' or the basement of the MAC BA. There were mostly nerds, super hipsters who look like nerds, computer programmers, math heads and those intelligent house aficionados (fags)! We were fresh from an afternoon at the sea, clear and salty, crammed into a very tight geometric sonic space. We just kept grinning at each other and slowly moving to find the rhythm. Oh, the we is Chanel and I. I'll leave you to explore. Erie.

The Undecided

2008-10-09T14:16:00.000-04:00

This is a really great website for those of us who may know about the political issues we care about, but don't quite know how to make a decision about whom to vote for. The Undecided uses a series of topics, such as political reform, same sex marriage, accountability, and decriminalization to determine which political party you are most aligned with. It also allows you to prioritize different issues using a sliding scale. There are approximately 50,000-100,000 people who use the site during election time, which is considerably low, but the concept is pretty fantastic.

There were a few key issues that I found difficult to locate, but one of the designers from The Movement, the design team who came up with the idea, reported that they just haven't had enough time to update the website as much as they would like. Thankfully the site is incredibly user-friendly and pretty fun to navigate through. It kind of reminds me of those blind Pepsi/Coke taste tests we used to do in the summer, except that instead of discovering that you actually prefer Pepsi, you may just discover that you actually prefer the Green Party.

http://www.theundecided.ca/

The Twisted Films of Pes

2008-10-06T15:49:00.000-04:00

eatpes.com is one of my favorite video sites. Here's my favorite of my favorite:

Orlan

2008-10-06T15:35:00.000-04:00

I caught the first few minutes of a lecture at OCAD by the French artist Orlan. I was pretty impressed that she came to OCAD, because she's an essential figure in contemporary art history course, which I've attended a lot of. "The body is political" she began, and in a thick French accent, ran through her artist's statement. Her famous plastic surgeries, where she remade herself as women painted by art masters, commented on the artificiality of beauty. From Wikipedia:

"from 1990 to 1993 she conducted her series of nine surgery-performances. These were filmed and broadcast in institutions throughout the world, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Sandra Gehring Gallery in New York. Orlan's goal in these surgeries is to acquire the ideal of beauty as suggested by the men who painted women. When the surgeries are completed she will have the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the nose of Gerome’s Psyche, the lips of François Boucher’s Europa, the eyes of Diana from a sixteenth-century French School of Fontainebleu painting and the forehead of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Orlan picked these characters, “not for the cannons of beauty they represent… but rather on account of the stories associated with them.” Diana because she is inferior to the gods and men but is leader of the goddesses and women; Mona Lisa because of the standard of beauty, or anti-beauty, she represents; Psyche because of her fragility and vulnerability within the soul; Venus for carnal beauty; Europa for her adventurous outlook to the horizon, the future."