Department of Visual Arts

This photo-essay documents the conception and realisation of a 'mobile display unit', a kind of cabinet of curiosities attached to a donkey, and made to travel through the streets of Beijing so that the texts, works and videos displayed there were accessible to passers-by.

Entretien avec le collectif torontois/ Interview with the Toronto Based Collective BLUE REPUBLIC Acclamé par la critique, Blue Republic est une collaboration artistique multidisciplinaire entre les artistes Anna Passakas et Radoslaw Kudlinski. Le duo s'est impliqué dans un grand nombre de projets et de présenta

We have seen in recent art practices artists whose works traverse the discourse of architecture and urbanism—Debord, Constant, Arakawa and Gins, Absalon and Hirshom, for example. On the other side of coin, there are trained architects who opt to practice from the ...

A television series comprised entirely of altered commercials. The intervention in question takes advantage of the standard durations and structures of conventional commercials (30 seconds / 1 minute) by simply swapping their sound and image tracks without any further manipulation. These new assemblages asymmetrically remainder indeterminate quantities and qualities, laying bare the structural stresses intrinsic to the domains of sound and image, liberating new associations (surplus value) while suppressing others, flickering between affective composites which collapse distinctions to those which strictly enforce the independence of either. More than a pruning of successful swaps (which appropriately signify), the series through the scale of its development over 24 episodes works on the level of the viewer's propensity to associate the visual and the sonic, where components differ freely instead of being wrought into binary oppositions. (What happens when efficient semiotic connections start to withdraw into infra-legible territory?) Ultimately, the series aims to be consistently noisy to the idea of legibility in favor of an ongoing negotiation, where indigestible combinations thwart the propensities of language to marshall meaning ahead of time. Not to mention the added complexities memory affords, as compounded repetition propels the consolidation of matter into an uncertain future...

by Iannis Xenakis represents a major turning point in composer-performer relations, when the well-oiled (and hardened) paradigms of Western Classical piano performance practice ®nally fell apart, replaced by provisional and open-ended values. The study of this work provided an impetus to search out other composers testing the notion of a``critical virtuosity'' in their music, deliberately writing against conventional physical paradigms in order to trigger new relationships between body and matter. In effect, the old conceit of projecting a traditionally con®dent, totalized vision is no longer in the foreground. The author concludes by confronting Evryali head-on and provides personal, and ultimately provisional, performance solutions.