nuit blanche + digital flavour
i’m pretty excited to have been asked to participate in a upcoming group show at ocad. it’s always necessary fun to have a deadline to make new work for, and a bit thrilling that this one will take place during nuit blanche – toronto’s all night contemporary art thing that happens september 29 from sundown to sunrise. if you missed it last year, check out torontoist’s amazing coverage and the blogTO flickr pool. based on an event that originated in paris a few years ago and has since spread, it was a night long adventure of wonder, urban exploration, art, performance and almost half a million people wandering downtown toronto til dawn.
the show and deadline are a great opportunity to keep busy in the studio and learn some new things, especially things i never would have imagined i’d learn when i was an analog silversmith of yore. while i’ve spent a good amount of time over the past couple years immersed in what people are doing with rfid, nfc, bluetooth, electronics, digital media, microprocessors and robotics, it’s leaned towards the meta-strategic and the behavioural rather than the hands on. but i’m learning. and i’m lucky that, despite my noobness, a couple of really amazing people with knowhow are game for experimentation, collaboration and play.
it’s still early, but a few initial ideas and challenges have come up in thinking about jewellery (or other body-oriented works) that incorporate active components and technologies. power supply, scale and sound technological production are biggies. functionality. aesthetics. material contingencies and value. compelling experiences and meaning that attracts, engages and extends beyond the work itself. many of these qualities are not exclusive to jewellery or other forms of body adornment, but i believe are amplified around the intimacy and intensely personal relationships we can create with such objects. and there are tons of people who have found interesting, insightful and brilliant ways of reconciling them.
read more after the jump…
jewellery is fascinating because, unlike other applied arts like pottery or weaving, it has no utilitarian function – it’s purpose is entirely an extension and articulation of social representation and systems. this is incredible when one considers the overall expenditures in production, exchange, resource management, value assignation, etc. not to mention the hidden or implicit costs (positive and negative) associated with the industry. as well, many innovations and applications have emerged from or added to the jewellery industry
the objects we adorn ourselves with are embedded with meanings that communicate context, status, value, identity, power, intent, knowledge, geography, narrative, technology, mastery, ownership, gender, belief, etc, etc, etc. with traditional materials, those meanings had a relative permanence – albeit extremely subjective and temporal – codifying relationships and contexts into an entity for which physical decay is a slow process. it incorporates our tacit knowledge – the socio-cultural underpinnings that influence and shape our behaviour. there’s also an aspect to the embedding of meaning that transfers elements of that tacit, inexplicable understanding into the realm of explicit, codified understanding through semiotics and semantics – mutual, unspoken contextual grounding.
themes that have been interesting and exciting in the past (and i think are finding a good home in the current exporations) have explored both dynamic and intimate participation with work. interactive work involving plants and gardens that must be maintained while wearing and also when the piece is not attached to the body raise issues of tending to and curating our social image, etc, etc. as well, a piece i created with copper powder “recorded” the impact and imprint of the people who traversed the gallery space (check portfolio in the above tabs for pics) – traces and unpredictability.
one of the biggest challenges that i think we’ll face in making any kind of work of this sort is reconciling the intimate and visceral qualities of jewellery and adornment with the more cerebral qualities of most digital media (broad generalization here). the tendency for some digital media (based on our experiences with computing and the web) is to appeal to the eyes and the ears rather than the other senses and the knowledge associated with them, and as a result many of our interactions have what gabe sawhney would say are the same taste or flavour. our primary modes of interaction and literacy (for good biological, survival-of-the-fittest reasons) deal with those sense primarily, but i think it interesting to work beyond that, to look at the semi-implicit or not-quite-as-intellectualized senses as the first point of contact.
it’s exciting to look at new opportunities for these themes to find new explorations and challenges, and i look forward to how we’ll be pushing out our ideas. look for the work at the ocad the night of nuit blanche!!
