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White Night . . .

Our first Nuit Blanche in Toronto is almost here! With a joyous synchronicity, one of the many installations this year is a piece by Philip Beesley, Aurora, described as a ‘responsive forest of light’.

Hopefully Saturday night will be short on sleep but rich in weird, wonder and joy! Can’t wait!

At its core, Nuit Blanche is a 12-hour event with a mandate to make contemporary art accessible to large audiences, while inspiring dialogue and engaging the public to examine its significance and impact on public space. Nuit Blanche is both a “high art” event and a free populous event that encourages celebration and community engagement. From sunset to sunrise city spaces and neighbourhoods are transformed into temporary exhibitions. Unusual or forbidden spaces become sites of contemporary art open for all-night discovery and rediscovery. Cultural institutions, from museums to galleries to artist run centres, open their doors and offer free access to contemporary art. The everyday is suspended as the city’s landscape is changed to welcome a variety of artistic experiences.

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Architectural Joy (ideaCity 2)

I was awed by the magic of Rachel Armstrong’s vision of a living architecture, creating a state of transformation, a language of metabolism, materials able to colonise a technological framework in symbiosis.

She showed us film of substances  that we normally perceive as inanimate (water, with olive oil and alkali) behaving like self-organizing systems.

The development of materials that possess a metabolism for use in architectural practice would confer some of the properties of living systems on our cities. These metabolic materials would enable architecture to change over time using local sources of energy and raw materials and respond to variations in the urban environment.

From Rachel Armstrong’s web site

I do not begin to understand either the science or the possibilities implied by this vision and for now it is just that; metabolic materials do not yet exist in practice. But joy was there in her fierce passion. And joy is truly present in her work with Philip Beesly on Hylozoic Ground for the Venice Biennale 2010 – utterly amazing!

Hylozoic Ground is an immersive, interactive environment that moves and breathes around its viewers. This environment can ‘feel’ and ‘care’. Next-generation artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and interactive technology create an environment that is nearly alive.

From the Hyzoloic Ground Website

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ideaCity 2010 – brim full with joy!

When I first started to explore how we perceive joy in contemporary society, I was surprised to find how few references there were to it on the web.

I spent last week as a volunteer at ideaCity, ‘Canada’s premiere meeting of the minds’. Fifty inspiring presenters from the most diverse backgrounds spoke, unscripted, to an audience of 700. Over the three days of the conference, the word joy was used or implied frequently, sometimes unexpectedly. Continue reading “ideaCity 2010 – brim full with joy!”

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Uniquely human . . .

A comment on my earlier post ‘The Word’ suggests that, whilst words enable us

. . . to be uniquely human by allowing us to carve off pieces of what is in order to bring it into ourselves, they also dissect. Once we’ve created that division – identified what is, and thus what isn’t, there is always that rift…

I wonder, do the words create the rift or simply allow us to live with and explore it?

Continue reading “Uniquely human . . .”