pointing to the edge of east.

a short visual poem to my beloved city of istanbul via some favorite photos taken over the last 4 years.

many more shots available here.

homeward bound.

a quick look at an evening at home…

it’s distinctly crisp and cold for october, hans needs to study his song writing for mcgill, erik is doing his nightly practice, i’m going over my work to do for the week, and we’re a happy house here on coloniale.

portrait of four as one.

I was working with a series of portraits taken in the quad, one I was going to choose to be the original picture to use for the assignment. They are all pictures of me yet they all look like a different girl. Some are prettier than others and especially after adding filters, some are gorgeous and others much less so. But come on now, that was all me taken in less than 20 minutes. Surely I can’t go from loving to disliking me so quickly. So instead of choosing one, I went for 4 different portraits to give a rounded vision of what I truly look like.

Photoshop is exactly what I knew it would be… A program that provides many ways to produce either super cheesy bordering on blindingly ugly design or of course, masterpieces of human creativity sprung into real space with the wizardry of adobe for the delight and astonishment of all.

After a few hours of frustration and hitting the ‘don’t save’ button, I finally realized that being sober about Filters and Image Adjustments was good for me and probably means I’m a adult. I mean, I never even bedazzled my clothes. Why should I start graphically doing so now?

assignment related.

keeping the masterpiece away from the nitty-gritty of explaining it all, here is the important (grade awarding) part.

I used 4 high resolution photographs. I reduced the image size to 800×600 pixels. I desaturated the coloration of each picture (to render them black and white), then added the fresco filter to 2 of them, and the film grain filter for the others. I used the rectangular marquee tool to select parts of the photographs I wanted and dragged them directly into a 5th blank canvas that I had rotated 90C. When I was done, I noticed that the bottom of my collage was lacking images so I cropped it one last time which is why the format is not exactly picture size.

Here are the pictures I used.

Oh and here is a previous attempt at doing this assignment. Ew. I saved it to never do that kind of cheesy ugly stuff again (or what i really mean: not to attempt concepts too ambitious until I’m fantastic at this).

It’s pretty quiet over here at just for laughs: The World Press Exhibition.

As a person that reads the news often and in detail, most of the content of this year’s World Press Winning Photography Exposition was far from new. I can recall the famous Zidane head butt and where I was watching the World Cup when it occurred (a summer house on the Aegean, and my cousin the traitor was supporting Italy), I can laugh at the larger than life portraits of Suparmurat Niyavoz, that crazy self-proclaimed father of the Turkmen (I call my father Muratbashi among other loving nicknames) and certainly the penguins migrating on a colossal iceberg gets a chuckle and a stare from me.

However, that is where the laughing stops. Walking alone through the exhibition (I left my expo partner behind to ponder the images alone, for fear I’d get really angry at the world and take it out on him perhaps?), I stop by each image and reread the context: deforestation, animals on the verge of extinction, the terrible treatment of illegal workers in Kuwait, dictatorship in Turkmenistan, the thousands of illegal immigrants who drown off the coast of Tenerife, femicide in Guatemala, the earthquake in Kashmir and just how slow aid was sent over, Palestine, the Lebanese and Iraq wars, child prostitution in Africa… It’s a lot of information to be reminded of so graphically in just an hour. And it shows. The mood on this very busy Sunday is quiet. It’s almost disconcerting that I can hear the Gotan Project as musical background, but that’s because I can barely hear the normal hubbub of weekend crowds (mind you, just what kind of musical soundtrack would be appropriate to accompany these images? I really wonder).

World Press is an incredibly important exhibition. Journalism is rendered alive by its use of photography. It brings heavy complex arguments and difficult to grasp world issues into a format that anyone with eyes and half a brain can understand and be touched by. If the whole world won’t read about the indescribably terrible events men, women and children endure, World Press Photo through its exhibitions helps to disseminate information via a medium that simply cannot leave an audience cold. And we certainly need to be touched by the images that we see. Knowledge being power, this exhibition gives you the need (maybe even the duty?) to become knowledgeable about world news and issues. Hopefully, a few activists are born this way. So much the better then that World Press Photo not only exhibits in many cities around the world, but also encourages photojournalism by offering educational programs and releasing publications[i]. They have the good sense to bombard us with large glossy reminders that the world is a far cry from peaceful AND they encourage us to participate in documenting this world.

Walking through the World Press exhibition is a singular experience. Most images demand a silent and somber respect. It would be difficult to enjoy a light stroll chattering with your friends when revisiting war, conflict and death. It’s all the more humbling exposed in Montreal, as StLaurent on a Sunday afternoon seems to be in a different dimension of reality, one so far removed from these photographs that we can hardly believe they are news content of the past year. Once again, my Sunday has been ruined but Muratbashi always used to say that only the ignorant sleep easily. And I REALLY don’t want to be ignorant.

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[i] “Home – World Press Photo.” 17 Sep. 2007 <http://www.worldpressphoto.org/>

not so casual sounds.

 

Espace SONO::Audio.Lab is almost pretentious in its completely unpretentious setting. Nestled in what most call a sketchy crossroad of downtown Montreal, SAT gallery is a small white-walled space with a slightly rough finishing touch. The Audio Lab setup doesn’t do much to embellish your art going experience either. A blue tent, a black box reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, a large bed and 2 white couches that look like they were bought and decorated by students on an Ikea budget are the only visuals that grace this place. But that’s the point really. Whether you are lying on a bed, on your stomach in a tent, comfortably ensconced in a couch or deprived of vision huddled in the black box, Tobias C. Van Veen and his 36 artist friends want you to LISTEN[i].

There is much to appreciate. The beds and tent offer an array of sound recordings chosen from a short list and listened to with earphones to ensure that the auditor is one on one with his sound. From recordings of the Montreal subway with its familiar singing on departure, to an FM radio dial stopping up and down frequency to give us a glimpse of the day’s musical offerings, it’s easy to relax and focus in just the way the artists intend us to. The comfy couches offer a more musical experience, showcasing many remixes by the Montreal-based DJ Fishead, self-proclaimed annihilator of the status quo[ii]. He’s first and foremost a talented mixer and it’s easy to get into his samples. The same can’t be said of the artist formation Onetoofreefor, a Belgian duo whose sampling brings to mind a much more R-rated and angrier version of Peaches mixed with scratching some very sharp nails on a blackboard. I was so startled I almost kicked a hole in the tent lining[iii].

It’s on my way out the door however that I truly experienced the kind of deep listening the curator was explaining in his artsy terms at the door. Back in the black box, prostrated in an uncomfortable folding chair, I stumbled on Helen Thorington’s 9-11-Scapes. It’s a 17 minute soundscape constructed from samples collected on September 11^th 2001 in and around the World Trade Center and gathered by NPR in the Sonic Memorial Project[iv]. In pitch black darkness, airplane crash and burning sounds lead to building alarms, crying and screaming, 911 calls and the crunching of the shovels that signify the retrieval of some two thousand bodies. Political issues regarding September 11^th and its aftermath for the modern world of foreign policy aside, anyone with half a heart is mesmerized to realize that the sounds of 9-11 are even more haunting than the images we all know so well.

In this unpretentious space bereft of visual glossy aids then, curator Van Veen expects that we will be impressed just listening. That implies that what we hear is worth at the very least a strong reaction. And it sure does that. I was torn between going home to find out DJ Fishead’s next showcase and getting a strong pick-me-up as the black box and Helen Thorington had really ruined my precious Sunday.

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[i] espace sono: list of artists featured in the exhibit.” 17 Sep. 2007 <http://upgrademtl.org/archives/Sept0507.htm

[ii] dj fishead. “FISHEAD – Espace sono Artist.” 17 Sep. 2007 <http://djfishead.com/>

[iii]For a taste of this innovative artistic genre: onetoofreefor mp3 samples.” 17 Sep. 2007 <http://data.projectsinge.net/onetoofreefor-mp3/

[iv] “The Sonic Memorial Project, Helen Thorington and the 9-11-scapes.” 17 Sep. 2007 <http://www.sonicmemorial.org/sonic/public/index.html>

 

Warning about reviews to come.

While I’m certain mois de la photo AND espace sono can be very pleasant sunday experiences for art lovers, i happened to stumble upon Helen Thorington’s ‘9-11-scapes’ in the black box, a haunting 17 minute sound montage of world trade center snippets of crashing buildings, dying people crying, firefighters screaming down the mic to ‘get away from the tower’ and the indelible sound of building emergency sirens (view the french brothers’ documentary footage on Sept. 11 for that particular brand of eerie).

Thoroughly rattled, I barely had time to regain mental strength before walking into 2006’s best murder-mayhem-humanity-in-decline captured artfully and very graphically by the world’s best journalist photographers: Decapitated penguins on my right, femicide sprawled in the streets of Guatemala in the middle and a little infant death in Palestine to my left.

Needless to say, I’m waiting till tomorrow to write a review and that’s partly because i had to have a drink after i was done. Happy sunday to you too montreal.

Welcome to a Dip’s Life.

Where I discover whether a long break from academia was an advantage…