Montréal has seen many, many pieces of public art pop up in the last few years, thanks in part to the Mural festival. These artworks are accessible, free to the public, and take art out of the institutional (dare I say elitist) art galleries. The city has started to curate a photo gallery of these murals, which number over 300(!). Worth a scroll to see some great pieces.
Synesthesia is a phenomenon where some people experience their senses intermixing with each other. They might see sounds, or hear sights, or even physically feel words. It’s a mental condition apparently attributed to many great artists, from Vincent Van Gogh to Billie Eilish to allegedly even Beyonce.
I have always wanted to experience synesthesia myself, but I always assumed it would be impossible. Certain pieces of art can give me a fleeting sensation of it—Van Gogh’s paintings and Kanye’s 808s & Heartbreak come to mind. Visuals at a concert, when done well, can give a feeling of seeing the music. But that’s a sort of inferred collective synesthesia, where I can sense the impact of it on the work, but I don’t really get to experience it as someone with the condition would.
It occurred to me recently that augmented reality headsets like Apple’s Vision Pro, along with generative AI, could provide the technology to do a reasonable real-time synesthesia simulator. I’m adding it to the list of projects I’d undertake if I had unlimited resources, but for now it’s just a thought experiment.
The Vision Pro, along with generative AI, would fail to reproduce all iterations of the condition, but it could hypothetically reproduce the following types of synesthesia:
Here are some art/tech projects which explore other aspects of synesthesia. Google’s Play a Kandinsky is beautiful, but is again an interpretation of an artist’s view.
The game Audiosurf matches audio to visuals in a synesthetic way. A seemingly defunct smartphone VR app seemingly tried to accomplish the same concept, though it glitches on my phone and hasn’t been updated in 6 years. There are some fascinating video visualizations of synesthesia, like this YouTube video of a violinist who sees notes as coloured shapes.
My version would be real time, and importantly, individualized. You would choose the type of synesthesia you wanted to recreate, or even the specific artist whose synesthesia you wanted to experience, and everything you saw and heard would be filtered to recreate the look and sound of that type.
Italian artist Leonardo Ulian makes some delightful mandalas out of electronics and other symbols of our digital world. Beautiful.
I spent my day off visiting the wonderfully punk Pussy Riot show at the MACM. Members of Pussy riot did all the installation themselves, using tape and sharpies to mount their impressive photo and video documentation on the walls of the museum.
I couldn’t help but remark about the ridiculousness of it all. That a global military power could be obviously so bothered, and even scared, of a few women with guitars playing sloppy punk music in public places. It underlined the power cart can have.
It all meshed with my concurrent reading of another politically-inclined artist’s biography, that being Ai Weiwei. In this quote from his autobiography he talks about the role of art in dissidence:
To conventional culture, I said, art should be a nail in the eye, a spike in the flesh, gravel in the shoe: the reason why art cannot be ignored is that it destabilizes what seems settled and secure. Change is an objective fact, and whether you like it or not, only by confronting challenges can you be sure you have enough kindling to keep the fire in your spirit burning. Don’t try to dream other people’s dreams, I told them; you have to face up to your own predicament honestly, on your own terms. There’s a huge gulf between your aesthetic passions as an artist and the indifference of the real world.
In his mailing list, The Red Hand Files, this week, Nick Cave responds to comments from other artists about their troubles with motivation:
Every time I set foot in my studio, intentions blazing, I crumble with pathetic and flaccid paralysis. Do it, paint. No. Fuck. Why not?
And he responds with some harsh but useful words on what it means to do creative, artistic work:
What makes our particular job so exceptional that it requires inspiration or a muse to do it? We are artists and we labour in the service of others. It is not something we do only if and when we feel motivated – we create because it is our responsibility to do so. In this respect our occupation is no different than that of most people. Does an ordinary adult go to work only if they feel in the mood? Do doctors? Do labourers? Do teachers?
Detail of Alexander Calder’s 21 meter-high sculpture ‘Trois Disques’. Taken in Montreal’s Parc Jean Drapeau.
Don’t sweat it if you don’t know who hip hop producer J Dilla is. I only had a rough understanding of who he was, and what his impacts on music were, before I read Dan Charnas’ amazing biography.
Dilla was a hip hop producer in the 90’s whose programming of drum machines brought in a style of drumming which nobody had ever really heard before. His beats were erratic and off time, which on those early drum machines took some effort to achieve. They weren’t quite straight time, and they weren’t swing time. They were in Dilla Time. He used this technique to give his music a slightly off, slightly drunk, even slightly unsettling feeling.
A great read, especially for those who love 90’s hip hop and sampling. Buy it at your small local independent book store.
From this New York Times profile of art in Ghana comes this photo of a beautiful space created by Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama, titled Parliament of Ghosts. What an incredible space.
The New Yorker has a nice little profile on Robert Cumming, an absurdist photographer I had never heard about. His pieces are whimsical and silly, like the above piece entitled “Watermelon/Bread”.
As an artist, he was an inveterate tinkerer who, for a period, taught himself a new fabrication skill every year, which would later come in handy when making the props that he used in his photographs. He was stubbornly inquisitive, often following his ideas wherever they led him, even—or especially—if it was impractical or absurd.
Via Rafa
During precontact days, birch bark biting was practiced mainly by women in tribes “wherever the birch tree grows,” Church says. That area is vast; it includes British Columbia, northwest Alaska, Washington state, the northern Great Plains, the Appalachian Mountains, the Great Lakes and New England. Tribes that have practiced the art form include some Algonquin peoples of the Great Lakes parts of Canada and the United States, Ojibwe, Pottawatomi, Abenaki, Odawa, Chippewa and some groups of Cree.
To create an image — a dragonfly, a flower, a hummingbird — artists use their eyeteeth (the sharp teeth also known as canines) to pierce the delicate, onion-thin skin just enough to make indentations. They move the piece around in their mouth, creating symmetrical shapes. They can’t see the results of their work until they unfold the bark and hold it to the light.