TRANSMEDIA :29:59
media art in public urban space

Curated by Michael Alstad and Michelle Kasprzak

November 1 - 31th, 2005:

29th minute: Cheryl Sourkes - 'Live from the Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas'
59th minute: BlueScreen - 'streamScape'

Year Zero One is pleased to present TRANSMEDIA :29:59, a year long exhibition on the pedestrian level video billboard at Yonge-Dundas Square in downtown Toronto. Launched August 1st 2005, TRANSMEDIA :29:59 features one minute video works 24/7 every half hour on the 29th and 59th minutes.

Featured for the month of November is Cheryl Sourkes's 'Live from the Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas' and BlueScreen's 'streamScapes'.

 
Cheryl Sourkes's Live from the Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas is a series of videos made by animating stills captured from a remote webcam. Live from the Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas shows various Elvis impersonators marrying a variety of heterosexual couples.

Although webcams are often considered Big Brother’s surveillance tool, they actually provide ordinary people with potent mechanisms for self-representation. Unlike the performances normal cameras elicit, people act naturally in front of webcams. Sourkes has tracked literally hundreds of cameras on the Internet during the past five or six years. She sees the real world online as a hybrid place that partakes of both spheres but is really something other. That something inevitably excludes a remainder which resists translation.

BlueScreen's streamScape is made up of hybridised images from 13 webcams scattered all over the world. Every minute the streams from all of these cameras are captured on a server and then incorporated to the on-line landscape. Every hour an accelerated video of the last hour will be showed on Dundas Square video billboard.

BlueScreen give's birth to a landscape that lives from the inside, an inhabited landscape, which has a particular life form and is nourished from the flow that inhabits it. This landscape is timeless or at least not subjected to a specific timeframe, and shares some of its time with the viewer, the time that it lives. Like the environment that surrounds us, it will evolve indefinitely around permanent elements that allow us to appropriate it, make it our own.



BIOS

Cheryl Sourkes was born in Montreal just after the Second World War ended. Technically speaking she is neither a war baby nor a boomer. This relation to category recurs in many aspects of her life and work. Cheryl Sourkes has lived in Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto. She can carry on at length about the ethos of the art scenes in each of these cities. Sometime during the mid-nineties Sourkes turned to the Internet for source material. For the last five or six years she has worked exclusively with Internet cameras. Her work is driven by questions of epistemology.

Cheryl Sourkes has exhibited widely throughout Canada, as well as internationally in the United States, France, Italy, Great Britain, Germany and Belgium. Her recent work can be found at www.cherylsourkes.com. She is represented by Peak Gallery. Since coming to Toronto in 1993, Sourkes has also curated extensively. Currently she programs the gallery, akau inc. on Queen Street West. Documentation from exhibitions at this space is available for viewing at www.akau.ca


BlueScreen

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$URL="http://www.b-l-u-e-s-c-r-e-e-n.net";
$Mail="b-l-u-e-s-c-r-e-e-n@b-l-u-e-s-c-r-e-e-n.net";
$Context=FALSE;
$MoreInfos=FALSE;
}
*

Year Zero One gratefully acknowledges the Ontario Arts Council,Yonge-Dundas Square and Clearchannel for their support of Transmedia :29:59.




TRANSMEDIA :29:59

<<Rewind

October 2005: Honeybyte, Risa Horowitz
September 2005: Pascual Sisto, Luke Lamborn
August 2005: Manu Laksch, Jillian Mcdonald