Jillian Mcdonald inserts her image digitally into TV and film scenes from three contemporary vampire stories –  Twilight (New Moon), True Blood, and Being Human – in order to engage in a staring contest with the vampires. Time is suspended in the staring contests which no one wins and no one loses. Mcdonald takes on the subject of longing and places it into a paralyzed, competitive moment between two subjects, writ large on an architectural exterior. The video addresses hunger, duration, competition, attention, and desire.

In Will Gill ‘s Firefly, illuminated arrows are launched through the darkness of a Newfoundland outport town, across barrens, through forests, outside church doors  and into vast oceans. Associative of both nature and technology, the kinetic points of light interrupt what could otherwise be understood as very traditional pictorial views, and bring to mind the material world within which we experience accelerated information.

Photo: Mark Bennett, 2011

Photo: Mark Bennett, 2011

The installation revisited 365 headlines from 2011, starting on January 1st and going through to December. From protests, elections, conflicts, change, victories and others daily stories – the year was reflected through the lens of local and international news headlines.

During this project the public was invited to rewrite these headlines together, collectively re-examining what worked and what didn’t. Participants used text messages to rewrite sections of the headlines, one word at a time.

To learn more about the project, visit the Rewrite the Year website.

A daredevil performs on the Ken Fox Wall of Death, a cylindrical wooden track 20 feet high and 32 feet in diameter.  The audience is keenly aware that deceleration on the steep vertical wall is not an option; slowing down would produce catastrophic results. Sasaki explores this action as an analogue for our culture of “electric speed”, identifying an imperative to continue along this trajectory (or, more likely, accelerate.) Shot at a high frame rate and presented in slow motion, the rider appears untethered from the physical forces that are keeping him aloft. Centrifugal motion becomes invisible and physical space is distorted as the rider seems to take on the ability to navigate impossible Escher-like planes. With a triumphant gesture he appears to transcend physical form, to float. He is both angelic and forebodingly reckless.

Jon Sasaki gratefully acknowledges Ken Fox, Alex Fox, and the Ken Fox Troupe for their generosity and participation.

Jeremy Bailey’s performance-oriented practice centres around the use of custom augmented reality software which overlays graphics overtop the photographic image. In Explore the Future of Creativity, Bailey has produced an advertisement for “Famous New Media Artist Jeremy Bailey”.  Bailey’s ad, designed for presentation on large scale public screens, runs concurrently with an external advertising campaign on Google adwords and YouTube. The work explores the urban screen as a commercially-driven element of public space and extends the urban screen to include the small, mobile, personal and social screens of our other devices. Bailey uses the aesthetics of the Internet and the perpetual cartoon “now” to interrogate  relationships between cultural and commercial contexts and to challenge expectations of both advertising and art within the frame of contemporary global media culture.