BURN PILE: Canada offers up top crop of GG finalists

I'm guessing most Americans are unfamiliar with the term "GGs", but to Canadians it's shorthand for the pinnacle of Canadian literary awards. The Canada Council for the Arts announced the list of finalists for the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Awards yesterday. The GGs are awarded in both official languages, in seven categories: fiction, poetry, drama, non‑fiction, children’s literature (text and illustration) and translation.  And this year, the finalists for this prestigious award are outstanding.

“Get ready for late nights!” said Robert Sirman, Director and CEO of the Canada Council for the Arts. “Great books abound among this year’s GG finalists and you won’t be able to put them down. Further proof of the prolific and potent Canadian literary scene.”

Which is exactly what you'd expect the top administrator of Canada's top arts organization to say, except in this particular case he's correct. Here are a few highlights from the English language list:

In the fiction category, there's Joseph Boyden's latest novel, The Orenda, (which is also a nominee for the Scotiabank Giller Prize). It is a 500-page epic full of blood, beauty and magic set in Canada’s earliest days. The Toronto Star calls it a "sweeping and ambitious new novel" set amid the 17th-century clashes involving Jesuit missionaries, the Huron and the Iroquois that marked Canada’s early beginnings. Boyden, who has Irish, Scottish, and Métis roots, says this particular story has been inside him waiting to be told for so long that it is “part of my DNA.” Click here to read a review in the Toronto Star and listen to Boyden read from The Orenda.

Boyden is no stranger to accolades. His first novel, Three Day Road,  received the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the 2005 Governor General's Award for Fiction. His second novel, Through Black Spruce, the second in a trilogy he started with Three Day Road, won the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Unlike Boyden, Metis-Mennonite poet Katherena Vermette is a fresh face on the list of GG finalists. Her debut collection North End Love Songs combines, according to a review in Prairie Fire, "elegiac and fiercely ecstatic melodies to sing of a complicated love for a city, a river, and a neighborhood. It is deeply rooted in its location, yet will reach out to readers everywhere with its harsh and beautiful tunings of growing up female in Winnipeg’s North End."

Vermette already won one award this year, the 2013 Lina Chartrand Poetry Award for her activist poems,” blue jay”, “red bird” and “cedar wax wing” (published in V.35 Issue 1 of CV2). The Lina Chartrand Poetry Award award was created to recognize an emerging poet as a tribute to the spirit of activist-poet Lina Chartrand’s life and work, and to celebrate women’s achievements in writing. (Click here to watch/hear Vermette read from North End Love Songs.)

Like many Canadians, Carolyn Abraham is an immigrant. Born in England, she moved to Canada with her family in 1972, bringing with her a fascinating family history ripe for the telling. It this that fills the pages of her second book, The Juggler's Children, a stunning book about tracing her family’s history through DNA analysis. According to a book review in the Globe and Mail, "The Juggler’s Children is many things, each one spellbinding: a thrillerish quest for origins, a continent-spanning travelogue, and an eye-opening foray into the annals and ethics of genetic science."

It should come as no surprise that Abraham uses DNA to help unravel the mystery of her family story: She was a medical reporter for many years, which led to her first book, Possessing Genius: The Bizarre Odyssey of Einstein’s Brain, a finalist for the 2002 Governor General’s Award for Non-fiction.

Click here for more information on all the GG finalists.

BLOG: Fiction editor C. Sanderson meets cowboy surrealist Peter Koch

by Candie Sanderson This summer, needing a break from the dry 90+ heat of the Missoula summer, I traveled to California and resumed my old job in the East Bay: selling original vintage posters. This meant going back to where it all started, this American thing: California was the first state I visited, the first I lived in, the one I'd return to. There, nestled in the fog and underneath the towering bridge, is a group of generous artists and writers, die-hard revolutionaries and bon vivants, who, like poster artist David Lance Goines, stood proudly next to Mario Savio during the Free Speech Movement,  and talked about surrealism when conformists were trying to bury it. Who would have thought that among them I would find a Montana native?

The first time I entered Peter Koch's sanctuary – a very private printing shop on the Fourth Street corridor in Berkeley – I knew nothing yet about Missoula's infamous cowboy surrealist. I was intimidated: entering Peter Koch's shop is stepping into a world of fine craftsmanship and bold artistry, with a guide who is nothing short of a legend. Peter Koch has worked for libraries, museums, universities. He has published and printed books of philosophy, poetry and literature – all the way to the Ancient Greek. His work, sophisticated, difficult, has been exhibited in places such as the New York and the San Francisco Public Libraries. On the walls of his shop, I saw beautiful poems in intricate types, brown sheets of handmade paper meant to imitate leather, black and white pictures of buffaloes and Native Americans printed on a paper so thin and fine the images seemed to be holding ghosts. These were no other than the pages of Missoula writer and UM faculty member Debra Earling's Lost Journals of Sacajewea. Little did I know that I would be sitting in one of her classes a year later.

Peter Koch embodies a dandier Missoula: one that was versed in counterculture, full of literary mavericks, modern-day pioneers, and cowboy surrealists. When Koch was still in Missoula, attacking those trying to ape Richard Hugo and falling into what he called “miserablism,” he founded the Montana Gothic: A Journal of Poetry, Literature and Graphics, a literary publication meant to argue with the romanticized vision of the West that was popular at the time. Between 1974 and 1977, six issues appeared, featuring artists like Jay Rummel and writers like Tess Gallagher.

Last month, during my California trip, I paid a visit to Koch's now familiar sanctuary. I sat down with him, this time as a friend, to discuss Missoula and the writing happening in its mountains. He handed me another one of his exceptional books: The Complete Montana Gothic, an anthology which contains all six issues of the ephemeral publication, along with new essays by Rick Newby, Edwin Dobb, David E. Thomas, and Koch himself. The release party, which was held at the Missoula Art Museum, brought back to the stage a West that is too seldom talked about. And I was lucky enough to attend.

For more about Peter Koch, check out The Independent's article .

jərˈmān: Experiments in Reductive Video by Steven H Silberg

Welcome to the March installment of jərˈmān. This month we have a couple of video pieces from a larger video project, Experiments in Reductive Video, by artist Steven H Silberg. These pieces treat the video screen as a material, sculptural object, rubbing away the excess information of a video until the viewer is left with a minimalist, meditative TRACE. There is a spiritual reality beneath the build up of the video screen and that spiritual reality is pure movement. Enjoy these two reductive videos and find more information about the work and the artist below.

Reductive Video Project 2: Experiments in Reductive Video (Landscape Studies)

Cape Neddick, Maine - August 2007 from Steven H Silberg on Vimeo.

Title: “Cape Neddick, Maine - August 2007” TRT: 4:45 (looping)

In Reductive Video, each frame of video is analyzed with the previous. Each frame is then reduced to only the advancing (or new) pixels. By displaying only the new pixels, the video itself is reduced to only the important elements needed to describe movement.

Reductive Video Project 3: Experiments in Reductive Video (Location Studies)

Baltimore Light Rail - Mount Royal Station - November 2009 from Steven H Silberg on Vimeo.

Title: “Baltimore Light Rail, Mount Royal Station – November 2009” TRT: 0:25 (looping)

Inspired by the Lumiere Brothers’ “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1895)”

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Experiments in Reductive Video (2009-present)

As television broadcast has moved to digital, we have seen the increased presence of glitches in our programming. Videos freeze and as the programming resumes, we become privy to the inner workings of the process of how the image is stored and transmitted. Movement and color shift are rendered as changes rather than wholly new images.

As we begin to store and record information, we have always chosen to fracture it. As one looks to the locomotion studies of Muybridge, we see a fracturing of movement into individual frames, revealing the elements of movement. But movement has form when we move beyond individual images. The glitches that we see as digital video recovers from a paused broadcast reveal the form of what is to come. The history of long exposure photography shows that motion can become shape – whether through the techniques of painting with light, as one sees with the Picasso images of Life magazine or in Nancy Breslin’s pinhole “Square Meals.” Marey similarly chose to show the form of movement over time in a single still image.

This body of work entitled “Reductive Video” borrows the choice to depict changes in movement (either as individual frames or wholly contained in a single image) and applies it to the technical rendering of images. Using custom software written in Max/MSP/Jitter, video is broken down to reveal only the pixels that change from frame to frame, no longer implying form, but instead the shape of what has changed from the previous frame. Resequenced as video, the individual frames become reminiscent of Muybridge’s silhouetted running horse. These individual frames are also layered to become a single image, showing changes in shape, reminiscent of Marey’s use of while lines on soldier’s uniforms – depicting a “wire frame” of physical movement.

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Steven H Silberg is an image-influenced, pixel-based cross media artist with a background ranging 
from photography to book conservation. Working in print, video, and interactive installation, he engages "new media" as a literalist. For him, the pixel and structure of the digital image is as important as the composition and content. By highlighting the construction of the image, Silberg allows his viewers to both engage the work visually and engage with the technology creating it.

Created in Baltimore, his work has been enjoyed regionally, at venues including Baltimore’s ArtScape, the University of Maryland, and the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts; nationally, at the University of Texas, Dallas, Missouri State University and Orange Coast College in California; and internationally at the Third Beijing International New Media Arts Exhibition and Symposium. Silberg was selected as the Winner of the Washington Post's 2010 Real Art DC competition and selected as a 2012 Semi-Finalist for the Bethesda Trawick Prize.

Find more pieces from the Reductive Video series here and more by Silberg here.

jərˈmān: from SOUND NOMADS

This month's jərˈmān features a couple of video's from an ongoing project, "Sound Nomads", by media artist Ger Ger.Since 2006, in collaboration with different guest nomads he has been staging guerrilla sound performances spanning deserts and hotel rooms. SOUND NOMADS are the technicians of the vibrations hidden in rivers and billboards. These are the technicians of immanence made manifest. These are the technicians of orchestral geology. For more information, visit www.soundnomads.com or gerger.com.

Evidence of Water

sn evidence of water from Colin Post on Vimeo.

Luxor

sn luxor 22145 from Colin Post on Vimeo.

Ger Ger, media artist and photographer, born in Vienna/A 1981, currently lives and works in Los Angeles/USA. He feels drawn to art and digital media early on in life, receives his first honors and awards aged fourteen. M.A. in Digital Arts and Visual Media Design. Study with Karel Dudesek, Peter Weibel and Tom Fürstner at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. He moves to Berlin/D in 2000. Scholarship in Visual Communication with Joachim Sauter at the University of Arts in Berlin. 2009 he founds the studio LA K50 and moves to L.A. in 2011. His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at Ars Electronica (Linz/A), Electrohype (Malmo/S), Open (London/UK), Art Basel Miami (USA), FILE (Sao Paulo/Curitiba City/BRA), Kunsthalle (Vienna/A), LA Freewaves (Los Angeles/USA), The National Art Center (Tokyo/J), Rencontres Internationales (Paris/F), and many other venues. Among his awards are the most prestigious available in the fields of media arts worldwide and include the Japan Media Arts Award, Prix Ars Electronica, CYNETart, Rheingold Award, and Prix MultimediaArt.

This material is copyright of Ger Ger. All Rights Reserved. No part of this may be reproduced without Ger Ger's express consent. gerger.com.

jərˈmān: Two Sound Art Pieces by Sarah Boothroyd

Welcome to the January installment of jərˈmān. Please enjoy these cold cuts in the middle of this cold month. These two pieces from artist Sarah Boothroyd are sculpted sound, a sculpting of the rumblings and waves that we are immersed in. In this sculpting, the pieces uncover the music already immanent in the rumblings around us. This is a poetry for the plugged-in-unconscious.

Rabble Rousers

2012 Stereo 28 minutes

"Protest, evasion, merry distrust, and a delight in mockery are symptoms of health; everything unconditional belongs in pathology.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

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A crowd of dissenters claps, chants, cheers, and shouts into the open air. Their chance choral creations are at once jubilant and angry, orderly and chaotic, rhythmic and random, melodious and cacophonous. Touching on ethics, justice, democracy, and global citizenship, Rabble Rousers explores the notion of protest as a spontaneous installation of improvised 'music' in public space.

Rabble Rousers features field recordings of protests from around the globe – including many culled from the Occupy Movement – as well as Creative Commons contributions from random coil, pleq (bartosz dziadosz), PAPERCUTZ, Carlos Lemosh, marcus fischer, upsteria, Erstlaub, Aurastore, Aos Crowley(Matt Dean), pocka (Brad Mitchell), Matthias Kispert, and the Prelinger Archives.

Thumbnail image credit: Stan Jourdan.

www.sarahboothroyd.com

Sex and Death

2010 Stereo 3 minutes

Three-minute spin on time-lapse phonography. Fragments, questions, and the banal. Life stories and other accidents.

Thumbnail image credit: Dan Anderson.

www.sarahboothroyd.com

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The audio work of Canadian Sarah Boothroyd has been featured by broadcasters, festivals and galleries in over 25 countries. She has won awards from Third Coast International Audio Festival, New York Festivals, the European Broadcasting Union, and La Muse En Circuit. Her website is www.sarahboothroyd.com.

jərˈmān: Mouth by Timothy David Orme

Welcome to the December installment of jərˈmān. This month we have a fantastic video erasure, "Mouth" by Timothy David Orme. The organ is isolated from the face. The mouth becomes mechanical - something to be tuned, a conduit, a passage for hums and vibrations. Is this sacrilegious? Yes.

Mouth

Mouth from Timothy David Orme on Vimeo.

From the artist: "Mouth" is a short erasure film that visually displays the remaining portions of a 35mm trailer that have not been scraped away, and aurally features the reading of a poem titled, simply, "Mouth."

jərˈmān: Dinner Theater by Liat Berdugo

Hello jərˈmāners, we've got a great piece for this month: the playful and engaging "Dinner Theater", a whodunit that inscribes before us who does it as they do it. Image collapses into text and text becomes an image. Find a statement by the artist and bio below! For more on jərˈmān and a backlog of jərˈmān pieces, go here.

Dinner Theater

by Liat Berdugo

dinner theater from liat berdugo on Vimeo.

In Dinner Theater, a narrative story is told through a seating chart: we learn about the characters by seeing their activities as projections from their assigned seats. One seat ‘fluffs hair’ while another ‘waves to arising persons’. The cacophony of actions narrates the play’s arc, from the first audience arrival, through multiple acts, and to an empty and silent theater at the end. Dinner Theater highlights the routines that an audience itself participates in when its members attend a show, as these routines often constitute performances in their own right.

Liat Berdugo is an American artist whose work focuses on the strange, delightful and increasingly ambiguous terrain that lies between the digital and the analog and between the online and the offline. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally, and she has performed throughout the U.S. and Canada. Berdugo is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Digital + Media at the Rhode Island School of Design. She currently lives and works in Providence, RI. More at http://digikits.ch.

jərˈmān: jpg.mp3, Jacob Riddle

Hello and welcome to jərˈmān, Cutbank's new media series. This month's installment is an image-file-turned-sound piece, or a window into the Inhuman thought system. Find a statement by the artist below. For more work by the artist, visit his website, www.thisisjacobriddle.com. Without further ado...

jpg.mp3

Jacob Riddle

jpg.mp3

Jpg.mp3 was created by extracting the hexadecimal code from a single jpeg image file then using a TTS program to have to computer read the hexadecimal code from the image. Jpg.mp3 is the auditory rendering of a digital photograph.

jpg.mp3 is part of a larger body of work titled .jpg. .jpg is an acknowledgment of the digital information that create what we view as an image. Beyond acknowledging this information it is reified into the physical world in several different non-photographic forms. These non-photographic representations of a image’s digital information draw attention to the shear volume of information needed to create these image files.

jərˈmān: One Quick Memory, Jonathan Johnson

jərˈmān took a bit of a break over the summer, but we're kicking off the fall with a great video piece. If you're unfamiliar with jərˈmān, it's the new media series here at Cutbank. For more information and a link to our back catalog, get on over here. For September, we've got a video by Jonathan Jonson - "One Quick Memory". Find a statement by the artist below.

I am interested in new meanings and formal relationships that come to the surface when sound and image from various sources are re-contextualized. I consider Internet, personal, found and archival images as latent records that reveal the comedy, geography and drama of our social lives.

One Quick Memory montages found images and sound to create a subjective recollection of a road trip nightmare in the tradition of Freudian inspired “dream movies”.

jərˈmān: "Doors of Nothingness" by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

Welcome to the June edition of jərˈmān. This month we have a great piece of sound/text interaction. Text finds itself talking about sound; sound finds itself acting as a text of the surroundings. Below, find a brief statement by the artist, a link to the complete project, and the featured piece. If you're new to jərˈmān, find all past pieces here.

Doors of Nothingness

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

Doors of Nothingness is a project to frame temporal thoughts that emerge from being within certain immersive but evanescent auditory situations. Essentially personal in nature, these texts refer to the pervasive interaction that happens between constantly migrating man and his ephemeral sonic environment in a context-driven approach. A corresponding collection of texts and audio files are the primary outcome of the project. What follows is a selection from the ongoing series. Link to the project

For more information on Budhaditya Chattopadhyay please visit his website

4.

The ears are open to the slightest movement in the nature of things. This hyper-alertedness captures part of my attention; I start to belong to the events happening around me; I become more fragmented, and the essence of myself becomes transitory; I exist only with the keyboard pressing each alphabet in a certain frequency in another cubicle detached from mine but connected through the corridor of a passage; I exist only to the slamming of door and migratory footsteps; I exist only in the copy-machine, recurring movement of the sliding door with paper coming out of it; somebody throws a word to somebody else, and that somebody is none other than myself; the words carry gestures of alienation as I stop understanding the meaning and signification; they remain as mere sound of spoken words, fractured human voices without any audible information; the keyboard, the copy-machine, the footsteps and the voice, all of them slowly take away bits and pieces of flesh from my body; even the fragile bones disappear into the nature of things and their mighty sounding. The ears become abstraction of the listening process.

jərˈmān: "Indeterminate Hikes" by ecoarttech

This month's jərˈmān features some great eco-Situationist art in the way of an exciting new mobile phone app, "Indeterminate Hikes". We will present here a slide show of documentary images from the project and a statement by the artists. For more information on and ecoarttech, find their website here, and for more information on "Indeterminate Hikes" specifically, click here.

Project Description

Indeterminate Hikes + (IH+) is a mobile phone app that transforms everyday landscapes into sites of bio-cultural diversity and wild happenings. Generally devices of rapid communication and consumerism, smartphones are re-appropriated by IH+ as tools of environmental imagination and meditative wonder, renewing awareness of intertwining biological, cultural, and media ecologies and slowing us down at the same time.

The app works by importing the rhetoric of wilderness into virtually any place accessible by Google Maps and encouraging its users to treat these locales as spaces worthy of the attention accorded to sublime landscapes, such as canyons and gorges. This project extends from ecoarttech’s belief that ecological awareness must be based in the places that humans actually live, not just in relatively uninhabited natural spaces. We also believe it is essential that conversations about environmental sustainability and ecological management be democratized through the arts, and not only considered within a scientific context.

IH+ is currently available on Android. The iPhone version will be released in summer 2012.

How IH+ Works

IH can be performed in two ways: (1) as an interactive public event led by artist-guides (e.g., at festivals/exhibitions), or (2) as a self-guided excursion taken by a hiker equipped with an IH+-enabled smartphone. After identifying participants’ location, IH+ provides a “hiking trail” with a series of randomly designated “Scenic Vistas,” where users are: (1) asked to contemplate “spectacular” views, much as they would on a mountaintop or at a waterfall, (2) encouraged to take 30 mindful breaths or a 5-minute break, while (3) contemplating a directive, such as “Follow the path of falling water,” “Wander the caverns on the surface of the earth, “Discover humans’ primal etchings.” On city streets, where most IH+ performances take place, these directions inspire participants to slow down and notice the sublimity of seemingly anti-spectacular spaces. Rather than encountering a stereotypically breathtaking panorama, participants are confronted with the notion that “falling water” may be the trickle of water dripping into a gutter; “caverns” may include the depths of basements or skyscrapers; and “primitive etchings” may be graffiti. Thus the ecological wonder usually associated with “natural” spaces, such as national parks, is re-appropriated here to renew awareness of the often-disregarded spaces in our culture that also need attention, such as alleyways, highways, and garbage dumps. IH+ hikers take away from our performances a sense that they see the world anew; they have treated the usually mundane act of walking through their home-city as wilderness excursion.

About ecoarttech

We, Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint, founded ecoarttech in 2005 to explore environmental issues and convergent media from an interdisciplinary perspective. Leila earned her PhD in literature from Columbia University in 2009 and was Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities at Wellesley College in 2010-2011. Cary is Assistant Professor of Digital Art at University of Rochester and has created new media art for over twenty years. His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, Rhizome.org at the New Museum for Contemporary Art, and Computer Fine Arts.

Our collaborative explores what it means to be a modern ecological being amidst networked environments, including biological systems, global cultural exchanges, international commerce, industrial grids, digital networks, and the world wide web. Merging primitive with emergent technologies, we investigate the overlapping terrain between “nature,” built environments, mobility, and electronic spaces. Our recent work includes commissions for the Whitney Museum of American Art, Turbulence.org, and University of North Texas and exhibitions/performances at MIT Media Lab, Smackmellon Gallery, European Media Art Festival, Exit Art Gallery, and Neuberger Museum of Art.

As former New Yorkers living upstate but with continual contact with NYC, we are intrigued by the effects of city-country relationships on the artistic imagination, especially with rural spaces becoming increasingly networked. In 2011, we will be "off-the-grid" artist-residents at Joya: Arte+Ecología, in an Eastern-Andalusian national park. We are also at work launching our own residency program in the Maine mountains where new media practitioners will be invited to make art in networked treehouses.

jərˈmān: Arlington (a sketch) by Michael Woody

Check out the latest from jərˈmān. We're happy to continue this monthly series with another amazing video piece. Please also find a statement by the artist below. If you're new to jərˈmān, check out last month's piece here. As always, we encourage you to use this space as a venue for discussion of the works presented. If you have a response to any of the pieces presented, send an e-mail to jermaincutbank@gmail.com

Arlington (a sketch) from Michael Woody on Vimeo.

Arlington is derived from the exploration of an archive that details specific facets of the lives of a small group of bikers from the late 1970s. It uses elements of the archive to understand characteristic events and people seen as extreme and marginal, and pieces together particular narratives that suggest their cultural and social values. According to what is revealed in this process, parts of the story are then shuffled, elements are obscured and emphasis is redistributed to address larger questions that explore ideas about liberation and identity.

The piece is developed as a form forward construct. That is, it is meant to reveal the general substrate of its own content and conventions. It is a piece that seems to have fidelity to specific memories and personal narrative, but works reflexively to expose the tenuous nature of history in general.

Arlington is not meant to support any empirical claims regarding the history of its characters or community exactly. In fact, it offers itself as a mediated construct that intentionally compromises such claims, providing fictions in their place, and suggests alternative story telling as a strategy for play and revelation.