When I was a kid, I tried to read Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, because I thought it would be a how-to guide for fixing motorcycles. I quickly discovered that the book contains very little practical information about bikes, and a whole lot of excruciatingly longwinded passages about Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality. The few parts I didn't skip led me to believe that Pirsig's methodology was far more complicated than was necessary. In fact, the task of assessing "Quality" can be accomplished simply by applying a few objective mathematical formulae. Let's look at an art example.

A painter becomes tired of making mediocre (we'll call that "M") work, and wants to start producing excellent ("E") work. In order to reach E, the painter must add something to M. That elusive, desirable element, "goodness," we'll refer to as "G" in our formula.

The corollary: bad art ("b") is work with even less "G" than the amount found in "M"

Practical application: Our painter takes a batch of paintings (quantity "X") to a curator. By applying the following formula, the curator can decide ("D") whether the series should be shown, ("S") or not shown ("N.")

If, however, the amount of badness, divided by the number of crappy paintings exceeds the goodness divided by the number of good paintings, then clearly the series is not worth showing, and D will result in a value of N… a decision made mathematically, not by resorting to unreliable intuition. These formulae are intended to take all the guesswork out of art evaluation, and are simple enough to be used even by people like myself, who scored a 53 in OAC algebra. (I should mention that my 53 was not really indicative of my algebraic ability, so much as an expression of Mr. Nassour's disapproval of my attitude toward his subject, which he unfairly perceived as "lacking seriousness.")

2. The Halifax Drawing Club

The Drawing Club is an informal social group for people who love to draw. Founded in 2002 by artist Rebecca Roberts, the Club early on adopted the motto, "Can't is not a word." Members of the Drawing Club have in common not only a love of drawing, but a desire to share their collaborative drawings with the world. To this end, the Drawing Club has mounted public exhibitions in Derby, England, and Canada's Maritime provinces, giving away drawings free of charge to gallery-goers and members of the public, inviting everyone to "Join the Club!"

Most recently, in early 2003 the Club participated in the exhibition Raw/Beauty, curated by Halifax artist Chris Lloyd for the Saint John Arts Centre in Saint John, New Brunswick. In an attempt to introduce itself and its work to New Brunswickers, The Drawing Club mounted a dynamic city-wide mail art campaign, sending free gifts of Club drawings in individually hand-decorated envelopes to the citizens of Saint John. Most recipients appreciated the art in silence; several phoned the Arts Centre to praise the "disgusting," "unsolicited" gifts. Later, an Arts Centre board member, mistakenly believing that a Club drawing was not appropriate to be seen by the children who attend piano recitals at the contemporary arts gallery, attempted to remove a work from the gallery. Curator Lloyd quickly sorted out this kerfuffle, and the Drawing Club declared the project a success.

Building on its momentum, in the coming year the Drawing Club plans to expand its visibility in its home city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Club members hope that their eye-catching holiday decoration of the street-level shop-windows of a local artist-run centre this past December will pave the way for similar window projects. Also in the works is a collaboration with players in Canada's newspaper industry. Daily papers, borrowed briefly from vending boxes in the wee hours of the morning, will be enhanced, embellished and interpreted by Club members, who will put their drawing skills to work turning daily newspapers into value-added products by the addition of original art to their pages.

Public projects aside, the heart of the Drawing Club is its bi-weekly meetings, egalitarian get-togethers at which concepts of "skill" and "talent" are abandoned. At Club meetings there is no such thing as a bad drawing; Drawing Club members often remind eachother, "Remember, can't is not a word!"

You can't not join the Club! For more information please contact Rebecca at drawing-club@excite.com.

3. The Kraken | Tasman Richardson

The Kraken, showing at Ne-Plus-Ultra, is one of those projects that has layers of meaning that you wouldn't be able to guess on your own. Speaking with the artist Tasman Richardson at the opening, the intricacies behind the piece began to come forth. I offered Tasman the opportunity to "expose his secrets" in the next Saturday Edition, and he took me up on the offer - TC.

The Kraken installation consists of three parts. The first being a set of hand molded ships and aeroplanes. The ships were made in very rough moulds and each additional casting would get worse. The models degrade and warp over time as a result. These represent the vessels lost in transit for various reasons but mostly related to the Bermuda Triangle and Devil's Sea off the east coast of Japan.

The video projection is a loop of complex edits made from images of people and vessels lost in the Bermuda Triangle. The images were faxed back and forth repeatedly until they were completely decimated and unrecognizable. The faxes were then scanned into a computer and numbered as video frames, 30 pages of faxing being equivalent to 1 second of video. Faxing was used as a unique dissolve treatment rather than photocopies due to the transitory nature of the fax. As information is transmitted over time and space a subtle erosion and misinterpretation occurs, becoming magnified in succession. The sounds of actual cockpit black box recordings are joined with the animated faxes to produce a range of "instruments" like a young pilot's face degrading with the sounds of screaming cockpit personnel during a crash. These linked samples are then arranged through a series of cut and paste operations much like a piano roll plays notes, a kind of video / music concrete. Supporting melodies are made using samples of waves crashing on the shore. The waves are slowed down and resampled to degrade them. This also creates a wavering sustained "note" that can be pitched up or down by adjusting the video clip speed. Many of the notes pitch bend which is especially difficult in video since a video clip can only play at a specified speed, it can't pitch bend, only shift. To do this you've got to make 5 or 6 copies of the one wave and then layer them on top of each other, each wave being 1% slower than the last. Together they look like one wave progressively slowing down and pitching down. The images of the clouds and the water from above were shot by myself in the cockpit of a single engine prop plane. All in all there are 8 layers of video playing so it's like having 8 voices of edits, an octate all running in harmony and supporting a beat. What you see is what you hear. There's no soundtrack being synchronized to. I'm not editing to an existing song, just straight cuts and then the each string of cuts is layered on top of another and set to luminance so that you can see through to the next layer.

The photos on the wall are of me. They're from every flight I took until now. A sort of chronology of my own erosion over time, over space, like the faxes and the imperfect moulds. The last two frames are blank, uncertain, hinting at the upcoming and inevitable crash that I'm so paranoid about. The images are filled with minute glitches that happen when you try and scan with a damaged usb port. Again, a reference to imperfections magnified in transit. Time and erosion, blah blah.

Seriously though that's pretty much it. I wrote this blurb that's a lot more concise and catchy to describe the installation. I'll paste that here too:

A turbulent voyage into certain oblivion at an infinite scale. The mythical hazards that await us in our passing. Faces and vessels lost at sea, faxed in relay, degrade with each imperfect transmission, each movement through space and time. Chronicled by snapshots taken in transit, the artists movement through space, one for every year and designated by flight number. Waves slowly make an irregular assent through the sound spectrum, surfacing as fine crystallized shards; the last moments collected from numerous flight recorder decks recovered from the wreckage. A morbid procession of vessels making an irregular descent, each an imperfect cast of an imperfect model.

4. First Day of War Contest

selected links
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp
Since the begining of the year, William Gibson has had an official website, and has been posting a blog.

http://www.runme.org/project/+mariobattle/
Myfawny Ashmore deconstructed a video game. It requires you to have a NES emulator

http://jennifermcmackon.com
Thrill Rides: an on-going series of videos. the series has already started, but it is worth repeat visits.

submitted links
http://www.swappingtons.com
swop CDs postcards videos dvds w/ other users. It's free to sign up - the only costs are for shipping things. The postage might be high for books, but CDs aren't that bad. It evens out, because people will pay to ship you stuff that you want.it works on a point system, so if you sign up, say that you were referred by janii (cause I get points). then, If you refer the site to others who sign up, you get points, etc (JD)

Dear Ms Abbot,

I'm very sorry about letting my friends smoke in the visitors apartment. There is no excuse for that, especially with that big sign on the door. I guess we should all be pretty worried about fires these days. As for the rest, well, I'm awfully sorry about that too - especially the bathroom - I guess my quick look around wasn't thorough enough - I would certainly have never left a mess of that nature for someone else to clean up if I had known it was there. That just wasn't something I would have expected any of the nice young professionals who came by to leave behind. It came as something of a surprise - the enthusiasm with which my friends threw themselves into an attempted re-enactment of the glory days before all of the really cool people moved to Toronto or got old. Especially on a Monday night. I guess we all wanted to think that we were channelling Vito Acconci and Carolee Schneeman.

I am torn in my feelings about Francis Dorsey's tea towels. I understand that they are meant to be used - but I also wish they hadn't been used so much, and I was very sad to find them such a mess in the morning. I am - I must confess - still very much on the fence about the whole life as art / art as life idea. It's a really nice idea, but it seems to leave people angry 9 times out of 10.

It is very important to me that you understand that the magazine is not at fault here. The two year relationship that I have had with them as writer and guest editor would never have led them to believe that I had any character flaws more serious than a tendency to run-on sentences. Last week's incident was an unusual case in its conflation of my private and professional activities. I can certainly understand that you would feel the need to communicate my inappropriate behaviours to the magazine's staff and board of directors, so that they may make more informed hiring decisions in the future - it was really very considerate of you to take the time to do so. I do hope though, that you won't hold them responsible for my actions - again, they could not possibly have predicted them. Just about everything about my professional track record implies that I'm a perfectly reasonable, and reasonably considerate person. They should not blamed for what was in essence a very effective deception on my part.

I hope that you will accept my apology with good will, and please contact me at home if there is anything I can do to make you feel better about this whole affair. My home phone number is 422 7299 and my email address is hollenbergs@hotmail.com.

Sincerely,

Art leads to competitive situations that acquire the artist to gain a competitive edge. This can force the artist to move out of the local, whether that be traveling, leaving their place of practice, or crossing disciplines to bring new information into their work, and therefore making them more competitive in the local scene because local styles develop in the appropriation of broader contexts. Trust us on this one. :ic: