TRIADIC DREAMS: A Conversation With Three Voices.
By
Donald Brackett
“Architecture is frozen music…” Goethe
Back in the sixties, David Crosby penned a telling song about breaking all the rules of relationships by attempting to have a three-way affair and wondering why it couldn’t work just as easily as the traditional format, assuming everyone involved was in agreement. “But I don’t really see, why can’t we go on as three. So you see what we can do, is to try something new, if you’re crazy to, why can’t we go on as three?” He went on to defy his community’s boundaries, which told him that “you can’t do that, it breaks all the rules, that you learned in school.”
But defying boundaries is the manner in which most innovations occur, and nowhere is that elemental fact more clearly and concisely expressed than in the fascinating multimedia works of Dimitri Papatheodorou, and in his own three way affair with mediums that most people assume are distinctly separate: visual art, architectural design and musical composition.
Mr. Papatheodorou (a beautiful Greek name that is easier to read than it is to say) not only actively works as a creative artist in the three mediums of paint, sound and structure, he also manages to explore three distinct stylistic languages or vernaculars within each of those same mediums. That makes three triads, each one revolving around the other and affecting its own orbit.
In painting: an abstract image, a hyper-real interior, a hybrid tree-like object. In building: a private residence, an institutional site, a public space.
In music: a raw love song, a quirky dance score, a piece of musique-concrete. The Greek god Janus has nothing on this contemporary artist, who in true polymath form turns his attention to the medium which can best express a particular idea at a particular time.
If that strikes you as incongruous, perhaps the easiest way to adapt to such a degree of diversity is to imagine yourself sitting in a certain building, looking at a certain painting, while listening to certain music. Now imagine the same thing three times. His songs are small monuments to short breath, little buildings one can live in for the duration, while hearing the colours emerge from insights which are very easy to call sonic paintings for the ears.
Like most of the best singer-songwriters, Papatheodorou is a dark mirror held up before our shared feelings and fears, singing of longing and loss, in a uniquely breathy voice poised somewhere between Serge Gainsbourg, Nick Drake and Van Dyke Parks on the vocal-emotional scale.
“Figurine”, one of his best and quirkiest compositions, is a good example of his modus operandi. Like many of his more picturesque songs, it utilizes a sonic technique that also calls to mind the solo work of Syd Barrett, the self-produced Jack White, and perhaps most surprisingly, the relatively unknown experimental work of Paul McCartney.
In it, he seems to celebrate, not necessarily the person he loves, but the fact that he loves that person, in an elliptical poetic style that often recalls the crystallized word-gestures of the great German poet and master of emotional minimalism, Paul Celan, if he had ever performed with Simon and Garfunkel. Such are the triadic dreams of Dimitri.
“Her origin unknown, I cut the groove to meet her, she sits on a window sill, holds the glass, she shatters, its figurine. When the wind meets the earth, what remains to share, if you and I breathe disparate air?….” Now, who among us hasn’t wondered exactly the same thing? His songs are enigmatic expressions of multiple emotions simultaneously, introspective reveries
about the vagaries of a life lived in hope, and in hope’s highest gear.
“Lovely” is simply a lovely song, and essentialist song which verges on being an instrumental, save for the ongoing breathy expression of a lover’s declaration, in which we recognize the struggle to express something inexplicable, which is surely the search of all real poetry. It appears we all implicitly understand that true love leaves us speechless, or should.
“Shrink” floats above the fray of emotions while at the same time asking perennial questions about the love that causes them: it has the tension of an important letter that was never sent, perhaps like Kafka’s letter to his father, never mailed, almost memorized. “If you refuse to panic, and if you decline to respond, it deflates and shrinks you away…”
“Space” is a gritty little groove that lays the foundation for some majestic musing by the musician’s 9 year old nephew, in a natural voice that weirdly mimics his uncle’s own preference for delivering his songs in a gentle tone that makes us lean forward, towards our own feelings as they float away before our eyes.
In “These Dreams” there is a gentle psychedelia wafting in the disparate air: “The seeds of love fall from above like empty thoughts, they resonate in the story of our lives, sometimes I think we’re destined, to forget these dreams belong to me and you…” An ironic reference perhaps to the alluring fact that once a dream is sung aloud, it belongs to everyone else but us.
“Here Comes the Big Sky” is like a psychological photograph with a soft and diffused focus: “When the last summer rose is earth enclosed and dark light comes too soon, here comes the big sky, and the shadows deepen with every breath, I know we’ll talk of love and many other things, here comes the big sky…” Like any other intriguing work of art, it proves impossible to explain how we understand its meaning, yet our right brain nods in agreement while our left brain scratches itself in wonderment.
“Rain” is a strange little trip, not down memory lane but down a lane that has yet to happen at all. For those of us who still enjoy believing that thunder is caused by people in the sky moving their furniture around, and I am one of them, this song answers any question I may ever have about abandonment, yet not in a way that can be quantified in any concrete manner. “To know that you’ve heard, to feel that you’ve made, a field-day of words, still they fall at your feet…..the rubber bursts and shattered dreams fall when clouds burst, sing yeah.”
“Sometimes I Cry” has something of the wistful air of the beached Brian Wilson, attempting to celebrate the simple things in life that can barely be described. “Until this day sometimes I cry...falling in love, falling in love, until this day, sometimes I cry, falling in love, until this day, sometimes I cry….” The paradox of fulfillment and loss both fuel this ode to release.
“Eating The World Raw” takes us to quite a different continent of feelings indeed. Bluesy and existential, it announces, “I’ve been bitten and scratched and rendered flat”, once again bringing to surface certain feelings perhaps that only fathers and sons can fully comprehend. “I fell hard one winter night, came along and swept away all my light, came along and swept away all sight, falling’s not bad when it happens like that….eating the world raw, I see the beauty and draw….” In other words, mail that letter now.
Strangely enough, songs which at first glance (the quiet glance of our unsuspecting ears), seem so hyper-personal can at some point also become utterly universal, if that is, the well of the singer-songwriter runs deep enough down into the darkness of the human heart, down where the invisible underground rivers of sadness and joy both overflow their banks at once.
But overflowing our emotional rivers and cascading over the personal sandbags we all use to keep our rivers in place, is of course the primary function of these songs and this music. Your sandbags, they seem to intimate, can never protect you from the ocean with you.
“Jackie O”, a miniature psycho-drama memorializing a permanent moment of public loss, also feels superbly like a soundtrack song to a Douglas Sirk film, Imitation of Life or Written on the Wind perhaps, in which tragedy and comedy are inextricably linked by our own actions.
But they are linked far down below our conscious and complaining minds, where all distinctions disappear. “She is headed for a fall, there is nothing she can do, the motorcade moves on…..and the world cries in demand, how will she go on to stand alone without her man?…..ancient waters heal the wound….God has found a Greek tycoon, now it’s Maria’s sad toss, to face the music she’s lost…”
Very few of our elegiac feelings around the events on the grassy-knoll tend to take into account the equally sad and tragic life of the great opera singer Maria Callas. Yet her own drama shows us how often the domino effect of chance events can ripple outward across generations, and how connected two widows might be: one losing a president, one losing a tycoon, both becoming major icons of loss in the process.
“Overture” does wonderfully what overtures are supposed to do, whether it is to start up our emotional engines in the beginning or to clutch them down restfully near the end. It is either a big introduction, a big intermission, or a big grand finale, though it leaves us knowing that there is more to come. It is the songwriter’s equivalent to an operatic staircase, leading up, up, up, and over the top. It builds to an intense climax and eventually fades away in a soft lingering note, not unlike the lives we all lead and the songs that illuminate those lives with a vigilant light that keeps watch.
This whole song cycle, each one separate and unique but also tied like pearls on a necklace, might very well be suggesting that it is all of our fates to face the music, not of what we have now but of what we have lost.
But that very same music then helps us celebrate where we are and what we have: these songs imply that if we are brave enough to also celebrate our losses we will then be lucky enough to celebrate our rewards.
Usually, the natural process known as dinergy is a binary one that feels somewhat dialectical: a new thing is being created by the collision of two existing things or conditions. However in the case of this artist, designer and musician we have an active tripolarity at work, with surprising results.
Realizing that I’ve both watched the pictures in his songs and lived in the temporary buildings of his music, now makes me want to listen to his paintings. His personal triad in action is practically an open invitation to synaesthesia: to hear the colour, see the sound and touch the physical poetry.
Morton Feldman was another sixties composer who once explored the realm of what he called triadic memories, suggesting through his elegant and somber tone clusters that they were events that had happened, or might have happened.
In the case of Dimitri Papatheodorou, his emotional clusters of song are more like suggestions that something, or someone, is possible, even if that something might be inexplicable, or that someone might be far away.
Each song is an event waiting to happen. Each song is a dream that becomes a memory, once we have lived inside it long enough to notice the habitat of the human heart.
Donald Brackett
Toronto-based art and music critic.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
The Mycelium Research Project
By Donald Brackett
“The computer and the internet have changed everything, and we are still attempting to cope with and make sense of their effects in the hope of profiting from technology’s still untapped potential. In an age of accelerated obsolescence, the only skill that can help one survive the technological turbulence is an ability to adapt to the emerging landscape so quickly that it borders on precognition.”
Jim Kinney, Professor, Graphic Design
School of Design
George Brown College
What are teaching and learning in the internet age? How must we adapt to keep up with the ever-accelerating rate of student access to alternative modes and methods of gathering information? These are the core questions at the heart of the Mycelium Research Project. Co-Coordinated by Professor Jim Kinney, IWB Director Luigi Ferrara, and Professor Monica Contreras, the project is a unique experiment in attempting to re-design a fast moving vehicle while still operating it safely at top speed, and all within the necessary parameters. The vehicle in question is the very educational format itself for teaching design in the 21rst century, and the dazzling new electronic means of enhancing its delivery.
The research objective is to creatively adapt and educationally evolve along with the rapidly changing information environment around us, rather than run the risk of technology generously offering us fantastic new opportunities for reaching students but our own tentative grasp of the new systems not being firm enough to fully capitalize on them.
Mycelium addresses that grasp and is actively involved in exploring applications of current and future technologies to the way in which design knowledge is shared and disseminated. The message may remain the same, but the medium is bound to change dramatically. In fact, the medium has probably already changed from what it was at the beginning of this sentence.
Simply put, mycelium refers to the capacity for mushrooms to multiply and yet remain linked by a curious kind of continuum: the mass of tubular branched filaments which at a certain stage produce spores, directly or through special fruiting bodies. It is through the mycelium that a fungus absorbs nutrients from its environment.
Mycelium is vital in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and is an important source of nutrients. Perhaps and apt metaphor for research into both the interconnections and the differences between learning information in the old analog manner and knowledge acquisition in the new digital manner. In short, it could be called developing a kind of pre-cognitive wisdom, one based on strategic expectation and informed intuition, the kind that can help students to teach themselves simply by assisting them in creating and sharing a critical mass of knowledge at a personal and peer level.
Personally, I’ve always been a big fan of pre-cognition. Or at least getting as close to it as possible through the diligent application of the skill of anticipating all future events related to a given project and to finding the easiest and most effortless ways of meeting them.
That’s the first image that comes to mind when imagining how to teach students what they already know, but don’t know that they know. I’m reminded once again of my Game Design Students, who teach me digital game history while I teach them the history of something called English. It seems counter-intuitive but is nonetheless true: they will teach me how to teach them.
At its heart, the Mycelium Project is special because of its implications: young people can learn to adapt so rapidly to technological change that they can teach us the best way to teach them, if we can learn to follow their lead. This means having curriculae that can morph at a moment’s notice in a lateral direction to suit some new system or program. Naturally this implies a seeming reversal of the traditional mentorship role, but it also supposes a wholly new advantage: young people often know what’s happening first in today’s hyper-electronic domains, and therefore they themselves might be ideally placed to help us find the new knowledge-base paradigm with which to best deliver it.
For Jim Kinney, this means being prepared to embrace a new school of thought:
“One where we are all students and teachers and work in a collective fashion to cope with and eventually thrive in this technologically induced maelstrom called popular culture. In this new classroom the traditional boundaries and categories are broken down and re-visioned as a collective cultivation of experiential knowledge sharing that may one day lead to students themselves generating cutting edge applications. Students have latent abilities and prior knowledge and a willingness to experiment with a myriad of new environments and tools and, thus, they constitute a critical resource for both learning and teaching.”
This approach suggests new notions of mastery in a world where Kinney says the tools and techniques of one’s craft change virtually every day and where embracing this new notion of mastery is logically consistent with an ever-changing object of inquiry. Especially when that object involves the very forces shaping one's discipline.
Kinney continues: “We need to facilitate rich, deep collegial interaction by providing the infrastructure and guidance for building and maintaining a resource that will help put our students at the forefront of design applications testing, support and development. I see a day when our students will work with leading technology companies to build, test and support important tools for the designer of tomorrow. This ‘perpetual beta lab” will be a research centre that encourages an entrepreneurial model and puts Toronto at the forefront of the emerging economy.”
It is clearly an experiment in self-directed learning which has great practical value in a global marketplace perpetually in need of new technical interpreters of the electronic message. “The collaboration with Apple last year brought this new model to fruition. First year design students in January and May of 2009 were handed over the controls of a podcast and wiki server to document and structure their experiences in learning through knowledge sharing. This resource, dubbed "The Knowledge Garden" provided the digital equivalent of 40 acres and a mule to the newly emancipated student. They were free to take this resource in any direction that they saw fit.”
The many intriguing directions that resulted were further enhanced by the collaboration between the School of Design and the corporate world, benefiting both parties by real-world testing of the educational use of podcast technology and mobile media. Kinney points out that Apple’s new Podcast Technology is untested in educational markets.
“This project tested the feasibility of using the Podcast technology in design education, thereby creating workflow scenarios for its possible and eventual use in institutional settings. These workflows are envisioned as evolving schematics that will allow for a nimble and rapidly reconfigurable use of podcasts as a means for providing content modules for mobile learners. An evaluation of this technology in applied learning contexts will provide Apple with valuable data on the relative usability and utility of using Podcasts and charting this use for the educational markets of the future.
“This project will provide evaluation data for the use of evolving a service bureau model, expertise and services for markets in education, broadcast/media, and arts/entertainment; the use of collaborative content creation for developing solution expertise construction for design and consultation services; developing and marketing all of the skills above to offer an integrated consultancy to advise clients on how to build accessible mutli-format digital content repositories.”
Long-term research interests will include: 1.RISK-based learning (Rapid Integration of Skills & Knowledge) that reduces the lag phase between software release and instruction; 2. Providing qualitative testing of graphic arts software at the beta phase of development for industry partners; 3. Publishing and distributing state-of-the-art learning objects; 4. Creating and evolving an institutional archive of learning modules; and
5. Empowering students with the ability to build and maintain the capacity to develop a peer-based knowledge base.
In a future posting we will focus on the various practical outputs from this project: blogged chronicles of anecdotes relating to team processes and podcast development; models for collaborative content authoring such as blog/podcast media, workflow structure & dynamics flowcharts and diagrams; and knowledge transfer models for project documentation and expertise sharing. Like most spores, this one moves fast.
By Donald Brackett
“The computer and the internet have changed everything, and we are still attempting to cope with and make sense of their effects in the hope of profiting from technology’s still untapped potential. In an age of accelerated obsolescence, the only skill that can help one survive the technological turbulence is an ability to adapt to the emerging landscape so quickly that it borders on precognition.”
Jim Kinney, Professor, Graphic Design
School of Design
George Brown College
What are teaching and learning in the internet age? How must we adapt to keep up with the ever-accelerating rate of student access to alternative modes and methods of gathering information? These are the core questions at the heart of the Mycelium Research Project. Co-Coordinated by Professor Jim Kinney, IWB Director Luigi Ferrara, and Professor Monica Contreras, the project is a unique experiment in attempting to re-design a fast moving vehicle while still operating it safely at top speed, and all within the necessary parameters. The vehicle in question is the very educational format itself for teaching design in the 21rst century, and the dazzling new electronic means of enhancing its delivery.
The research objective is to creatively adapt and educationally evolve along with the rapidly changing information environment around us, rather than run the risk of technology generously offering us fantastic new opportunities for reaching students but our own tentative grasp of the new systems not being firm enough to fully capitalize on them.
Mycelium addresses that grasp and is actively involved in exploring applications of current and future technologies to the way in which design knowledge is shared and disseminated. The message may remain the same, but the medium is bound to change dramatically. In fact, the medium has probably already changed from what it was at the beginning of this sentence.
Simply put, mycelium refers to the capacity for mushrooms to multiply and yet remain linked by a curious kind of continuum: the mass of tubular branched filaments which at a certain stage produce spores, directly or through special fruiting bodies. It is through the mycelium that a fungus absorbs nutrients from its environment.
Mycelium is vital in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and is an important source of nutrients. Perhaps and apt metaphor for research into both the interconnections and the differences between learning information in the old analog manner and knowledge acquisition in the new digital manner. In short, it could be called developing a kind of pre-cognitive wisdom, one based on strategic expectation and informed intuition, the kind that can help students to teach themselves simply by assisting them in creating and sharing a critical mass of knowledge at a personal and peer level.
Personally, I’ve always been a big fan of pre-cognition. Or at least getting as close to it as possible through the diligent application of the skill of anticipating all future events related to a given project and to finding the easiest and most effortless ways of meeting them.
That’s the first image that comes to mind when imagining how to teach students what they already know, but don’t know that they know. I’m reminded once again of my Game Design Students, who teach me digital game history while I teach them the history of something called English. It seems counter-intuitive but is nonetheless true: they will teach me how to teach them.
At its heart, the Mycelium Project is special because of its implications: young people can learn to adapt so rapidly to technological change that they can teach us the best way to teach them, if we can learn to follow their lead. This means having curriculae that can morph at a moment’s notice in a lateral direction to suit some new system or program. Naturally this implies a seeming reversal of the traditional mentorship role, but it also supposes a wholly new advantage: young people often know what’s happening first in today’s hyper-electronic domains, and therefore they themselves might be ideally placed to help us find the new knowledge-base paradigm with which to best deliver it.
For Jim Kinney, this means being prepared to embrace a new school of thought:
“One where we are all students and teachers and work in a collective fashion to cope with and eventually thrive in this technologically induced maelstrom called popular culture. In this new classroom the traditional boundaries and categories are broken down and re-visioned as a collective cultivation of experiential knowledge sharing that may one day lead to students themselves generating cutting edge applications. Students have latent abilities and prior knowledge and a willingness to experiment with a myriad of new environments and tools and, thus, they constitute a critical resource for both learning and teaching.”
This approach suggests new notions of mastery in a world where Kinney says the tools and techniques of one’s craft change virtually every day and where embracing this new notion of mastery is logically consistent with an ever-changing object of inquiry. Especially when that object involves the very forces shaping one's discipline.
Kinney continues: “We need to facilitate rich, deep collegial interaction by providing the infrastructure and guidance for building and maintaining a resource that will help put our students at the forefront of design applications testing, support and development. I see a day when our students will work with leading technology companies to build, test and support important tools for the designer of tomorrow. This ‘perpetual beta lab” will be a research centre that encourages an entrepreneurial model and puts Toronto at the forefront of the emerging economy.”
It is clearly an experiment in self-directed learning which has great practical value in a global marketplace perpetually in need of new technical interpreters of the electronic message. “The collaboration with Apple last year brought this new model to fruition. First year design students in January and May of 2009 were handed over the controls of a podcast and wiki server to document and structure their experiences in learning through knowledge sharing. This resource, dubbed "The Knowledge Garden" provided the digital equivalent of 40 acres and a mule to the newly emancipated student. They were free to take this resource in any direction that they saw fit.”
The many intriguing directions that resulted were further enhanced by the collaboration between the School of Design and the corporate world, benefiting both parties by real-world testing of the educational use of podcast technology and mobile media. Kinney points out that Apple’s new Podcast Technology is untested in educational markets.
“This project tested the feasibility of using the Podcast technology in design education, thereby creating workflow scenarios for its possible and eventual use in institutional settings. These workflows are envisioned as evolving schematics that will allow for a nimble and rapidly reconfigurable use of podcasts as a means for providing content modules for mobile learners. An evaluation of this technology in applied learning contexts will provide Apple with valuable data on the relative usability and utility of using Podcasts and charting this use for the educational markets of the future.
“This project will provide evaluation data for the use of evolving a service bureau model, expertise and services for markets in education, broadcast/media, and arts/entertainment; the use of collaborative content creation for developing solution expertise construction for design and consultation services; developing and marketing all of the skills above to offer an integrated consultancy to advise clients on how to build accessible mutli-format digital content repositories.”
Long-term research interests will include: 1.RISK-based learning (Rapid Integration of Skills & Knowledge) that reduces the lag phase between software release and instruction; 2. Providing qualitative testing of graphic arts software at the beta phase of development for industry partners; 3. Publishing and distributing state-of-the-art learning objects; 4. Creating and evolving an institutional archive of learning modules; and
5. Empowering students with the ability to build and maintain the capacity to develop a peer-based knowledge base.
In a future posting we will focus on the various practical outputs from this project: blogged chronicles of anecdotes relating to team processes and podcast development; models for collaborative content authoring such as blog/podcast media, workflow structure & dynamics flowcharts and diagrams; and knowledge transfer models for project documentation and expertise sharing. Like most spores, this one moves fast.
MORE THAN JUST A GAME
By Donald Brackett
“Video games are the art form for the digital age.
They combine a variety of disciplines and skills
to transmit the same emotional responses
provided by paintings, photography and film.”
Jean-Paul Amore, Program Coordinator,
Game Development/Game Design
As one accustomed to writing what used to be called art criticism, it has taken me a little while to warm up to video games as a contemporary form of artistic expression, even long after accepting video itself as a serious and valid medium with which to express aesthetic ideas and social issues.
But once I saw this digital medium more accurately, not as an alternative to but as an extension of visual art’s core themes through the technological marriage of television and computers, I realized that there is much more to video games than meets the eye. Mechanical bride indeed, Dr. McLuhan, once again you have been proven correct!
Video games are serious business. I know, since every time I teach my English Communications course to the game design students, I immediately realize that I’m talking to the future tense, and sometimes it can be. I’m speaking to beings from a rapidly transforming age who seem to have absorbed all the art-forms that preceded them and found a novel way to express age old ideas and feelings in a new and utterly compelling manner. My agreement with them is a simple one, I’ll teach you about English communications and you teach me about video games. So far, they have certainly delivered on their side of the bargain. Especially since one of my assignments allowed them to write a review essay on the latest video game release of their choice.
What began as somewhat of a novelty in the 1970’s has expanded from a niche market to the entertainment mainstream and has even influenced other forms of art making along the way, and will generate upwards of 12 billion dollars this year. Serious business, but not only has the format become wildly successful across many demographics, the gaming industry has also been responsible for many advancements in the personal computer domain itself: sound cards, graphics cards, 3d graphic accelerators, CD Rom and DVD Rom drives being just a few of the innovations that gaming bestowed on the rest of the “straight” computer world.
Ben Sawyer of Digitalmill has observed that “The game industry chain is made up of six connected but distinctive layers: the capital and publishing layer, involved in paying for development of new titles and seeking returns through licensing of the titles; the product and talent layer, involving developers, designers and artists, who may be working under individual contracts or as part of in-house development teams; the production and tools layer, which generates content production tools, game development middleware, customizable game engines, and production management tools; the distribution layer of the publishing industry, involved in generating and marketing catalogs of games for retail and online distribution; the hardware layer, with the providers of the underlying platform generally being console-based; and finally, the end-users layer, involving the players of the games themselves.”
This industry has evolved light years away from the day in 1958 when a nuclear scientist named William Higinbotham invented a “game” called Tennis for Two, something he originally intended strictly as an electrical experiment. Even earlier on in 1948, during a time which now seems almost medieval by comparison to today’s stunning content, Thomas Goldsmith and Estle Mann created perhaps the oldest known game, one with the fantastic title of Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device.
The complexity and subtlety of the contemporary gaming industry are well understood and outlined by Program Coordinator JP Amore: “The Game Development and Game Design programs are a community of faculty, students and industry looking to inspire creative solutions, unique designs and artistic expression to the new wave of video games. It takes people of vision to seize this challenge and opportunity. Expanding beyond the idea that games are entertainment, we investigate meaningful ways to design and develop games that allow users to explore, learn, empathize, and experience development in new ways. Our programs expose and explore theory and application across multiple creative and technical disciplines.”
Indeed, the layers of George Brown College’s Gaming department are just as comprehensive as the industry itself, since it has been created to simulate the actual field and to generate the professional designers who will make the next astonishing leaps forward in this supersonic collision of art and business. As Amore outlines it: in Game Development, students develop both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional artistic abilities by learning concept art, sprite and pixel art, modeling, texturing, animation and level design. Taught by faculty with industry experience and mentored by local game industry leaders, students will eventually develop games for commercial, educational and even more “serious” purposes.
Here, students have the unique opportunity to develop commercial quality games in a video game studio-simulated environment, at times developed with industry partners and professional game programmers. It is anticipated that graduates of the Game Development program will find employment in the game industry at an entry-level position. Prior to graduation, each student will assemble a portfolio/demo of their creative work demonstrating their ability in game development and highlighting their chosen area of specialization.
In the related Game Design program, students develop their production and design abilities in management scenarios by learning design documentation, milestone and pipeline scheduling, game design theory and psychology. The Advanced Digital Design program responds to a growing need within the design industry for a new talent and skill-set - one that crosses the traditional discipline boundaries of advertising, industrial and graphic design and new media design. This program is designed to give power back to designers, teaching them the latest real-time interactive tools and technologies. With the integration of these technologies into public and commercial settings, such as museums and retail environments, as well as education and medical sectors, designers need to be armed with key knowledge of interface design, information visualization and virtual spaces. They have a mission to create friendly systems and interfaces that dramatically improve the lives of consumers and sellers alike.
One famous cultural theorist, Angela Ndalianis, has even bravely compared the video game industry to the complex Baroque art of the seventeenth century, with its equivalent fascination for opulent spectacle. This was definitely the point when I realized that perhaps we should all pay more attention to what these young people are saying and doing with their creative consoles.
I think it was the great German comedian Nietzsche who once remarked that the best students always end up teaching their teachers, and this is precisely what has occurred in the case of my English Communications students. They have given me much food for thought as I navigate the new forms of communication at play in today’s hyper-accelerated cultural arena. They have also alerted me to the fact that the line between science fiction and science fact is often just a keystroke away. Can the realm of Star Trek’s virtual holo-deck really be that far away?
DONALD BRACKETT
Professor Donald Brackett is a culture critic specializing in the history, theory and practice of art, design, and architecture. He currently teaches art history and contemporary art issues at Centennial College, as well as design issues/history for George Brown College, and Art History for The Life Institute of Ryerson University.
He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Arts Dealers Association of Canada and the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. Brackett is a well known art historian, critic and curator, who was for twelve years was the art critic for CJRT FM, Ryerson’s professional radio station at the time. The author of many essays, articles and monographs on art and design history and contemporary culture, he is also the author of two recently published books on the subject of creative collaboration in the arts.
By Donald Brackett
“Video games are the art form for the digital age.
They combine a variety of disciplines and skills
to transmit the same emotional responses
provided by paintings, photography and film.”
Jean-Paul Amore, Program Coordinator,
Game Development/Game Design
As one accustomed to writing what used to be called art criticism, it has taken me a little while to warm up to video games as a contemporary form of artistic expression, even long after accepting video itself as a serious and valid medium with which to express aesthetic ideas and social issues.
But once I saw this digital medium more accurately, not as an alternative to but as an extension of visual art’s core themes through the technological marriage of television and computers, I realized that there is much more to video games than meets the eye. Mechanical bride indeed, Dr. McLuhan, once again you have been proven correct!
Video games are serious business. I know, since every time I teach my English Communications course to the game design students, I immediately realize that I’m talking to the future tense, and sometimes it can be. I’m speaking to beings from a rapidly transforming age who seem to have absorbed all the art-forms that preceded them and found a novel way to express age old ideas and feelings in a new and utterly compelling manner. My agreement with them is a simple one, I’ll teach you about English communications and you teach me about video games. So far, they have certainly delivered on their side of the bargain. Especially since one of my assignments allowed them to write a review essay on the latest video game release of their choice.
What began as somewhat of a novelty in the 1970’s has expanded from a niche market to the entertainment mainstream and has even influenced other forms of art making along the way, and will generate upwards of 12 billion dollars this year. Serious business, but not only has the format become wildly successful across many demographics, the gaming industry has also been responsible for many advancements in the personal computer domain itself: sound cards, graphics cards, 3d graphic accelerators, CD Rom and DVD Rom drives being just a few of the innovations that gaming bestowed on the rest of the “straight” computer world.
Ben Sawyer of Digitalmill has observed that “The game industry chain is made up of six connected but distinctive layers: the capital and publishing layer, involved in paying for development of new titles and seeking returns through licensing of the titles; the product and talent layer, involving developers, designers and artists, who may be working under individual contracts or as part of in-house development teams; the production and tools layer, which generates content production tools, game development middleware, customizable game engines, and production management tools; the distribution layer of the publishing industry, involved in generating and marketing catalogs of games for retail and online distribution; the hardware layer, with the providers of the underlying platform generally being console-based; and finally, the end-users layer, involving the players of the games themselves.”
This industry has evolved light years away from the day in 1958 when a nuclear scientist named William Higinbotham invented a “game” called Tennis for Two, something he originally intended strictly as an electrical experiment. Even earlier on in 1948, during a time which now seems almost medieval by comparison to today’s stunning content, Thomas Goldsmith and Estle Mann created perhaps the oldest known game, one with the fantastic title of Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device.
The complexity and subtlety of the contemporary gaming industry are well understood and outlined by Program Coordinator JP Amore: “The Game Development and Game Design programs are a community of faculty, students and industry looking to inspire creative solutions, unique designs and artistic expression to the new wave of video games. It takes people of vision to seize this challenge and opportunity. Expanding beyond the idea that games are entertainment, we investigate meaningful ways to design and develop games that allow users to explore, learn, empathize, and experience development in new ways. Our programs expose and explore theory and application across multiple creative and technical disciplines.”
Indeed, the layers of George Brown College’s Gaming department are just as comprehensive as the industry itself, since it has been created to simulate the actual field and to generate the professional designers who will make the next astonishing leaps forward in this supersonic collision of art and business. As Amore outlines it: in Game Development, students develop both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional artistic abilities by learning concept art, sprite and pixel art, modeling, texturing, animation and level design. Taught by faculty with industry experience and mentored by local game industry leaders, students will eventually develop games for commercial, educational and even more “serious” purposes.
Here, students have the unique opportunity to develop commercial quality games in a video game studio-simulated environment, at times developed with industry partners and professional game programmers. It is anticipated that graduates of the Game Development program will find employment in the game industry at an entry-level position. Prior to graduation, each student will assemble a portfolio/demo of their creative work demonstrating their ability in game development and highlighting their chosen area of specialization.
In the related Game Design program, students develop their production and design abilities in management scenarios by learning design documentation, milestone and pipeline scheduling, game design theory and psychology. The Advanced Digital Design program responds to a growing need within the design industry for a new talent and skill-set - one that crosses the traditional discipline boundaries of advertising, industrial and graphic design and new media design. This program is designed to give power back to designers, teaching them the latest real-time interactive tools and technologies. With the integration of these technologies into public and commercial settings, such as museums and retail environments, as well as education and medical sectors, designers need to be armed with key knowledge of interface design, information visualization and virtual spaces. They have a mission to create friendly systems and interfaces that dramatically improve the lives of consumers and sellers alike.
One famous cultural theorist, Angela Ndalianis, has even bravely compared the video game industry to the complex Baroque art of the seventeenth century, with its equivalent fascination for opulent spectacle. This was definitely the point when I realized that perhaps we should all pay more attention to what these young people are saying and doing with their creative consoles.
I think it was the great German comedian Nietzsche who once remarked that the best students always end up teaching their teachers, and this is precisely what has occurred in the case of my English Communications students. They have given me much food for thought as I navigate the new forms of communication at play in today’s hyper-accelerated cultural arena. They have also alerted me to the fact that the line between science fiction and science fact is often just a keystroke away. Can the realm of Star Trek’s virtual holo-deck really be that far away?
DONALD BRACKETT
Professor Donald Brackett is a culture critic specializing in the history, theory and practice of art, design, and architecture. He currently teaches art history and contemporary art issues at Centennial College, as well as design issues/history for George Brown College, and Art History for The Life Institute of Ryerson University.
He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Arts Dealers Association of Canada and the Ontario Association of Art Galleries. Brackett is a well known art historian, critic and curator, who was for twelve years was the art critic for CJRT FM, Ryerson’s professional radio station at the time. The author of many essays, articles and monographs on art and design history and contemporary culture, he is also the author of two recently published books on the subject of creative collaboration in the arts.
The Pursuit of Perfection in Paint:
Recent Work of Malcolm Rains
by Donald Brackett
“Beauty is the promise of happiness.”
Stendhal, 1837
There is a stubborn beauty at work in the paintings of Malcolm Rains. I’ve watched it operate for nearly thirty years. It is stubborn in the best possible sense, though persistent might be a better word. It is cunning. It is serious. But it is also paradoxical and whimsical. And it plays Rains like a violin, audaciously using him as a living tool to achieve its own ends. Considering that these marvelous paintings are the end result, it is both a benevolent haunting and an elegant partnership.
It often seems that painting is a fugitive in the arts of the twenty-first century, not quite on the run but definitely being stalked by its own digital shadows. It also certainly appears that painting itself has become a fugitive from the burden its own long history, but that history is largely a parade of one liberation after another anyway, until each subsequent purpose or function of painting was replaced by an ever expanding array of new visual possibilities for those terms. Including not having any purpose or function other than to provide a pure viewing experience.
From my perspective at this moment in our shared cultural history, and with the wisdom of hindsight, it now feels utterly obvious that as soon as the first camera shutters starting clicking in the 1840’s, it was already then that the paintings of Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Yves Klein, Robert Ryman, or others of the same sensibility, became almost inevitable. As did the later visions of Yves Gaucher, Guido Molinari and Ron Martin, a list to which I would also add the name of Malcolm Rains, for reasons that become as clear as his recent two groups of paintings, the “Sunyata” and the “Olympus” series.
The shared spiritual approach of all these artists, the ritual totality of pure paint as a retinal bath, is the logical consequence of the illuminating and convulsive liberation of painting from the classical mimetic task which spontaneously occurred in the Impressionist artists concurrent with the camera’s arrival, and which rapidly rose to complete prominence in the heroic scale of modernism in general.
But ironically, this beauty that persists throughout Rains’ oeuvre is not in any way hiding from modernism, in fact in a quirky sense, it represents the height of modernism itself, in terms of its rigorous self-analysis and determined exploration of the limits of the limitless. In fact, the quiet and under-explored zone where Malevich converses with Morandi is a place that Rains has been quite comfortable working in for years.
Equally elusive and fugitive these days is the former artistic affinity for and allegiance to beauty as a viable aesthetic option for self-expression. As early as the 18th century in fact, beauty was already being denigrated in favour of the sublime, a state of mind or condition of the spirit where admiration for the visual appeals of proportion and harmony was replaced by a supposedly more rigorous appreciation for the awesome powers of nature hidden behind and above the beauty.
But the sublime is, after all, only the result of turning up the volume on the beauty-dial until it overwhelms the senses of the viewer, and more importantly, their sensibility, thus rendering a state of palpable astonishment available to them. Access to astonishment is also the hidden purpose and function of ultimate or absolute painting, especially as practiced by Malcolm Rains; painting which aims to reveal the ongoing inter-relationships between matter, beauty, spirit, the sublime and consciousness itself. Simply put, those relationships are based on the reciprocal maintenance contract between being and nothingness: we are the dotted line on which that contract is signed. Rothko tried to document this territory, and he succeeded, but it frightened him terribly and caused a surfeit of sadness.
It may come as no surprise to viewers familiar with the poetic reflections of Malcolm Rains that they have always been beautiful, however what may surprise many are the reasons why. His long and successful career as a painter’s painter appears to contain some obvious urges to show us the real world in a pigmented vision of startling clarity, usually associated with his well known still life works, the almost fetishistic depictions of either fruit or sculptural paper forms in empty space, or the watery expanse of lake-scapes, themselves also empty.
And one of his earliest works was a series of sculptures from 1979, a plaster object which nonetheless has a highly minimal and monochrome painting incised onto its apparently empty surface. Thus this new work is a return for Rains, not a departure at all.
But the true surprise may be contained in the realization that he has always been a conceptual painter, but one who harmonizes mind and matter. He has never been an artist solely concerned with the fidelity of re-presenting organic or synthetic objects in a kind of pristinely pure environment, even though that seems to be one of his chief talents. Nonetheless, in my viewing of his work over the long distance race in which he is engaged, I have always suspected that the deceptive subject matter being depicted was not the actual content but rather only the form that the content was temporarily assuming.
At least one of his true subjects has always been and still remains the portrayal of Time, which makes consciousness possible, as conveyed by light, which makes it palpable. Otherwise it is utterly immaterial and is only accessible to us through the mirroring concepts we project toward the outside world, a theatre set which we ourselves are far more responsible for constructing than most people might suspect, even though quantum physics has been warning us for years.
Even in such masterful works as the still life series of meticulous fruit portraits, which I believe continue the ancient vanitas theme in a most dramatic manner, or the classical series of paper sculptures, which I believe are all about entropy, another form of vanitas in slow motion, or the lake-scapes, veritable diagrams of formlessness, there is a consistent theme which moves effortlessly forward and on through to his newest body of work. We are time.
But with “Sunyata”, and to a great degree the follow-up motifs in his latest “Olympus” series, there is no re-presentation here to speak of, there has been a complete merger between the form and the content. They are one, and never before has the modernist credo that form is content and content is form been so obvious and gorgeous at the same time.
These are, quite simply put, quantum paintings: depictions of open-ended moments which support any and all outward manifestations, without necessarily being attached to or limited by them.
In other words, such moments are the ground upon which any figure must appear, and out of which previously the fruit and paper rushed towards us. But look closely around the fruit and paper still life works; all around those supposed subjects is the true hidden subject, namely the void out of which they, like us, emerge. As an experiment: try noticing that when you are absent and not thinking, the pictures in the Sunyata and Olympus series are present and accounted for, but when you are present, they suddenly appear to be absent, and consequently, empty.
Electrons do the same thing when you stare at them, they shift from wave formation to particle formation. Do they do this because they are shy? No, they do it because they are us. As the French author Antoine Ste. Exupery once remarked, “What is essential is invisible to the eye and can only be seen with the heart.” With these new paintings, Rains is making a definitive declaration that such is the case. The palpable desire of these images, and of their maker, is to transcend our everyday assumptions about what the world looks like, and that desire is amplified through their purity, simplicity, and near trance-like vitality. In the end, even though the works may really be about a condition which is inherently beyond desire, they are still stunning evocations of the journey toward the desireless state: roadmaps to infinity.
For Rains, this quest can be summed up simply: the way to the immaterial is to reduce pictorial sensibility to raw matter, and to reveal that matter is, in the end, only more mind.
Once again, the contest between beauty and the sublime is an entertaining but illusory one, since they are not separate now and actually never were. What is matter? Never mind. What is mind? No matter.
Each of Rains’ visual phases, looked at collectively, is also part of a shared sensibility devoted to exploring matter as an extension of mind, and objects as the skin surrounding the void. The fruit and paper paintings were things that were not holes. He has always shown us the way we see things, as much as the things we see, things emerging from this groundless void and made possible by it. But now, Rains is depicting the void itself, portrayed as the energy-ground for all figures, which was always quietly lurking right in front of us in the deceptive literalness of his earlier phenomenological pictures.
This is the operation of a profound continuum in action. Continuum is often misunderstood to mean some vague connecting wavelength between things or events, but what it really means is the link between things that change into one another so gradually that one can’t tell where one ends and another begins. The link in Rains’ case is twofold: first, the stubborn beauty of his images and the persistence of our retina in wanting and needing that kind of nourishment; second, the actual content of his work is sight unseen, it is really the act of looking through sight, of seeing through sight, and not of looking at anything at all.
That reciprocal relationship between being and not being, between looking and seeing, that is what Rains is really proposing and expressing in these new works, as well as a corporate merger between the head and heart, two companies which usually compete with one another, much to our detriment. In nature, this relationship gives rise to the patterns around us that suggest order and proportion and it always follows the same harmonious design, in resolution. In culture, it results in pure abstraction, and that results not in a revolution in permanence but rather in a permanent revolution.
“The Pursuit of Actaeon”, one of my favourites in the recent Metiver Gallery “Olympus” show, is also about the pursuit of perfection in paint, surely one of the most elemental missions of classical modernism. The swampy lagoon-like environment of Actaeon’s pursuit is the place where the mythology of modernism comes to rest. Before it moves on. Again.
Donald Brackett is a Toronto-based culture critic and curator.
Malcolm Rains is represented in Toronto by the Nicholas Metivier Gallery
Recent Work of Malcolm Rains
by Donald Brackett
“Beauty is the promise of happiness.”
Stendhal, 1837
There is a stubborn beauty at work in the paintings of Malcolm Rains. I’ve watched it operate for nearly thirty years. It is stubborn in the best possible sense, though persistent might be a better word. It is cunning. It is serious. But it is also paradoxical and whimsical. And it plays Rains like a violin, audaciously using him as a living tool to achieve its own ends. Considering that these marvelous paintings are the end result, it is both a benevolent haunting and an elegant partnership.
It often seems that painting is a fugitive in the arts of the twenty-first century, not quite on the run but definitely being stalked by its own digital shadows. It also certainly appears that painting itself has become a fugitive from the burden its own long history, but that history is largely a parade of one liberation after another anyway, until each subsequent purpose or function of painting was replaced by an ever expanding array of new visual possibilities for those terms. Including not having any purpose or function other than to provide a pure viewing experience.
From my perspective at this moment in our shared cultural history, and with the wisdom of hindsight, it now feels utterly obvious that as soon as the first camera shutters starting clicking in the 1840’s, it was already then that the paintings of Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Yves Klein, Robert Ryman, or others of the same sensibility, became almost inevitable. As did the later visions of Yves Gaucher, Guido Molinari and Ron Martin, a list to which I would also add the name of Malcolm Rains, for reasons that become as clear as his recent two groups of paintings, the “Sunyata” and the “Olympus” series.
The shared spiritual approach of all these artists, the ritual totality of pure paint as a retinal bath, is the logical consequence of the illuminating and convulsive liberation of painting from the classical mimetic task which spontaneously occurred in the Impressionist artists concurrent with the camera’s arrival, and which rapidly rose to complete prominence in the heroic scale of modernism in general.
But ironically, this beauty that persists throughout Rains’ oeuvre is not in any way hiding from modernism, in fact in a quirky sense, it represents the height of modernism itself, in terms of its rigorous self-analysis and determined exploration of the limits of the limitless. In fact, the quiet and under-explored zone where Malevich converses with Morandi is a place that Rains has been quite comfortable working in for years.
Equally elusive and fugitive these days is the former artistic affinity for and allegiance to beauty as a viable aesthetic option for self-expression. As early as the 18th century in fact, beauty was already being denigrated in favour of the sublime, a state of mind or condition of the spirit where admiration for the visual appeals of proportion and harmony was replaced by a supposedly more rigorous appreciation for the awesome powers of nature hidden behind and above the beauty.
But the sublime is, after all, only the result of turning up the volume on the beauty-dial until it overwhelms the senses of the viewer, and more importantly, their sensibility, thus rendering a state of palpable astonishment available to them. Access to astonishment is also the hidden purpose and function of ultimate or absolute painting, especially as practiced by Malcolm Rains; painting which aims to reveal the ongoing inter-relationships between matter, beauty, spirit, the sublime and consciousness itself. Simply put, those relationships are based on the reciprocal maintenance contract between being and nothingness: we are the dotted line on which that contract is signed. Rothko tried to document this territory, and he succeeded, but it frightened him terribly and caused a surfeit of sadness.
It may come as no surprise to viewers familiar with the poetic reflections of Malcolm Rains that they have always been beautiful, however what may surprise many are the reasons why. His long and successful career as a painter’s painter appears to contain some obvious urges to show us the real world in a pigmented vision of startling clarity, usually associated with his well known still life works, the almost fetishistic depictions of either fruit or sculptural paper forms in empty space, or the watery expanse of lake-scapes, themselves also empty.
And one of his earliest works was a series of sculptures from 1979, a plaster object which nonetheless has a highly minimal and monochrome painting incised onto its apparently empty surface. Thus this new work is a return for Rains, not a departure at all.
But the true surprise may be contained in the realization that he has always been a conceptual painter, but one who harmonizes mind and matter. He has never been an artist solely concerned with the fidelity of re-presenting organic or synthetic objects in a kind of pristinely pure environment, even though that seems to be one of his chief talents. Nonetheless, in my viewing of his work over the long distance race in which he is engaged, I have always suspected that the deceptive subject matter being depicted was not the actual content but rather only the form that the content was temporarily assuming.
At least one of his true subjects has always been and still remains the portrayal of Time, which makes consciousness possible, as conveyed by light, which makes it palpable. Otherwise it is utterly immaterial and is only accessible to us through the mirroring concepts we project toward the outside world, a theatre set which we ourselves are far more responsible for constructing than most people might suspect, even though quantum physics has been warning us for years.
Even in such masterful works as the still life series of meticulous fruit portraits, which I believe continue the ancient vanitas theme in a most dramatic manner, or the classical series of paper sculptures, which I believe are all about entropy, another form of vanitas in slow motion, or the lake-scapes, veritable diagrams of formlessness, there is a consistent theme which moves effortlessly forward and on through to his newest body of work. We are time.
But with “Sunyata”, and to a great degree the follow-up motifs in his latest “Olympus” series, there is no re-presentation here to speak of, there has been a complete merger between the form and the content. They are one, and never before has the modernist credo that form is content and content is form been so obvious and gorgeous at the same time.
These are, quite simply put, quantum paintings: depictions of open-ended moments which support any and all outward manifestations, without necessarily being attached to or limited by them.
In other words, such moments are the ground upon which any figure must appear, and out of which previously the fruit and paper rushed towards us. But look closely around the fruit and paper still life works; all around those supposed subjects is the true hidden subject, namely the void out of which they, like us, emerge. As an experiment: try noticing that when you are absent and not thinking, the pictures in the Sunyata and Olympus series are present and accounted for, but when you are present, they suddenly appear to be absent, and consequently, empty.
Electrons do the same thing when you stare at them, they shift from wave formation to particle formation. Do they do this because they are shy? No, they do it because they are us. As the French author Antoine Ste. Exupery once remarked, “What is essential is invisible to the eye and can only be seen with the heart.” With these new paintings, Rains is making a definitive declaration that such is the case. The palpable desire of these images, and of their maker, is to transcend our everyday assumptions about what the world looks like, and that desire is amplified through their purity, simplicity, and near trance-like vitality. In the end, even though the works may really be about a condition which is inherently beyond desire, they are still stunning evocations of the journey toward the desireless state: roadmaps to infinity.
For Rains, this quest can be summed up simply: the way to the immaterial is to reduce pictorial sensibility to raw matter, and to reveal that matter is, in the end, only more mind.
Once again, the contest between beauty and the sublime is an entertaining but illusory one, since they are not separate now and actually never were. What is matter? Never mind. What is mind? No matter.
Each of Rains’ visual phases, looked at collectively, is also part of a shared sensibility devoted to exploring matter as an extension of mind, and objects as the skin surrounding the void. The fruit and paper paintings were things that were not holes. He has always shown us the way we see things, as much as the things we see, things emerging from this groundless void and made possible by it. But now, Rains is depicting the void itself, portrayed as the energy-ground for all figures, which was always quietly lurking right in front of us in the deceptive literalness of his earlier phenomenological pictures.
This is the operation of a profound continuum in action. Continuum is often misunderstood to mean some vague connecting wavelength between things or events, but what it really means is the link between things that change into one another so gradually that one can’t tell where one ends and another begins. The link in Rains’ case is twofold: first, the stubborn beauty of his images and the persistence of our retina in wanting and needing that kind of nourishment; second, the actual content of his work is sight unseen, it is really the act of looking through sight, of seeing through sight, and not of looking at anything at all.
That reciprocal relationship between being and not being, between looking and seeing, that is what Rains is really proposing and expressing in these new works, as well as a corporate merger between the head and heart, two companies which usually compete with one another, much to our detriment. In nature, this relationship gives rise to the patterns around us that suggest order and proportion and it always follows the same harmonious design, in resolution. In culture, it results in pure abstraction, and that results not in a revolution in permanence but rather in a permanent revolution.
“The Pursuit of Actaeon”, one of my favourites in the recent Metiver Gallery “Olympus” show, is also about the pursuit of perfection in paint, surely one of the most elemental missions of classical modernism. The swampy lagoon-like environment of Actaeon’s pursuit is the place where the mythology of modernism comes to rest. Before it moves on. Again.
Donald Brackett is a Toronto-based culture critic and curator.
Malcolm Rains is represented in Toronto by the Nicholas Metivier Gallery
Boundarylessness
Boundary: (boun-da-re) noun, plural: boundaries: Something that indicates bounds or limits, sometimes called a frontier; the politics of division; an edge in the topology of manifolds; a limiting location mapped by the most advanced or newest activities in a limited area of knowledge or practice; to form the limit of.
Boundarylessness: noun: IWB Post-Grad Program at George Brown College’s School of Design
The Institute Without Boundaries, a post-graduate program in the School of Design, George Brown College, is where the interdisciplinary world of creative design and design management comes to party, intellectually speaking, with a mandate that personifies the core notions of integrated education and lateral thinking. Edward de Bono might have been quite at home here. So would Buckminster Fuller or Niels Diffrient.
Contrary to that most commonplace of metaphors, to push the envelope or to stretch the boundaries, the IWB chooses instead to ignore those inhibitions altogether, not just reinterpret or move them around so they’re less noticeable. Here, they’re more concerned with that special in-between zone that emerges between overlapping design disciplines, and in that counter-intuitive gap between design assumption and design application.
This zone is a unique creative location where seemingly different professional paths of design expertise first intersect and then superimpose in order to operate cooperatively. Formed in a kind of visionary partnership that resulted after a very popular collaborative project between the Design School of George Brown College and designer Bruce Mau, what began as an exploration of the utopian design notions contained in both the Massive Change exhibition and book quickly evolved into a discreet educational program which has grown exponentially over the past six years.
Maya Lin, the acclaimed Yale Design architectural graduate and public art/monument specialist, perhaps best known for her highly successful Vietnam Veterans and Martin Luther King memorials, has expressed it quite succinctly in her own remarkable book, Boundaries. “I feel I exist at and on the boundaries, somewhere between science and art, art and architecture, public and private. I am always trying to find a balance between these opposing forces, finding the place where opposites meet, existing not on either side but on the line that divides, and that line takes on a dimensionality, it takes on a sense of place.”
At the Institute Without Boundaries, their methodology explores that place in a way that encourages students of each and every design discipline to pay attention to the edges of our awareness, to notice what is going on at the periphery of possibility. Their mandate is as direct as it is elegant: find the next generation of young design innovators and then give them the practical training they’ll need to design a workable future for the rest of us.
What makes this design school program distinctive is that they provide the ideal context for prepared strategies when that future presents itself. Canadian science fiction writer William Gibson once remarked that the future has arrived, but it’s just not evenly distributed. And a recent guest lecturer at the IWB, urban planner Robert Ouellette, has observed astutely that design itself is the distribution vehicle for the future. This inspiring insight is somewhat reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s own definition of design as a distribution system for ideas and services on a worldwide basis.
In a way, the product being created at the IWB is design insight into what the future might bring and the proper preparation for it with adequate design strategies to meet its challenges. In other words: the even distribution of the future amongst everyone equally.
At the IWB, it is precisely this kind of incisive and thought provoking domain, a unified field of free research, that is put into practice every day. Beyond just the built environment, from it’s smallest to its largest scales, the world of everyday design issues and objects is also explored rigorously in a manner emphasizing the key elements of creative collaboration, intellectual cooperation and professional mentoring at the highest levels.
This also makes for a remarkably vital and creatively challenging collision of cultures, languages, contexts, perspectives, angles and avenues of shared study, since their students are drawn from the international and multi-cultural communities. Indeed, this is the very kind of collision that so often results in a new hybrid form, something that did not exist before the academic players encountered each other, but one which will inform their future professional lives in a subtle yet deep-seated way.
Like Maya Lin’s personal practice, the IWB’s process-driven context also strives to create a professional institution, a place in which to think, but without trying to dictate what to think, apart from encouraging excellence through cooperative synergy. The IWB was literally born in the context of collaboration and cooperation and it continues to focus
on these vital principles as it undergoes the kind of organic growth that always rewards ongoing innovation.
After its inception in 2003 by George Brown College with its inaugural project, Massive Change, the collaboration resulted in a remarkable book and exhibition which traveled from the Vancouver Art Gallery to the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Six IWB students worked in the Bruce Mau Design studio researching, writing, and designing a public showcase, a website, a radio show and a seminal book that explored multi-faceted discourse on the future of global design.
In 2004, eight new students carried the exhibition project to fruition and the student-designed Massive Change product line was launched by the well known Umbra company, with the exhibition subsequently moving on to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2006.
From 2006-09 the World House Project was undertaken at the Institute Without Boundaries to explore the conceptual evolution of Home, and ultimately to re-imagine and recreate the ways in which we all live together.. The project aimed to produce a knowledge base for housing design that can be applied to both local and international contexts with the goal of generating a housing system that achieves a balance between the extremes of urban sprawl and urban slums and also enables people to build sustaining, accessible, and healthy human dwellings and communities. To do so, the Institute engaged students, teachers, and industry and community experts, locally and worldwide, to work on this challenge collaboratively. This project has lead to the development of various housing prototypes, design tools and systems frameworks which will be presented as an exhibition at the opening of The Brickworks in Toronto, in 2011.
The third and current activity at IWB researches and redefines the complex subject of
City Systems, at a time in our history when conscious urban renewal is both a challenge and a necessity. Luigi Ferrara, Director of the Institute Without Boundaries, encapsulates the current mission statement very well:
"With a commitment to leadership through design and social innovation, the Institute Without Boundaries has been amassing knowledge, wisdom and capacity through design education, research and practice. In undertaking this work, the students, faculty and industry partners at the Institute have built upon four key pillars: Inter-disciplinary collaboration to solve complex problems and issues that face humanity; engaging stakeholders, users, communities and members of the public in the design process; developing holistic design practices that create robust, long-term solutions; and finally, taking on the challenge and risk of applied research projects for clients and documenting and exhibiting the results of our learning experience. Our work has taught us that it is not the world of design that matters but rather the design of the world. Building on this knowledge, the Institute moves from the design of the home with the World House Project to addressing the designs of the interconnected built environment with the City Systems Project.”
What’s up next for the Institute Without Boundaries? One could easily speculate that the next program focus might be on global systems: a much needed template for eliminating barriers to true shared growth and the full realization of our mutual human potential. Perhaps. But it is probably currently gestating, taking shape in that special place reserved for creative thinking that cannot be rushed or pushed. But wherever it takes us thematically, and whatever it explores academically, it will continue to take a big picture approach which vigorously reminds us that we’re all in this together, and that design indeed does touch everyone.
Donald Brackett :
The author is a culture critic specializing in the history, theory and practice of art, design, and architecture. He teaches a Design Issues course for the IWB called Urban Syntax.
Boundary: (boun-da-re) noun, plural: boundaries: Something that indicates bounds or limits, sometimes called a frontier; the politics of division; an edge in the topology of manifolds; a limiting location mapped by the most advanced or newest activities in a limited area of knowledge or practice; to form the limit of.
Boundarylessness: noun: IWB Post-Grad Program at George Brown College’s School of Design
The Institute Without Boundaries, a post-graduate program in the School of Design, George Brown College, is where the interdisciplinary world of creative design and design management comes to party, intellectually speaking, with a mandate that personifies the core notions of integrated education and lateral thinking. Edward de Bono might have been quite at home here. So would Buckminster Fuller or Niels Diffrient.
Contrary to that most commonplace of metaphors, to push the envelope or to stretch the boundaries, the IWB chooses instead to ignore those inhibitions altogether, not just reinterpret or move them around so they’re less noticeable. Here, they’re more concerned with that special in-between zone that emerges between overlapping design disciplines, and in that counter-intuitive gap between design assumption and design application.
This zone is a unique creative location where seemingly different professional paths of design expertise first intersect and then superimpose in order to operate cooperatively. Formed in a kind of visionary partnership that resulted after a very popular collaborative project between the Design School of George Brown College and designer Bruce Mau, what began as an exploration of the utopian design notions contained in both the Massive Change exhibition and book quickly evolved into a discreet educational program which has grown exponentially over the past six years.
Maya Lin, the acclaimed Yale Design architectural graduate and public art/monument specialist, perhaps best known for her highly successful Vietnam Veterans and Martin Luther King memorials, has expressed it quite succinctly in her own remarkable book, Boundaries. “I feel I exist at and on the boundaries, somewhere between science and art, art and architecture, public and private. I am always trying to find a balance between these opposing forces, finding the place where opposites meet, existing not on either side but on the line that divides, and that line takes on a dimensionality, it takes on a sense of place.”
At the Institute Without Boundaries, their methodology explores that place in a way that encourages students of each and every design discipline to pay attention to the edges of our awareness, to notice what is going on at the periphery of possibility. Their mandate is as direct as it is elegant: find the next generation of young design innovators and then give them the practical training they’ll need to design a workable future for the rest of us.
What makes this design school program distinctive is that they provide the ideal context for prepared strategies when that future presents itself. Canadian science fiction writer William Gibson once remarked that the future has arrived, but it’s just not evenly distributed. And a recent guest lecturer at the IWB, urban planner Robert Ouellette, has observed astutely that design itself is the distribution vehicle for the future. This inspiring insight is somewhat reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller’s own definition of design as a distribution system for ideas and services on a worldwide basis.
In a way, the product being created at the IWB is design insight into what the future might bring and the proper preparation for it with adequate design strategies to meet its challenges. In other words: the even distribution of the future amongst everyone equally.
At the IWB, it is precisely this kind of incisive and thought provoking domain, a unified field of free research, that is put into practice every day. Beyond just the built environment, from it’s smallest to its largest scales, the world of everyday design issues and objects is also explored rigorously in a manner emphasizing the key elements of creative collaboration, intellectual cooperation and professional mentoring at the highest levels.
This also makes for a remarkably vital and creatively challenging collision of cultures, languages, contexts, perspectives, angles and avenues of shared study, since their students are drawn from the international and multi-cultural communities. Indeed, this is the very kind of collision that so often results in a new hybrid form, something that did not exist before the academic players encountered each other, but one which will inform their future professional lives in a subtle yet deep-seated way.
Like Maya Lin’s personal practice, the IWB’s process-driven context also strives to create a professional institution, a place in which to think, but without trying to dictate what to think, apart from encouraging excellence through cooperative synergy. The IWB was literally born in the context of collaboration and cooperation and it continues to focus
on these vital principles as it undergoes the kind of organic growth that always rewards ongoing innovation.
After its inception in 2003 by George Brown College with its inaugural project, Massive Change, the collaboration resulted in a remarkable book and exhibition which traveled from the Vancouver Art Gallery to the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Six IWB students worked in the Bruce Mau Design studio researching, writing, and designing a public showcase, a website, a radio show and a seminal book that explored multi-faceted discourse on the future of global design.
In 2004, eight new students carried the exhibition project to fruition and the student-designed Massive Change product line was launched by the well known Umbra company, with the exhibition subsequently moving on to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2006.
From 2006-09 the World House Project was undertaken at the Institute Without Boundaries to explore the conceptual evolution of Home, and ultimately to re-imagine and recreate the ways in which we all live together.. The project aimed to produce a knowledge base for housing design that can be applied to both local and international contexts with the goal of generating a housing system that achieves a balance between the extremes of urban sprawl and urban slums and also enables people to build sustaining, accessible, and healthy human dwellings and communities. To do so, the Institute engaged students, teachers, and industry and community experts, locally and worldwide, to work on this challenge collaboratively. This project has lead to the development of various housing prototypes, design tools and systems frameworks which will be presented as an exhibition at the opening of The Brickworks in Toronto, in 2011.
The third and current activity at IWB researches and redefines the complex subject of
City Systems, at a time in our history when conscious urban renewal is both a challenge and a necessity. Luigi Ferrara, Director of the Institute Without Boundaries, encapsulates the current mission statement very well:
"With a commitment to leadership through design and social innovation, the Institute Without Boundaries has been amassing knowledge, wisdom and capacity through design education, research and practice. In undertaking this work, the students, faculty and industry partners at the Institute have built upon four key pillars: Inter-disciplinary collaboration to solve complex problems and issues that face humanity; engaging stakeholders, users, communities and members of the public in the design process; developing holistic design practices that create robust, long-term solutions; and finally, taking on the challenge and risk of applied research projects for clients and documenting and exhibiting the results of our learning experience. Our work has taught us that it is not the world of design that matters but rather the design of the world. Building on this knowledge, the Institute moves from the design of the home with the World House Project to addressing the designs of the interconnected built environment with the City Systems Project.”
What’s up next for the Institute Without Boundaries? One could easily speculate that the next program focus might be on global systems: a much needed template for eliminating barriers to true shared growth and the full realization of our mutual human potential. Perhaps. But it is probably currently gestating, taking shape in that special place reserved for creative thinking that cannot be rushed or pushed. But wherever it takes us thematically, and whatever it explores academically, it will continue to take a big picture approach which vigorously reminds us that we’re all in this together, and that design indeed does touch everyone.
Donald Brackett :
The author is a culture critic specializing in the history, theory and practice of art, design, and architecture. He teaches a Design Issues course for the IWB called Urban Syntax.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
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