Canadian Arts-Funding Bonanza
Censorship and arts funding became a hot topic in the recent Canadian election when the right-wing Alliance Party tried to make an issue of the Canada Council's funding of "Bubbles Galore" a film about a porn actress who takes control of the representation of her own images by making adult films. The centrist Liberal Party took the policy-oriented highroad and triumphed with a detailed platform that should result in $600 million in new arts funding over the next four years. They pledged to double support for Canadian feature films; to invest $200 million annually in Canadian television programming; to renew Canada's Sound Recording Development Program; and to guarantee annual funding of nearly $1 billion for the CBC. The platform also states that the Liberal party wants "all Canadians ... and the world ... to have the chance to read Canadian authors, enjoy Canadian TV and film, experience Canadian performance and art, and cheer on Canada's athletes ... [by doing so] we're ensuring that our culture and our identity remain protected despite the changing rules of world trade." Move over NAFTA. From Arts Wire Current
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Wunder-Full
What's precious and what's not in an age of cultural fragmentation, global pop culture and information overload? For "WonderWalker: A Global Online Wunderkammer," artists Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg revisit the 17th-century "wunderkammer," or wonder chamber. Instead of precious icons and ostrich eggs, this digital archive is comprised of a collection of links, resulting in a visually swarming, collaborative map of Web "objects" that range from "dusty radio archives" to a homepage devoted to crystals. Visitors can collect an "object" and add it to the communal stash along with their rationale for its inclusion or simply browse this highly unusual archive.
From Walker Art Center
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O.J. Redux
The recent televised journey of the truck full of contested
U.S. election ballots from Miami to Tallahassee reminded many
of us of similar shots of a white Bronco careening down the
L.A. freeway a few years ago. "Beyond the Vanishing Point:
Media and Myth in America" is an exhibition of Warren Neidich's
color photos of what he calls "Camp
O.J.," the media infrastructure of vans, cameras, scaffolding
and news personnel that brought us "all O.J., all the time."
The work is not only intellectually savvy, but oddly
photogenic. Through December 30 at Bayly Art Museum,
University of Virginia, Rugby Rd., Charlottesville, Virginia. The
exhibition will be followed by a book — also called "Camp
O.J." — featuring photographs by Neidich and essays by David
Hunt and Charles Stainback. Available February, 2001, through
D.A.P.
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Censorship, Singapore-Style
S. Thenmoli, president of the Agni Kootthu theater group, was arrested after trying to rehearse playwright Elangovan's "Talaq." Authorities told her that the one-woman play about marital violence and divorce among Indian Muslims was banned and could not be presented in English or Malay because artistic works must "respect religious sensitivities in multiracial and multi-religious Singapore." Although the Singaporean Straits Times newspaper published an article headlined "Ministry Reveals Details of Talaq Ban" on November 15, it failed to publish many critical responses from women's groups, the play's original producers or Thenmoli herself; these have been posted online by the Singapore Internet Community. The play was previously staged in Singapore in December, 1998, and February, 1999, and actually performed by the woman upon whom the play's character is based. Thenmoli has been released on bail and as yet no charges have been brought against her.
From Singapore Internet Community
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AIDS: The Rest of the Year
The media used to shine their spotlight on HIV/AIDS twice a year: during the summer's annual International AIDS Conference and on December 1, known as World AIDS Day and Day With(out) Art. Now that low-wattage illumination seems to be dimming even as the global pandemic widens, according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Artery: The AIDS-Arts Forum, edited by MediaChannel's own Robert Atkins, is a year-round, online resource that's simultaneously 'zine, forum and data base-driven repository of resources analyzing and interpreting the ongoing intersection of AIDS and culture. The winter issue, devoted to activism, attempts a fresh synthesis of theory and practice. It includes interviews with activists of all stripes on how they got that way (lots of nuns and grandparents lurk in these folks' backgrounds); a primer for the teaching of activism; and the catalog essay and program notes from the Guggenheim-Museum exhibition, "Fever in the Archive."
For more on AIDS and media, see the MediaChannel special report: The Epidemic And The Media.
From Artery: The AIDS-Arts Forum
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Call Alan Greenspan
Anyone who's glanced at a newspaper story about Microsoft's monopoly over our digital desktops knows that it's software rather than hardware that will determine the destiny of today's screen-based computing. The dominator of all is the computer's operating system itself ... either Microsoft Windows, Mac OS or Linux. Together We Can Defeat Capitalism, a feisty artists collective, has announced the release of the beta version of its Anti-Capitalist Operating System. Critique the social critics: downloads and comments invited.
From Together We Can Defeat Capitalism
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State Of The (Web) Art
The Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul's "Web Project 8 — Web Art in Seoul" is a biennial, online-only look at recent Web work. It's also a fair sampling of the current state of the art. The exhibitors — Superbad (Ben Benjamin), Diane Bertolo, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries, Jeong-hwa Choi, Jodi, Candy Factory (Takuji Kogo), Olia Lialina and Alexei Shulgin — riff on the filmic possibilities of the medium, the use of open source code and even the pleasures of dancing text and manic mouse manipulation. Although most of the artists are "established" Web-art pioneers, this exhibition showcases increasingly sophisticated work and often transcends the early declamatory art-statements about interactivity, links and other essential characteristics of the new medium in the mid-'90s. Through February 1, 2001. From The Total Museum of Contemporary Art.
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Nobel Prize Ruffles China
Three Chinese poets, Wei Manzeng, Jiang Nan and Wang Changhuai, were arrested in Guangxi province for attempting to organize a national literary symposium. They were detained after refusing a police request to cancel the event because two "problematic poets" had been invited to the conference of more than 200 poets originally planned for November 6-11. (It has not been rescheduled.) The police also nixed the inclusion of guests known to help underground Chinese poets get published. The symposium was to be one of the first literary events in China following the announcement that exiled Chinese writer Gao Xingjian, whose works are banned in his homeland, won the 2000
Nobel Prize for Literature. China's constitution guarantees freedom of the press and association, but such rights are routinely curbed by the government, according to AFP/China Times Inter@ctive.
From Arts Wire Current
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AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE
MEDIA.
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