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Gathering free TV’s for Macbeth: nach Shakespeare

Imagine if, ten years ago, you could drive around collecting free, working televisions until you filled several carloads, then finally had to abandon dozens more because you had no room.

That’s where we’re at today, as the dominant technology of our living room becomes obsolete practically overnight. HDTV is sending those heavy, awkward boxes out to the curb, to be replaced with newer, more expensive, and quicker-to-obsolescence machines.

I’m designing media for a new theatre show – Macbeth: nach Shakespeare by Heiner Muller. I’m building a throne of televisions that will show piles of corpses whenever the King sits on it… I thought it might be easy to gather free TV’s through craigslist, but I never imagined how quickly the cathode-ray sets were being discarded.

This class-warfare Macbeth takes the moral clarity out of the story: Instead of Macbeth murdering a wonderful King out of pure bloody ambition, we start the play with Macbeth committing murders for the King’s benefit. Peasants strung up for not paying rent, rebellious lords skinned alive for disloyalty. So when Macbeth decides to murder up instead of murdering down, the moral leap isn’t that big: what’s one more dead body on the pile?

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Critical Mass Vancouver March 2011

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This month’s mass was gettin’ bigger, as the sun came out and the DST-change made it brighter.  The weather was threatening as late as 4 pm in my neighbourhood but it ended up being a beautiful day.

First surprise of the Mass was the giant American film shoot occupying the Art Gallery square before us.  What made it a little more surprising was that one of the ride veterans led the start of the ride through the film shoot – or so we thought.  It looked like a good bit of fun and a political point well-made when we started passing right in front of the camera.  But then he stopped, took two steps up the Art Gallery stairs, and the guy started explaining why we were going to occupy the gallery steps for 20 minutes until it was time to leave on the ride.

Uh-oh!  I signed up to make a statement about bike culture over car culture, not to make a statement against Hollywood Film Productions.  I make plenty of those every day, and while I like the idea of earning everyone on set an extra 20 minutes of pay while slowing down the Hollywood agenda by several nanoseconds, I had no clear reason to throw Critical Mass into a head-on, high-stakes confrontation with max-pressure location managers, whose chief activity all day is cajoling people to  get the hell out of the way and let them get on with their work.

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Inside the Burrard Bridge Stairwell

I’m doing the cinematography for a project with Josh Hite and Scott Billings, untitled for now.

They are creating a machine to bring a camera up and down the center of the long-closed Burrard Bridge stairwell, in a repeatable spiral pattern.  Then actors will be performing gestures, scenes, and actions on the stairs, drawn from a collection of movies that feature scenes in stairwells.

Here’s a writeup from Price Tags, which talks more about the project and tells you how you might get involved, if you want…

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Flick’s Video Art at W2 – March 18

Well if my birthday wasn’t cool enough, I’m having a group show with Drop Out Video Arts at W2 on March 18!

Channels 3×4, Animal Bodies, Magneticring Team Up with Video Artists for Vancouver’s Drop In/Drop Out.

I’ll be projecting the first aspect of a piece called DOARIP (Death of Analog, Rest in Pieces) involving Avatar and smashed televisions.

More to follow…

Here’s the website for Drop Out Video Arts

And the trailer for the show:

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Critical Mass February Vancouver

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I think I have frostbite in my little toes.  But it was worth it to Critically Mass.

I also did an interview with Openfile.ca, a new online / local news service, about the question of whether critical mass is needed in the New World of Bike Lanes.  I’ll post that when it’s written up.

The big question today was – what would become of the pseudo-counter-mass which was meant to draw riders off into the bike lanes, to celebrate them and avoid angering the Easily-Angered Car Gods??  Well, it looked like there wasn’t much of an issue – Jamie Ollivier  was there, doing his thing, and the main Mass did ours.

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Michael Geist – Liberal MP Dan McTeague Emerges As Unofficial CRIA Spokesperson

by Flick Harrison

Canada’s copyright battles are in a holding pattern while Canada stumbles through 3 successive minority governments in almost 7 years.  It’s a hot potato that won’t be sorted until someone has a safe majority to risk the bruising online guerre-a-outrance that would inevitably ensue.

The Conservatives, now in power, really need their Guy-Fawkes blogaholics firmly-onside, in order to strangle every Liberal social program in its crib, and those people would be very leery of a DMCA-style bill in Canada… but that’s exactly what’s coming, whether the Conservatives or Liberals take power. Neither side can really admit that or even address it directly. The NDP is always wary of staking any new turf that suggests them once again to be bug-eyed communists in the opinion of the corporate press.

Here’s a good article by Michael Geist about the lawsuit against ISOhunt, which I didn’t know was proudly Canadian.  ISOhunt launched a court action to get a ruling that their torrent-search site was operating within Canadian law (!), and the recording industry used the opportunity to launch their own suit for damages against ISOhunt.

Michael Geist – Liberal MP Dan McTeague Emerges As Unofficial CRIA Spokesperson.

“Were this nothing more than an MP getting the law wrong, it would not be particularly noteworthy. More important is that McTeague’s recent comments appear to be coming directly from CRIA. The Toronto Star letter to the editor includes quotes from two old posts on my blog (here and here). The visitor log for my site reveals that only one party accessed both posts in the period between February 14th (when the column first appeared) and February 21st (when the letter to the editor appeared). That party was CRIA, suggesting that the McTeague letter may largely be a cut and paste of materials supplied by CRIA lobbyists.”

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Fake car survey on Dunsmuir Viaduct?

[thought i put a note debunking this – but it seems to be missing.  This turned out to be over-hasty in the heated debate over bike lanes – these guys, in a complicated way, WERE working for the city.  Sorry for the overreaction]

The people who oppose bike lanes are doing a bit of a dirty tricks campaign… maybe.

 

These folks in the video were out claiming to be working for the city, acted a little shady when questioned, and yesterday were suggesting that “the city is thinking of getting rid of the bike lanes.”
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