Category Archives: Fearless City

Digital Shrine at Parade of Lost Souls: Participate!

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Parade of Lost Souls

(psst, can I get some coverage up in here? Links, tweets, emails, posts gratefully accepted. Spread the word and win fabulous, yet completely imaginary, prizes)

stolen from the FearlessCity website:

Fearless City LogoSaturday, Oct 25th, 2008, Grandview Park, Vancouver, BC
Time: 6.30 PM, procession at 7:00 PM


The Parade of the Lost Souls is a lively commemoration of the cycle of life and death, and of facing fears in order to live life to its fullest. Costumed stilt walkers, jugglers, dancers, skeletal brides, blessed witches, ghastly ghouls, and prancing pixies lead a walking procession through the neighbourhood to honour the dead, wake the living and celebrate.

The Digital Shrine at Parade of the Lost Souls is an installation where hand-made / solid shrine objects are placed, notes of remembrance can be written and posted on paper or video, and a
projection screen mixes text, pictures and video. The Digital Shrine is a way to pay tribute to friends and loved ones who have DIED or things that have PASSED.

Send your text, images, video up to 10mb to Shrine08 curator Flick Harrison: shrine08 at publicdreams dot org

OR post to YOUTUBE / FLIKR & tag with shrine08 and we’ll find it!

Deadline for youtube / flikr / email content: Oct 24th

Text / picture SMS messages: During Parade only.

text / pic to: 778-320-6673

or TWITTER #shrine08

Or come to Shrine Making Workshops:

http://www.publicdreams.org/section_details.html?trunk_id=1&branch_id=13&page_no=3

and SEE THE DIGITAL SHRINE at Grandview Park at Parade of Lost Souls

Terms of Use: All submissions will be licensed to Public Dreams Society under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5, Canada terms.

Digital Shrine Website, including submission instruction sheet /handbill:
http://tinyurl.com/3nqzro

Public Dreams Society thanks Fearless City Mobile and DTES Community Arts Network for their help in creating the Digital Shrine.

Thanks,
Flick Harrison
Digital Shrine 08 Curator
http://tinyurl.com/3nqzro
shrine08 AT publicdreams DOT org

Downtown Eastside Artist Opportunity

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Fearless City Logo

**please post and forward

Fearless City Mobile Call for Participants
Short-term contracts for Downtown Eastside Residents,

We are fast approaching Fearless City Mobile’s exciting upcoming project-
Parade of Lost Souls, on Saturday October 25th, and are looking for 10 people to bring the Mobile Souls and Digital Shrine to life.

The Parade of the Lost Souls is a Grandview-Woodland’s Community
Halloween event that celebrates the cycle of life & death, and
encourages us to face our fears in order to live life to its fullest.
It is a time and a place to share losses at one of the many shrines
and celebrate life and to enrich our community. It takes Place on
Saturday October 25th, beginning at Grandview Park at 6:30pm. A
parade/procession will snake throughout the commercial drive area,
beginning at the NE corner of the park at 7pm.

Mobile Souls is a montage of live streaming video of the Parade and
installations along the route, as well as ‘mms’ texts and digital cell
phone images from festival attendees, that will be sifted, VJ’d and
projected. The montage will be projected on a screen at the corner of
Kitchener and Commercial and animated by live shadow puppet performers.

Fearless City Mobile will also be supporting the Digital Shrine
installation in Grandview Park. The shrine consists of digital images,
text and video sent in by community members in advance, as well as
mms texts sent in throughout the event.

Parade of Lost Souls is produced by the Public Dreams Society. For
more information on the event you can visit www.publicdreams.org.

Fearless City Mobile is a project of the Fearless Media Cluster of the
DTES Community Arts Network. For more information visit
www.fearlesscity.ca.

———

We are looking for 10 people in total to fill the following positions.

You do not need to have any experience with the following equipment,
software, or technology to apply for this opportunity.
**** All technical
equipment will be provided by Fearless city Mobile:

a) 1x VJ Assistant (Mobile Souls): Assisting VJ Jesse Scott in sorting
through incoming live streamed mobile video, still images and text. Text
will be manipulated in Livetype and exported into Modul8, the software
that will mix the video, text and still images.

b) 1x VJ Assistant (Digital Shrine): Assisting VJ Suez Holland and
Cultural Curator Flick Harrison in sorting through incoming live streamed
still images and text. Text will be manipulated in Livetype and exported
into Modul8, the software that will mix the text and still images with the
video material that flick has collected prior to the event. Video will not
be live streamed to this station.

c) 4x Mobile Videographers: Shooting mobile video of the event and
live-streaming it to the Mobile Souls VJ Station via Livecast.
Videographers will be positioned throughout the parade.

d) 4x Mobile SMS/MMS Outreachers: Outreaching to Parade of Lost
Souls attendees and introducing them to the Mobile Souls cell phone
texting platform. Instructing attendees on how to text in their
thoughts,
reflections and comments about the event to a specified Mobile
Souls phone number. These texts will be downloaded by a sift tool to
the VJ Stations.

You are also required to offer to text peoples comments for them
on your own phone, and to demonstrate the process.

The responsibilities for this contract include:

1. Attending an orientation workshop on Wednesday October 22 from
1-6pm at the Lori Krill Co-op at 65 W. Cordova

2. Attending the event on Saturday October 25th from setup at
5:00pm until the event ends at 12am. Wearing Halloween Costumes is
encouraged.

3. Completing a participant feedback form.

The Artist Fee for each position is $200.00.

Please submit a short paragraph stating your interest in the
project and a position to amy at fearlessmedia.ca by Tuesday October 21
at 12noon.

Amy Kazymerchyk
Fearless City Mobile
DTES Community Arts Network.

Operation Recuperation: the raincoaster situation

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I’m feeling better (well enough, in fact, to blog!) and thought I’d give my millions of devoted readers (both of you; did I mention I had two million readers? Well, two million people of whom one point seven came here looking for Beaver Shots and went away confused, which is something, anyway) some clue as to what I’ve been going through.

As happens each year at the turning of the seasons, when the sun looks at Vancouver and turns, in fact, away completely, tossing a heartless “see you in May” over its shoulder as it heads to California, the rains have set in and that means that the mold, the mildew, the emos and the creepy-crawlies are ascendant.

All of these, with the exception of emos (because I hate clove cigarettes) can, according to my doctor, be found in my lungs at the present time.

My lungs, in fact, look something like this:

The fungus Pilobolus fires off its sporangiophore using a water cannon or “squirt gun,” reaching accelerations that are among the fastest in nature.

Here we present a montage of high-speed video clips showing sporangiophore discharge in the fungus Pilobolus kleinii. The videos were obtained at camera frame rates of up to 250,000 fps. Each discharge is completed in less than 0.25 milliseconds; an eye blink takes 100 milliseconds, or 400 times longer! The music is Verdi’s Anvil Chorus.

For more information, click here.

Anvil Chorus and all.

Oh, yes, and I forgot to mention that yesterday, when I sat down to blog, I was bitten on the ass by an Aggressive House Spider. They don’t call them that for nothing, and that was the reason I ended up smearing toothpaste on my butt at two in the morning.

What? What? It draws the poison out.

Although the Co-op where I live has improved things somewhat in the last year, tacking a new roof on so the water hardly ever wells up through my carpet anymore and disposing of the large areas of ceiling which had rotted through and caved in on the second floor (it’s a four-story building) and even carting away some of the drywall in the lobby where the mildew had eaten through, things here cannot be said to be spore-free.

And my lungs, scarred by some mystery illness when I was a baby, have never been the best (every time I get a chest X-ray they look all concerned until I say “oh, is this about the scar tissue? Check the records”). And there is, as there always is, a flu/cold/virus of doom going around Vancouver which knocks everyone on their asses for a week or so.

And so.

Put all these things together and you get someone who’s been running a temperature for nearly three weeks, appears to be unable to fully digest food of any kind, has essentially no appetite, produces her own body weight in mucus every eighteen hours, and coughs like that guy…that guy at the theatre…that one everyone hated by fifteen minutes into the flick. If I ever get this money I’m owed, I’m trotting straight down to Canadian Tire and buying one of those combo heater/dehumidifiers/air filters, and there goes three hundred bucks but it’s worth it.

Which is why I’m staying home tonight instead of going out to a social activist/geek event three blocks from my house featuring free booze.

Yes. I said free booze.

That’s how sick I am.

Mobile Swarm by Fearless City: the transcript

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Fearless City LogoMobile SWARM.

So.

So, the idea is: SWARM is a night when a large group of artist-run Vancouver galleries cooperate for once and have openings and parties on the same night, featuring local artists. Pictures on Flickr here.

So. Here in Zone Two, otherwise known as the Downtown EastSide, we had 13 galleries participating, and the Fearless City project sent teams out to each of the galleries to capture people’s reactions to the art and post them via SMS to a Twitter clone called SIFT which civilians can think of as just a place where all the text messages got filed one after the others.

You text your reactions to art: simple.

Oh yeah, and we had a repurposed shopping cart roving the streets packed to the gills with high-tech batteries, powering in order of importance a laptop which was managing the anarchy insofar as it could be managed AND a 48″ screen on which were displayed all of the messages as they came in unfiltered and in real time or as real as text messaging can get.

For realz.

The # codes are codes for which gallery the message originated from. From which the message originated.

Whatever.

Will link these up later if I’m not too lazy.

  • #ac = access gallery
  • #as = artspeak
  • #cw = cineworks although I don’t think anyone got there, as it is nowhere near the DTES actually. Perhaps they were only there in class solidarity
  • #cc = clackclack empire
  • #gg = gallery gachet
  • # hp = helen pitt gallery
  • # iu = interurban gallery
  • #lg = les gallery
  • #na = 221a (one of my team’s)
  • # og = orr gallery
  • # pg = plank gallery (one of my team’s)
  • #sg = shudder gallery (one of my team’s)
  • #uv = UVic 2nd Year (nobody went there, just too far away practically in Hastings Sunrise.

And now, to the transcript in REVERSE chronological order, as I am too lazy to flip this all around. And this is what it looked like, entirely unfiltered.

#as Reagan, please!
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:42 by Anonymous
#

Horse pussy is much tighter than female
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:35 by Anonymous
#

#pg muse needs more interesting projects. Andrew salgado rocks.
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:30 by Anonymous
#

Wheres the graveyard party at sorry!
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:16 by Anonymous
#

You are the best – don’t stop ‘011
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:10 by Anonymous
#

I lub you artists- keep doing your thang! DTES Forever – masala mario
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:06 by Anonymous
#

Oh yea
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:04 by Anonymous
#

Lotussss
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:03 by Anonymous
#

Where is the party at ??
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:03 by Anonymous
#

I have never felt so embowered
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:03 by Anonymous
#

Hey did I’d keel
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:03 by Anonymous
#

Swarmmmmmmmmmm
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:03 by Anonymous
#

This is addictive!!!!
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:02 by Anonymous
#

Mobile swarmin till the morn
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:01 by Anonymous
#

I came, i saw, then i came again.
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:00 by Anonymous
#
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:00 by Anonymous
#

#gg just let it out. Whatever that means to you.
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 23:00 by Anonymous
#

I love my thumbs!!!!!
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 22:56 by Anonymous
#

Best thing I’ve seen tonight!!!
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 22:56 by Anonymous
#

Big sad faces and empty spaces….what does that say about us?
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 22:56 by Anonymous
#

#as what’s happening at the after party?
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 22:55 by Anonymous
#

J Dilla never sounded better
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 22:48 by Anonymous
#

Yay gachet!
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 22:47 by Anonymous
#

You are in the middle of the opus, right now.
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 22:46 by Anonymous
#

#gg We are the barbarians and our love for art and culture can’t hide that
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 22:44 by Anonymous
#

#iu why should i care?
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 22:41 by Anonymous
#

Ac
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 22:39 by Anonymous
#

#gg I am standing right behind u
— Fri, 09/05/2008 – 22:34 by Anonymous
#
Continue reading →

Mobile SWARM: Live Art Project Tonight

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Mobile SWARM at Fearless CityFearless City Logo

Mobile SWARM is tonight. Since the backstage section of the project started thirty seconds ago, I don’t really have time to explain. The project itself starts at 7pm Pacific Time and goes till 10. You can see it live here:

Mobile Swarm

And if any of you technical genii know how to hook that up to a Prologue themed blog on an independent install using WordPress technology, or push it to a blog at Fearless City via RSS or something (that one’s Drupal), or hook it up with a Twitter feed (either mine or a brand new one) please put the details in the comments here.