Sean Lynch

On March 12th, there is going to be an art show/party/concert that will be unlike anything else you will (probably) see in this city this year. It’s at the Uptown, and it starts at 9PM. The cost is 10$ if you get a ticket ahead of time at either the Uptown Theatre or The Gallery. The cost is 15$ at the door, although I recommend you get tickets ahead of time, as this thing might be absolutely nuts. It’s put on by the wonderful Randy Gibson and crew, and promises to be an exciting time. I’m working on an interactive video piece with Darren Bolz, and hopefully it will turn out well. There should be a few other interactive pieces, some sweet bands (WarPaint, who I’ve now recently discovered, are playing, and they rule), and an overall great time to be had by all.

Here’s the promo, which I’m in:

So last Thursday I went with a few people in my lab to see some videos by a group called Negativland, with an introduction to each video by Mark Hosler, one of the founding members. For those of you who don’t know (this included me up until last Wednesday), Negativland are a mash up group who have been making videos for about 30 years. They traditionally do mash ups of pop culture, to make political points, humor, criticize religion, or to just stir shit up. For that, I give them mad props. The videos were all entertaining, although an interesting discussion came up with a friend about whether mash up could be done without ugliness(as, truthfully, each video was quite an eye sore), and whether aesthetics should still be there in all art. I don’t feel aesthetics are necessary, but I do think it’s interesting to see the variance in opinions towards aesthetic. I always like things that bring up emotions in me, and usually prefer ones that bring up happy ones; aesthetic always plays an important role in bringing comfort into an equation, or at least making people feel pleased to look at something. At the same time, the ugliness of the work can work as a great metaphor for the mismash of visuals that we are bombarded with in our culture. Mind you, with all art, hopefully the emotion that you feel in it comes out; when creating work critical of culture, it’s usually critical of it aesthetically as well, and provokes ugly thoughts.

Anyways, here’s a video from the group.

Last semester I took a bunch of photos of a typewriter for the first project. I had to make a board of a few of these, cut to 50mmx50mm, which I may list here if I choose to show some of my work from the semester. This typewriter represents a month and a half of suffering in my life that I’ll unfortunately be forced to remember. I do now have an obsession with typewriters, and I’ll think about posting some of the terribleamazing projects I did.

This is a project I made with Lowell Smith on tracking lasers, and using this to modify video.

This is a video that I developed with Suk Kyoung from the Alberta College of Art & Design