Scrapyard guitars workshop at SOVA

I gave a workshop at School of Visual Art in Dawson City with the folks from the first year 3D class. The basic idea is to get the students to make guitars(or something like that) out of discarded materials. In three hours I introduced acoustic coupling, some basic mechanics and musical ideas to the group. It was really fun. Everyone finished their project. There was some great visual ideas, unusual juxtapositions and noise.

Dawson City Yukon

The view from the plane as we came in to land.



Dawson City

Barnacle Bob pounds em out at The Snake Pit for Happy Hour on Fridays.









Bonanza Creek.



#4 Dredge preserved and land locked up Bonanza Creek turned into a historic site by Parks Canada.





Evan, David, Colin and myself.

The Road to El Dorado

That's the title of my audio work submitted to The 8 Fest in Toronto. The festival screenings are coming up at the end of January 2010. When I was invited to participate back in October I had no idea I would be invited to Dawson City to participate in a residency at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture.

Milada, one of The 8 Fest coordinators gave me the theme of 'Golden' of which I could interpret in any way I wanted. So I racked my brain and did some googling and settled on gold fever, evils of capitalism, and popular culture representations of same. I did a mash up with sound sampled from the Price is Right, Goldfinger(the 007 Bond movie soundstrack), The Wizard of Oz and the cartoon The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. A fun romp using my soundscape making software.

To make a long story short, I was invited to Dawson City after I delivered the 'The Road to El Dorado'. Dawson City Yukon is the heart of the Klondike Gold Rush, an event that brought thousands of gold seekers to the Yukon starting around 1896. The history here is deep with stories of fortunes won and lost all related directly to gold.

Did I conjure up this trip with the creation of the art work?

Return to San Jose....I'm in the Yukon now

I arrived in Dawson City Yukon this morning. I think I'm channeling the spirit of the stampeders that travelled from California to get here during the Klondike Gold Rush. More on that later. This is what happened last week.

Back in the summer of 2006, I went to San Jose California to take in the ISEA 2006 symposium and the beginnings of a new festival, 01 San Jose. I took in as much as I could of the city and all the festival and symposium activity seceretly hoping I would someday go back and participate. This is what I posted back then. blog entry
And now I returned to San Jose and yes! I will be installing a scaled up in size version of my sound installation wind coil sound flow at the 2010 01SJ Biennial: Build You Own World.






Unbelievably, I went ice skating at a skating rink installed under the palm trees in front of the San Jose Museum of Art. I think the last time I skated was 1981 or so.








The venue for wind coil sound flow will be the interior of the Rotunda at the new city hall.

January heating up

In order to beat the January doom/blues, I like to make myself as busy as possible at this time of the year. The heat is on! Besides a pile of paper work and the total reorganizing of my studio, I have the following to keep me going until February.

i'll be heading to San Jose California for a couple of days to participate in meetings and check out the venue for my future participation in the 2010 01 San Jose Biennial with the theme Build Your Own World. I'm really looking forward and quite exited to be building my work wind coil sound flow as part of Out of the Garage. I can really relate to the themes and everything having to do with this so far has been very good.

On January 16 I'll be helping out with this. Video Pool will be participating in the international celebration of Art's Birthday

The next morning I'll be jumping on a plane and heading to the sub-arctic climes of the Yukon where I'll be participating in the residency program at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture.

At the end of the month my audio piece 'The Road to El Dorado' will be paired up as a soundtrack for a short film at The 8 Fest in Toronto.