Tag Archives: Remembrance Day

Vancouver (Canada) Biennale and #ArtProject2020, a free virtual art & technology expo from November 11th to 15th, 2020

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It’s a bit odd that the organizers for an event held in Canada would arrange to have Remembrance Day for the opening day and not make any acknowledgements. (For those not familiar with it, here’s more about Remembrance Day (Wikipedia entry) and there’s more here on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s [CBC] Remembrance Day 2020 webpage and on this Nov. 10, 2020 ‘Here’s everything you need to know about the poppy’ article for the Daily Hive.)

The event description is quite exciting and the poster image is engaging, although ….

Courtesy: Vancouver Biennale

Did they intend for the blocks to the left and right (gateway to the bridge?) to look like someone holding both hands giving you the finger on each side? Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t ‘unsee’ it.

Moving on, there’s more information about the expo from a Nov. 9, 2020 Vancouver Biennale announcement (received via email),

The Vancouver Biennale announces a global invitation to #ArtProject2020, a free virtual art and technology expo about how the latest technologies are influencing the art world. The expo will run from November 11th to 15th and feature over 80 international speakers and 40 events offering accessible information and educational resources for digital art. Everyone with a personal or professional interest in art and technology, including curators, galleries, museums, artists, collectors, innovators, experience designers, and futurists will find the expo fascinating and is invited to register. Trilingual programming in English, Spanish, and Chinese will be available.

To reserve a free ticket and see the complete speaker list and schedule, visit www.artproject.io.

Curated by New York-based Colombian artist Jessica Angel, the expo will accompany the Vancouver Biennale’s first exhibition of tokenized art with new works by Jessica Angel, Dina Goldstein, Diana Thorneycroft, and Kristin McIver. Tokenized art is powered by blockchain technology and has redefined digital artwork ownership, allowing artists and collectors the benefit of true digital scarcity. The exhibition will be launched via the blockchain marketplace, Ephimera.

About the Expo

Panel Discussions, Artist Talks, Keynote Speakers: Innovators, curators, legal experts, and artists working at the leading edge of digital art will cover topics including What Is Cryptoart?, Finding Opportunity in the Digital, Women Leading the Art and Tech Movement, The Art of Immersion, Decentralising Power and Resources in the Art World, and Tools for Artists and Collectors. Speakers include The Whitney Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, Christie’s, Foundation for Art and Blockchain, SuperRare, and Art in America.

Learning: Barrier-free educational workshops will teach participants about using open-source and accessible innovative tools to create, monetize, and collect digital art. Workshops are integrated with various blockchain projects to drive adoption through experience. Featured presenters include Ephimera, Status, and MakerDAO. Indigenous Matriachs 4 will present from the Immersive Knowledge Transfer series for XR media creators, artists, and storytellers from diverse cultural communities.

Activities: A Crypto-Art Puzzle will drop clues every day of the event, and the Digital Art Battle will challenge artists to draw live. This gamified experience will offer winners rewards in different tokens. Participates can also join the Rare AF team on a Virtual Gallery Tour through the Metaverse, where gallery owners will share the inspirations behind their virtual spaces.

Anchoring the virtual expo is a future physical installation by Jessica Angel. Cleverly titled Voxel Bridge, this public artwork will transform the area underneath Vancouver’s Cambie Street Bridge into a three-layered immersive experience to transport visitors between physical and digital worlds. Working with the vastness of the concrete bridge as first layer, Angel adds her site-specific installation as a second layer, and completes the experience with augmented reality enhancements over the real world as the third and final layer. The installation is slated for completion in Spring 2021 as part of the Vancouver Biennale Exhibition.

“I never want to see the Biennale stuck in the past, presenting only static sculpture in an ever-changing world. We work with what comes next, the yet unknown, and we want to go where the future is heading and where public art has, perhaps, always been going. I am excited for this expo and the next chapter of the Biennale.”  – Barrie Mowatt, Founder & Artistic Director of Vancouver Biennale

“Art is a mobilizing force with the power to bridge seemingly dissimilar worlds, and Voxel Bridge exhibits this capacity. This expo transcends the enjoyment of art into a unifying and experimenting effort, that enables blockchain technology and established art institutions to examine ways of interaction. Join us in the virtual public space, to learn, and to cultivate new forms of participation.”             – Jessica Angel, Artist

Do check the schedule: http://www.artproject.io/ (keep scrolling) and don’t forget it’s free in exchange for your registration information. Enjoy!

Remembrance of things past

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It’s Remembrance Day today (Nov. 11, 2016), a statutory holiday (in Canada) honouring the members of the military who have died and who have been injured in battle.

As for the survivors, our returning soldiers don’t have adequate support to reenter society after their tour of duty. Even more sadly, that has been true since time immemorial. The one hopeful aspect we have is increased awareness which will hopefully lead to needed changes.

Renata D’Aliesio, Les Perreaux and Allan Maki wrote a Nov. 4, 2016 article for the Globe and Mail about soldier suicide in Canada,

This article is part of The Unremembered, a Globe and Mail investigation into soldiers and veterans who died by suicide after deployment during the Afghanistan mission.

They were sons of bankers, miners and infanteers. They were strongmen and endurance runners. They were husbands and fathers who took their children camping and taught them how to play shinny on backyard rinks.

All 31 were dedicated Canadian soldiers and airmen who served on the perilous Afghanistan mission. They all came home. All ended their lives.

Most were haunted by the things they saw and did in Afghanistan, their families told The Globe and Mail. Many asked the military for help, but in several cases, their medical assessments and treatment were delayed, even as their post-traumatic stress, depression and sleeplessness worsened.

I believe there are issues with former peacekeepers; I’m thinking in particular of those who served in the Balkans and Rwanda, although I’m other certain missions could also be mentioned.

I grew up in a house with someone who had PTSD (post traumatic stress syndrome)—my father, a WWII veteran. It was difficult; he was difficult.  Only many years later did I realize what an extraordinary effort it must have taken for him to establish a family and relationships, go to work day in and day out, fight a battle with the bottle in his 40s, and come through the other side when he was in 70s, shortly before he died.

I once read this description of the process we all have to go through when soldiers return (the following is paraphrased),

There are two jobs to be accomplished. We have to forgive them (the soldiers) for what they’ve done and then, they have to forgive us for asking them to do it.

If I find anything about how to encourage the Canadian military to provide better support other than contacting your Member of Parliament, I will add it to this post.

One final remembrance of things past. Leonard Cohen died on Nov. 10, 2016. This Oct. 17, 2016 article by David Remnick seems quite timely (h/t Lainey Gossip Nov. 11, 2016 intro),

… Even before he had much of an audience, he had a distinct idea of the audience he wanted. In a letter to his publisher, he said that he was out to reach “inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists.”

I find it peculiarly appropriate to apply the description to soldiers.

Finally, here’s the song everyone has been playing in tribute to Cohen. This cover features a performance by the sublime K D Lang,

In Memoriam.

Business in Vancouver discovers nanotechnology

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There’ve been two articles in the Vancouver (Canada) newspaper, Business in Vancouver by Tyler Orton about a Simon Fraser University spin-off (start up) company, Nanotech Security. I first mentioned the not-yet-named company in a January 17, 2011 posting about proposed anti-counterfeiting measures based on the structures present on the Blue Morpho butterfly’s wings.

Orton’s Feb. 24, 2015 piece for Business in Vancouver provides an update on the company and on some of the business issues associated with a new technology and the strategy being used to introduce it,

Colour-shifting optical film has been the industry standard for banknote security since the 1990s. Depending on the angle of view, colours change on security features printed on bills in a way that the average person can recognize.

Because the nanotechnology has yet to be fully commercialized, the optical film side of the business is growing the most.

…

… increased demand for the optical film products prompted Nanotech to add a second shift at its Quebec cellulose facility, which was acquired – along with the legacy business – from North Vancouver’s Fortress Paper (TSX:FTP) in August.

Fortress Paper CEO Chad Wasilenkoff said when discussions began over the sale of Fortress Optical Features (FOF) he was immediately drawn to Nanotech’s butterfly technology.

“Getting a brand-new security feature that has not been used anywhere before … [banks] are just not willing to take a chance on new things in general when it comes to banknotes,” he told Business in Vancouver.

“It will take a little while to come to fruition, but we think putting these two entities [Nanotech and FOF] together will definitely fast-track that.”

Counterfeiting hit its most recent peak in 2004, when 470 fake notes per million were detected across the country, according to a 2011 Bank of Canada (BoC) study.

…

Wasilenkoff, whose company operates another banknote security firm in Switzerland, said he was happy with the return on investment after Fortress bought the BoC assets for  $750,000 and sold them to Nanotech three years later for $17.5 million.

“We were able to find a solution that was really synergistic for both companies,” he said, adding that Fortress will receive preferential treatment on new security features Nanotech develops.

…

LeRoux [Nanotech chief development officer Igi LeRoux] added that acquiring the legacy business was necessary if the nanotechnology was to be taken seriously in an industry that greets upstart companies with skepticism.

“[Now] We have an established network, we have an established market base, we have an existing product and – most importantly – we have an existing reputation in the industry.”

Orton’s Aug. 28, 2015 piece for Business in Vancouver builds on his Feb. work (Note: Links have been removed),

Banknotes implanted with nanotechnology, bills printed with pinhead-sized images at maximum resolution or even coins that can store of data.

… it’s not the kind of out-there concepts that only exists in the mind of the CEO of Nanotech Security [Doug Blakeway].

The Burnaby-based banknote security firm has been working non-stop to get these anti-counterfeiting measures onto the streets as quickly as possible and is preparing to ramp up production and sales of its technology after securing $2.6 million in its latest round of fundraising that closed Wednesday (August 26 [2015]).

…

Blakeway said the plan is to converge the nanotechnology and the optical film technology soon. It’s a measure he said is necessary to introduce the nanotechnology to issuing authorities that may be skeptical about the new product.

It probably won’t be until November before Nanotech discloses which countries are using its technology. Issuing authorities, Blakeway said, are reluctant to reveal exactly what measures they’re taking to fight counterfeiting.

“You can talk about the top 10 issuing authorities or the G8 issuing authorities,” he said.

…

But Nanotech isn’t stopping only at imprinting bills with the microscopic holes.

Mints began asking last year if it could transfer its technology onto coins in a stamping operation without any extra cost, save for the dye they use.

Moving forward, the coins will be able to store data through an image that’s carried through light waves.

I trust someone will notify the US government about this proposed nanotechnology-enabled coinage. There have been concerns about Canadian coinage in the past as noted in a May 7, 2007 article in thestar.com by Ted Bridis (Associated Press),

An odd-looking Canadian coin with a bright red flower was the culprit behind the U.S. Defence Department’s false espionage warning earlier this year, the Associated Press has learned.

The odd-looking – but harmless – “poppy coin” was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors travelling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as “anomalous” and “filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology,” according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

The silver-coloured 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy – Canada’s flower of remembrance – inlaid over a maple leaf. The unorthodox quarter is identical to the coins pictured and described as suspicious in the contractors’ accounts.

The supposed nano-technology actually was a conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy’s red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada’s 117,000 war dead.

“It did not appear to be electronic (analog) in nature or have a power source,” wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. “Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire like mesh suspended on top.”

The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defence Security Service, an agency of the Defence Department, that mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors travelled through Canada.

It seems those army contractors were prescient about nanotechnology-enabled coins. As for the potential to use these coins for spying, I leave that speculation to those who know more about the technology.