Art
'We need you every day': Phone-based art class keeps seniors connected during pandemic – CBC.ca
When COVID-19 reached British Columbia this past spring, Norma Taite, who’s in her 80s, hunkered down in her South Surrey home, ready for her busy social life to shrink.
But a new initiative to keep seniors in South Surrey and White Rock connected and engaged from the comfort of their homes has prevented that from happening.
And Taite, a long-time “dabbler” in the arts, has experienced something of a creative renaissance along the way.
Since May, she and a small group of seniors in South Surrey and White Rock have taken part in an intimate, weekly art class conducted over the phone every Monday morning. The class is a part of a new project called Seniors’ Centre Without Walls (SCWW).
“Maybe I’m a new Grandma Moses?” Taite joked, referencing the American folk artist who only began painting at 78.
Like interactive radio
Modelled after similar programs elsewhere in North America, SCWW offers local seniors an opportunity to participate in numerous phone-based presentations and activities that mirror programming one might find at a seniors’ centre.
Among many options, participants can join a book club, follow an exercise class, stay up-to-date on Japanese news (one of few non-English programs offered) or tune in to You be the Judge of That!, a program where participants collectively determine a verdict for real-life court cases — all through their telephone line.
SCWW, which launched in April, is a project from the Surrey Intercultural Seniors Social Inclusion Partnership (SISSIP) and is partially funded by the federal government.
Edwin Chau, who oversees SCWW, said the project was already in the works before the pandemic arrived. But these isolating times have given it even more purpose.
During one art class CBC News joined, three different participants told the instructor the same thing: “We need you every day.”
For Chau, making the program accessible was always key.
After a person signs up for a certain program, all they have to do is pick up the phone when it rings at the scheduled time, press a number and they’ve joined the call.
Simplicity is important for the art program, as well. During one of the first classes, the instructor asked everyone to sketch a plant outside a nearby window using whatever tools and material they had lying around.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad,” said Chau. “It’s the opportunity to have that release, that artistic outlet during this time.”
Analog vs. digital
Ahead of each class, Chau physically mails all the participants a poster detailing what to expect that week.
Claire Moore, who teaches the class alongside another artist, says the analog nature of the program may come off as romantic to some, but it’s deeply practical.
At least one of the women in the class — which hovers around six members from week to week — doesn’t own a computer or a television.
“You are forced to reckon with: how do you live in this world if you don’t have any form of [digital] technology?” she said. “The only way is to use the systems that we all regard as archaic.”
Moore has taught art for years. Though she expected the phone to be the main challenge this time, she said there are other variables involved.
For instance, two participants are visually impaired, including Taite, who’s now legally blind after being diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) nearly a decade ago. The ocular condition leads to the severe blurring of one’s centre of vision.
“When I retired I thought: ‘OK, I’ll do this and that,'” Taite said.
A former art student with experience using clay, she had originally hoped to tap back into her creative side a few years ago, “however, health and fate got in the way.”
Added Taite with a laugh, “so here I am, painting at home with a telephone instructor.”
Art
Unique art collection on display – CTV News Vancouver
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Unique art collection on display CTV News Vancouver
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Art
This N.B. artist joined an online movement. Now her art is being shown across the world. – CBC.ca
Since joining a community that dreams of an internet free from giant corporations that can exploit users’ time and data, Victoria West’s digital artwork has been exhibited across the globe.
West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, 30 kilometres southeast of Fredericton, has had her work shown in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Townsville in northeastern Australia, Miami, New York City, and even a museum in Albuquerque, N.M., — all through connections she’s made in Web3.
West warned it was a “rabbit hole,” but what she found in wonderland she doesn’t believe she’d find anywhere else.
Web3 is a future version of the internet.
Web1, West said, was the first version of the internet, in which users passively consumed information.
As the 2000s dawned, Web2 emerged, and users could now post their own content — think Twitter, blogs, YouTube. People are now creating more and more in digital spaces, but the downside of Web2 is that corporations are technically still the owners of all that creation, and they could take your data and potentially do with it as they please.
Enter Web3, which still exists more in theory: nobody and everybody owns the internet. This version aims to be decentralized. It doesn’t eradicate the distrust some people have in mega companies like Google and Meta — it just removes the need for it, because no one person or organization can own the blockchain Web3 operates on.
West said within Web3 there’s an art movement, with artists working together and taking control of their work. Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had an internet connection, as well as Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello. It’s the renaissance all over again, West said, except it’s happening with digital art.
“And it’s happening online on a much bigger scale.”
Before learning about W3 in 2021, West said she was in a photography bubble.
Photography isn’t the art form West imagined herself pursuing when she was younger. But when she bought a camera after the first commercial digital models arrived on the market in the mid-2000s, she was hooked.
“I was bothering everybody around me to take their portrait,” she said.
She built up her portraiture business, becoming involved with the Professional Photographers of Canada and competing in photography contests. Still, West didn’t want to just capture moments — she wanted to make them.
That’s when artificial intelligence came on the scene.
West was using Midjourney, a generative AI program, when it was still in beta testing. Around the same time she became involved with Web3, she experimented with blending AI-produced textures into her photography. In her business, AI quickened her workflow and allowed her to change backdrops and furniture.
While creating a piece in 2023 called When I Die, West wanted to design a man underground with roots blossoming into a tree. Well, there aren’t any blossoming trees in Canada in February, West joked — so she made the tree using AI.
“I feel like someone took handcuffs off me, and I’m free,” she said.
Lauren Cruikshank, an associate professor in culture and media studies at the University of New Brunswick, has spoken about the use of AI in universities, but she also thinks about it through an artistic lens.
From the camera to spell check, Cruikshank said the same discussion happens with each new medium: how much of the artistry belongs to the artist, how much to the tools they’re using?
“For some people where it gets uncomfortable is where the role of the human is minimal compared to how much the AI tool is creating or having creative influence,” she said.
With AI, Cruikshank agreed there are degrees — there’s a difference between prompting an AI to generate an image of a beautiful sunset and claiming it as your artwork and what West is doing, combining AI with her own artistry.
“That sounds really compelling to me,” Cruikshank said.
When West first saw Lume Studios on Broadway in lower Manhattan, the place she’d eventually display Eden’s Dye, her immersive art exhibit, she knew she wanted it immediately.
She collaborated on the exhibit with some of her Web3 friends. Los Angeles actors and poets Laurence Fuller and Vincent D’Onofrio wrote poetry to accompany each piece of art, which West created using both photography and AI. A coder friend joined the crew, and the result was a floor-to-ceiling immersive exhibit. West’s collaborators also choreographed performances to complement the art, using music produced by AI.
“Why wouldn’t I do that if I can?” West asked. “It’s freeing, I think, and lets you push the boundaries of photography and what you can do with it.”
While the exhibit leaned heavily on romantic, classical themes and Baroque aesthetics, Eden’s Dye is almost a premonition: minted, digital artwork taking up entire walls in people’s homes, flowers growing from code, experiencing art in virtual realms.
Demand will only grow, West said. Technology will progress and the internet will change. But what she really wanted was for people to walk into Eden’s Dye and be amazed by the art they were experiencing.
“They came because of the art, and they were there enjoying the art. You don’t really need to understand anything beyond that.”
Art
Niagara quilt expo to explore history of modern art form – Welland Tribune
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These aren’t your grandma’s quilts.
Being a grandmother herself, Lorna Costantini said she’s not a huge fan of the above phrase, but she can’t help but use it to describe modern quilting.
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