Wired Women Salon # 70 :: Top Chrono

The time has come for our 2008 TOP CHRONO Salon! Once again, Studio XX will showcase the work of talented women artists who will share sneak peeks of their latest artworks, productions or performances. Audiences will enjoy performance pieces, presentations with images and sound, spoken word, music, video and other magnificent surprises true to our artform. Invited artists will be subject to the playful random rules of the universe : each will have between 4 to 7 minutes to execute their presentation. The lenght will be determined by the cast of the dice!

Join us for a fabulous celebration capping off a prolific year of creative endeavours !

With : Lorella Abenavoli, Beewoo, J.R. Carpenter, Darsha Hewitt, Virpi Kettu, Maroussia Lévesque, Hélène Prévost, Nelly-Ève Rajotte and Victoria Stanton.

Wired Women Salon # 70 [Dec. 18] :: Top Chrono
Thursday, December 18th 2008, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM
@ Geordie Theatre Space:: 4001 Berri St., Ground Floor Montreal
Entrance Fee : 6$, free for Studio XX members.

*** Top Chrono Special : one-night only !
Become a member of Studio XX at the event and receive a complimentary copy of our limited edition xxxboîte : http://www.studioxx.org/en/xxxboite

STUDIO XX
4001 Berri St., Suite 201, Montreal (Quebec) H2L 4H2
Between Roy and Duluth
Sherbrooke Metro, or the 24 bus (Sherbrooke)
http://www.studioxx.org

Information :: 514.845.7934
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WOMEN'S ART: TAKING OVER THE WEB

Studio XX launches MATRICULES: Canada's largest public online archive of digital artwork by women and one of the world's largest online archives of women's digital art. Created with invaluable support from Heritage Canada's Canadian Culture Online Program and hosted by Studio XX, Mobile Media Lab and the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University, Matricules will launch on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 from 5:30 PM to 7:30 PM at Hexagram Concordia, 1515 Ste-Catherine West (corner Guy) on the 11th floor.

Matricules is an electronic documentary herstory spanning eleven years of research, creation and exploration at Canada's one-of-a kind Studio XX. Mingle with some of Montreal's most celebrated new media artists on a spectacular terrace overlooking Montreal and enjoy a performative reading by J.R. Carpenter, two-time winner of CBC's Quebec Short Story Competition. Prominent interdisciplinary artists Caroline Martel and jake moore will offer their take on the website's creation process and Matricules Project Director Stephanie Lagueux will give audiences a private tour of this remarkable new digital archive.

The xxxboîte, a limited edition artifact comprised of original texts and a DVD produced in celebration of Studio XX's first decade will also be presented and available for purchase as an important addition to any contemporary art collection.

Founded in 1996 with the goal of ensuring a defining presence for women in cyberspace and in the development of the digital arts, Studio XX is Canada's foremost feminist digital art centre for technological exploration, creation and critique. Committed to establishing women's access to technology, with a strong focus on Open-Source software, Studio XX offers artist residencies, monthly performance salons, an electronic magazine, a weekly radio show and HTMlles: an international biennial cyberarts festival.

"Matricules is a privileged gateway to dazzling integral digital artworks" comments Paulina Abarca-Cantin, Studio XX's Director General. "This electronic treasure box offers the public live works by greats like Shawna Dempsey, Chantal DuPont, Deborah VanSlet, Women with Kitchen Appliances, Suzanne Kozel, Isabelle Choinière and AGF to name but a very, very few of the best of the best."

Matricules was made possible through generous support from The Canada Council for the Arts, The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, Mobile Media Lab and the Koumbit network. Studio XX wishes to thank its members, volunteers and visionary funding partners including Canadian Heritage's Canadian Culture Online initiative.

http://www.studioxx.org
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Getting In On The Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together

In the beginning there were only a few of us. That we knew of. We thought there might be others, but we weren’t sure where to look. We were in a room. It was a small room. If it had a glass ceiling, we couldn’t see it. The point was to share the room, and what was in it. What was in it was a lot of paper and also, a computer. It was our understanding that the computer would replace the paper. We hadn’t got that working yet. We had other, more pressing questions: Where is this place called cyberspace? And who pays for it? We asked around, but no one would tell us anything. Go away, they said. You’re no good at math, they said. Which only made us ask more questions: What are they hiding from us – passwords, codes, equipment? What are we missing – information, networks, power? What don’t they want us to know – that if they can do it we can do it? If they can do it than how hard could it possibly be?

One day we decided we would ask the computer. Computer, do you contain any answers to the many questions you engender? We huddled around it. We only had the one. It was a grey-beige box with a beetle-black glass eye. We knew we had to get past the surface of the thing. We knew that deep down inside our grey-beige box was much larger than it appeared. It was connected to other grey-beige boxes in other rooms. Stashed away inside these millions of boxes there must be billions of answers.

We switched the computer on. There was a click, a whir, and then a steady hum. Soon enough we sat basking in a blue-green glow. A cursor blinked at us. We blinked back. Now what do we do? Expectations were running high. We’d been promised progress, deliverance, another chance. And there was this cursor clearing a path to the command line for us, a clean slate. Before we knew it we were giving it orders: run, kill, execute. This kind of language was hard for some of us to take. Some of us just wanted to: sleep, jobs, stop, exit. Others wanted to know more: list, who, finger, history. Cables coiled at our feet. They snaked out the door. We slipped out with them. So this is how we shed our skin!

We had stumbled into uncharted territory, an outlaw zone where we could be anything, anyone, anywhere. We could be logical. We could be abstract. We could be “it” or “he/she” or we could log in as Guest and cruise anonymous through Archie, Gopher, Telnet and FTP. We wandered around like this for a dog’s age. Which, in Internet years, was just a few days. We still had bodies. Our wrists were sore. And everywhere we went we were: @gender, language thwarting us at every turn.

One day we were minding our own business writing shell scripts on the command line when a bright spec appeared on the horizon. It was a pixel. It was a mass of pixels. The pixels joined forces. Soon they formed a thumbnail, and then a whole jpeg. An image! The next thing we knew no one knew who was issuing commands anymore. We were all clicking away on icons. What we saw was what we got. One thing linking to another, faster and faster, around and around we went.

Now all we have to do is ask, and answers come racing at us. So many answers. What were the questions again? They were merely predictions. They enabled us to move forward. Toward what? We never would have guessed. How many of us there are. How much we do and do not know. How are we going to remember all this? Will our uncertainties be stored online, along with our desires? Maybe we’d better print them out just in case. How necessary is closure? Well, it’s a start anyway.

"Getting in on the Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together," an essay by J. R. Carpenter, published in xxxboîte, an artifact produced in celebration of the first ten years of Studio XX, a Feminist art centre for technological exploration, creation, and critique.


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xxxboîte

Official launch: Wednesday 17 October , 5 à 7
Galerie Yerge au, 2060 Joly, Montreal [map]

xxxboîte is an artifact produced in celebration of the first ten years of Studio XX, Centre d'artiste féministe engagé dans l'exploration, la création et la critique en art technologique. The boîte contains a publication featuring new texts from Kim Sawchuk, Marie-Christiane Mathieu, Anna Friz, J.R.Carpenter, and Michelle Kasprzak and a DVD comprised of documentation of selected projects, presentations and events of the first ten years of programming at studioxx. Inserted into this collection is a limited edition print from Montréal based artist, beewoo.

Faced with the impossibility of fully describing something that continues to shift in form and intentions, commissaire invitée, jake moore, has instead assembled the residue and remnants of the studio’s affects and actions for your consideration. The resulting collection indicates a centre ripe with exchange, diversity, and energy whose development parallels that of contemporary digital technologies.

Artists and projects represented on the DVD include: Kim Sawchuk, Kathy Kennedy, Sheryl Hamilton, Deb Van Slet, Histoire Orales, MXXR, Élène Tremblay, Anna Friz, Annabelle Chvostek, Katarina Soukup, Valerie Walker, Nancy Wight, Hope Peterson, Stephanie Lagueux, Diane Labrosse, Chantal Dumas, Caroline Martel, Miriam Verburg, Genevieve Heistek, Nancy Tobin, Bernadette Houde, Anne-Francoise Jacques and more…..

For more information and/or to order xxxboîte contact studioxx
4001 Rue Berri, espace 201, Montréal. Québec H2L 4H2
tél: 514-845-7934 . fax: 514.845.4941, accès (carte) | info@studioxx.org
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Strata of Data: Digging Through A Dozen Years Onine

Show-And-Tell was my favorite subject in grade school. I especially loved the unprepared kids who took whatever they had in their knapsack - like an apple, or a hairbrush - and made a really great show out of it. In University I worked in the Visual Arts Slide Library -170,000 tiny pictures of art, and my job was to find and file them. Heaven! So, as you can imagine, I got pretty excited when Studio XX in Montreal invited me to give a presentation at:

Salon Femmes Br@nchées #61 :: ART.chives : art, archives, & databases.

"In this era of sampling and access to «public» information archives increasingly represent a source of artistic material. Studio XX invites you to a «5 à 7» for informal discussions with artists whose work makes diverse artistic use of archives and databases… Featuring presentations from: Aesha Hameed, J. R. Carpenter & Projet Matricules."

Thursday, February 16th, 2006
5pm-7pm, Studio XX

Strata of Data: Digging Through A Dozen Years On Line: J. R. Carpenter got her first Unix account in 1993 and has been making web art projects since 1995. She constructs her online fictions with Internet flotsam and jetsam: found images, found audio, found data, and found scripts. Carpenter lurks in listserves, prowls developer-sites, copy and pastes and habitually Views Source. She collects old textbooks in the alleyway and photographs other people’s graffiti. She alters slick blocks of CSS, and tweaks cheesy javascript effects for narrative purposes. Her web projects retain a low-tech aura. She uses a lot of black and white images (because that’s what colour photocopies come in), uses DHTML when Flash would do nicely, avoids software solutions, embraces cross-browser/cross-platform vagaries, and aims for scalability and graceful fails. In this presentation she’ll lead us on a tangential tour through her archive of web art projects, pointing out the "borrowed" bits along the way.

If you can't make it on Thursday, that's okay. You can dig through my data any time, at: http://Luckysoap.com

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Founded in 1996, Studio XX is Montreal’s foremost women’s digital resource centre. Through a variety of creative activities and initiatives, the Studio works with women to demystify digital technologies, to critically examine their social aspects, to facilitate women’s access to technology, and to create and exhibit women’s new digital art.

STUDIO XX
338 Terrasse Saint-Denis, Montréal (Québec) H2X 1E8
À deux pas au sud de l'intersection Sherbrooke et St-Denis.
Métro Sherbrooke, ou autobus 24 (Sherbrooke) ou 125 (Ontario).
(514) 845-0289 / http://www.studioxx.org
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