François Lalumière:On the Phone with Mum. Montreal artist François Lalumière, known for his colorful installations is one the artist invited to participate.

Macaroni necklace for Mom

In celebration of Mother’s Day, several students have asked 18 Montreal artists “ to make a necklace out of macaroni ”. From the 5th to the 12th of May 2012, at the studio XX in Montréal, Macaroni Necklace for Mom will show the works of several different exhibitors in a multi-disciplinary visual arts exhibition.

What is it about ?

The idea of making a necklace out of macaroni for one’s mother originates in the poetry of simple daily objects. A necklace of noodles has always been the king of preschool creations. Unfortunately, these projects are regarded with derision : they are seen to have little to no commercial value. Nonetheless, such an object conserves its sentimental value, crystallized in the pure intention of a child who carefully makes it, for his or her mother. Macaroni Necklace for Mom also proposes to banish barriers which circumscribe any creative discipline to celebrate “an object with a modest soul, without borders of any kind or origin”; a stance which, echoes the proposition of the artist Hervé Perdriolle – a key promoter of Free Form.

The Genesis

Cybèle B. Pilon – a communications undergraduate at the University of Montréal – invited 18 Montreal artists from different disciplines to make a necklace out of macaroni to celebrate Mother’s Day. To mark the same occasion as a youngster, she often spent time in similar handicraft activities in elementary school.

Years pass but the games we play remain the same. Cybèle is passionate about things that, on the surface, are ordinary, simple; she has organized a team consisting of Guillaume, Marie- Audrey and Cassie to turn this crazy project into a reality. The desire to learn and participate in a worthwhile project prompted these four students from communications, design and scenography, to organize the project.

A Macaroni Necklace for Mother aims to stimulate the Montreal cultural scene as well as to honor women as part of a celebration of Mother’s Day. One hopes to find as well, in this project, a continuing hope to erase the lines which define disciplines, media and other barriers between the contemporary arts.

Studio XX

4001, rue Berri – Suite 201 (between Duluth and Roy, Sherbrooke metro)
Montreal, Quebec, H2L 4H2
514 845-7934

If you happen to be in the neighborhood, check this exhibition out.

It’ll be open till this Saturday, May 12th.

The metro is a fast and convenient way to get people fast from point A to point B, and it does not hinder the traffic, the cityscape, you don’t hear it, you don’t see it, but it’s there and it’s hard to beat. The problem with underground metros is the price of building the network, it’s very expensive to build a km of metro line and because of this, cities usually go for cheaper solutions.

I wonder if the place of the metro would be reconsidered, if it would be perceived as more than just another way to transport people, and in paralel, to be used for transporting goods? The bill of developing new metro lines would be split between the passengers and the freight companies. There would be fewer trucks on the road and the metro line could be used at its maximum capacity.

This solution might be too crazy to be realistic, but the main idea behind it I think should be considered. The idea come to me from the French word for “public transportation”, which is “transport en commun”, that could be translated as “joint transportation”. As people can share the same vehicle, why couldn’t they share it with goods too?

Balance is about Canada, about Quebec, about multiculturalism, about the difficulty to keep the right balance in order to advance and avoid falling in chauvinism, racism or xenophobia.

From my personal experience, as a new comer to Canada, I was surprised by the openness of people here, how easily they accept that I come from somewhere else.  How easy it is to feel home in Canada, in Quebec, in Montreal.

The only thing I’m still struggling with and the only thing that shatters my illusion of a harmonious society is the relationship between certain Francophones and Anglophones.

It’s an extremely touchy subject, that makes interaction with locals difficult. I got Francophone friends, I got Anglophone friends and they are all open minded people with a lot of respect for other cultures (I’m avoiding bigots), but there are times, especially when elections are near, when poison is in the air. Poison spread by political parties without a serious platform and cheap journalism that tries to sell a few extra papers by steering up the spirits.

I’m looking forward to the time, when the Red will recognize the importance of Blue in creating a unique richness and when Blue will stop focusing on a pessimistic interpretation of its past and start focusing on its future.

There are several fields I can specialize in: Archival Studies, Librarianship, Information Architecture, Information and Knowledge Management.

At this stage, I’m not 100% sure which way I want to go, I still have to take the prerequisite classes and after I might be wiser. For sure I’m not too much interested in a career in archiving or librarianship, so I still have to decide between Knowledge Management or Information Architecture. We’ll see…

Starting this post, I added a new category to this blog, Information studies. As I will advance in this field, I will use this category to regroup ideas, books and articles about IS.

But not all is smooth for him, there will still remain some difficult questions to answer, as in this Haretz article.

The attacker happens to be a Muslim, and this could raise the popularity of Marie LePen too, the candidate of the far right, so Sarkozy had to show that he would go even further to stop terrorists, by imposing the same sentence on repeated visitors of websites that promote terror as on the visitors of child pornography websites, meaning sentences of up to two years in prison and €30,000.

What makes me wonder about the wisdom of his intention, apart from consolidating his image among  his electoral base, is that monitoring visits to websites that promote terror won’t be an easy task.

In the case of child pornography, it’s easier to set up rules, images of models under the age of 18, will be flagged, hence visiting such a website is punishable, but what about terror websites? It’s quite unclear, when does a website will become flagged? What does it mean repeated visitor? How many time a person has to go on such a website to be considered a repeated offender?

Will the law enforcement keep just as a close eye on Neo-Nazi websites and forums as they will on Islamist sites? After all, Anders Behring Breivik was not an Islamist, still he’s the author of the worst terror attack in Scandinavia.

My other question is how will jailing visitors of Islamist websites will be prove to be effective on the long run?

The Toulouse killer was a small time crook that became radicalized while doing time. Sending people to jail, who already seem to be attracted by extremist ideologies, will mean that they get a bursary to the best universities of crime and terror. If they won’t come out from jail more radical than ever, for sure they will have plenty of opportunity to recruit others for their cause.

I still remember our first St-Patrick’s Day parade, it was just a few weeks after our arrival to Montreal.

As new immigrants, we thought on a Sunday, we should go to a Romanian church, maybe we’ll get introduced to the Romanian community and we could make some connections that would help us in our integration.

At the time, we lived in DDO, in the West Island, to get to downtown, where the Romanians were renting a church, we had to take two busses than take the metro, change lines, etc. It was a long trip and it took a lot of determination to go there on a Sunday, especially for us, not your typical church goer type.

From the time we got on the first buss, we noticed there we a few people wearing strange stuff, funny hats and a girls face was painted in green. We thought, they’re going to some party and we tried not to show we’re new comers, so we would just look elsewhere. On the second buss there were even more pople, with even stranger hats and the metro was unusually packed, all with people dressed in green. We realized that this must be something bigger than a weird party and we became so curios to see where everyone is going dressed like this, that we dropped the plan to go to church and we just followed the crowd.

As we got out on St-Catherine street, at Peel metro station, the sidewalks were occupied by a huge crowd and in the middle of the street there was the St-Patrick’s Day parade.

Everyone shouting “Happy St-Patrick!”, bunch of drunk people, kids, cops, bagpipes, clowns (it was later that I learned they’re the Shriners), etc. The parade went on and on and on, and we forgot completely about our plan to go to church. We were happy because we were part of something special, something Canadian and we felt more integrated into our new home, than we would ever feel by going to any Romanian church.

The parade left on me a lasting impression, I even made a painting that you can see here and I try to never miss it. Every year we would go with my wife and celebrate the coming of Spring. Today was no different, especially that we had 20 degrees Celsius, we went again to have a beer and shout “Happy St-Patrick” to strangers.

He has all the right to do so, since he was one of the pundits who have predicted this phenomenon at the launch of the first iPad, two years ago. His predictions are confirmed by statistics, there are way more tablets sold than PC’s and the numbers are looking better and better for tablet makers. PC is something that covers quite many different types of devices, but in this post, I will follow Mike Elgan in calling PC a workstation or a laptop.

Can anyone say no to Mike Elgan or to Tim Cook and all the other gurus? Will anyone, by looking at the numbers and listening to these guys, claim we’re not in a post-PC world?

Let me be the one saying it, but let me add to it, we’re not yet in the post-PC world , but we’re heading towards it with full speed. Here is why:

Tablets are not replacing PC’s

Tablets (and here I would include smartphones too) let you do things that with a workstation or a laptop would be quite cumbersome, like accessing the Internet on the go, or while laying on a sofa while watching TV. Touch screens are way more intuitive to use than a mouse or a trackpad, hence the popularity of tablets even among non-technical people.

PC’s are still more ergonomically adapted as tablets

As intuitive as it is a touch device, it is still not as efficient as PC with a keyboard and a mouse, when it comes to ergonomics, it’s OK to write an email or a blog post on a tablet, but I would like to see that secretary who has to type every day hundreds of emails doing it on the screen of a tablet. I’m sure at the end of the day her neck and her wrist will be soar as hell.

What it would take to really talk about post-PC?

Tablets have succeeded in taking over from PC the entertainment part, but they are still far from dominating the workplace, because of productivity issues. In response to this deficiency and because the tablet market is expanding, there is a whole new sector mushrooming, the accessory producers. There are plenty of keyboards already that work with tablets, that will make typing more easy, but we still have to solve the problem with the limited screen size of a tablet.

Be that a wired or a wireless solution, in the end we will need a way to connect tablets to a bigger screen or why not, to several of them. It’s a long known fact that having a fast computer with enough screen that you don’t have to juggle with windows on top of each other, will improve productivity.

When we talk about big screens, sorry, but touch is out of question and the good old mouse or something similar to it, will be a lot more easy our wrist than stretching out to push a screen, especially when it comes to repetitive movements performed over a long time.

For storage, I think tablets are doing good, maybe the 16G version won’t be too practical in a professional environment, but I’m sure SSD prices will end up dropping and we’ll laugh at the price Apple is charging right now for the 64G iPad.

What is your take on this, are we or not in the post-PC era?

Je clique l’icône Commenter en bas de l’article et je tombe sur une page qui me demande de m’inscrire ou de m’identifier.

Ayoye! Ça commence mal…

OK, j’ai été encore assez enthousiaste pour cliquer le lien pour m’inscrire et là, je tombe sur un formulaire en trois étapes avec pleines questions obligatoires :

Vous pouvez le deviner, j’ai été ben dégonflé. Tout mon enthousiasme a été en train de s’évaporer et je n’avais aucune envie d’écrire quoique soit, mais j’ai été curieuse de voir jusqu’à où cette aberration peut aller.

Alors, j’ai rempli les questions dans la première étape et voila, dans la deuxième pas, les affaires me pose un autre paquet des questions inutiles, cette fois-ci il m’oblige pas de répondre, mais nous sommes encore, en plein, dans la perte du temps des lecteurs.

Dans la troisième étape, on va choisir l’infolettre.

Oh! C’est cool! Des infolettres personnalisées! Je ne savais pas, qu’est-ce que manque de ma vie, encore une infolettre!

Entre temps que j’ai passés à travers les différents choix, j’ai oublié une bonne partie de ce que je voulais écrire comme commentaire.

Comme coup de grâce, à la fin de ce calvaire, je m’attendais d’être déjà connecté, après tout, j’ai répondu à toutes les questions obligatoires, mais non, les affaires.com me demande de m’identifier…

Un peu plus sur les affaires.com

Pour ceux qui ne sont pas de Québec, voici un extrait de leur site :

« La plus importante salle de rédaction spécialisée en économie du Québec. Plus de 30 journalistes, ainsi qu’un réseau de pigistes et d’experts reconnus dans le milieu des affaires.

Plus de 300 000 visiteurs uniques par mois, qui totalisent 3,5 millions de pages vues. »

Je ne sais pas si quelqu’une a remarqué, les commentaires sont presque introuvables sur ce site.

Alors, si vous voulez que le monde laisse des commentaires sur votre site, s’il vous plaît, évitez d’emmerder vos lecteurs.

Photo from Wikipedia Commons

When you visit a museum or a library, often you will get these signs: “No photography” and “No cell phones”. Let’s take a look at their pertinence one by one.

Some museums, won’t let their visitors take pictures and they come up with various reasons: people stopping to take pictures might hinder the flow of visitors, the flash could damage the exhibits, or because of copyright constraints. Probably there are other arguments too, but these are the main ones I heard about.

As long as people are reasonable and behave in a manner to let others enjoy the exhibition, taking pictures should not be forbidden. By taking a photo, the visitor interacts with the exhibit, that photo will help to process and remember the big quantity of information that she will hopefully get by being there.

When it comes to using flash, I totally understand and aprove to tell people to cancel it; the high intensity of the flash light can have negative effects on certain exhibits. To a certain extent, I would also support forbidding photography in certain areas where highly photo sensitive objects are showcased and where organizers don’t want to take the risk that someone will forget to close his flash. For the rest let’s go for it! After all, there are experts that question the danger linked to sporadic use of flash in a gallery.

Copyright! Come on… I still have to understand, who seriously thinks that a picture taken by a visitor, will compete with the official image that was taken by a professional in a studio. Let people take pictures, let them share these images with their relatives and friends, because they are doing free publicity for the exhibition and in the end, the organizers and the owner of the artifacts will be glad to have more visitors and more profit if you like.

Let’s now enter a library where there is a sign forbidding the use of cell phones. I can imagine the first librarian who got fed up to listening all day long to the Nokia ring tones and she printed out a “No cell phones” sign.

In the mean time, phones evolved and I don’t mean that their ringtones are nicer than before, but they can connect to the Internet and help a reader, or why not, the librarian, find more information about a book, or find a library code, on the spot, just by using a smart phone.  On top of this, smart phones are also ebook readers. Librarians who use these signs should wake up and better focus on deploying free WiFi in their library and make sure their library has a good collection of ebooks.

Colours of India: View of the exhibition room. Photo by Alain Vandal ©Pointe-à-Callière

Yesterday I went to visit the Colours of India at Pointe-à-Callière. Since I had a meeting at 6:30 in the Old Port, I thought I will just go and make a small incursion into India. I arrived at 3:30 hopping that the museum will be open till 6, but sorry I was to discover that only during the Summer they are open till 6 and normally they close at 5. Would they be open during the week at least one evening till at least 7, if not till 9PM, then people who work downtown could go see an exhibition from time to time, after work. I hope the new management will fix this among other problems.

Other problems?

Although I thought, and I was even warned at the entrance, that one hour and a half won’t be enough to see the exhibition, my next disappointment came when I got inside. A small room with a few artifacts of recent date: most of them from 20th century, with a few 19th century items and exceptionally here and there some 18th century exhibits; considering the long history of India, nothing to be impressed of.

I could immediately sense that the exhibition was constructed around the photos of Suzanne Held and the rest of the artifacts were added just to have an excuse for showing these images in a museum. Beautiful photos, I have to admit, but that’s it.

There is very little information offered for the visitors, and even that is confusing. You have to be an expert in India’s geography to know where an image was taken, or where those shoes come from.

Instead of educating the visitors, the exhibition is reinforcing stereotypes that Westerners have about this country. India, the holly land, where everyone and their grandfather is a sadhu, where Hinduism is the main religion, let’s not mention Islam and we should be OK with ignoring Sikhism.

The exhibition fails to explore the history and the cultural diversity  of India. The guide told me that the focus of the exhibition was more artistic, but as an art exhibition, it’s more than shallow. I would have been much more interested to see photos taken by Indian photographers, and not by a European lady on vacation.

Would this exhibition been organized by the Indian Ministry of Tourism, I would have had nothing to complain about, but from a museum of archeology and history, I’m expecting more.