Web/Tech – Suzanne Wexler

Electro-fabulous Snowglobes

* The design story below detailed a winter light installation piece on display in downtown Montreal until about March 2011. The best part of doing this piece was how utterly enthusiastic designer, Bernard Duguay, was about doing the project, called Spheres Polaires. (I-heart-enthusiasm, btw. It’s a sentiment oftentimes lost in ultra-cool Montreal!). Duguay wanted to create a winterland of snowglobes, an abstract bubble-icious microcosm of the city, and totally succeeded.

This beautiful shot of the installation was taken by Dario Ayala, one of the my favorite Montreal Gazette photographers.

*The article below appeared in the Montreal Gazette and the National Post.

Electro-Snowglobes

An outdoor light installation featuring 25 giant glowing bubbles is set up in Montreal’s Place des Spectacles and the adjoining Place des Arts area, inspiring hordes of photo-happy tourists and passersby to interact with the urban landscape this season.

“It’s land art for winter, plus it makes you feel like you’re in the future,” explains Bernard Duguay, the art director of the project, Spheres Polaires. Duguay conceived of the electrofabulous snowglobe scene in response to a contest, open to the public, organized by the Quartier des spectacles Partnership.

“They wanted to populate the outdoor space with something dream-like and interactive,” he says. Duguay is founder of multimedia installation company Lucion Media, which has put on shows during Canada Day festivities and produced interactive displays at the Science Centre in Old Montreal. After hearing about the contest, Duguay quickly envisioned the micro-city of spheres. But at first he was hoping to do something high-tech with the bubbles, such as having people electronically paint on them. “After a lot of [research and development], we decided to go more artistic, which meant we had to be crafty. We thought of shadow theatre,” he says. Duguay’s winning project, Spheres Polaires, executed in collaboration with his colleagues at Lucion Media and with musical director Pierre Gagnon, is among three light installation works on display at three locations along St. Catherine Street in the Quartier des spectacles.

The visceral, magical-style bubbles of Spheres Polaires are made of white, reinforced vinyl hollow domes, which Duguay says appear ” E. T.-like” during the day (they’re meant to be viewed in the evening or night).

These inflated domes, or bubbles, range from three metres to 10 metres in circumference. Their interiors are lit and have one-metre-square speakers. Some contain a rotating mobile for producing special effects.

From the exterior, the bubbles boast three different themes — winter light, urban winter and winter games. These themes determine whether the bubbles are aglow with disco-like projections activated by sensors (winter lights), or covered in swirling shadow puppets featuring the Jacques Cartier Bridge or an airplane zooming by (urban winter). Expect to see abstract scenes of children playing hockey in the winter games theme.

Spectators can control the position of the lights in a few bubbles with the swish of a hand, thanks to a one-metre-tall puck-shaped sensor on the outside. The bubbles also emit sounds ranging from New Age whispers to exuberant roars. This unexpected audio helps shake you to the core.

“We made the bubbles close enough so they feel like the squeeze of the city. And like a dance with traffic lights, sound adds to the experience,” Duguay says.

– Spheres Polaires will be on display at Montreal’s Quartier des spectacles until Feb. 27.

Social Photography 101 and the SELFIE; Becoming Master of your iPhoto Domain is all about Planned Casualness

How to pose for the oh-so-casual selfie?

Hair up with whispers of a come-hither look?…. OR

… Hair down and a pearly white, off-kilter smile?

As you can see from my webpage photo, I tend to prefer the sultry look. Regardless, since it took me a zillion tries to even get those semi-decent photos, I think I should practice my casual pic pose a little more!

*The article below appeared, in full or in part, in The Montreal Gazette, The Vancouver Sun, Edmonton Journal, and The Province.

Social Photography 101

The camera doesn’t love me. It doesn’t quite loathe me, either. Occasionally, it warms up to my crooked nose and zigzag smile. But based on the law of averages, I can safely predict that I’d rather see most shots taken of me disappear into the vast digital universe where they came from.

Unfortunately, they often pop up on someone else’s Flickr photo montage or Facebook page. But I’m trying to get over it. Online photo albums and social networking sites are flourishing, and embedded cameras on cellphones, iPhones and computers give millions of new photo diarists endless opportunities to showcase their skill.

And true, the skill can get ugly. Much like most new art forms, social photography — photographs intended to be shared with a large network of people — is one that beats to the most unusual sensibility. Formalities like posing or centring the shot become extraneous. Rather, it’s all about documenting your own real-time narrative, and you don’t even need a third party to help you do it.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, all you need to do is to reach out your arm, aim somewhere around your nose and snap, flash or click! You’ve got a perfectly acceptable self-portrait, aka “Selfie”, to post online. An instructional online slide show running with the piece explained that these shots should look fun and slightly off-kilter. And, like the self-portrait artist Cindy Sherman, funny costumes are welcome, too.

Whether it’s a wonky selfie, or you posting a few action shots of your pals, photography this millennium is certainly not what it used to be. But, like everything else that looks effortlessly cool, major preparation is often involved.

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Flash sales blow up

Thanks to a tip from a friend, the outnet.com is one of my favorite new flash sale websites. Even though the labels are exclusive, the site doesn’t insist upon that “members only” policy. The above patterned dresses by Pucci, Matthew Williamson, and Erdem (respectively), were all available for a very limited time on the website at over 60% to 70% off.

*This article appeared orignally in the Montreal Gazette and on the Canada.com network.

At a large warehouse in St. Laurent, in a newly crafted photo studio, Alisa Pysaryeva, a model from Folio agency, strikes a pose in a Whitney Eve dress. A few doors down in another studio, a mint green Balenciaga handbag is being puffed and positioned for its photo op. Luxury handbags are lined up, awaiting their turns.

Photo shoots like these happen daily at Beyond the Rack, a Montreal company that sells discount Gucci, Juicy Couture and lesser-known brand-name items at online “flash sales.” A flash sale means that bargain items -typically last season’s overstock and sample pieces reduced in price by 40 to 70 per cent -are available only for a brief, limited time.

For Beyond the Rack’s shoppers, that’s a mere 36 hours after the sale opens at 11 a.m., when a mass emailing alerts customers to the latest deals -like the Balenciaga bag going for $1,599 instead of the original $2,095. Buyers then act fast. Not only will the company’s million-plus customers be vying for the same discount items, but when the time’s up, the “flash sale” is extinguished.

Far beyond Beyond the Rack -indeed, over the border and across the sea -similar flash sale websites are scorching through the Internet. Popular sites, all ending with a . com, include Gilt Groupe, Haute-Look, Vente Privee, RueLaLa, Enviius, Ideeli and Fashion Vault (eBay’s latest attempt get into the game). Each has its own photo studios, models and designer labels, and each insists that its customers are really “private members”-that is, to get daily emails about these flash sales, shoppers must be invited to join the website by a friend, or request a membership online.

Even if practically everyone who signs up for most of these sites is accepted, it’s a tactic that helps turn potential waste into a desirable commodity.

“Like a bouncer with velvet ropes, you’ve got to create a fence, a barrier around these clearance items,” says Beyond the Rack CEO Yona Shtern.

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Your mind on brain games

“Bird Safari: Featured in the visual-training program InSight, this game asks players to recall a specific bird — flashed on the screen for only an instant – out of a flock. InSight costs $395 U.S. online through Posit Science.”

*This article appeared, in full or in part, in the Montreal Gazette, the Vancouver Sun, the Ottawa Citizen, GlobalNational Television, the Windsor Star, the Edmonton Journal, and more.

Before I begin listing the latest computer games and expert tips on how best to improve your brain fitness, like push-ups for normal aging and forgetful minds, here are some thoughts from my grandma, a foxy eighty-something:

“Don’t tell me to do those puzzles. They just rock me into insensibility,” she said. “My brain moves too fast to begin with. In less than five minutes, I’m trying to remember when your grandpa’s next doctor’s appointment is, and whether we need coffee cream, God forbid.

“Meanwhile your grandpa starts hollering, ‘Where’s my walking stick? Where’s my hearing aid?’ And while I’m standing on my head looking for his stuff, the oatmeal pot boils over. Anyhow, you’re nuttier than a fruitcake if you think getting old is like a bowl of cherries,” she said

Fortunately for my grandmother, wisdom isn’t lost with age as easily as walking sticks.

“Some things don’t decline,” says Fergus Craik, a leading cognitive psychologist based in Toronto and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Memory.”For example, people in their 50s and 60s tend to have better vocabulary and word knowledge (than younger people). And knowledge of the world seems to hold up with age, as do skilled procedures like mental arithmetic or playing piano, if you still practice.”

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