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Travelling to Scintillation
Oct. 13th, 2018 10:33 pmThis was going to be two paragraphs at the top of an entry about the Scintillation convention. Scintillation was wonderful and exciting and I will post about it soonish, but this has grown into a whole entry itself.
On the first day I spent in Montreal I had flown almost sleepless for more than twenty hours, from New Zealand via LA and Calgary. (Things have changed since Douglas Adams began a novel by saying, "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'As pretty as an airport.' " Every airport I visited was attractive, but in particular I think 'As pretty as Calgary airport' would be thoroughly reasonable. Statues of silver mesh, fountains, pillars on the baggage carousels seeming to rise through the ceiling into unpresent daylight, genuinely elegant ads for a bank, spaciousness, courtesy, croissants, a snowy city... Alright, that last might only seem especially positive to folk like me who don't have to live in it). I liked most of the flying well enough, was tired but not too tired, was held up at customs but not too held up at customs. And I'd seen sheet lightning from above, and a circular sunbow. On arrival at seven AM, feeling like stretching my legs, I set off to walk from the airport in Montreal towards the centre of town. It's lucky the road layout made that impossible, because I had made some unwarranted assumptions about scale. The bus ride to Centreville took forty minutes.
I have no idea what I'd expected Montreal to be like, only that it wasn't. At first there was an extreme dissonance to my being there, as though I'd signed up to have someone play a gentle electric current over part of my brain and temporarily turn off my life. 'I am not a person who is in Canada' had always held true before; what had happened? It was my first foreign city as an adult. Perhaps this feeling can't repeat, or will need an exponentially greater unfamiliarity, we'll see. At the time I took refuge in a café. Very nice danish, tolerable coffee, manageability upon the world. I shouldn't then have walked into the Notre Dame De Montreal -- "Help, too many icons" -- but I'm glad to have seen it, and may someday see it again when less fuddled. (At my usual peak of energy I might be able to pay attention to, why, a full tenth of the icons! Or, dare I aspire, an eighth!)
And then I set out trying to find the Airbnb I was to stay at, and drifted slowly into a fascinating nightmare. I've never been as tired as I was by the end of that day, determined as I was to avoid jetlag and not sleep too early. By the time I'd found the Airbnb and was walking back toward the city to try to find the internet access which would allow me to check the Airbnb website to make sure I knew where to find the keys, I began to recognize my name in random things strangers were saying. I said, 'Excuse me,' to a passer-by, hoping for directions, and he walked on without stopping. I felt increasingly paranoid. By the time I'd found a tourist information centre and been told that internet cafes are not really a relevant thing anymore, because everyone except me travels with a phone instead of whatever you call that old thing, I was unable to simultaneously walk in a straight line and think. Repeatedly, I would find myself coming back to myself without having noticed leaving in the first place. It took me at least a second longer than usual to respond to pedestrian signals. I was scrupulously careful in crossing roads, figuring that unpleasant as all of this was, only being hit by a car was likely to give it long-term consequences. I was going what felt like long distances in order to accomplish small tasks the significances of which I could only just keep track of. Montreal is full of wonderful street art, one piece of which showed a figure whose yellow smiley face was melting like candlewax to reveal a skeletal jaw. That there seemed relevant.
But I got my check-in instructions by text, got dinner (which helped), and succeeded in not passing out until seven. This description is less accurate than a hard-copy diary entry I might have written the next morning, but instead of writing that diary entry, (which I'm usually reliable about) I decided that I'd just as soon not remember all the details right then, and went off to find some bagels. Montreal has wonderful bagels. it didn't occur to me, when I was directed to the St Viateur bagel shop, that they would sell not bagel sandwiches but individual bagels, a dollar each, ten varieties... I got six. With some apples from a university market, that was two breakfasts and a lunch, with enough left over to share around on Friday's botanic gardens walk. I will reuse this method.
Next I went to the Musee de Beaux Arts. After spending a while among European paintings, and a while lost in an educational space, I came to a group of artworks investigating the problems of the museum's cultural artifact collections, which were not generally assembled with respect for their meanings and contexts so much as a sense of the exotic and shiny. All these artworks were interesting -- for example, a large touchscreen displaying the pictures of twenty objects from the collection, each linked to the story of a person for whom that object was personally important -- but I had an odd experience with one of them.
There were two African masks hanging on the walls, (perhaps three?), with descriptions beside them. In the middle of the space were three curving, vaguely humanoid metal shapes, like (I thought in context) the stick figures of dance moves. On one of the figures hung a virtual reality headset. I tried putting it on, but it didn't seem to be working, so I went and read the work's information plaque. Lost in Display, it was called. The artist sought to replace the missing contexts of the masks, which, despite usually being displayed on walls, had all been made to be danced in. 'The work combines the display of objects with elements of virtual reality and dance,' it finished. (Paraphrase). I put on the headset again, fiddled with its straps, peered up and down, walked about trying not to bump into anything. All I could see was an occasional light, now at one side of my visual field, now at the other, making me think that if I could just get the headset into the right position it would show something. But it didn't. I took it off again, and wandered off to look at something else.
I'm not sure when it occurred to me that the artwork might not be broken at all. By the time I'd come back and tried the headset again -- which I was now thinking of as a mask -- I had the sense of participating in a dark and perfectly-constructed joke, testing a hypothesis I was already convinced by. My eyes covered, I walked around the stick figures, put my head in the empty space where one of their heads might have been, twirled, looked harder for the mask's 'on' switch. No. Just a wandering light. 'You thought I would make you feel nice about the history which put these masks here?' said the art to me. 'Connected to an African culture? Please. This is what you can have: elements of virtual reality, and elements of dance. Lost in display. I hope you enjoyed it.'
This was the experience of art which struck me most powerfully in the museum, a museum full of great European paintings, illuminated manuscripts, modernist chairs.* And as far as I can tell I made it up. At least, if it's a dark joke, the museum website is going along with it, for in the entry for the work (by Brendan Fernandes) it refers to filmed dancers. Presumably the headset was broken. I've written this experience down because I don't think it's one anyone else will, in fact, have. I'd be glad to see the bright version of this artwork. The dark one is going to be returning to me in museum galleries for some time to come.
*Although, while I'm compiling peculiar experiences produced by tiredness, there's something rather wonderful about hurrying, weary from hours of museum-walking, past two floors' worth of gorgeously ridiculous chairs.
On the first day I spent in Montreal I had flown almost sleepless for more than twenty hours, from New Zealand via LA and Calgary. (Things have changed since Douglas Adams began a novel by saying, "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'As pretty as an airport.' " Every airport I visited was attractive, but in particular I think 'As pretty as Calgary airport' would be thoroughly reasonable. Statues of silver mesh, fountains, pillars on the baggage carousels seeming to rise through the ceiling into unpresent daylight, genuinely elegant ads for a bank, spaciousness, courtesy, croissants, a snowy city... Alright, that last might only seem especially positive to folk like me who don't have to live in it). I liked most of the flying well enough, was tired but not too tired, was held up at customs but not too held up at customs. And I'd seen sheet lightning from above, and a circular sunbow. On arrival at seven AM, feeling like stretching my legs, I set off to walk from the airport in Montreal towards the centre of town. It's lucky the road layout made that impossible, because I had made some unwarranted assumptions about scale. The bus ride to Centreville took forty minutes.
I have no idea what I'd expected Montreal to be like, only that it wasn't. At first there was an extreme dissonance to my being there, as though I'd signed up to have someone play a gentle electric current over part of my brain and temporarily turn off my life. 'I am not a person who is in Canada' had always held true before; what had happened? It was my first foreign city as an adult. Perhaps this feeling can't repeat, or will need an exponentially greater unfamiliarity, we'll see. At the time I took refuge in a café. Very nice danish, tolerable coffee, manageability upon the world. I shouldn't then have walked into the Notre Dame De Montreal -- "Help, too many icons" -- but I'm glad to have seen it, and may someday see it again when less fuddled. (At my usual peak of energy I might be able to pay attention to, why, a full tenth of the icons! Or, dare I aspire, an eighth!)
And then I set out trying to find the Airbnb I was to stay at, and drifted slowly into a fascinating nightmare. I've never been as tired as I was by the end of that day, determined as I was to avoid jetlag and not sleep too early. By the time I'd found the Airbnb and was walking back toward the city to try to find the internet access which would allow me to check the Airbnb website to make sure I knew where to find the keys, I began to recognize my name in random things strangers were saying. I said, 'Excuse me,' to a passer-by, hoping for directions, and he walked on without stopping. I felt increasingly paranoid. By the time I'd found a tourist information centre and been told that internet cafes are not really a relevant thing anymore, because everyone except me travels with a phone instead of whatever you call that old thing, I was unable to simultaneously walk in a straight line and think. Repeatedly, I would find myself coming back to myself without having noticed leaving in the first place. It took me at least a second longer than usual to respond to pedestrian signals. I was scrupulously careful in crossing roads, figuring that unpleasant as all of this was, only being hit by a car was likely to give it long-term consequences. I was going what felt like long distances in order to accomplish small tasks the significances of which I could only just keep track of. Montreal is full of wonderful street art, one piece of which showed a figure whose yellow smiley face was melting like candlewax to reveal a skeletal jaw. That there seemed relevant.
But I got my check-in instructions by text, got dinner (which helped), and succeeded in not passing out until seven. This description is less accurate than a hard-copy diary entry I might have written the next morning, but instead of writing that diary entry, (which I'm usually reliable about) I decided that I'd just as soon not remember all the details right then, and went off to find some bagels. Montreal has wonderful bagels. it didn't occur to me, when I was directed to the St Viateur bagel shop, that they would sell not bagel sandwiches but individual bagels, a dollar each, ten varieties... I got six. With some apples from a university market, that was two breakfasts and a lunch, with enough left over to share around on Friday's botanic gardens walk. I will reuse this method.
Next I went to the Musee de Beaux Arts. After spending a while among European paintings, and a while lost in an educational space, I came to a group of artworks investigating the problems of the museum's cultural artifact collections, which were not generally assembled with respect for their meanings and contexts so much as a sense of the exotic and shiny. All these artworks were interesting -- for example, a large touchscreen displaying the pictures of twenty objects from the collection, each linked to the story of a person for whom that object was personally important -- but I had an odd experience with one of them.
There were two African masks hanging on the walls, (perhaps three?), with descriptions beside them. In the middle of the space were three curving, vaguely humanoid metal shapes, like (I thought in context) the stick figures of dance moves. On one of the figures hung a virtual reality headset. I tried putting it on, but it didn't seem to be working, so I went and read the work's information plaque. Lost in Display, it was called. The artist sought to replace the missing contexts of the masks, which, despite usually being displayed on walls, had all been made to be danced in. 'The work combines the display of objects with elements of virtual reality and dance,' it finished. (Paraphrase). I put on the headset again, fiddled with its straps, peered up and down, walked about trying not to bump into anything. All I could see was an occasional light, now at one side of my visual field, now at the other, making me think that if I could just get the headset into the right position it would show something. But it didn't. I took it off again, and wandered off to look at something else.
I'm not sure when it occurred to me that the artwork might not be broken at all. By the time I'd come back and tried the headset again -- which I was now thinking of as a mask -- I had the sense of participating in a dark and perfectly-constructed joke, testing a hypothesis I was already convinced by. My eyes covered, I walked around the stick figures, put my head in the empty space where one of their heads might have been, twirled, looked harder for the mask's 'on' switch. No. Just a wandering light. 'You thought I would make you feel nice about the history which put these masks here?' said the art to me. 'Connected to an African culture? Please. This is what you can have: elements of virtual reality, and elements of dance. Lost in display. I hope you enjoyed it.'
This was the experience of art which struck me most powerfully in the museum, a museum full of great European paintings, illuminated manuscripts, modernist chairs.* And as far as I can tell I made it up. At least, if it's a dark joke, the museum website is going along with it, for in the entry for the work (by Brendan Fernandes) it refers to filmed dancers. Presumably the headset was broken. I've written this experience down because I don't think it's one anyone else will, in fact, have. I'd be glad to see the bright version of this artwork. The dark one is going to be returning to me in museum galleries for some time to come.
*Although, while I'm compiling peculiar experiences produced by tiredness, there's something rather wonderful about hurrying, weary from hours of museum-walking, past two floors' worth of gorgeously ridiculous chairs.
