Digital Agency and Resistance from Tank Magazine

by Joanna Chaffin

The last time that I went to pick up a magazine, I was immediately drawn to Tank. It’s not the easiest magazine in the world to come by, especially in Canada, as it’s published in the UK, but definitely worth a read if you get your hands on it. When flipping through the Spring 2014 issue titled “Complicity,” I couldn’t help but notice the emphasis that was put on digitization and technology. It seemed that with every new article I was being referred to a different page which told me how to “bring the magazine to life” by downloading an app that would allow me to watch videos which correspond to the article.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

by Alex Southey

The Dawn of the Planet of The Apes is better than Rise of the Planet of the Apes by a wide margin, and most of that comes from their differences. Both movies have helped to revive interest in the original Planet of the Apes (the series from the Sixties) and its one-off reboot attempt with Mark Wahlberg in the early 2000s. With Andy Serkis (“Gollum” from Lord of the Rings) reprising his role of Caesar in Rise, in Dawn takes a step forward. Caesar isn’t in a learning process anymore, he’s learned how to lead and create a self-sufficient community. Community and the struggle for power are the major themes, which reflect not only on the humans in the film, but the humans watching.

The Nine Circles of Melancholy

by Jason Smythe

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Opera for a Small Room, 2005 (interior view)
Mixed media installation, with audio, record players, records, speakers and synchronized lighting, 20 minutes (loop) Courtesy of the Artists, and Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York Photo: Markus Tretter, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2005-06

Cardiff and Miller’s Lost in the Memory Palace is an awesome exhibit, and focuses on a number of complex themes. It consists of nine rooms, all containing a unique installation and exploring the theme of memory creation and loss. But for whatever reason writing an article about it has been, to put it mildly, a nightmare. I kid you not, I have written, and then quickly deleted, three completed articles on this exhibit! Were the deletions really necessary, you ask? They were, because none of them fully captured the complexity of the exhibit. My first article focused too much on the room called “The Killing Machine,” and the second article focused too much on another room called “Opera for a Small Room.” The third article well, it just plain sucked—please don’t make me relive the horror of that cursed third article! In the words of Kurtz: “The horror… the horror…”

You Can’t See All of the Louvre in One Day.

by Zoya Mirzaghitova

The Louvre—the world’s mecca of art museums; it’s legendary, spectacular, perpetually crowded, overrated?—maybe, but definitely very, very big. Despite all of its qualities, the thing I hear most about the Louvre is that you can’t see it all in one day. The truth is that you can. On my first visit to the Louvre, we saw every corner of it in just under seven hours, and this includes a lunch break in one of its many cafes. However, what I realized while walking around the museum was how true it really is that you can’t see it all in one day. You can physically walk around and see everything but the size of the collection is so overwhelming that by the end you either glaze over or find some other way to adapt to the amount of information coming at you at every turn.

A Tight (But Still Creative) City

by Jason Smythe

One of the Canada Line’s exit shelters is located at the intersection of Robson and Granville, and it is a rather mundane structure, with a look that can best be described as cookie-cutter modernist. I say this because it looks like something you could buy at Ikea. However, over the eons one thing has remained constant: using art to liven up even the most boring of structures. Thankfully, this most Ikea of exit shelters has received some art: the installation Tight City.