Just a quick note that this Saturday on May 3rd, the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design... ahem, I mean Emily Carr University of Art and Design, will be having their annual opening night gala complete with snacks and the usual wheat and grape-based beverages. I highly recommend this event to anyone with any interest in the arts, cinema, animation or design!

Now in it's ninth year, Vancouver's premiere experimental arts festival Signal + Noise is back at VIVO Media Arts Centre, starting this Thursday night. The three-day festival aims to generate discourse and facilitate creative exchange in response to a theme - this year's being "Media Intercourse". Of course, another goal is simply to entertain, get you thinking and show off some of the outstanding alternative-media artists in our city and from afar.

We have written about this festival a few times before, and not without good reason. These truly are the sights and sounds from out there, the art that percolates underground like the tidal flats of False Creek. Like those flats, every now and then a rising tide will dampen the earth and flood the basements, giving light to a new level of artistry - visually, sonically, even texturally. Now we can add erotic and sensual leanings to this list.

While others aim to spam Google Maps, Melanie Coles is instead using the popular online mapping application to graduate from school, relying on satellite imaging technology for her final project at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Dubbed "Where on Earth is Waldo", Coles has adopted the "go-big-or-go-home" attitude and has created a massive sixteen-meter version of the normally one-centimeter-tall Waldo on giant sheets of vinyl using the classic Renaissance grid method. To ensure her novelty-sized Waldo doesn't get blown away by our monsoon-like weather systems, Coles enlisted her friends for a little slave labour, "borrowing" sand from a local beach to fill small black sand bags for the outline of Waldo's lanky figure.

The intersection of visual arts and internet-culture has been blogged about here at Beyond Robson before. In fact, its almost become a theme of our local arts coverage. From web-design to ASCII art to trawling the pages of FFFFOUND!; artistic experimentation, (development or disintegration?), has been a defining feature of the internet-era. Local artists have hardly been immune to this recent digitization of aesthetics, and some of the most exciting work shown in the city lately has been directly inspired by the 'net.

Established Vancouver artists Kristina Lee Podesva and Alan McConchie's new piece at the Helen Pitt Gallery offers what may be the most overtly web-kindled art I've seen in an official Vancouver exhibition. In fact, the installation can only be viewed on the internet, since March 13, as part of Helen Pitt's new 'Web Gallery'. The piece, titled the Google Emotional Index, uses the inescapable search engine as its primary inspiration, offering a maze-like collage of contemporary images and a glimpse into the chaos of modern morality...

This spring, a select group of schools invited from across the globe will meet in the Czech Republic for Setkání/Encounter. While it may sound like the title of the latest William Gibson novel, Setkání is actually a five day gathering of the world's most promising young theatrical talent. On April 15, schools from Europe, South Africa, and North America will join in the city of Brno to perform their winning selections. A group of students and alumni from Theatre UBC have been among the few chosen to present their work and discuss their methodology at this years' event.

The Vancouver troupe has been asked to make the journey to re-stage 2007's Diary of a Madman. The play is an original theatrical adaptation of Gogol's classic short story, the tale of a middle class Russian's descent into complete lunacy. For me, watching the experimental production was a singular experience, and it seems I'm not alone in my admiration for this unique piece of darkly droll dream-theatre.

With fourteen schools selected to join in this year's festival, the group from UBC will be the only Canadian program represented. In fact, they'll be joining a performance from New York's Columbia University as the festival's first ever North American selections. The cast and crew are currently fund raising, as plane tickets to the Czech Republic apparently don't come on the cheap. So on Saturday night they'll be presenting a special, one night re-staging of Diary in order to help with the finances. Admission is by donation, and I recommend that everyone with an empty Saturday night seize what may be their last opportunity to see the performance...

As I stepped inside the Contemporary Art Gallery earlier this week, I was instantly drawn to the green glow and haunting music which emanated from the tiny viewing alcove just left of the entrance. After poking my head inside, I was greeted by a security-camera quality video showing a witch and a ninja as they slowly walked through the streets of Italy. The alluringly low-budget piece, filmed at night, joins two immediately recognizable, yet wholly disparate cultural icons in such unconventional activities as marshmallow roasting and hand-holding. Filmed in an eerie night-vision green, the video installation "Witch vs Ninja" is the newest work from Ontario artists FASTWÜRMS and only hints at the scope of their current exhibit DONKY@NINJA@WITCH at the CAG, running until March 23rd.

This unsettling marriage of modern stereotypes, avant-pagan imagery, and dark but often playful humor pervades the entire exhibition, which celebrates the last ten years of artistic output from Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse. The artistic duo have been combining the traditions of Wicca, craft-making, punk culture and modern art since their formation in 1979 (check out their manifesto & media kit online in pdf). Now instructors at the University of Guelph, they've held successful exhibitions across North America which have been consistently met with critical acclaim and public attention. This retrospective, however, is their first showing of work in Vancouver.

First displayed last fall in Toronto, DONKY@NINJA@WITCH weaves together five of the duo's previously acclaimed installations, dating from 1995 to the present. The resultant farrago of fringe imagery and experimental art leaves one feeling dumbstruck; the exhibit overwhelms on a level both sensual and cerebral and it almost left me too intimidated to attempt a review. Regardless of my inability to properly articulate its power, the show is essential viewing for anyone fascinated by contemporary art or fringe culture...