Adam Lauder

Ontario College of Art and Design | OCAD University

While working at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) as an English instructor in the early 1970s, American artist Martha Wilson enacted a series of critical interventions within the algorithmic protocols of conceptual art. Situated at the confluence of conceptual and protofeminist currents and navigating the interstices of the legenda...

Absentee Information,”Lucy R. Lippard’s contribution to the iconic catalogue for INFORMATION(1970), the era-definingMoMA exhibition curated by KynastonMcShine, illuminates the informational and proto-feminist logics underpinning the innovative critic-curator’s approach to problems of community decision amidst her transition to a feminist position....

Background The author argues for a reconsideration of Robert Smithson’s relationship to the spatial discourse and proto-media studies of Wyndham Lewis and his Canadian protégé Marshall McLuhan. Analysis Through a comparative reading of a lesser-known Lewis text and Smithson’s photo-essays and related earthworks, the article sets out to re-evaluate...

The late writings and visual art of Bertram Brooker (1888-1955) represent an overlooked bridge between the space-time discourse of British modernist Wyndham Lewis and the Toronto School of Communication. The Canadian artist-advertiser’s multidisciplinary production of the 1930s through the mid-1950s revisits his earlier thematization of Bergsonian...

Structural parallels between the disposable "five-year plants" developed by Albert Kahn Associates, in response to the multiple exigencies of wartime planning, and the newly uncertain character of the spaces described by the classical information theory of Claude Shannon during the same period is an entry point for critiquing the rhetoric of crisis...

This article examines the conceptual artist Iain Baxter&'s transformation of landscape conventions under the influence of media theory and western popularizations of Zen philosophy. The artist's McLuhan-inspired representations of ‘information’ provided a foundation for his prescient ecological critique of first-generation American Information Theo...

Through a close reading of the 1976 artist’s book and exhibition catalogue “Celebration of the Body,” the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.’s pioneering representations of the body’s “informationalization” are situated within the conceptual company’s creative reworking of Marshall McLuhan’s sensory media theories. In turn, McLuhan’s thought is located within a g...

This essay re-evaluates the disavowed relationship between the advertising career and colour feld paintings of the Canadian artist Jack Bush (1909-77). Bush's belated transition out of the world of graphic design uniquely equipped him to fulfll the eforts of the American formalist critic Clement Greenberg (1909-94) to buttress the remnants of the h...

IAINBAXTER&raisonnE is an experimental catalogue raisonné of the conceptual artist IAIN BAXTER &, former President of the ‘critical company’ N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. (NETCO). NETCO creatively re-purposed the media ecology of Marshall McLuhan to challenge Conceptual art’s utilitarian ‘aesthetic of administration’ as well as the categorical assumptions in...

This article explores time concepts derived from Henri Bergson as adapted by Canadian marketing theorist and visual artist Bertram Brooker (1888–1955) in articles and textbooks published during the 1920s and early 1930s. Inspired by Bergson’s critique of the Western metaphysical tradition, Brooker proposed innovative, participatory advertising stra...

This article explores the creative philosophy of information developed by conceptual artist IAIN BAXTER& (Joseph Iain Wilson Baxter; b. 1936) since the mid-1960s, in tandem with the artist's personal information management (PIM) behaviors, as influences on the design of the experimental IAINBAXTER&raisonnE. In particular, it investigates the extent...

Hanne Darboven’s numerical practice fulfils Alain Badiou’s definition of a new artistic configuration (albeit one that the philosopher does not foretell). Darboven’s writing – like that of Isidore Ducasse – subverts ordinary thinking through the ‘alien qualities’ of mathematics. Yet, in Darboven’s grammatical oeuvre, infinity emerges as a function...

This paper presents a systematic analysis of concepts of information found in the visual art of the Vancouver-based conceptual company N.E. Thing Co. Ltd. The company's evolving representations of "Sensitivity Information" are resolved into three distinct overlapping phases that correspond with co-president lain Baxter's deepening engagement with M...

As editor of Marketing magazine in the mid-1920s, the Toronto-based artist, author and advertising executive Bertram Brooker (1888-1955) introduced new techniques of market research to Canadian readers and elaborated innovative analyses of advertising as a synesthetic media system. Brooker's writings on markets are explored as a possible influence...

The IAINBAXTER&raisonnE creatively repurposes the conventions of print catalogues raisonnés to support the development of an experimental scholarly communications platform and collaborative e-research zone. The IB&raisonnE responds to a growing literature on digital humanities that addresses the unique requirements of humanities scholars in an e-re...

In an economy that increasingly trades in electronic information products, the copy assumes a new reversibility, as a figure at once valued for its rapid exchangeability and vilified for of its associations with counterfeit and fraud. The incorporation of confidence measures into the design of electronic information products is symptomatic of a pri...

In the 1930s and 1940s, Canadian architect Percy Nobbs (1875-1964) advanced an ecological approach to landscape preservation through popular texts on sport fishing and in writings for the journal of the Atlantic Salmon Association (ASA), which he founded in 1948. This article ties Nobbs's choreography of human-animal interactions into a wider reass...

There is growing recognition of the significance of the 1970 MoMA exhibition organized by Kynaston McShine (1935- ), Information, to broader narratives of Conceptual art and the so-called Information Society. Previous studies have focussed on Information as a symptom of processes of informatization (Meltzer, 2006) as well as the aspirational politi...