Tiff Talk Tomorrow

Note: This entry was written Thursday, September 29th, two days before the talk. I didn’t have a chance to edit and post the entry until the day after the talk.

I have a talk coming up at SoOnCon this Saturday. Brad and I will be standing on a stage in the Tiff Bell Lightbox giving a 30 minute presentation about the problems we see with the art world.

When we initially signed up to give this talk, the concern going through our minds was filling time. The idea of standing on stage and talking for half an hour seemed very daunting.

“Thirty minutes? Can we even put together enough content?”

While brainstorming for this talk, I loaded up Semantik, a piece of mind-mapping software I find to be very useful. This technique turned out to be very effective; after only several days of hammering out rough ideas, I had quite the tangled web of notes, far too many to cram into only 30 minutes.

I began going over what I had, looking for the gems that must work their way into our speech. Brad and I had a few disagreements over what to include and what to leave out. I wanted more ideas and more examples, he wanted more bridges and details.

We took a selection of the ideas, polished them up, added some support material, and arranged it all in a more-or-less coherent way. Then we did our first dry run, and we clocked in around 25 minutes, not including some examples and videos, which add up to a total of about 4 minutes. Damn, that was close! Only off my one minute, and that was our first run.

There were a lot of really good ideas that didn’t make the cut. We already had a good flow and the right length, and we didn’t want to break what we had going. But I also didn’t want to let the ideas go to waste.

When I exported my mind map to a text document and reviewed everything I had, I realized that I put together nearly 5000 words, and that was all unsupported point form notes. And this was only a few days of brainstorming. Clearly, I’ve got a lot to say on the subject.

I think I know what I will be writing about for the next little while.

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Kyle Clements

Kyle Clements is a Toronto-based artist and nerd. During his thesis at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Kyle began working on his Urban Landscapes series, a body of work that aims to capture the energy and excitement of life in the fast-paced urban environment. After graduating from OCAD in 2006, Kyle spent a year living in Asia to gather source material and experience in a different kind or urban environment. His work is vibrant and colourful. Whether painting the harsh Northern landscape, or capturing the overwhelming buzz of life in the city, his acrylic paintings hover between representation and abstraction.