We asked Montreal artist Juan Ortiz-Apuy to share some of his favourite online destinations for Top Tabs, a series featuring the top Internet finds and fancies from artists, curators, dealers and more.
1. The Public Domain Review
The Public Domain Review is one of my favourite online journals to find an interesting read in. Modelled as a kind of digital cabinet of curiosities, you can read about everything from “Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments” to the curious history of “Forgotten Failures of African Exploration” by the British. In keeping with its vision of the cultural archive as a public domain, this site has also a tremendous collection of films, images, audio clips and animated GIFs, all focused on the peculiar and mysterious.
2. ARTtube
ARTtube is an archive of videos on art and design co-authored by five museums in the Netherlands and Belgium. The video clips are short in duration, generally less than 10 minutes, making them the perfect lunch companions.
3. The Organist
Self-described as a weekly experimental arts and culture radio program, the Organist is produced by the publishing house McSweeney’s and KCRW. All episodes are playable online or downloadable as podcasts, and like some of McSweeney’s other projects such as the Internet Tendency (updated daily), the Organist is often inventive and humorous.
4. thoughtmaybe
Another great resource, thoughtmaybe is a library of critical and activist films and documentaries all watchable online in their entirety. I first came across it while looking for Adam Curtis films a few years back, and they have quite a few in there, including the now-classic The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares and The Trap.
5. Weird Sites
I’ve been collecting weird websites for a while, often handpicking the most absurd yet simple. Now I have a bookmark folder filled with them. Here are two I came across this week: pointerpointer and fallingfalling.
Juan Ortiz-Apuy is represented by Gallery Antoine Ertaskiran in Montreal, and has forthcoming solo exhibitions at the Ottawa School of Art Gallery, SNAP Gallery in Edmonton and Gallery 44 in Toronto. He recently completed a residency at Kunstnarhuset Messen in Ålvik, Norway, and will be the artist-in-residence at the KulttuuriKauppila Art Centre in Li, Finland, and at the VS Gallery in Toronto this fall.
