rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

Last week we did a press barrage for the upcoming Cantocore show in Guangzhou, China! I know a lot of you are spread all throughout the globe, but nonetheless, I hope that anyone in the region can make it for the big September 5th Opening! It will be fantastic.

I wrote the exhibition text, have been coordinating fabrication, and somewhere in the midst trying to finish my project for the exhibition. We are up late right now finishing some projects and the publication is coming along nicely for the last minute print deadline for tomorrow Here is a sampling of the press text which you can read in full at cantocore.com:

Today the Cantocore Project and Ping Pong Space announced the upcoming contemporary art show, Cantocore: Import/Export in Guangzhou, China during September 2008. This initial show features contemporary artists from San Francisco and Guangzhou producing artwork around the more detailed relationship between import and export of culture and materials between Guangzhou, China and San Francisco. This first part of the Cantocore exhibition, Import, begins with an opening on Friday, September 5 from 8 PM at the brand new Ping Pong Space in Guangzhou, China. The show continues until Tuesday, September 16 with gallery hours of 2:00 PM until 10:00 PM daily. The second part of the show, Export, opens Sunday, September 21 at 8 PM until 10 PM when a special video screening developed by San Francisco’s Mission 17 titled “Stardusted” will be presented at the Ping Pong Bar from 10 PM until 11PM. The second half, Export, continues daily until Saturday, October 4 with daily hours from 2:00 PM to 10:00 PM.

The Cantocore Import/Export exhibition examines, through applied art practice, the relationship between import and export of culture between Guangzhou and San Francisco by asking a simple phrase: Are you Cantocore? Guangzhou, also called Canton, is the third most populous city in China and its province, Guangdong, is a major manufacturer of textiles and electronics for export to the United States. San Francisco has the largest import of Chinese immigrants of any US city, primarily from the Guangdong province. Chinese immigrants also created the largest Chinatown in North America in San Francisco. However, understanding the conceptual framework of Cantocore is not limited to geographic divisions, nor reductive dichotomies driven by post-colonial stereotypes such as East vs. West, nor Olympic nationalism pridefully paramount in China vs. US “non-political” sports matches. Cantocore is the reality of life versus the theory set forth by jurisdictions where people live.

The artists in the Cantocore exhibition were tasked with creating projects which explore import and export, materially and conceptually. Practically, how can one’s artwork be actualized either through fabrication locally in Guangzhou or imported from San Francisco? Guidelines for the creation of the work were left alone since modern strategies for creating artwork such as remaking, remixing, interpreting, pirating, translating, copying, and appropriating content, already espouse the Cantocore style. After the proposals were received from invited artists, curation of works took place based upon the processes, scope, location of artists and available resources to constitute this first Cantocore dialogue.

Curation for this show has been a group effort by Deer Fang, Justin Hoover, and Jon Phillips from the Cantocore Project and Wu Jay from Ping Pong Space (PPS). Layout and Design for the show is done by Pierre Picard (PPS) while wordsmithing has been handled by Nikita Choi (PPS), Jon Phillips and Deer Fang.

Exhibition Venue

#60 Xian Lie Dong Heng Lu Ping Pong Space, Guangzhou

Cantocore Import
September 6th - 26th, 2008
Opening: Friday, September 5th, 8PM – 10 PM.
Drinks after at Ping Pong Bar.

Cantocore Export
September 22nd - October 2nd, 2008
Opening: Sunday, September 21st, 8PM - 10PM

Video Screening “Stardusted” at Ping Pong Bar

September 21st 2008, 10PM – 11PM

Regular Gallery Hours
Tuesday - Sunday 2 PM – 10 PM
Gallery Closed on Monday

Ping Pong Bar Open Everyday

Also, we just updated some images of works for the show. Here is a sampling of the full post over at Cantocore.com.

For all you needing images out there, we have just up pushed out images for David Johnson who will be exhibiting a work titled “Made in China” and Guy Overfelt who is getting some magic smoke fabricated.

Guy Overfelt's Untitled (Up in Smoke) Sketch

Please check out the press section to help blog and promote this show!

I’ve noticed for ages that my thinkpad x61 with 4 gigs of ram has been sluggish on the desktop with redraws. Now that I have a bit more time, I looked into this, oh, and because I’ve been shamed into getting all the funky compiz-fusion graphics looking hot on my desktop by Freddie B and Mr. Adams.

After some gentoo forum spelunking into the issue across distros, I found out that at least with Intel 965 (x3100) and kernel 2.6.25-26, there are some major issues with mtrr not being set properly.

I took the plunge at trying to understand the issue and wrote a basic script to fix-up my mtrr settings from the commandline:

#!/bin/bash
#
# fixmtrr
#
# fixes /proc/mtrr
# based upon termites script from gentoo forums

# disable pre-existing ones and order does matter!
echo "disable=0" >| /proc/mtrr
echo "disable=1" >| /proc/mtrr
echo "disable=3" >| /proc/mtrr
echo "disable=4" >| /proc/mtrr
echo "disable=5" >| /proc/mtrr
echo "disable=2" >| /proc/mtrr

# Now create the right ones...

# These are powers of two, they get progressively smaller
# so we can get right up to the system device page below.
echo "base=0x00000000 size=0x80000000 type=write-back" >| /proc/mtrr
echo "base=0x80000000 size=0x40000000 type=write-back" >| /proc/mtrr
echo "base=0xC0000000 size=0x10000000 type=write-back" >| /proc/mtrr

# Video Card:
# 0x10000000 was the value for size trying for
echo "base=0xE0000000 size=0x10000000 type=write-combining" >| /proc/mtrr

# High memory area
echo "base=0x100000000 size=0x40000000 type=write-back" >| /proc/mtrr

This helped to set my mtrr up right so that X can find the dynamic shared memory to do all the fun compiz effects and more. If there is a better fix for the above, I’d love to hear about it! More than just bling bling, my overall computer is much much better. I can’t believe I put up with this!

Then, I started running powertop to test out my system, and noticed that there are many features that can be set after a computer is setup, so I created an init script to set all this at boot:

!/sbin/runscript
#
# This starts the thinkpad post-boot settings
#

TITLE="Thinkpad Specific Options"
LINKPOWER=/sys/class/scsi_host/host0/link_power_management_policy
FIXMTRR=/usr/local/bin/fixmtrr
WRITEBACK=/proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs

checkconfig() {
    if [ ! -e $LINKPOWER ] &&
       [ ! -e $FIXMTRR ] &&
       [ ! -e $WRITEBACK ] ; then
        eerror "You cannot set $TITLE. Check settings."
        return 1
    fi
}

start()
{
    checkconfig || return 1

    ebegin "Starting $TITLE"
    $FIXMTRR
    echo min_power > $LINKPOWER
    echo 1500 > $WRITEBACK
}

stop()
{
    checkconfig || return 1

    ebegin "Stopping $TITLE"
    echo 500 > $WRITEBACK
}

Make sure to put the fixmtrr script in /usr/local/bin or change the path to fixmtrr in your script. Then, set thinkpad script to run at boot before xdm kicks in:

rc-update add thinkpad boot

These are pretty basic scripts, but I wanted to dump them out for other users of this system. Its beyond just Gentoo-based distros, and will take a while to get into main kernel especially for slow distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, etc

I had to put that one in there for those who try to convert or chide me off Gentoo.