This is a post about META

On Saturday afternoon I went to META. I walked to the Bourroghes (Queen and Bathurst) from my house, and trust me that's a distance. Also I had a giant blister on my foot, so owie.

The show was on the sixth floor of the building. The elevator was terrifying.

It's a high-ceilinged open space with ART in it. ART EVERYWHERE. I don't know how many pieces were there, but it was a number. Most disappointingly, the first piece at the entrance (cars that make music or whatever) weren't doing anything. I went left.

There was the immersive WTF thing, but someone was in that. And there was the music playing thing, but strangers were using it. So I looked at the earthquake ready/lie detecty machine that was drawing pictures. Cool. And then I listened to the voices in the corner. It reminds me of Janet Cardiff's piece The 40 Part Motet, but with people talking about their experience with mental illness instead of signing a beautiful motet.

Next I went right. I looked at the rain room thing. I wondered if I should step into it, but there were mirrors on the floor so I just looked. It's a very visually interesting piece. The mirrors on the floor and ceiling make the rain on the wall look like it's going down into the floor forever. And the sound of rain is very calming. Also calming - the womb room. I think I stayed in there for a while because it's quiet and dark and I like that kind of thing.

Then I went into the back section. There was a hanging sculpture with rear projection mapping. A dress I didn't realize was moving until I read the thing on the wall. A bike and mirror that I didn't realize were part of the same piece. A thing trying to solve a marble maze except there was no end point and it just looked really sad. Kathleen was there? And the thing at the end that I didn't realize what it was supposed to do. There was a bridge I was afraid to step on, but I did and the touch screen seemed really unresponsive. And then I went back to the front room.

The WTF video installation thing was free, so I stepped inside. It was... disagreeable. I felt probably how Republicans feel when they watch Michael Moore documentaries. The medium was appropriate to get the message across, but I feel like the message is fundamentally conservative. Technology changes the way we interact with the world, and that's perfectly acceptable to me. It's ironic that new media was used to promote an anti-technology view.

While I was back, I also took the personality test thing. It reminds me of one of those online quizzes you take to find out "which Game of Thrones character are you?" and it's probably based in some philosophy of personality I fundamentally disagree with. I guess some people like to know how INT-J they are because they need this information for something. I also don't understand the necessity of the video game layer. It's a multiple choice quiz. Those have existed for far longer than Unity has.

And then I walked home. And that was my experience of META 2014.