Timothy Comeau

Over the years my notebooks have been the most popular and complimented section of my website, and thus I feel obliged to maintain their precence.

I’m out & about in Toronto enough to have ended up on Google and Apple Maps Streetview multiple times.

The Cable Project enabled media artists to expose themselves to a variety of televisual material with hope that it would benefit their practice. I gave away Rogers cable television subscriptions to eight Toronto media artists over the winter of 2004—2005.

I saw regular television as a media library that media artists should have access to, and since cable tv was regarded as either an expensive luxury or derided as too common, the idea was to make it easy and free.

Vita Nova is the product of creative writing I began in the summer of 1999, and by the end of that year I was curating it to assemble a narrative divided into four parts. A guiding theme was a summation of my experience growing up in Nova Scotia ("vita nova scotia") but it also repurposed the title of a work by Dante Alighieri, whose work I then understood as a summation of the 14^th Century zeitgeist. I too wanted to capture the spirit of the age and record what it was like to grow up in the late 20^th Century.

The Book of Marks consists of a Clairefontaine graph paper notebook with a leather cover, in which I have filled in each square with a mark. It measures 14.5 centimetres by 20.5 centimetres (5.7 x 8 inches) and contains a total of 192 pages. Some pages contain only a few marks, most are completely filled in.

As a grade 5 school project we wrote messages in bottles which were dumped at sea by lobster fishermen on one of their regular runs. My bottle crossed the Atlantic and landed on a beach in Spain. Two years later in 1988 I received a letter from the Spanish man who found it on one of his morning walks.