Timothy Comeau
💡 Projects
Queen and McCaul
Queen & McCaul (Oct 2023)
I photographed OCAD under construction on Wednesday October 22 2003 from the corner of McCaul and Queen. Twenty years later on the same day, I rephotographed the scene.
Queen and Spadina
Queen & Spadina (Mar 2022)
On a Sunday morning in March 2002 I photographed the area around Queen St and Spadina Ave in Toronto. Twenty years later on the same day, I rephotographed the area to document the passage of time.
Sunnyside 1974 | 2021
Sunnyside (Aug 2021)
Rephotographing the Toronto skyline from a particular spot at Sunnyside park; 1974 vs. 2021
Genealogy
Genealogy (May 2021 – Ongoing)
As a half-Acadian, I have a well documented genealogy, which I began researching in autumn 1990. In the years since I've also gathered information on other lines in my family, through the additional research of other family members.
This website was produced to collect all the information gathered in a future-proof format outside of a subscription website, proprietary software, or the time-capsule of a web framework's dependencies.
Tenet: Step by Step
Tenet: Step by Step (Dec 2020)
No one understands Christophr Nolan's 2020 film Tenet, so I wanted to break it down step by step. I also wanted to analyse how it tells a non-linear story in the unavoidably linear format of a movie.
Anno Domini
Anno Domini (Dec 2018)
Using HTML & Flexbox CSS to layout chronology of the last 2000 years (source Wikipedia and miscellanous) and wanting to visualize the stretch of time as a series of decades, especially since decades are how we primarily experience our time in memory after the individual year.
https://chronologies.timothycomeau.com/anno_domini/
Version Two: https://chronologies.timothycomeau.com/ad/
King St East 1998 | 2018
King Street East (Dec 2018)
On December 22 1998 I photographed the area around St. James Park on Toronto's King Street East. Twenty years later I revisited the spots to reproduce the photographs and document the passage of time.
The Rosary
The Rosary (Oct 2018)
The Rosary is an algorithmic prayer system that I wanted to code.
Blue Jays Hat
Blue Jays Hat (2017)
I’m the only person in the crowd wearing a Blue Jays hat.
Elizabeths
Elizabeths (2015)
A Twitter feed that only follows Elizabeths. This is partially inspired by Ceal Floyer's Monochrome Till Receipt (White).
https://twitter.com/TheElizabaths/lists/elizabeths
As of 2023, the feed in the subsite below no longer works, but is listed here for archival reasons:
Notebook Drawings
Notebook Drawings (2012 – 2013)
In late 2012 and early 2013, I archived and publicized doodles and drawings from my turn-of-the-century notebooks.
Chronologies
Chronologies (2011 – Ongoing)
Various chronological projects, including novels and Anno Domini mention above.
9/11 Drawings
9/11 Drawings (2001 / 2010)
Five days after 9/11, I made a series of drawings as I thought about and processed the momentous event. In 2010 I digitized them by re-doing them with Adobe Illustrator, and made a print on demand book.
Order 9/11 Drawings from Blurb.com
New Year's Day Photos
New Year's Day Photos (2010 – 2024)
Since 2010, I've taken photos of the state of my appartment on On January 1st, documenting how thing have (or have not) changed over the previous year.
Eleven Thirty One
Eleven Thirty One (2006 – 2010)
In 2006 I typed up the entries from my 1986 Diary on my blog. In 2010 I compilled the entries and the blog commentary into a book called Eleven Thirty One (age 11 vs. age 31)
Order Eleven Thirty One from Lulu.com
The On Kawara Code
The On Kawara Code (May 2008)
The work of conceptual artist On Kawara (1932–2014) reproduced using computer code. Part of the inspiration of this was to illustrate how computers have made trivial what was once labour intensive and remarkable.
December Thirteenth
December Thirteenth Series (2002 – Ongoing)
On December 13th 2002 I walked along Toronto's Bloor St West from Spadina Ave toward Yonge St and took photos along the way, documenting “the world of 2002”. Five years later I decided to repeat the walk on December 13th 2007 and re-photograph the spots and subsquently do this every five years. Thus, by 2024, there are photos from December 13th 2002, 2007, 2012, 2017 & 2022.
Time Reading
Time Reading (2007 – 2008)
Various moments documented with photographs as a conceptual art project. Originally these were published as wide-distribution emails.
At the time I was known for my Goodreads.ca email list, so when I needed a name for the series I went with "time reading".
Digitized Journal
Digitized Journal (2005 – Ongoing)
In 2005 I began to digitize my journal, at first by building my own MySQL and PHP website, before moving to WordPress in early 2007. In 2012 I built the current the WordPress theme. The Journal runs on localhost and is not public, although because it is a WordPress blog, I anticipate making it public one day.
The Cable Project
The Cable Project (2004 – 2005)
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.
Goodreads.ca
Goodreads.ca (2004 – 2009)
I no longer own the 'goodreads.ca' domain but before the Goodreads.com site began I ran a email newsletter and blog, which is now archived at the link below. This consisted of articles that I'd run across and wanted to share with my subscribers.
For organizational purposes each email was coded in a Year-Week-Count format. For instance, the last emails sent in Septemmber 2009 are ones coded 09w20:1 to 09w20:4, which says four emails were sent in week 20 of 2009.
A lot of the links are now broken, which shows the idea that "once it's on the web it's around forever" is largely untrue.
The Time Traveler
The Time Traveler From the Future Stands Amazed (Jan 2003)
In early 2003 I made a staple-bound booklet that told a story about a walk down Toronto's Bloor Street at the end of 2002.
This digital version of the booklet was made in December 2018.
timothycomeau.com
timothycomeau.com (2002 – Ongoing)
I've maintained an online precence for over twenty years. At first it was to showcase my work as an artist, and then it became a way to promote myself as a web-developer. It's always hand-coded (no Squarespace, Wix, WordPress etc) and because of that I have a wabi-sabi attitude that it doesn't have to be perfect all the time. I revise it every few years, usually when I want to try out something new. Sometimes things are broken, or the UX/UI is nuts, etc, because I'm experimenting.
Parks Canada
Parks Canada or the Technonaissance? (July 2001)
In 2001, after living in the Toronto suburb of Ajax for 18 months, I returned to Halifax for a show at the Khyber artist run centre, and displayed drawings and photographs. I wrote an exhibition essay that was published as a staple-bound booklet. The essay has since been digitized in my writing section here.
Vita Nova
Vita Nova (2000)
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 14th Century zeitgeist. I too wanted to capture the spirit of the age and record what it was like to grow up in the late 20th Century.
Ardeches
Ardeches (Feb 1999)
My NSCAD grad show in Feburary 1999 was called Ardeches, which is the region of France where the Chauvet painted cave was found in 1994. Rather than pronounce it the French way (“ahr‑desh”) for the purpose of this show I always anglicized it and pronoucned it “ahr‑dekis”, partially as a reflection of my dual English and French heritage. Situated in the school's third gallery which was entered down stairs and down a hall (echoing a painted cave) I produced work which sought to remind people that by the late 20th Century, we were surrounded by the animated images of TV and movies, all of which contributed to a contemporary mythology.
Notebook Selections
Notebook Selections (1999)
Notebook Selections consisted of photocopies from notebooks I used in 1998, and was displayed in early 1999 on the third floor of NSCAD.
The Book of Marks
The Book of Marks (1998 – 2001)
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.
Hypercard Project
Hypercard Project (1997)
This is a hypercard project I completed for a computer class while at NSCAD in 1997.
Given that Hypercard was in many way a precursor to the web, I wanted to revisit this project as a document of my proto-web work. I recall doing this very last minute, and at the time I was listening to a lot of Beethoven, so the project was a quick walk through complete with a sound sample of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony taken from the cassette I removed from my Walkman.
I recovered this project in May 2012 using a USB diskette reader and the Basilisk II Mac emulator to take screencaps, and built this web version in May 2018. The cards are presented in a looping sequence:
Ludwig Van → The Skull → The Hand → The Ear → Deafness → Back to Ludwig Van & play his Fifth Symphony opening.
Notebooks
Notebooks (1990 – 2024)
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.
Message in a Bottle
Message in a Bottle (1986)
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.
A note about branding
My various projects are branded with self-portraits to help mark their place in time.
When I was fresh out of art-school, I was thinking about logos and identity marks and defaulted to the standard artist self-portrait. A self-portrait made the most sense to me because unlike corporations, an artist is a person, and we recognize people by their faces. This was before the concept of "selfy" developed, and social media and online avatars became common.
2002
2002
2006
2008
2009
2012
2014
2017
TBD
WHAT ABOUT THIS THING?
This is a branding mark I created in 2017 for my professional web-freelancing. It was used on invoices and business cards, and is this site's favicon.