BlackFlash Magazine 27.3

BlackFlash ART.PHOTOGRAPHY.NEW MEDIA

2.0

featuring Garnet Hertz Kate Armstrong Michelle Teran Ellen Moffat Michelle Kasprzak Blair Fornwald Karen Asher Derek Liddington Mark Clintberg Sarah Fuller Robert Canali

Edward Burtynsky, Alberta Oil Sands #6, Fort McMurray Alberta, Canada, 2007. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

BURTYNSKY OIL

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ONLINE ARTIST PROJECTS BY Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge and Simmons & Burke

7 MAY – 15 AUGUST 2010 CANADIAN PREMIERE

www.therooms.ca Edward Burtynsky: Oil is organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and made possible with the generous support of the Scotiabank Group.

757.8000 | 9 Bonaventure Ave. | St. John’s, NL PM 400 29877 R10606

27.3 SUMMER 2010 $8

DIABOLIQUE | PART ONE College Art Gallery 2 March 26 - June 4, 2010 Curated by Amanda Cachia Organized by the Dunlop Art Gallery Artists: Jake & Dinos Chapman, Douglas Coupland Dana Claxton, William Kentridge, Fawad Khan Shirin Neshat, Michael Patterson-Carver Raymond Pettibon, Nancy Spero Scott Waters and Balint Zsako

DIABOLIQUE | PART TWO College Art Gallery 2 June 18 - August 14, 2010 Curated by Amanda Cachia Organized by the Dunlop Art Gallery Artists: Matilda Aslizadeh, Rebecca Belmore Mario Doucette, David Garneau, Wanda Koop, Emanuel Licha, Althea Thauberger Jason Thiry and Scott Waters

MEETING POINT College Art Gallery 1 March 26 - August 14, 2010 Curated by Earl Miller Organized by the College Art Galleries and the Doris McCarthy Gallery Artists: Laura Belém, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller cinemari (Cinthia Marcelle & Marilá Dardot), cinemata (Cinthia Marcelle & Tiago Mata Machado) Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, General Idea Anitra Hamilton, Mike Hansen, Chris Hanson & Hendrika Sonnenberg, Micah Lexier Jennifer Marman & Daniel Borins and Rivane Neuenschwander

LINEage: TRACING GENERATIONS OF FACULTY (1936-2008) Kenderdine Art Gallery April 7 - July 23, 2010 Organized by the Kenderdine Art Gallery and the Department of Art & Art History Artists: Eli Bornstein, Robert Christie, Reta Cowley, Stan Day Hans Dommasch, Bill Epp, Mina Forsyth, George Glenn, Augustus Kenderdine, Don McNamee, Wynona Mulcaster, Brenda Pelkey Warren Peterson, Otto Rogers, Gordon Snelgrove, Hilda Stewart James Thornsbury, Patrick Traer, David Umholtz and Janet Werner

KENDERDINE ART GALLERY 51 Campus Drive University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5A8 Mon to Fri 11:30 - 4:00 COLLEGE ART GALLERIES 107 Administration Place University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5A2 Mon to Sat 11:00 - 4:00 t: 306.966.4571 e: kag.cag@usask.ca www.usask.ca/kenderdine

Image: Jake & Dinos Chapman, War, 2004, painted bronze. Courtesy of White Cube, London, England

downloadable at www.bartgazzola.com/aword

THE A WORD

CFCR 90.5 FM’s spoken word program focusing on the visual arts in and around the Saskatoon area, hosted by artist / writer Bart Gazzola.

Exhibitions will be reviewed and persons of note interviewed.

Past Guests include Jen Budney, Mary Ann Barkhouse, Clive Robertson, Patrick Traer, Ruth Cuthand and various other notables in the larger Saskatoon Arts Community and beyond.

This airs on CFCR 90.5 FM, or can be heard at cfcr.ca, every Thursday night at 7 PM

MANAGING EDITOR/ART DIRECTOR John Shelling 306.374.5115 editor@blackflash.ca BLACKFLASH 2.0 Guest Editor Dagmara Genda Designer Troy Gronsdahl

BUFFALO BERRY PRESS BOARD Ian Campbell (Chair), David Hutton, Danielle Raymond, Liam Richards, Richard Swain

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE Jennifer Crane, Dagmara Genda, Karla Griffin, James Hare, Biliana Velkova ADVISORY PANEL Richard Baillargeon, Michael Maranda, Carol Williams WEBSITE Richard Swain

PRINTED IN CANADA BY Friesens

VOLUNTEERS Cindy Baker, Steph Canning, Amber Christensen, Karla Griffin, Brenna Millard, Maja Montgomery, Megan Morman, Shanelle Papp, Karen Polowick, Nathan Raine, Lindsay Royale, Jordan Schwab, Sara Waldbillig, and Jeremy Warren

SPECIAL THANKS TO: Sarah Robins from Caffe Sola, Rich Taylor and Phil Greer from Vive, Lynne Wells, Kirby Wirchenko and the Broadway Theatre Staff, Jack Getzlaf, Sheila Crampton and the Performance Productions Crew

BlackFlash is grateful for the generous donations by Jeff Braid, Barrie Forbes, Jennifer Crane, Dan and Rema McKenzie, Phil Greer, Kelly Foth, and Mike and Bev Rooney.

Thank you.

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BlackFlash /Contents/Summer

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Features

Volume 27.3 May – August 2010

Giving Space: Conversations and Wanderings by Blair Fornwald

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Visual Geographies: A Conversation between Kate Armstrong, Garnet Hertz, and Michelle Teran

5 6 7 8 10 12 55-56

Media Art, Interactivity, and Play: A Conversation between Ellen Moffat and Michelle Kasprzak

Artist Project Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge Simmons & Burke

Column Mark Clintberg

Departments Cover Editor’s Note Contributors Review Artist Profile Critique Image Blog

Clockwise from top left: Jim Verburg, For a Relationship (detail), 2007, video, 4 minutes, 30 seconds, courtesy of the artist; Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge, Guest Room (detail), 2009, photo/video installation, dimensions variable, courtesy of the artist; Simmons & Burke, Equus (detail), 2010, record cover, 31.4 x 31.4 cm, courtesy of the artists; Jen Hamilton and Jen Southern, Satellite Bureau: Regina (detail), 2005, project facilitated by, and exhibited at Neutral Ground, Regina, SK, courtesy of the artists; Garnet Hertz, OutRun (detail), arcade cabinet, customized golf cart drivetrain, custom software, 120 x 240 x 170 cm, courtesy of the artist; Ellen Moffat, vBox (detail), 2008, multi-channel sound, audio equipment, sensors, wood, various hardware, 610 x 76 x 30 cm, courtesy of the artist.

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AKA GALLERY 424 - 20TH ST W S A S K AT O O N , S K S 7 M 0 X 4 C A N A D A T:306.652.0044 h t t p : // w w w . a k a g a l l e r y . o r g /

I N A CC ESSABLE

CITY

CURATED BY JEFF NACHTIGALL

SEPTEMBER 10 - OCTOBER 22, 2010 Accessibility is a catch phrase used by politicians at various levels of government. It is reduced to a slogan that pacifies the public conscience.

Individuals with limited mobility find themselves “safely” tucked away in special care homes, existing on the margins of our able bodied world. It is a very different world when viewed from the vantage point of a wheelchair.

Providing a forum and means for artistic expression, this collaborative project engages the artists involved and the public in a dialogue on what it means to be in a wheelchair in this city.

REGION C O N T E M P O R A R Y S A S K AT C H E WA N PA I N T I N G E X H I B I T I O N

EDITORIAL POLICY BlackFlash is published by Buffalo Berry Press Inc. Copyright is retained by contributors. Contents may not be reproduced without permission. Letters to BlackFlash become the property of the magazine and may be printed in whole or in part. BlackFlash prefers that proposals for material to be published in the magazine be submitted to the editors before a final manuscript is prepared. Unsolicited manuscripts and photographs will be returned only if accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope.

RETURN ALL UNDELIVERABLE CANADIAN ADDRESSES TO: BlackFlash, P.O. Box 7381 Stn. Main, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, S7K 4J3

PRIVACY POLICY From time to time we make our subscribers’ names available to organizations whose products or services we feel may be of interest to them.

To be excluded from these mailings, please send your request, along with

OCTOBER 29 - DECEMBER 3, 2010 In this place, with histories always weighing down upon us, expressed in our religiously ordered grid road system, ideas of who we are that manifest through the images we create are always present.

How does one deal with alternative - often conflicting - histories here, and as painting is the creation - the privileging, the opinion, of a moment, it is more informed by the artist(s) than other media. An image is literally created; how does that now operate in this site of contested narratives?

SW-COC-001271

a copy of your subscription information to the mailing address shown.

BlackFlash gratefully acknowledges the support of the Saskatchewan Arts Board, the Canada Council for the Arts, our many generous volunteers, and our donors.

ISSN 0826-3922 Canadian Publication Mail Product Agreement No. 40029877 PAP Registration No. 10606 Postage paid at Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada This issue published May 2010 CORRESPONDENCE Please address all correspondence to: BlackFlash, P.O. Box 7381 Stn. Main, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada S7K 4J3 SUBSCRIPTIONS CND:1 year (3 issues) $22 2 years (6 issues) $40 3 years (9 issues) $ 50 US orders add $4 per year International subs. 1 year $32 Institutional subs. 1 year $32

Contest Winners Robert Canali

Closer &

Sarah Fuller

Portrait of the Artist Asleep Holding a Pinhole Camera

Above: Robert Canali, Closer, 2010, 50 x 60 cm, c-print, courtesy of the artist; Below: Sarah Fuller, Portrait of the Artist Asleep Holding a Pinhole Camera, 2008, c-print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm

With the collaborative nature of the BlackFlash 2.0 project in mind, the cover is a collage of two images selected from the entries we received, from across Canada and the United States, to our “Cover Contest.” We invited the public to submit images of their artwork onto the BF 2.0 website so we could splice, sample and distort them into a pseudo-collaborative compilation. We would like to thank all of the artists who submitted their artwork.

Congratulations to Robert Canali from Caledon, Ontario and Sarah Fuller from Banff, Alberta whose photographs were chosen as the components from which we created the cover image for this issue.

Canali, a BFA student at York University, says his work “explores the way in which photography and its relationship to presence can be experienced through installation.” With this portrait of his father Canali’s intent is to “establish a discourse which draws the viewer closer to the image in hope of some sort of revelation.”

Fuller’s work is concerned with “dreams, the subconscious, and altered states.” Portrait of an Artist Asleep... is part of her project Dream Lab (2008), an “interdisciplinary project that was explored in collaboration with the Dream and Nightmare Lab at the Sacred Heart hospital in Montreal.”

Robert Canali’s website: www.robertcanali.com Sarah Fuller’s website: www.sarahfullerphotography.ca

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The 2.0 Moment

Two years ago, when we were in the process of re-shaping the magazine, both in content and aesthetics, we asked ourselves how we wanted to re-invent BlackFlash. What image did we want to portray? How did we see ourselves? These questions, while holding in them a great deal of potential, also brought with them a fair degree of risk. BlackFlash 2.0 (BF 2.0), a web-based collaborative authorship project, is not so much a product of change but an exploration of change during this time. The BF 2.0 website was set up to explore the possibility of dialogue, collaborative content, and how a magazine can be composed in its traditional linear format from online material. This issue is the product of that exploration. It is a collaboratively produced publication that remaps, or perhaps narrates, the information that was contributed to the BF 2.0 blog over the course of a year.

When we embarked on the project we were very much aware of the various problems inherent not only in online communities but in the concept of the 2.0 phenomenon in general. While Web 2.0 was supposed to revolutionize the Internet, making it a platform for the people by the people, many have argued the steps purportedly taken in that direction were actually there all along. The 2.0 moment, that transcendent instance of immediate communication and collaboration, might have been little more than enthusiastic techno-utopianism—a kind of self-affirming jargon. That being said, the web has facilitated a degree of collaboration that would have previously been impossible. Musicians use the Internet as a virtual studio for collaboration, people stream and re-edit each others’ videos, others engage in critical or, oftentimes, inane conversation. Simultaneously, sites of social interaction have been co-opted by spam and advertising and so are pulled into the black hole of computer-generated noninformation. MySpace is one example of a once promising but now defunct social network. Facebook has been grappling with its own problems ranging from controversies relating to its privacy policy as well as a spate of information stealing applications. With the transcendence of the 2.0 moment come risks that quickly bring us back to reality. There is possibility for creative growth as well as the threat of the, by now

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familiar, vitriol of aliased masses or worse yet, virtual silence.

As we were keen to avoid the various pitfalls inherent in opening the magazine to public participation, we tried to construct forums that would entice participation and interesting results. This came in two forms—contests and incentives as well as hired artist projects and curated online discussions. In this issue you’ll find a bit of both. We have published excerpts from a discussion that spontaneously emerged about the work of an artist who posted his photographs on the site (p. 12), we published one photograph from each person who posted to our image blog (p. 55-56).

Moreover, we chose one artist from the site, Derek Liddington, to feature in the magazine (p. 10). Our curated initiatives consisted of two artist projects made for the website and for print (p. 16 and 20) as well as two conversations between artists and scholars around the world (p. 36 and 44). All the commissioned projects in some way reflected on or paralleled the rationale behind the BF 2.0 experiment. Notions of interactivity, mapping, and geography have been consistently explored by the participants on the site.

After this issue, we will let the site take its course—either as a possible way to inject new content into the magazine or otherwise allow the website to slip into digital oblivion.

Either way, it has been an exciting year that has brought together a variety of different, interesting people as well as proposing new ways in which to look at magazine publishing. We sincerely hope you enjoy this issue and check out or contribute to the website at blackflash.ca/2.

Dagmara Genda Guest Editor

Send your feedback to: BlackFlash Magazine P.O. Box 7381 Stn Main, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, S7K 4J3 or e-mail: letters@blackflash.ca

Blair Fornwald is an interdisciplinary artist living in Regina, Saskatchewan. Her work is generally performancebased and is manifest in a variety of forms including live performance, burlesque, photography, video, installation, and intervention, and social practice. She works both independently and collaboratively with the artist’s collective Turner Prize* and has presented work across Canada and the United States. She holds an MFA in studio arts from the University of Western Ontario (2007) and a BFA in Intermedia from the University of Regina (2002).

Richard Hines was born and raised in Windsor, Ontario.

He lives and works in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His photographic work has been published, written about, and exhibited widely. His most recent project entails accompanying people on their vacations to photograph them. He is the recipient of numerous grants, most recently a Major Arts Grant from the Manitoba Arts Council. He has taught at NSCAD University, Mt. Allison University, and the University of Saskatchewan. This is his first review for BlackFlash Magazine.

photo: Brian Telzerow

Dr. Gerar Edizel, a native of Izmir, Turkey, earned a BFA at the State Academy of Applied Fine Arts in Istanbul, an MFA in Studio Art at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, Illinois, and a Ph.D. in the History of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

He is a professor of modern and contemporary art history with an interest in media arts at the School of Art and Design, NYSCC, at Alfred University, New York.

Mark Clintberg is a Ph.D. student in the Interuniversity Doctoral Program in Art History at Concordia University. He earned his M.A. at Concordia University (2008), and his B.F.A. from the Alberta College of Art & Design, completing a portion of his studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design (2001). After graduation he became Associate Curator at the Art Gallery of Calgary, and completed the International Curatorial Program at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, Florida.

Alongside his pursuits as an academic he is also an artist. His work is held in public and private collections across Canada and the United States.

His writing has been published in Canadian Art, Maisonneuve, Pivot, The Art Newspaper, Arte al Dia International, BING, Border Crossings, and BlackFlash.

Dagmara Genda is a Polish-Canadian artist and writer currently living in London, UK where she is a PhD candidate in Humanities and Cultural Studies at the London Consortium.

She completed her BFA Honours in painting at the University of Manitoba and an MFA at the University of Western Ontario. Since graduating with her MFA, she has exhibited cross-country with the support of the Saskatchewan Arts Board, published with Locus Suspectus magazine and written for Forest City Gallery in London, Ontario and AKA Gallery in Saskatoon. She continues to write for BlackFlash magazine and serves on its editorial committee. Her research and artistic interests include research in art, East/West aesthetic hybrids, and contemporary Polish and Canadian art.

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No Cause for Concern Karen Asher, PLATFORM centre for photographic + digital arts, Winnipeg, January 15 – February 27 2010

Photography is simple. In fact, anyone can achieve satisfactory results. Point a camera at something (someone or somewhere), press a button and you have an instantly recognizable image. Upload that image to the Internet and you can share its amazingly descriptive capabilities with friends and colleagues.

Now retake that same photograph and move the camera angle slightly to the left or right. What happens to the image? It is now completely different. A distinct change in time and perspective has occurred and the experience of the former activity has affected how, why, and where you will move the camera; and just to compound the actual complexity of the process add in the chance factor. What happens if a cat just happens to walk into the frame while taking the second photograph?

Photography is in fact not simple but entirely difficult and unwavering in its intricacies. Although we can get caught up in debating the merits of its descriptive capabilities, the real dilemma exists in how we interpret the descriptions in them. That is what we are reminded of when looking at the striking photographs from Karen Asher’s exhibition No Cause for Concern.

One photograph, The Ice Cream Man, shows a tanned, well-dressed, older gentleman looking just above and to the left of the viewer. The man is holding a half-eaten ice cream cone (which threatens to drip), while wearing a clear, thin oxygen tube that runs down his chest from his nostrils. These two disparate elements along with his large beaming smile seem to dominate the image by their apparent incongruity and more importantly, through Asher’s direct use of flash.

Does the small indulgence of an ice cream cone by a man of such ill health (the oxygen tubes) really need to carry such a darkly funny sentiment? Hard to say, but it is unmistakable.

Another photograph, Mom in Bed, reveals itself as decidedly more morose and personal. This stems from the relationship between the descriptive elements in the image and the accompanying title. In Mom in Bed, the figure is Asher’s mother, which is an important distinction. Asher could have left the title more generic as she does with The Ice Cream Man, but

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instead Asher, akin to journalists captioning their images, guides the viewer in a more focused direction. This deliberate titling is bold and effective, adding a layer of intimacy to the image, in which her mother lies quietly in bed (maybe asleep) with her hand and arm, bloated, pale, and slightly out of focus in the foreground. Her mother’s arm and hand controls our attention and creates a triangular focal point with the flowers in the background and her mother’s slightly turned head. The positioning of the hand and arm and more importantly, the low oblique positioning of the camera in relation to the subject seems to create a visual wall between the viewer and her mother. While The Ice Cream Man seems to poke fun at our playful darker side, Mom in Bed does nothing of the sort. The distance between the viewer and Asher’s mother, while not far physically, seems emotionally oceanic.

No Cause for Concern is a wonderfully diverse and inspired collection of photographs. Where Asher seems to falter, which is not very often, is when she moves a little too close, stylistically and thematically, to the photographers from which she draws influence. Photographs such as Parade and Marathon Runner make the viewer think overwhelmingly of the tradition they stem from as opposed to the content itself. There is a strangeness to these two images that seems forced and familiar.

Despite this criticism, there are photographs amongst the fifteen exhibited prints that will make other photographers jealous. There is also an openness and sense of adventure in many of Asher’s images. Where she is strongest, where she appears to exist more, is in The Ice Cream Man, Mom in Bed, Johnny, Dad, and Mike and Sylvia. These photographs veer further from the photographic centre and instead roam freely, zigzagging around the fringes of her imagination. They point toward a fresh, exciting, and idiosyncratic voice on the crowded Canadian photographic landscape.

— Richard Hines

Karen Asher’s website : www.karenasher.ca

Left Top: Mom in Bed, 2009; Left Bottom: The Ice Cream Man , 2008; Above: Dad, 2009; all photographs c-prints, 61 x 61 cm, courtesy of the artist

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From Reference to Legibility Reading the work of Derek Liddington

Those who do not understand the references in Neon Sign after Ron Terada after Bruce Nauman (The Warriors) (2010) might wonder what function they serve and if they serve any function, who are they meant for? One might also be tempted to ask that of an urban hipster who dangerously verges on the démodé and whose style is marked by a past resemblance reinterpreted in the present—a style that shifts uncomfortably (and often ironically) between a fixed point in time and a semantic code. What I mean to say is that sheer readability would render the fashionista out of fashion and a fixed period would mark him obsolete. “The man of fashion,” writes Giorgio Agamben, “is able to read the signatures of the time only if he instead of entirely placing himself in the past or coinciding wholly in the present, lingers in their ‘constellation,’ that is, in the very place of signatures.”1 Reading Derek Liddington’s work, therefore, is a practice in reading signatures which are the very things that make readability possible. Signatures are that which bridge the semiotic (a recognizable system of signs such as words) with the semantic (or an understandable system of signs that form a given type of knowledge— in other words, a discourse). Keeping in mind that even a sentence’s meaning cannot be fully exhausted, we should not expect art to be any more yielding but perhaps understand it as a dialogue rather than an exposition. Liddington’s work is not about revealing a chain of references but interrogating the very notion of readability and how an artist might develop his or her own “signature” within that very chain.

The tag is a type of signature, a territorial marker written onto buildings, public spaces, walls, bridges, etc., usually under the cover of night when the writer herself cannot be easily seen. The mark itself is not only a signifier but it is also efficacious—it transgresses and breaks the law. It also transgresses conceptions of art. Graffiti made it into galleries on account of its virtuosity but the very look of tags, their tie to vandalism, render them a threat to property, aesthet-

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ics and power. This efficacy that exceeds signification is a fundamental characteristic of signatures that can be traced to a history and theory of sacraments. It is this characteristic that separates the signature from the sign and places it in the gap between the semiotic and semantic. The sacrament is not only a sign that refers to a spiritual meaning but one that also imparts an “indelible character” on the subject.2 In this way the validity of the sacrament is preserved despite the possibility of a lack of faith on the priest’s or recipient’s part. Tags, like sacraments and signatures, do not lose efficacy when appropriated, reproduced and disseminated regardless of context and circumstance. They become detached from the writer and from their referent (which was never an originary referent anyway) in order to signify only itself or the very significance that extended its scope of readability.

The tag is always a citation, an iteration that has meaning and moreover gains meaning, only inasmuch as it is cited.

With every repetition, the tag grows in force. It also marks its surface as much as the surface marks it. For the writer, every surface becomes a palimpsest, characterized by a negotiation between law and transgression, between an imposed stability of the mark and its promiscuous efficacy.

Tags cover tags which are covered by a law enforcer’s paint “remover” or another layer of paint, often to be tagged again.

Liddington recounts how he noticed, a block away from his apartment, a tag reading “The Warriors.” This tag was one of many situated within an area of a few blocks. It made him reconsider a 1979 American cult action movie on gang turf warfare in relation to his own exploration of signature and territory. Neon Sign is an extension of the tagger’s mark into a new turf. Liddington repeats the tag as a marking device on a temporary wall made to resemble (but not imitate) a brick wall. His tag is not a mark on a public space but rather an imagined space—the discourse that we call the “art world.”

This space is the very medium he works with. The artist’s

Top: Derek Liddington, Neon Sign after Ron Terada after Bruce Nauman (The Warriors) (detail), 2010, neon sign, brick paper, plywood, 2.4 x 3.7 m, courtesy of the artist; Left: installation view

career is often marked by a dissemination of his work, its reproduction, its quotation and finally, its imitation. By writing his signature, he opens new avenues of readability, new ways to connect words and compose meaning. The signatures Liddington consciously utilizes are those that have come to shape his own experience and situate him as an artist.

Agamben writes that the historical object is never given neutrally; it is always bound with an index or signature that constitutes it as an image that “determines and conditions its legibility.”3 By explicitly using and bringing together other discursive structures (conceptual art and B-movies for example), Liddington conditions not so much the legibility of the work he makes, but the role of the signature through which we understand art and culture. Neon Sign emulates the font from The Warriors movie poster which is itself a film based on a novel. Liddington uses neon as a territorial marker as an artist situated after Ron Terada who worked

as an artist situated after Bruce Nauman. The word “after” comes to mean both chronology as well as influence and mentorship. It comes to chart the historical and signifying chain of reference that may eventually be half-hidden, marked over and repainted. Neon Sign, then, does not posit a chain of reference as much as an exploration of the gap between the semiotic and the semantic, or that which connects sign and discourse; this, according to Agamben, is the signature. In a contemporary world of tags (those on walls as well as those on blogs and websites), keywords and searches, Liddington finds himself in the company of the artists whose work he interrogates. Through use of signature as his own signature, Liddington invariably situates himself alongside Terada and Nauman. It is in this way that Liddington’s process of signification goes beyond signifying to become efficacious.

It positions him in a chain of tags and explores how one might construct readability in contemporary art practice.

— Dagmara Genda

Derek Liddington’s website: www.derekliddington.com

Notes: 1. Giorgio Agamben, “Theory of Signatures”, in The Signature of all Things, translated by Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Attell (New York : Zone Books, 2009), 74.

2. Ibid., 48.

3. Ibid., 73.

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The Nature of Picture Making Part of the BlackFlash 2.0 project was to encourage artists to post their own or someone else’s work in order to encourage a dialogue, engage in critique, and/ or get noticed by BlackFlash Magazine. The following conversation developed around Colin Carney’s work, an interdisciplinary artist living in Guelph, Ontario.

Carney’s excerpt from his artist statement sparked a conversation on the nature of writing about art .

@

Excerpts have been edited and taken from the full conversation which can be found on www.blackflash.ca/2/colin-carney

------------------------------------------------------------------------------Colin Carney (from artist statement): My digital photographs are manipulated to extend the perceptual impact of the subject. By layering different exposures of the same object or circumstance onto itself I create an organic ‘other.’ The layering facilitates curious intersections and contradictions.

The resulting hybrid image is complicated in orientation and lends itself to memory. The secondary function of the work in this way is an unspecific evocation. My prints ultimately rest in a tension between “presentness” and memory.

David Pollock: “Organic other”— please explain. Is there a non-organic other? How does and why does an image that is “complicated in orientation” “lend itself to memory”? It seems to me the work centres around time and layered perspectives. All photographs are concerned with time, and as such, with mortality. Yes, memory is connected to things past but the tension between “presentness” and memory you suggest is not revealed in the work ...

This is academic jargon. Free yourself before it’s too late.

CC: First, let me say I am aware of what is academic here and in no way feel bound or trapped in it.

But thank you for offering an out. I am a willing participant and feel no bristle at the mention of it.

On the issue of tension. You almost answer this for yourself in your criticism. The comment, “It seems to me the work centers around time and layered perspectives,” is a fair assessment. By collapsing many layers of the same subject, shot in the same circumstance at various vantage points into a singular image, I am interested in generating something

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specific. The viewer repeats his or her first experience with the subject when unpacking the elements, offering many opportunities for discovery. It is a bit like blending many extended first glances. Resting in and extending that glance before meaning is deciphered relates directly to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and “primary perception.” It would seem, based on your own work and statement, phenomenology is a mutually relevant area of photographic interest.

How this lends to memory. The viewer is afforded a position in this work to see the subject all at once without having to make sensible concrete conclusions about the truth of the subject or their position in relation to it. The memory of a subject is similar. Conflated by primary and secondary information without any pure certainty, memory harbours a similarly shifting perspective in time and vantage. This interests me and has been a part of my investigations for some time.

It is curious that a word such as “organic” would seem so controversial. As a fellow printmaker you might be more sympathetic to the notion of growing an image through process.

That all this “is not revealed in the work” might matter more if there was no life to my work outside of academia and I can accept your disinterest in or disapproval of it.

DP: Yes, I make work like yourself with the intent to challenge our frameworks and attempt to place the viewer in a position that can reveal our symbolic relationships with the world. I’m interested in your process and images, but reacted to the language.

I was being provocative and you have risen to the occasion with an elaboration that I appreciate.

Growing an image through process, that is what it is all about—including an involvement in the evolution of an image as an object (print). “Organic Other” is the phrase that I found difficult—if you meant it to indicate process and growth of an image it seems to me that using the word “other” in quotation marks brings in notions of power relationships and confuses your statement. ...

You, like myself, are engaged with picture making and as we look around at comments on this site and in the pages of BlackFlash we often see what could be called an illustration of, or an extension of, ideas that belong primarily in the field of social sciences.

Colin Carney, Left: Precipice; Right: Apparition; both works 2009, archival digital print, 137.2 x 91.4 cm, courtesy of the artist

Catherine Wilcox-Titus: Having gone through some agonizing years of required reading of art history jargon, I concluded a few things. One is that there is a terrific amount of unintelligible dross out there that just simply doesn’t end up being very useful. I am thinking especially of the psychoanalytic arguments that are based on limited samples and observation, third party reports at best, and “take my word for it” kinds of argumentation. Film studies has been especially plagued by this, though thankfully seems to be evolving beyond it. Having said that, among the pages of opaque argumentation, there are gems of really useful ideas.

Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida (1980), Sigmund Freud’s notion of the uncanny and so on (which comes to mind in Colin’s work of layered images). Third, when Colin uses the words “organic” and “other” I would urge caution, because if I have learned one thing above all else through the Ph.D., it is to be alert to specific words which come already heavily freighted with associations. Organic, for instance, is one of the most abused words in the lexicon, misunderstood by non-scientists, rendered meaningless in the food industry and advertising and so on. So precision in language is an ongoing struggle in general. I urge my students to strive for precision in language as a scientist might aim for precise numbers. The concept of “otherness,” as I am sure you all know, fills entire libraries. I certainly understand Colin’s use of that word to describe his work and it seems entirely apt.

The question of the (sometimes) forced link between the social sciences and art is as already noted often an attempt to assure audiences and potential audiences of the usefulness of the arts. I value art that offers those kinds of links but only when the aesthetics are absolutely primary and the social observations are complex, non-polemical and come back to an individual perspective that is alive to that phenomenological content. The example of William Kentridge comes to mind (not a photographer though he does use some lens-based media. I am not completely conversant with the field of photographers). His work is

rich, complex, and he has a political and social content, but it is always subordinate to the strong aesthetic content and his sensitivity to his location in time and space.

DP: Let me start by throwing out a few thoughts. Yes, I would agree that the background issue of art as a form of sociological observation that uses the language of the social sciences reveals a desire for credibility. Let me introduce my bias as follows: Most of us begin our involvement with art by drawing. Our continued interest is a fascination with representation and behind that a heightened awareness of the contingencies of existence and consequent need for control. We seek this through picture making.

There is a difference between an artist who uses photography and its inherent qualities to illustrate questions of perception, social roles and values, memory and time, and a photographic artist who is coming from a photographic tradition (which for me starts with Walker Evans and continues up to Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joel Sternfeld, Alec Soth and Jeff Wall, to name a few). The most significant difference being an engagement with picture making.

I recently attended a themed group show at an art school centred around the Urban Environment. There was a panel to discuss “what makes a city livable.” The work on the walls was not discussed but only served as a backdrop for sociological observations. It revealed to me that photography is still viewed by many as a means to illustrate ideas and concepts.

I think of artists such as the Bechers and Jeff Wall as picturemakers first. Their social critique and politics are aspects of meaning including some that are contradictory. The work is a continuation of Charles Baudelaire’s “painting of modern life.”

I will end with this: jargon is used to create identity in a subculture and art should represent our attempt to find collective meanings in contemporary life.

Colin Carney’s website: www.colincarney.com

BlackFlash.ca 13

Frottage

Love Affairs In Photography, Part Two

By Mark Clintberg

This article is the second in a series of three texts that address puzzles associated with the troubling senses of security and affection we feel for photographs, feelings which are difficult to attend to from an analytical perspective. These articles are intended as a personal account of a suite of photographic examples that have troubled my own work as an art historian.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------To say that “I love a photograph” seems to step outside of any form of analysis and into a romantic, foppish, sentimental, and therefore dangerous territory governed by emotion instead of the pursuit of knowledge. And this province, populated by those with happy spirits but clouded minds, is one best avoided by anyone with a genuine hope of understanding art, I have been cautioned. Can we have amorous relations with artworks and manage to research or think about them effectively? It seems perverse, but I want to take this question seriously. Do we love an artwork for the sake of its beauty? Or can we claim there is something of an actual relationship— one between the object and the viewer, one that hints at reciprocity—embedded in our judgment of its worth?

Jean-Paul Sartre writes of a painting, “[d]oubtless the composition is also inhabited by a soul, and since there must have been motives, even hidden ones, for the painter

14 BlackFlash.ca

to have chosen yellow rather than violet, it may be asserted that the objects thus created reflect his deepest tendencies. However, they never express his anger, his anguish, or his joy as do words or the expression of the face […] his emotions get mixed up and grow obscure. Nobody can quite recognize them there,” in the artwork itself.

From Sartre’s position, any emotion that the viewer receives from the artwork is not transmitted from the artist. Is there no amorous form, then, that can be invested and deposited by the artist for later retrieval? For the moment, let’s assume the answer is no. If we cannot engage with the artist, we are limited to—and enabled through—a relationship with the artwork.

Can an artwork grant emotions to the viewer? Two extreme results become possible: “I wept (with joy, with anger, with sadness)” or “I didn’t feel anything.” If the viewer fails to feel anything at all before an artwork, frequently this is seen as a shortcoming rather than a strength of the work. If the viewer feels too much, and fails to “love the normal amount,” to borrow a phrase from a Daniel Barrow performance, frequently this is blamed on the viewer’s lack of objectivity—particularly when the suitor of the work is involved in writing art history.

I want to suggest that we can use love, affection, and all the personal interests that these feelings involve as a

Jim Verburg, For a Relationship, 2007, video, 4 minutes, 30 seconds, courtesy of the artist

valid point of discussion when approaching artworks instead of treating these responses and their study as the fanciful and vaguely erotic aspirations held by those citizens inhabiting the foggy realm I described earlier.

A case study will assist in testing these waters: the artwork of Jim Verburg, a young Canadian artist working in Montreal and Toronto. Verburg’s photographic practice offers a daily account of his romantic dealings, and relationships with friends and family. For a Relationship (2007) is a video made of still photographs the artist has taken over the course of two years; tranquil landscapes, family portraits, erotic assignations, and domestic activities merge to form an archive of two years’ lived experience. As I have discussed elsewhere, Verburg’s project is diaristic. A voice-over encapsulates the artist’s values and also his desire to express his values and sense of interpersonal turmoil to an unknown subject. His hopeful attempts at communication with this individual are riddled with expectations, and are continually foiled. Verburg’s video might generate feelings of either sympathy or dispute in the viewer, but since the piece is formulated for public presentation, its status as a genuine emotional performance is compellingly suspect. If we feel for this work, if we manage, in a way, to care not just for its subject, but also for the tenderness and respect that it presents, and for the artwork itself as an

object, is our judgment clouded—or enabled? Are we duped by the artist’s ability to deposit a performed emotion in the work? The uncertainty that results is abrasive for the viewer.

The uncertainty produced by our possible presentiments of the artist’s fakery are part of the lure and potency of photographs of this kind. The abrasion I describe above is part of the viewer’s pleasure when confronting a work that begs them to feel. It is a proposition. Any emotion born from the question the work asks cannot be divorced from its aesthetic content. Though when I confront my position as a writer, I can’t help but wish that they could be divided: getting too close to work of this kind can easily result in heartbreak.

I respectfully dedicate this series to art historians Dr. Cynthia Hammond, Dr. Johanne Sloan, and Dr. Martha Langford, whose ideas, writing, and friendly collegiality have inspired this offering.

Jim Verburg’s website: www.jimverburg.com

BlackFlash.ca 15

A Challenge to Perception

By Gerar Edizel

@ Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge’s

online artist project, Frameworks, can be viewed at www.blackflash.ca/2/elr

16 BlackFlash.ca

Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge’s recent work reveals her interest in trompe l’œil as a method for the destabilization of vision. Her art undermines our perceptual presuppositions by making us conscious of our vision as an activity. Her strategies aim at the problematization of the viewer’s perception.

Perception results from the body’s capacity to track sensory changes in its interactions within the environment. It depends on the movement of the body in space. Perceptual consciousness consists of a complex set of skills of environmental attunement earned in a lifetime and embedded in the enactments of the body. Sight is built on a massive amount of background experience. Alva Noë, philosopher of cognitive science who is a proponent of this view, argues that the apparent immediacy of recognition through likeness in pictorial imagery relies on technologies of depiction developed in accordance with our skills. In other words, we construct pictures in adequacy with a perceptual repertoire inflected by culture. Pictorial recognition follows effortlessly.

As far as our expectations from visual representations are concerned, Leblanc-Roberge’s life scale “photographic” constructions, Guest Room (2009) and Living Room (2009), seem, at first sight, to fit well within the traditional schemes that produce verisimilitude: the appearance of truth or reality. Uneasiness follows instantly: doors contain conflicted perspectives, floorboards opt for their own vanishing point, and spatial recession falls in disagreement with its own appearance.

We feel a loss of footing as our visual perception that projects us into the virtual space of the image falls at odds with our proprioceptors that fire warning signals though our nervous system: “beware, there is something wrong with what lies

Opposite Far Left: Living Room, 2009; Opposite Left: Music Room, 2010; Right Guest Room, 2009; All photo/video installation, dimensions variable, courtesy of the artist

Opposite: Bedroom, 2009; Above: Frameworks installation view

ahead.” The body expresses its distress as vertigo. We had already seen this at work in Giorgio De Chirico’s paintings.

But Leblanc-Roberge goes well beyond a photographic restaging of De Chirico’s unresolvable perspectives.

She alternately layers real and representational framing devices, such as doors and picture frames, containing each other in such a way as to allow for oases of security in the form of tangible bits of reality at once undermined and reset by fictitious frames. In this context, the relief or recess of the framing devices—illusory or real—play a key role in accentuating the sense of verisimilitude and push it into the arena of trompe l’œil.

As we uneasily perform a visual stumble into LeblancRoberge’s reconstructed interior spaces, we become aware of the fact that we construct our perception like an interlocking series of patchworks. Each element in this patchwork consists of attunements among units in a network of action-perceptions. The apparent coherence and familiarity of our visual

environment relies on an over-lapping of feedback across mutually supporting instances of action-perception. LeblancRoberge uses trompe l’œil for the subtle but disquieting undoing of the fabric responsible for the illusion of perceptual stability. In other words, she takes apart the background presuppositions that cause us to take vision for granted.

It becomes possible, then, to see Frameworks, LeblancRoberge’s compilation of contiguous and worn frames of ancient windows and storm doors through which we glimpse animations of modern indoor life, as a reference to the tensions she senses between traditional understandings of vision and the simultaneity of perception they can no longer contain.

With the subtle discordances that her pictorial manipulations inject in our vision, Leblanc-Roberge reminds us that perception remains open for playful reconstruction in art.

Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge’s website: www.evelynelr.com

BlackFlash.ca 19

Simmons & Burke, Krapp’s Last Tape, 2010, record cover, 31.4 x 31.4 cm, all courtesy of the artists

Abbreviations

By Simmons & Burke Text by Dagmara Genda

@ For the audio accompaniment to this artist project visit www.blackflash.ca/2/simmons-and-burke

Simmons & Burke are the California collaborative duo Case Simmons and Andrew Burke, who work in a variety of media including digital and audio collage. Relying on one another’s expertise, visual arts and music respectively, they explore the inter-relations of sound and image, including the way each might influence and manipulate the other. Previous works, specifically their series You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth (2008), have included elaborate audio-visual collages sourced from the Internet. The resulting images were fantastical Bosch-like creations coupled with intricate sound overlays giving the work an unexpected multi-sensory depth.

For their BlackFlash 2.0 project, Abbreviations, Simmons & Burke worked in their usual medium of audio-visual collage but the project is separated onto two mediums—the website hosts the audio component of the project while the images are shown here in print. Rather than being an intricate amalgamation of web detritus, this project is composed of six dramatic abbreviations of operas, plays and Broadway musicals. However, these abbreviations are not so much citations of the works themselves but collages incorporating various elements that might reference or comment on

the drama in one way or another. The sounds include anything from Ace of Base and deadpan voice-overs to Philip Glass. The results range from witty quips to haunting tracks that recontextualize the six source works in unexpected ways. The visuals are similarly composed of direct references and abstract association. They are conceptualized as album covers that might function as images in their own right or in conjunction with their audio counterparts online.

The references present in the work of Simmons & Burke seem to have less to do with origins than notions of recognizability. Rather than leading back to a source, their work seems to complicate, multiply and duplicate. Themes can be picked up but many are also missed. Others are recognized as having been heard before but cannot quite be placed.

Images and sounds may begin to act like a sort of uncanny haunting, a familiarity made eerie by its very strangeness.

A marked change from their previous orgy of excess, Abbreviations is less about the physical and more about the ghostly traces that populate our associations and daily lives.

Simmons & Burke’s website: www.simmonsandburke.com

BlackFlash.ca 21

Simmons & Burke, Equus, 2010, record cover, 31.4 x 31.4 cm

Simmons & Burke, Music Man, 2010, record cover, 31.4 x 31.4 cm

Simmons & Burke, The Exikes, 2010, record cover, 31.4 x 31.4 cm

Simmons & Burke, L’Orfeo, 2010, record cover, 31.4 x 31.4 cm

Simmons & Burke, The Crucible, 2010, record cover, 31.4 x 31.4 cm

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Summer exhibitions June 25 – September 19, 2010 • Opening Reception: Friday, June 25 at 8pm

Vistas: Artists on the Canadian Pacific Railway In this sweeping exhibition, images express the CPR’s vision of a new Canada spanning the continent. It’s a stunning body of artwork, the first to reveal the Canadian West as a desirable, majestic and awe-inspiring destination.

Organized and circulated by the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Carvings and Commerce: Model Totem Poles 1880 – 2010 Celebrate one of Canada’s most famous icons.

Model totem poles are presented as fine art, folk art, collectibles, and pop culture, as well as evolving signs of First Nations identity. Guestcurated for the Mendel by Michael D. Hall and Pat Glascock.

Image Left: William Brymner, In the Selkirks near Glacier House, n.d., oil on canvas. Collection of the Glenbow Museum. Right: Kenneth Wilsen, Untitled (model totem pole), n.d., argillite. Collection of the Mendel Art Gallery. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. George Ann Murray 2008.

Vistas has been made possible in part through a contribution from the Museums Assistance Program, Department of Canadian Heritage. The Mendel Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the City of Saskatoon, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, The Canada Council for the Arts, and Saskatchewan Lotteries.

OPEN DAILY 9AM–9PM FREE ADMISSION

950 SPADINA CRES E SASKATOON, SK

The Mendel Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the City of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Arts Board, Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, Saskatchewan Lotteries, and the National Gallery of Canada

Michelle Teran, Bad Boy Emily from The City is Creative series, 2009, photo: Sarie Hermens

30 > Giving Space: Conversations and Wanderings by Blair Fornwald 36> Visual Geographies: a conversation between Kate Armstrong, Garnet Hertz and Michelle Teran 44 > Media Art, Interactivity, and Play: a conversation between Ellen Moffat and Michelle Kasprzak

BlackFlash.ca 29

Giving Space Conversations and Wandering

By Blair Fornwald

@ Leave a comment for this article at www.blackflash.ca/2/giving-space

My thinking about the space of the Internet is informed by analogy, by conceptions of the social, and of social space, that preceded and now exist alongside their Net incarnations. For myself, a casual user, the Internet is a space analogous to the one my body inhabits and moves through in order to find people and things. I think of cities: the city I live in, cities I have visited and cities in texts. I am reminded of Jorge Luis Borges’ cartographer, in On Exactitude in Science (1946), who makes a map at a 1:1 scale; a map so complete that it covers and becomes the terrain it surveys. I am reminded of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) where a fictionalized Marco Polo tells the Emperor Kublai Khan stories of the fantastic, gorgeous and horrible cities that he had visited on his travels: cities that defied the laws of gravity and time, haunted the memory and eventually revealed themselves to be accounts of one particular city while simultaneously being all cities everywhere. Mostly, I am reminded of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980), a text like a vast, varied plane, organized not into chapters meant to be read in sequence, but as plateaus which provide the reader with multiple points of entry. This text has, rather conspicuously, no subject or object, but rather charts out an ontological space of relations and intensities: lines of convergence that form nodes or assemblages, lines that rupture and shatter these formations and lines of flight

30 BlackFlash.ca

that carry them away. It is an instructional model, the authors’ directive, “Make a map, not a tracing,”1 speaks to the way that we move through cities, through virtual spaces and through the text. What does it mean to make a map and not a tracing?

I walked with a new friend in the city on a relatively warm January evening. It was the first time in ages that one was able to walk comfortably instead of rushing through the cold with shoulders hunched and muscles stiff, anxious to reach one’s destination. As we walked, our route of travel seemed to be dictated by the cadence and flow of our conversation and not by any desire to reach a particular place. At one point I realized that I didn’t really know where we were. A rare occurrence in our small, familiar city. We had gotten, quite literally, lost in conversation.

Conversations and wandering can be understood as analogous practices. A conversation meanders and spreads. It is loosely organized, or rather, it is self-organizing. An effective dialogue draws heavily upon inferences, loose or illogical connections, statements that spark anecdotes, memories and partial fictions that follow their own particular trajectories. Conversations are, in Deleuzeo-Gutattarian terms, made of lines of flight and rupture; one line converges with another, these lines are interrupted by some salient point and then they form a new line. The trajectory of a conversation is unpredictable

Jen Hamilton and Jen Southern, Satellite Bureau: Regina, 2005, project facilitated by, and exhibited at Neutral Ground, Regina, courtesy of the artists

and untraceable. Recounting it results in a kind of data loss, but it is also a necessary organization of these productive, wandering lines.

Likewise, wandering can be a productive and creative act, quite unlike walking with the intent of getting somewhere.

The former maps, while the latter traces over a route that has already been established. Wandering is the essential act of Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur, one who wanders or strolls through the city in order to experience it. The flâneur becomes an authority on modern urban culture by strolling through it.

The flâneur’s participation in urban life remains critical. While technology and industrialization created the modern city, with its emphasis on productivity, efficiency, and speed, the flâneur strolls at an impeccably and productively leisurely pace. Walter Benjamin, in The Arcades Project (1927-1940), notes that for a brief time it became fashionable to for the flâneur to walk through Paris with a turtle on a dainty leash, letting the turtle set the pace. Such dandified and performative behaviour suggests that these strolls were meant to critique the habitual and repetitive movements of the multitude. The stroll acts as a dialectical counterpoint, the ambling bon vivant, a generalist with his turtle on a string versus the harried modern worker.

Somewhat similar in practice, though different in intent, is the dérive (translated as “drift”), a spatializing exercise pro-

moted as one of the key practices of the Situationist International, a group of Leftist revolutionaries, intellectuals and artists active in Europe from the late fifties to the early seventies.

The key figure of this movement, writer Guy Debord, defined the effects (and simultaneously, the affects) of late capitalism, mass media and bureaucracy as the spectacle. The spectacle is a divisional device that separates individuals from one another and from their roles as engaged citizens through the use of seductive imagery that conflates desire with need. The spectacle is, in Debord’s words, “not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,”2 a relationship based on consumption, rather than production. The dérive is a tool meant to re-engage with the city beyond the spectacle, to make a map of the “psychogeographical relief”3 of one’s surroundings. To practice it, one or more people are instructed to set aside a segment of time to explore urban spaces, generally by walking. The trajectory is to be determined by the invisible but perceptible forces that attract to one place and repel from another. One can dérive in order to study a particular area (useful for determining the boundaries and limits of a certain psychogeographical space, as opposed to a demarcated neighbourhood or district) or the point can be to purposefully disorient oneself. Generally there will be some overlap; one might intend to study a particular

BlackFlash.ca 31

Above and Opposite: Jen Hamilton, Jen Southern, Chris St. Amand, Running Stitch, 2006, photo: Philip Carr, project exhibited at Fabrica, Brighton, UK, courtesy of the artists

area, but psychogeographical dictates may send one beyond these confines into new and unfamiliar spaces. Conversely, one might intend to get lost and find oneself very close to home, experiencing familiar territory with an unfamiliar purpose.

In the spring of 2005 I participated in Satellite Bureau, a locative media research project by artists Jen Hamilton and Jen Southern. The Satellite Bureau operated out of Neutral Ground Artist-Run Centre’s project space in Regina for ten days. Over this time Hamilton and Southern invited people to take them on a walk. Prior to the walk, the participants were asked to keep the following questions in mind, “What are the boundaries that constitute the differing neighbourhoods, locales, regions, developing areas and degenerating areas, specific to this city? … Where do you think the city is falling apart or coming together?”4 This was prior to Regina’s economic upswing and Saskatchewan’s emergence as a have-province and it was easy to find areas of degeneration, the downtown was an abyss of buildings for lease and empty lots. Finding places where the city was coming together seemed far more difficult. We wandered through the quiet city streets together as I held a GPS device that traced our footpath from a satellite somewhere in space. We talked about where we were going, what we were

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doing and how I navigated the city on a day-to-day basis.

Data collected on the walk was used to generate line drawings which were represented in various media in the galleryturned-research lab. On one wall the drawings were translated into a collective map, marked out in strings, forming a snapshot of the city. The drawings were not overlaid onto a grid of the city though mostly straight lines and right angles indicated the physical boundaries of buildings and streets. The points of degeneration, the torn down Coronet theatre, the vacant Army & Navy department store, were not visible, but it was possible to see points of convergence where our various paths crossed.

Perhaps the points of convergence were harder to see in the real space of the city because they were always shifting, located on a temporal and social plane, rather than a physical one.

In their multiplicity, these drawings spoke to the myriad of ways that inhabitants move through space. Hamilton and Southern continue to trace the movements of inhabitants in various locales using various media. A more recent research project made in collaboration with Chris St. Armand, entitled Running Stitch (2008), utilizes GPS technology and engages walking practices to map out collective movements which are then translated into tapestries: the paths made by walking con-

currently are then stitched onto canvasses by the artists and local participants. These tapestries continue to grow in complexity for the duration of the projects. Steps and stitches, both in the process of becoming line. Footpaths and threadlines, both errant and meandering, both inscribed onto organized, striated grids.

This work has been staged in Brighton, England (2006), Dundee, Scotland (2008), Yokohama, Japan (2008), and most recently, in Umeå, Sweden (2009). As the maps build in density, the artists note, the viewer “sees the city emerge from the canvas.” The city that emerges is not the official, sanctioned city, but the city as defined by its inhabitants. The invisible is rendered visible, sort of. As Michel de Certeau notes, tactical practices like wandering are never really visible.

“It is true,” he writes, “that the operations of walking can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice.”5 Walking, stitching, speaking: these are ways of being in the

world. The path, the embroidered line, and the written text are traces of this being.

De Certeau calls walking an “enunciatory”6 operation. We hear footsteps but we do not see them. A footstep and an enunciation become something when they are repeated, a walk or a story unfolds invisibly in time. And in time, cities change. They are shaped by convergence and destroyed by rupture. Their boundaries shift and dissolve; they swallow other cities whole.

In Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Kublai Khan leafs through maps in a great atlas identifying cities of his past and present by their shape and form, the local geographies that shape them, from inference, or remembered description. The former city of Troy, however, he mistakes for the soon-to-be city of Constantinople.

From the conflation of these two cities emerges an new form, that of another harbour city, San Francisco. Then York, then New Amsterdam, then New York.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins. In the last pages of the atlas, there is an outpouring of networks without beginning or end, cities in the shape of Los Angeles, in the shape of Kyōto-Ōsaka, without shape.7 BlackFlash.ca 33

Mammalian Diving Reflex, Home Tours, 2005, performance, courtesy of the artists

In this prophecy, Khan foresees the crumbling and dissolution of his empire and of all future empires as well. All that can be left, he reasons, is “inferno.”8 Marco Polo replies that if there is inferno, it is not something that will arrive, it has arrived and it is formed “by being together.”9 There are only two ways to escape suffering this inferno, he explains: one can either accept it and become so inured to it that it becomes invisible or one can “seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”10 The second is a much more difficult, but ultimately preferable, option.

Invisible Cities was published in 1972. The story takes place in the late thirteenth century. Khan’s prophetic vision of eternal networks, formless cities, and empire succeeding empire aptly describes the socio-spatial and political conditions of our present and predictably, our future. One might also be tempted to read Calvino’s vision as prophetic. But Calvino describes a condition that has existed since the moment people started coexisting. Ever since we started being human. Ever since we built settlements, ever since these settlements became cities,

34 BlackFlash.ca

territories, countries, and empires, we have lived in confusing and troubling times. Social relations and the systems and structures that organize and hierarchize these relations have always confounded us. We are always, and have always been, in the inferno.

So what is not inferno? What matters? The practices of flânerie and the dérive both seek to find what matters: what is not a product of the infrastructure of the industrial city or the spectacle of capital. Work like Hamilton, Southern, and St. Armand’s actively engages participants and invests meaning in an everyday practice, in this case, walking, by rendering it visible. Artists are in a position to seek and recognize the notinferno through social and aesthetic research and to make it endure by giving it space.

The city, much like the space of the Internet, is and is not inferno. It has both shape and is shapeless. It is infrastructure and networks; at its most basic, it is made of people. Its infrastructure and networks are built by, used by, transgressed by, and bear the traces of the city’s ever-changing populace. The city is both geographically fixed with a material presence and

also has another temporal, ghostlike, presence that conflates past and present as its inhabitants pass through it.

Rachelle Viader Knowles has asked participants in the Former Resident Project (2006-present): “When you move, what moves with you?”11 Conversely one might ask “When you move, what do you leave behind?” As a series of collaborations and conversations with individuals about the places they once lived, the work explores concepts of the city, its narratives and the way that the places of one’s past inform their present. Viader Knowles’ work takes different forms in both physical and online spaces and changes form with each new collaboration and each new city. In Brooklyn, in 2006, Viader Knowles collected stories from people who had once lived there but had since moved. These stories were printed on magnets and installed in the spaces they referenced, to be read, removed, or taken home, by others. The work also exists as a website that maps locations, names and stories of the former residents.

The stories refer to the sites they occupy (or occupied), but they also refer to a different place, a different Brooklyn that exists as a memory. “For many of us,” Viader Knowles notes in reference to this work, “‘residence is a multiple thing, a series of spaces, places, narratives and residues that shift and slip over time.”12 Recently there has been a trend in the arts to engage with the social, to make moments of social engagement the locus of the work. As Darren O’Donnell, Artistic Director of the Toronto theatre company the Mammalian Diving Reflex notes, this is a micropolitical strategy that too often fails to engage in the difficult work of going “beyond pleasant aesthetics ... beyond typical ideas of creativity and imagination, directly engaging with the civic sphere.” O’Donnell and the Mammalian Diving Reflex produce works that investigate the risks and rewards of civic engagement. Projects under the banner Social Acupuncture aim to diagnose and treat sore spots in the collective social body by facilitating interactions between people who under ordinary circumstances, would likely not have met. The project attempts to cross age, gender, racial, cultural, or economic barriers. These interactions, like the treatment of pain or illness in the physical body, are somewhat invasive or uncomfortable; the discomfort is part of the cure. Home Tours (2005), for example, is an intimate and disarming form of the dérive whereby a group of people walk through residential neighbourhoods, knock on people’s doors and ask if they can come inside for a quick tour. To do this, O’Donnell notes that one must “court failure,”14 and risk the scary, but ultimately harmless, possibility of rejection and to anticipate that the possible rewards will be worthwhile. Home Tours is invasive but it is also generous. Not only is it generous to invite strangers into your home for a tour, it is also generous to ask questions, to let others speak.

To identify the ways that the contemporary city exists as a space that people move through, a space that is mapped and made by its users, is to identify that which is not inferno, that which matters. “The city” may be defined in broad or metaphorical terms: it may exist in the imagination, in the past or future, in a transgeographical or virtual state. Space becomes infinitely more comprehensible when one may traverse through it and sustain dialogues within it.

NOTES: 1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987], 12.

2. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith [Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2006], 12.

3. Guy Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive,’ Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb [Berkley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981], 50.

4. Jen Hamilton, Jen Southern, and Chris St. Armand, Satellite Bureau: Regina 2008. Hamilton, Southern, and St. Armand.

15 January 2010 <http://www.satellitebureau.net/p4.php> 5. Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans.

Steven Rendall [Berkley: University of California Press, 1988], 97.

6. De Certeau, 99.

7. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver. [Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974], 139.

8. Calvino, 165.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Rachelle Viader Knowles. The Former Resident Project n.d. Rachelle Viader Knowles. 15 January 2010 <http://uregina.ca/rvk/frp/> 12. Ibid.

13. Darren O’ Donnell, Social Acupuncture: A Guide to Suicide, Performance, and Utopia. [Toronto: Coach House Books, 2006], 24.

14. Darren O’ Donnell, Social Acupuncture: Home Tours 2006.

Mamillian Diving Reflex. 15 January 2010 <http://www.mammalian.ca/template.php?content=social_hometours>

BlackFlash.ca 35

Visual Geographies a conversation between Kate Armstrong (Vancouver), Garnet Hertz (California), and Michelle Teran (Berlin)

Kate Armstrong is a Vancouver based artist, writer, and independent curator.

Her interdisciplinary practice merges networked media, written forms and urban experiences. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at the Prairie Art Gallery (Grande Prairie, Alberta) and Unrecorded at Akbank Sanat in Istanbul, Turkey. She has written for P.S.1/ MoMa, Fillip, and the Kootenay School of Writing, contributed to DAMP: Contemporary Vancouver Media Arts (Anvil Press, 2008), and is the author of Crisis & Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture (Michigan State University Press, 2002).

Kate Armstrong’s website: www.katearmstrong.com

Garnet Hertz is an interdisciplinary artist, Fulbright Scholar and doctoral candidate in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. He also holds an MFA from the Arts Computation Engineering program at UCI, has completed UCI’s Critical Theory Emphasis and is currently an affiliate of the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction in the Department of Informatics. His dissertation research explores the creative, historical and cultural advantages of reusing obsolete information technologies in the media arts and uses these examples to construct a critical theory of a cluster of related activities: circuit bending, D.I.Y., critical design and media archaeology.

Garnet Hertz’s website: www.conceptlab.com

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Michelle Teran (Canada) explores the interplay between social and media networks within urban environments, She uses performative action, many times involving public participation, to articulate the relation of media to the body and architecture by staging urban interventions such as tours, walks, outdoor projections, participatory installations and happenings. These projects involve working within different locations, social and cultural contexts and are the direct results of occupying spaces and cultivating exchanges.

She has talked, performed, exhibited at events and venues throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.

Michelle Teran’s website: www.ubermatic.org

@ To read the entire conversation go to www.blackflash.ca/2/cat/con/vg This conversation between three Canadian artists took place over a period of two months. They came together on the BlackFlash 2.0 website to discuss reality, virtuality, and location.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------BlackFlash: When I first read about your projects I thought of Jean Baudrillard’s Precession of the Simulacra and the Jorge Luis Borges fable “On Exactitude in Science” he cites at the start of his essay. In the fable, a cartographer draws a map of the Empire that it is so accurate it covers the entire real territory but in the fable the map eventually fades and only tatters remain. Baudrillard claims that today the map and territory have a reversed relationship. The simulation actually precedes the territory, rather than vice versa. Garnet, you seem to literally put that notion to the test but I think this applies to all three projects.

Michelle Teran: One thing that I’m exploring within my artistic projects is the relationship between the production of information, how it is visualized on a map and the experience of encountering it at street-level. I was asked into this conversation because of a series of urban investigations I am currently undertaking where I re-locate YouTube videos in the cities where they were produced and then start to meet and collaborate with some of the video makers who become active agents in a various interventions and actions. In this case, I first start with the map and then enter the territory. Mapping for me is about locating and aggregating data, looking at the relations and associations within different groupings which then become spatial narratives. However at the street level, which is a geographical experience of place, this narrative can start to break down or new narratives arise. Things are not where they say they are, distances are longer, there is traffic, people are different than you expected, unexpected things happen and suddenly disorientation sets in. I’m performing the map, but the map is falling apart. It is the breakdown between map and territory that I am drawn to the most where a dialogue between the two brings about a different reality that is based on discontinuity, fragmentation, relational flux, and hybridity.

Kate Armstrong: I was looking at relationships between places—the structures and activities of a city—as another kind of information network, or exploring ways these extended, evolved or evidenced other networks. The interest was about

information, function, and connection that pulled away from the screen and started to operate in new ways by relating to and attaching to the real world.

One of the directions this has taken me is using the activity and movement of people or structures in the world to animate and recombine text. In the Path project, I produced a 12 volume bookwork from text that was recombined or put into order by the incidental physical movement of an individual going about their life in cafés in Montréal.

I’m interested in how activity of any kind (physical movement, network activity, social or symbolic activity) can be something you can kind of attach to and use as a generator. Doing this is funny from the perspective of mapping. That which is produced becomes a kind of a map, because there is a relation between “real” information (that which acts as a generator, i.e. the movement of an individual) and representational or poetic information (that which is mixed as evidence of the activity, i.e. the text they recombine when they move). This to me is the essence of a map: shifting overlays between real and representational information. For me, there is always a reversal, and I’m interested in beauty and surprise.

Garnet Hertz: About five years ago I started exploring biomimetics and computer simulations of biological intelligence, and produced Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot (2004–2006) which attempted to rethink a trend in robotics to increasingly use simulated models of insects. In this case, I saw scientific research pursuing a goal of a sanitized, simulated model of something, but afraid to directly engage with the real thing. In this project, I replaced the sanitized, simulated model of insect logic on a microprocessor – which is frequently used to control mobile robotic systems – with the real thing, an actual cockroach. It’s an extension of the logic and a perversion of it at the same time: it can show that simulations are inherently curated, manicured and biased.

In my most recent work, Out Run (began in 2009), I’ve been exploring the theme of simulation in video games and points at which games cross over into everyday physical reality. In my OutRun project, I am taking a sit-down arcade game cabinet that is modeled after a Ferrari Testarossa and enabling it to actually drive. In other words, I am “un-simulating” an 800 pound driving video game built by Sega in 1986 and converting it into a small car. While driving your miniature Ferrari, the

BlackFlash.ca 37

Left and Centre: Michelle Teran, Buscando al Sr Goodbar, 2009; Right: Michelle Teran, The City is Creative, 2009

video game screen in front of you will completely obfuscate your view, but software is being built to render the real world in the style of the original 8-bit video game. It is like a fantasy taken to its extreme and gone humorously wrong. I expect that it will be quite dangerous driving a car with only a 1986 computer simulation of reality as your windshield but perhaps not too different from people that have blind faith in GPS navigation systems while driving.

Coming back to Baudrillard, I think it is worthwhile to note that about fifteen years after he published Simulacra and Simulations (1981) that he brought forward the concept of “radical thought” as a method out of his somewhat fatalistic view of simulacra and how images degrade from reflections, to perversions, to masking absence, to pure simulation. One of my favorite passages of text is from Baudrillard’s description of radical thought in The Perfect Crime (1996) and I think it pertains to some of the work that Michelle, Kate and I are involved in: Cipher, do not decipher. Work over the illusion. Create illusion to create an event. Make enigmatic what is clear, render unintelligible what is only too intelligible, make the event itself unreadable. Accentuate the false transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion about it, or the germs or viruses of a radical illusion – in other words, a radical disillusioning of the real … The absolute rule is to give back more than you were given. Never less, always more.

The absolute rule of thought is to give back the world as it was given to us – unintelligible. And, if possible, to render it a little more unintelligible.

I think of radical thought as being similar to the historical role of the trickster—one that disrupts the everyday by inverting conventional behavior, using humour, and being open and at peace with life’s paradoxes and multiplicities. Being a clown doesn’t accomplish much but trying to intelligently invert social conventions and assumptions can constructively

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and artistically rewire our understandings of who we are.

Mapping real space using virtual models is a part of “working over the illusion.”

MT: For me, there is always a potential for destabilization and subsequent strangeness through the introduction of technological systems. In an almost parasitic manner, my method of working is to explore the leakages that inevitably occur when technologies are used in other ways than originally intended or when the division between the public and the private become very ambiguous and blurred. What happens when technological products and platforms become subverted by simply changing the context for how they are used? What are the social and cultural conditions that accompany these technologies and how can new social situations be created?

For example, I discovered that if people include the geo-coordinates of their videos when publishing them on YouTube then these videos automatically appear as a layer of information on Google Earth. This re-introduces an element of place within the videos themselves. Using this feature I started to “virtually” visit cities and start to get to know some of the people living there through the videos that they produced. I also knew where they lived. Through a YouTube channel you can also send a message to a person. Therefore the placement of the video on a map, and the infrastructure of YouTube sets up the potential that at some point somebody might want to contact that person back and maybe pay him/her a visit.

For Buscando al Sr. Goodbar (2009), I created a bus tour throughout Murcia, Spain where a search was made for the authors and locations of various YouTube videos produced in the city. During the performance the bus moved through the city and we visited some sites where videos had been produced as well as some people living there. The movements through the city were mirrored on Google Earth which could be seen on

a large monitor installed at the front of the bus. Videos were played as we reached a place on the map where an action had taken place, such as a video of somebody doing Tai Chi which was played as we drove by a park. In preparing for the tour, I contacted several people in advance and asked if we could pay them a visit, where they would re-enact some performances on their videos. Therefore at certain points we got off the bus and entered into people’s spaces. For example, there was a young guy playing piano. First we watched his video on the bus, then met him at the entrance of the building and were led into the room where the piano was situated. Once we were all seated, he played the piano for us. Therefore a video was first made in a private space, then broadcast on YouTube for an anonymous public who then reentered the private space. In this way, the videos’ author started to experience certain consequences of the media that had been produced and made public.

Right now I’m working on a new commission called The City is Creative (2009), taking place in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, that explores the everyday performative actions that often go unnoticed. I contacted different people within the city I found through YouTube/Google Earth and asked them to produce reinterpretations of their videos, using something they already did to create something new. We are all working together within an abandoned office/factory building, former site of Philips headquarters which is zoned for an urban development project called “The Creative City” a term which strikes me as funny since cities for me are already creative. I contacted twenty people, most of them that do not consider themselves artists, and fifteen wrote me back. One of them is a thirty-seven year-old engineer who had made a radio controlled flying saucer that we ended up using to make a science fiction movie together one afternoon. I filmed another person who explores spaces through juggling. A tango salon took place in the former showroom. Another guy who does “forced feminization” perfor-

mances by dressing up in latex and scrubbing his living room floor, is going to do an intervention within one of the spaces when I return to Eindhoven in two weeks. He was an employee of Philips for twenty years and worked within these buildings, which puts an extra, interesting layer to the experience. All the videos made will be screened at a festival in September which will take place in Eindhoven.

Somebody commented that what I am doing with The City is Creative is creating an alternate art school, itself a social space. For me it is intriguing to see what happens when you issue out an invitation to a complete stranger. The first disclosure was made through a YouTube video. What other things are revealed when we finally agree to meet? What links can be made between an anonymous group of individuals, connected randomly together through their media?

KA: I have never liked any of the words suggested by language—“cyber,” “virtual,” etc., and I always think that it is a mistake to think of the real and the virtual as a simple binary.

These things are intertwined and complex, and there isn’t really any reason we should separate out that which happens “on the screen” from that which happens “off the screen.”

I think it is a real challenge to work with elements between screen/not screen and have them retain or recapture vitality, loveliness and importance, because in culture we are used to transferring between these modes and we tend to discard the haeccaeity of the thing if it is onscreen. I see this thread in some of Garnet’s work, for example with his use of the real cockroach in Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot. This is one of the things I think is successful about Michelle’s new projects— there is a cascading array of representation and represented activity and it is examining what that movement is, and where that transformation is happening or not happening.

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Left: Michelle Teran, Buscando al Sr Goodbar, 2009, photo: Sarie Hermens; Middle: Michelle Teran, Tango Salon from The City is Creative series, 2009, photo: Sarie Hermens

GH: One thing that I think is productive—or at least a topic that I’m interested in—is complicating or critiquing utopian and oversimplified views of technology. Technological utopianism often overlooks the raw and beautiful complexity of mundane, everyday life.

For me, tactics for rethinking this include extending communication and representation technologies beyond their normal scope or range of use. This is a way we, in Baudrillard’s terms, work over the illusion. When extended to their limits, media technologies can invert themselves, which I think is nicely articulated by Marshall McLuhan through his tetrads of media.

Towards the end of his life, McLuhan and his son Eric embarked on a project to update the 1964 book Understanding Media in response to critics’ requests to provide a solid basis for his drastic and metaphoric claims; the result was Laws of Media: The New Science (1989), published by Eric eight years after Marshall’s death. The book articulated that media technologies have the potential to change in four distinct ways and constructed a poetic four-region model to envision their concept with characteristics of obsolescence, retrieval, enhancement, and reversal. The reversal, in McLuhan’s eyes, occurs when something is pushed to its limits.

The main point of relevance to this discussion on simulations is that when mediating technologies are pushed beyond their ordinary limits, they can reverse or flip in their intent or use. The McLuhan diagram gives me a visual graph to think about how projects simultaneously amplify, invert, revive, and subsume—they swirl around and don’t simply proceed in a straight line.

When a simulation is taken beyond its role as a safe fantasy and pushed to envelop and take over reality, it becomes perverted. Problematizing a binary virtual/physical view of the world, for example, can be done by taking virtuality to an extreme. In the process, beliefs are “perverted” (Rafael Lozano-

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Hemmer, Perverting Technological Correctness, Leonardo 29:1, 1996). By taking a belief or simulation too far, it stops being a comforting diversion and flips into an absurdity, an obsession or a dark dream. . . . The work that we’re doing might be thought of as exploring an in-between space or, as I’ve heard Tim Durfee refer to it, a spandrel: an in-between space that has evolved into something new. I think that artists serve as good navigators and explorers of the in-between.

BF: How much is technological utopianism an issue or challenge in your respective practices and how prevalent is it in general?

GH: I spent part of my childhood growing up on a farm in Saskatchewan, which is idyllic in some ways but far from utopian. Clemenceau, Saskatchewan is a real, grounded place and the only utopias I found there were in the oil paintings by my grandmother and the odd (and failed) mechanical devices that my uncle cobbled together from bits of engines, parts and abandoned machinery. I learned a genuine joy in creating something out of nothing and utopian dreams were usually brought down by mechanical malfunction, the two dimensional picture plane, harsh weather, or something else. The false promise of utopia fills the landscape of Saskatchewan: as a place where many European immigrants were promised an idealized future and came to find a bitterly hostile environment.

As a teenager and early in my twenties I found myself caught up in the promises of the Web, e-mail, FTP, and Usenet. In 1994 the idea I could look at photos on the FTP server of Survival Research Labs in California had an immense impact on me. I was quickly swept up in communities of artists using technology but maintained a discomfort with the beaming promise of technology: of the spiritual transcendence of virtual reality, of

Right: Garnet Hertz, OutRun, Arcade Cabinet, Customized Golf Cart Drivetrain, Custom Software, 120 x 240 x 170 cm, courtesy of the artist

Mondo 2000, Wired Magazine, and of what is termed by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron as The Californian Ideology.

Although I didn’t think it at the time, I think the reality of Clemenceau made it impossible to believe. Clemenceau was (in Michel Foucault’s terms) my heterotopia.

Instead, I found resonance with what is now termed “D.I.Y.”— and my heroes were Mark Pauline, Simon Penny and other people hacking around with physical devices. I grew to hate VRML, the glossy promises of interactive communication and of the Californian Ideology. For me the best part of the Internet was finding that there was a community of junkyard hackers like my Uncle Reginald in Clemenceau. Utopian promises of technology are alluring and sexy but seem oversimplified and shallow, like a type of pornography. There’s only a surface promise and no personality.

Consumer culture, of course, requires a consistent cycle of excitement and hype over the promise of tomorrow—but for me this was harder to be swept up in with fond memories of Clemenceau. Playing in abandoned cars, making go-karts, and watching my grandmother construct images out of oil paint: it was all too real and fun to get caught up in a fictional future.

KA: I still see a lot of technological utopianism from technology people who don’t connect to any critical traditions. There is something so beautiful and mind-altering in the 2.0 moment where it is a matter of doing simple reversals on ideas from inherited power structures and saying, “Aha! Yes! So what does it look like now?” But of course the ideas that gave rise to these sea-changes in the way we view contemporary culture (Tim O’Reilly et al) were based on much thought and development and were not as easy to articulate at the outset as they are now, 5 or more years down the line. When thinking about these things as currents in culture I think it’s important to hold the big, buoyant visions but also to investigate that which is

small and complex, intricate, even contradictory, as this is the essence of critical procedure and without it giant parts get lost and simplicity gets held in areas where it is not useful. Art people don’t usually fall victim to the simplicity—I think they are used to seeking the overlapping areas (otherwise known as gaps).

I was so interested to read Garnet’s reflections on his childhood in Saskatchewan and to think back to my own experiences of technology. I remember as a child growing up in Calgary in the 1970s feeling the basic stupid flotation of technology: technology was consumption based (Radio Shack), alien, delicious, dissociative and liberating (yellow Sony Walkman), fragmenting or inconvenient (moving from LPs to cassettes to accommodate David Bowie and Duran Duran, and having an 8 track in the station wagon), or somehow dangerous and larger than myself in scientific function, magnitude and domain (the microwave oven).

My primary point of contact with personal communications technology was a princess telephone and a separate children’s line so my sister and I could speak late at night to boys. It didn’t change much from grade 6 until my first year of graduate school when I was given an e-mail address as an automatic step in the registration process. I remember feeling very apathetic and not being able to imagine who I’d speak to using this mode, because no one I knew had an e-mail address. When it became apparent that my friend in graduate school at Harvard was also given one, we began to communicate over e-mail and we found that it was much more convenient than writing letters. By the next year I’d also discovered this strange shell network function that I accessed using PINE, and through this I would connect for very long real-time textual conversations to my friends and professors, and the discussion was magical and confessional and the modes of discussion quite distinct from those of real life.

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Left: Garnet Hertz, Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot, Aluminum, Motors, Custom Electronics, 55 x 50 x 45 cm, courtesy of the artist

MT: I am always fascinated by the way technological products are described for the consumer, such as in advertising and on the product’s packaging. These descriptions become narratives, based on techno-utopian visions of seamless productivity, efficiency, simplicity, affordability, progress and control.

Taken from another viewpoint, more complex realities can be entered when these value systems are disrupted simply by exploring the unintended uses of these different technologies and in ways that insert a criticality into the process by highlighting the social and the political.

As Kate so aptly pointed out, artists look for the gaps (otherwise known as leakages). I think that all of our work speaks for this. At the same time, I continue to be surprised by the recurring tendency to equate innovation with technological advancement and the “new,” even within the “media art circles” that I find myself in. This is probably related to the funders than anything else. However, technology is now so ubiquitous and readily available on an everyday level, I find it more interesting and relevant to think about the cultural, social and aesthetic conditions that emerge through technological use.

Since we are sharing stories here, a few nights ago I entered into a three-way conference call using Skype with two friends, Ellen Røed and Amanda Steggell, both artists who are based in Bergen and Oslo respectively. We tried to connect together using video but discovered this was not an option. This was surprising for us since in the past this was quite a common way for us to meet. Starting in the 90s we started doing experiments with online performance, within public chat and video conference rooms, using CU-SeeMe, ICQ and IVisit software and later on things like Nato 0+55 and KKeyWorx. We worked from our homes and studios, on our own computers and using dial-up modems. One of the drives was to see how far we could push the technology, aesthetically exploring different qualities of the media, the limitations of bandwidth as well as

42 BlackFlash.ca

the experience of being in different time zones. Explorations of time delay, feedback, multiple representations of actions and temporalities were composed together in a common landscape. These connections were highly unstable and ephemeral moments but this was part of the excitement.

Because we were using public chat rooms, you never knew what kind of people you would meet. Many times there would be live video of men jerking off, or just a few curious people popping in for a chat. It was great to have this random mix of people who would inadvertently become part of the performance.

For me, it was quite an awakening working in this way because, again referring to Kate, we were not dealing with big ideas but instead, in my opinion, researching these small but complex experiences of working and being together online.

GH: Recently, I’ve also been rethinking the “avant garde” metaphor within art: of artists being on the front line of change, and of forging a path into the future. Michel de Certeau’s concept of fas, fetiales, and creating a theatre for future actions has an avant garde resonance to it. Many exceptional pieces of artwork successfully function as antennae into the future and lay a foundation of things to come but this isn’t the sole role of art. There is also a reflective recycling of the past, of picking up the discarded memories and artifacts of culture—and this backwardness tends to sometimes be underdeveloped in the media arts. Media art doesn’t need to be more cutting-edge: it needs to be more emotional, historical and thoughtful.

And not that driving around in an arcade cabinet is so thoughtful but it tries to look into the past and short-circuit it with the present. My recent thoughts are in line with what some term as a media archaeological perspective: to look backward and forward at the same time, and pursue them simultaneously. It’s more interesting than trailblazing a path into the future: I think many that seek the leading edge even-

Centre and Right: Kate Armstrong, Path, 2008, 12 volume bookwork, courtesy of the artist

tually find out that they were just redoing something that had been done before.

KA: I love this point about Certeau and the Roman priests— fetiales—who would “perform rites on specific places to set the stage for future action.” It is really an interesting angle for me in terms of a question that is very fundamental to me— action, the role of action, the place of action, and how activity can become an element in the composition of a work. Certeau’s reading of this phenomenon—that the story precedes the action—is huge for me: I think of my Narrative City projects being almost like a potential story system that is written, and then sits, awaiting activation by the movement of a body in space (or a body on the network).

I think also that in a huge number of contemporary art practices we find the idea of constructing a platform upon which actual social and political activity can take place and somehow the fascination is with the nature of it as actual, as something real that bubbles up from the world into the situation and finds a place within the frame.

The other thing that comes to mind here relating to our ongoing discussions and ideas of representation, the real and media is this nice quotation from Walter Benjamin, on the subject of how film doesn’t show the apparatus of filming. He writes “The equipment-free aspect of reality here becomes the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology.”

BF: How does geography affect art practice?

GH: In 1995 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron coined the phrase The Californian Ideology in an essay by the same title which provided a genealogy of the concept of the internet as a placeless and universalizing utopia: “This new faith has

emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, TV programmes, Web sites, news groups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.” A lot of forces were at play in the mid-nineties, but Wired Magazine with editor Kevin Kelly were especially influential in promoting information technologies as emancipatory, limitless and beyond geography.

Although the Internet has the power to build communities and bring together diverse geographic places, it has also emerged as a very local and geographically situated place. Geert Lovink has articulated this point nicely by highlighting statistical figures of internet use: in August 2008 China surpassed the United States in internet use, with users being overwhelmingly non-Californian—Asia has 578.5 million users, Europe has 384.5 million, North America has 248.2 million, and Latin America/Caribbean has 139.0 million. (For an excellent overview of a lecture Lovink gave in February 2009 at UC Irvine, see Liz Losh’s insightful The Empirical Turn.) Within these statistics, a Californian Ideology doesn’t hold up. It’s grown to be an incredibly diverse place linguistically, with highly localized and geographically situated practices.

As Lovink has humorously pointed out through a drawing from the webcomic xkcd, even our concepts of digital space are localized. Today our concept of the internet has more similarity to political balkanization of physical geography than universalizing dreams of VRML, for example.

In terms of my own experiences, many things change with a change in physical location. This includes art scenes, and living ... Continued on Page 49

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Media Art, Interactivity, and Play a conversation between Michelle Kasprzak (Edinburgh) and Ellen Moffat (Saskatoon)

Michelle Kasprzak is a Canadian curator, writer, and orator based in Edinburgh. She has exhibited and lectured across North America and Europe. She has appeared in numerous publications and on radio and television broadcasts including BBC Scotland, BBC Wales, CBC national, and other programmes syndicated worldwide. She completed her MA in Visual and Media Arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal in spring of 2006, and later that year was awarded a curatorial research residency at the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland.

Michelle Kasprzak’s website: www.michelle.kasprzak.ca 44 BlackFlash.ca

Ellen Moffat is originally from Toronto, has lived and worked throughout Canada and currently lives in Saskatoon.

A self-described “transplant without blood connections,” she uses speech, text, and sound as ways to navigate the ephemerality of space, the roots of locale, tradition, and cultural identity. Her work includes soundscapes and interactive media installations that create emersive yet temporary and fragile environments. Speaking to both the nomadic and the local, Moffat encourages the viewer to explore his/her own position and identity.

Ellen Moffat’s website: www.ellenmoffat.ca

@ To read the entire conversation go to www.blackflash.ca/2/cat/con/maip The conversation between Michelle Kasprzak and Ellen Moffat was the first dialogue in our commissioned conversation series. As an online project attempting to negotiate lines between collaboration and authorship, 2.0 was the ideal place to host a conversation on participation in media art. We decided to bring together a writer/curator and a multi-media artist who did not know each other to present their ideas to a wider public. What follows are excerpts from the online conversation.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------BlackFlash: Perhaps it is a useful place to start by talking about recent work or interests and the role interactivity and play within it. My own thoughts on the topic have included a few questions. Is there a possible critical function to play? How does interactivity affect your/the artist’s position in relation to the work? Has audience participation changed or affected the way you/artists work?

versity (then Ryerson Polytechnic Institute). As part of this lecture that mostly concerned itself with chess, Slopek also mentioned the ancient game of go, and outlined numerous points about the game, its strategies, and finally the concept of “good shape.”

The game of go is simple: your aim is to use your game pieces to control more of the 19 x 19 game grid than your opponent.

Players attempt to gain control and remove their opponent’s stones from the board by surrounding them. According to an issue of the British Go Journal, movements that are considered to have “good shape” have some of the following criteria:

Ellen Moffat: Interactivity is a buzzword of new media practices. My interpretation of the term is closer to “active engagement.” I am interested in setting up conditions for participation as (co)authoring and dialogue. . . . My current focus is in constructed situations in which visitors can participate actively as collaborators or co-authors.

(Alternately, they can be spectators or listeners.) My motive is to expand levels of engagement in and through art as dialogue.

New media technologies facilitate this process in part through their user interfaces. Play is an integral element of engagement as a process of discovery. I am seriously curious about how people respond in the situations I’ve constructed. Their responses allow me to assess whether my intentions have been conveyed as well as the functionality of the interfaces.

I don’t insist on a prescribed response. This would be social engineering or behavioural conformity. My inquiry is creative co-authorship as agency.

. . . Interactivity in an artwork, when it allows a depth of engagement that goes beyond a simple binary, permits viewers to utilize strategies of a sophistication and ambiguity that are on par with game strategies that would result in “good shape.”

Though if the game being played in an interactive artwork is about subtlety, I imagine I would always “win”: while computers are able to humble human masters in the game of chess, due to the sophistication of go, a computer program is unlikely to ever surpass a human go master. . . . I would assert that interactivity changes the relationship between viewer and artist, engaging them on a continuum between high-level and lowlevel interaction.

Michelle Kasprzak: A few years ago, I was listening to a lecture by Ed Slopek wherein he was describing some characteristics of the game of chess, and in particular, the role chess played in a performance by Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, entitled Reunion, that was performed in 1968 at Ryerson Uni-

1. Maximize liberties 2. Maximize eye-making potential 3. Keep options open 4. Influence as much of the board as possible 5. Deny the opponent good shape

EM: Responding to the questions about linearity and complexity in games is difficult. To be honest, I can speak directly only of chess since I have not played go and I find chess complex. Both games use binary structures with two players in competition and have goals of winning. Relations between the players are necessarily antagonistic (even if friendly). The games’ ends vary in terms of clarity or ambiguity. I agree with Michelle that ambiguity and non-deterministic outcomes are preferable. They require new perspectives, analysis and interpretation. This is also the potential for the art experience.

BlackFlash.ca 45

Ellen Moffat, vBox, 2008, multi-channel sound, audio equipment, sensors, wood, various hardware, 610 x 76 x 30 cm, courtesy of the artist

The initial responsibility of the artist is a conceptual, technical or aesthetic inquiry or line of investigation. Because of this, the art experience will likely be limited to a small audience. Ideally (and hypothetically), the art experience functions at multiple levels and with diverse audiences. Higher levels of sophistication reduce the membership of the audience. Victoria sculptor Mowry Baden (whose kinesthetic, task-oriented works require physical interaction and engagement resulting in heightened sensory perception) has suggested that the true audience for any artwork consists of about six people.

BF: Is it useful to distinguish co-authorship from collaboration? Can we see co-authorship as similar to a few artists working collaboratively in a collective or is a different type of engagement implied?

EM: The boundary between collaboration and co-authorship is blurred, and artistic disciplines differ in their uses and

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interpretations of the terms. However, the terms are distinct.

Collaboration and co-authorship are strategies for production and participation that contest individualistic art experiences without denying either the individual’s engagement or the individual subject. They posit new connections with art as an object, a relational experience or a network. They also connect with gaming and play.

My graduate advisor, André Jodoin, insisted that collaboration started with the project’s point of conception, sort of like birth. Without the co-generation of the original concept as a shared process, the project was not a true collaboration. I take a softer approach to collaboration although I find the strictness of André’s interpretation useful and appealing in its clarity. For me, collaboration refers to projects and processes with shared resources and responsibility for production and realization of mutually defined goals.

Co-authorship relates to text, writing and composition using established structures with options for engagement and

interaction. The structure functions as a set of parameters for participants, with options and choices for interpretation and invention. In my own work, I use the term co-authorship for projects which invite participants to modify existing scores.

My reference is the original Fluxus notion of “do-it-yourself” which holds that “anyone can create work from any score, acknowledging the composer as the originator of the work while realizing the work freely and even interpreting it in far different ways than the original composer might have done.” Interpretation of the original text or composition passes authorship to the participant as a co-author.

The collective is a group of individual subjects. (Ideally) it endorses plurality and multiplicity. As a social aggregate, the collective is a sociopolitical entity that suggests society as a metaphor. Interaction among members of the collective may be enacted through collaborative and co-authoring actions.

MK: I was recently reading an interview on the SFMOMA’s website, about their recent exhibition, The Art of Participation.

In the interview, Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts says: One thing that is really key to this whole project as an exhibition is that we want to explore what it could mean for the museum to be not just a container for artworks, but actually a producer, or a site of production. And we’ve been thinking about the practice of institutional critique many artists developed in the 70s and 80s which in part involved leaving institutional spaces and going into alternative spaces, and the way some contemporary artists work in different kinds of social space, perhaps educational spaces, blurring the distinctions between them. In a museum we normally have a clear distinction between what is gallery space, what is social space, and what is educational space, and this is something that many contemporary artists would certainly want to challenge.

What I think is interesting about this exhibition, and this quote in particular is that Frieling (speaking from within the institution), acknowledges the importance of the institutional critique that artists can bring, and talks of blurring distinctions, when by definition, the museum can’t take the blurring of distinctions to its limit. It would undo the raison d’être of museums to really let go of its power to categorize and legitimize. However, parallel things grow up around these forces and become part of a cultural conversation that museums must engage in. There is an obvious parallel in publishing, in that web-powered print on demand as well as blogs and wikis force a conversation about access to audiences and freedom of expression. This very experiment we are taking part in acknowledges the impact the web has had and will feed back into print, which will extend the power of what we say here, but still encapsulate it in the context of an online conversation.

EM: The term “producer” can suggest control. However, the relationship between the museum and the artist needs to be arms-length. The museum as a site of production does not suggest tension between the institution and the artist, but with the museum as a producer, the dynamic is not clear, at least to me.

My response to your question about media art and participation will emphasize sound and listening. Digital technologies impact sense perceptions and social change. Listening and media art can extend individual sensibilities to collectivity and inter-connectivity. They give participants a sense of active involvement in many lives, set up conditions for different experiences of social space and social behaviour, and bridge our private and public worlds. These ideas are compatible with Freiling’s curatorial statement about the shifting function of the museum as a site of production and as a social space.

I’m currently reading Brandon LaBelle’s Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. LaBelle identifies listening as an agent for shifting individuality into a larger field of experience. Listening breaks apart the “shell of the listener” blurring the finite borders of individuality toward a broader space of multiplicity. He quotes John Cage who in turn credits Marshall McLuhan with the recognition that new art and music implement processes that provide opportunities for perceptual shifts from “life done for us to life that we do for ourselves.”1 LaBelle completes this chapter of the book with the statement that these opportunities make us “increasingly and productively vulnerable.” This phrase has resonance for me.

Vulnerability is our humanity. Our future is uncertain. Technology is our surround. Do new media technologies assist us with facing our contemporary uncertainty in concrete terms?

In altering our understanding of collectivity, do they also alter our actions? Does the social space of the museum extend beyond the museum or does the institution aestheticize vulnerability and uncertainty?

MK: I’d like to begin this last post in our conversation with the video from the Exquisite Bodies (2009) (this video can be seen at: http://bit.ly/atmUcc) exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, particularly because of the depiction of the inanimate or imaginary body as something for entertainment and as an interactive object. At around the one minute mark, you can observe curator Kate Forde demonstrate a beautiful anatomical model that one can “dissect” by lifting or folding down paper flaps, exploring the body interactively in an analogue fashion.

While this example may seem utterly divorced from the conversation that we are having about contemporary notions of interactivity and digital media, I think it’s relevant. As simple as they are, the paper flaps are interactive and educational, and presumably everyone who came into contact with them knew how to use them.

BlackFlash.ca 47

Anita Fontaine and Mike Pelletier, CuteXdoom II, 2009, video game, sound by Luke Ilett, dimensions variable, courtesy of the artists

Designer and researcher Julian Bleecker once created a list of the “Top 15 criteria that define interactive or new media art,” and one of these tongue-in-cheek criteria was “Your audience ‘interacts’ by clapping/hooting/making bird calls/flapping their arms like a duck or waving their arms wildly while standing in front of a wall onto which is projected squiggly lines.” As hilarious and hyperbolic as his list is, it raises some serious issues with the genre, most notably, that when there is no clear call to action or way of developing a relationship with a work, audiences resort to “making bird calls” in an effort to elicit an evolution in the artwork they are viewing. A failure to provide clear protocols means that an experience meant to be about the work devolves into people asking each other, “is this thing on?”

From my point of view, I suppose that where interactivity can turn into play is at the point where the interaction design makes play possible. Earlier this year, I curated an exhibition entitled The Aesthetics of Gaming (2009) at Pace Digital Gallery in New York City. The exhibition presented two game environments: Avoid by Joe McKay and CuteXdoom II (2009) by Anita Fontaine and Mike Pelletier. The works address both the intertwining of games and stories and the aesthetics of artist-created games. But most importantly, I feel that the development of games by artists has something in common with the anatomical studies (both as entertainment and as serious study) in days gone by: the hand of the artist plays a significant role,

48 BlackFlash.ca

and the dexterity of the artist and participants to visualize and construct reality in three dimensions determines the depth of an audience’s experience. These artists have had to investigate how games might work under the surface, as well as provide a compelling aesthetic surface that will draw players in.

It goes without saying that video games are part of a massive entertainment industry and that several generations of people now know many conventions of game play in this context.

While the complexity of game modification and design presents a unique challenge to artists, the conventions of game design can provide the cues that will prevent any “is this thing on?” moments. It also provides a consistent framework to work against—because audiences are familiar with gaming conventions, assumptions of how an experience is to be navigated or how a narrative will be resolved can be challenged. Like the paper flaps of yesterday, the game controllers and joysticks of today smooth the way towards insight into the guts of an artist’s message, whether an artist chooses to work with conventions, or against them.

NOTES: 1. Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives in Sound Art, (New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 247.

Visual Geographies Continued from Page 43

in Southern California for the past six years has significantly impacted my work. Creating the work still consists of sitting down, building, soldering, and producing it, but the community that it enters into and circulates in is considerably different. It’s not the Californian Ideology that makes a difference, though: it’s the local that has the greatest impact.

KA: I can’t seem to get a grip on the idea that I belong to any specific place, and I try to embrace the radical accident of my geographic associations. I live in Vancouver now but grew up in Calgary and lived for two decades in between those points in France, Ontario, Tokyo, Scotland, Newfoundland, and New York. My family has been in Alberta for five generations but were originally an impassive array of wanderers from a variety of Northern places and their connection to each other as well as to the place where they eventually settled seems quite random. It’s funny to think of the way you can be situated, but randomly. Maybe it’s a kind of aleatory process; I could have been anyone.

The fact that I live in Vancouver now seems to me like a kind of crazy inverse holiday; I routinely go off elsewhere and am always so happy to return. My connection to place becomes social. The border is a man in an outfit.

MT: I’ve never thought about the Internet as a placeless place. If anything geographical location always figured very highly within my earlier Internet experiences and continues to be important to this day. It was important to mix online exchange with ‘meat space’ meetings in order to solidify both working and social relationships.

Since the 80s I have been both living and making work in different places around the world. Where I have been and what I have done are connected to a process akin to improvisation and emergence rather than through a large well thought-out plan. To date I have lived in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, the Czech Republic, Mexico, Italy, the Netherlands, and now presently Germany. I grew up in a small town in Southern Alberta and spent 17 years living there. Being there was in itself an improvised event. My parents moved there because my father could not immediately practice medicine in Ontario as he had gotten his degree in Mexico, his country of birth. Small rural areas in Canada were always in need of doctors, so we ended up in one of them.

So, to try to answer your question, I think that the process of moving has informed who I am and also what I do. These two aspects of myself become so intertwined that it’s impossible to separate one from the other. I resonate the most creatively when working in a site-specific manner and in ways that relate to people and stories within that place. Some of these experiences could be considered quite pedestrian. This is attributed to the economic situation of me being there. I mostly work under artist-in-residence or commission models and also get

some financial support through artist grants. This means that my time there is dependent on what is possible in terms of financial and other production support. I can be somewhere anywhere from a few days to several months.

Concerning art scenes in different cities, I once again return to the question of geography which is an inquiry into the production of space. I am continually interested in how cultural spaces are produced. What you’ll see in Toronto for example, varies from what you’ll see in Stockholm, Seoul, Pristine, Zagreb, Bergen or Madrid. Why is that? When I start to map out cultural institutions, what they look like, how accessible they are, who works there, who their audience is, proximity to other centers, funding models, as well as the activities that go on inside them, I start to see how they are built and placed in the city varies and is influenced by local conditions and contexts.

Although there are definitely cross-pollinations of various themes within the media arts, such as open-source, sustainability, media activism, urbanism, bio-art, gaming, etc., there are still variations in the ways these discussions and productions materialize as well as expectations of what an artists role should be within an institution. This is not to say that everything is completely different everywhere I go, but that there are interplays of sameness and difference. I think that I am the most affected and influenced by these variations.

I write this last post from Skopje, Macedonia where I gave a workshop yesterday. During the workshop we explored Skopje through YouTube and Google Earth and used the media and the map to determine which parts of the city we wanted to visit. We found a video of a burning house, made one year ago, and decided that we wanted to find it. A taxi driver took us to a northern suburb and dropped us off on an unfamiliar street.

We tried to find the house by approaching people on the street and asking them if they knew anything about it. Most of them didn’t know English and so we were passed from one person to the next until we were led to a woman who peeked her head out from the window of her third floor apartment. She finally led us to the spot, former site of a children’s library and current building for the Red Cross. It was such a disorienting experience, but in a very exciting way, to emerge from the map and suddenly be hurtling in a cab towards the unknown.

BlackFlash.ca 49

Covers: BlackFlash Benefit Concert

Photography by Dave Hutton and Ian Campbell

We held our first ever BlackFlash Benefit Concert, Covers, on March 27th, 2010 at the Broadway Theatre in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Six bands, including Shuyler Jansen and Foam Lake, Ride â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Til Dawn, Tyson McShane, Jen Lane, Smokekiller, and The Perogies played amazing sets covering music from their favorite bands. Thanks to everyone who came out, all of the volunteers 50 BlackFlash.ca

that helped make the night a success, the staff at the Broadway Theatre, the Performance Productions crew and especially the following people who made generous donations to BlackFlash Magazine: Mike and Bev Rooney, Jeff Braid, Barrie Forbes, Jennifer Crane, Phil Greer, Dan and Rema McKenzie, Linda Millard, and Kelly Foth.

celebrate!

June 25 - July 7, 2010

24 Call for Submissions Eastern Edge’s Contemporary Art Festival stage & site-specific performance St. John’s NL August 2010

24hourartmarathon.wordpress.com for submission guidelines contact easternedgegallery@gmail.com deadline June 15

the works art & design festivals’ 25th anniversary in 2010 www.theworks.ab.ca

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ARCHIVES MAGAZINE on-line

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cielvariable.ca/archives 4,000 images | 750 artists | 1,000 essays | 350 authors, and more...

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3rd annual image contest

Grand Prize $500

2009 Still Image Winner: Clare Samuel, Untitled from the series ‘It is Still’, 2008, c-print, 76.2 x 76.2 cm, claresamuel.com Submission deadline: January 31, 2011 Contest entry and rules at blackflash.ca/opticnerve

To Be Reckoned With...

Mary Anne Barkhouse, Ruth Cuthand, David Garneau, Robert Houle, Nadia Myre May 15 – August 22, 2010

A permanent collection exhibition organized by the MacKenzie Art Gallery with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the City of Regina Arts Commission.

Left to right: Ruth Cuthand, Trading: Bubonic Plague, 2008, Trading: Chicken Pox, 2008, Trading: Typhoid Fever, 2008 acrylic paint, glass seed beads on beading medium mounted on suede board, 45.7 x 61 cm each. Images courtesy the artist.

3475 Albert Street, Regina, SK, www.mackenzieartgallery.ca

Clockwise from top: Nathan Raine, Ferdinand & Marianne/Near Resolution, digital c-print, 45 x 30 cm; Kristopher Grunert, The Seylynn Lights (1), 2009, digital c-print, 75 x 100 cm; Jessica McCarrel, Cadaver drawing, ink on paper, 20.3 x 27.9 cm, cropped image, courtesy of the artist; Brad Proudlove, Trees, 2010, photograph, 20.3 x 30.5 cm; Erin Griffin, Untitled, 2008, photograph; Carolyn Doucette, Carwash10 from the series Everything You Can Do at a Drive-Through, 2010, digital photo print on Kodak photographic paper, 40.6 x 50.8 cm; Maury Gortemiller, Bodies, 2009, digital c-print, 60 x 76 cm; Dennis Stewart, The Extended Revelation, 2010, Shot with an Original 1970 era Russian Lomo Smena 8M camera on Perutz Primera 200 film, 20.35 x 20.35 cm; Carl Warren, Fire in the Columbia Gorge, 2009; Carey Shaw, Bonnie, 2009, digital photo, 20.3 x 30.5 cm. All courtesy of the artists.

BlackFlash.ca 55

Flash Blog We asked our readers to upload their artwork onto the BlackFlash 2.0 image blog with the idea that it would be interesting to see what they are creating and the combinations of images that we would eventually print on the page. The images on this page and the previous one are the result of this project.

Clockwise: from top right: Margaret Dragu, Traffic Accident at Granville Island Underpass from The Roadside Memorial/Traffic Accident/Shrine Collection by Lady Justice, 2009, used in performances/videos by Lady Justice (aka Margaret Dragu); Richard Palanuk, Reclining Pear, 2007, pigmented inks on rag paper, 50.8 x 50.8 cm; Megan Morman, Unmentionable Anecdote from Cooler, 2009, digital collage; Devlon Duthie, In the Library, 2010, digital photograph, 6.06 x 7.58 cm; David Pollock, Rock and Gem Shop, Victoria, 2009, pigment print from 4x5 original, 60.96 x 76.2 cm; Robert Fougere, Light a candle for Joan, 2009, digital scan of black and white photograph; Audrey Kerchner, Boy playing battleship, 2009, digital photograph; Serena McCarroll, Soggy Box, 2004 (series ongoing), c-print, 51 x 73 cm; Sarah Fuller, Portrait of the Artist Asleep Holding a Pinhole Camera, 2008, type c-print, 76.2 x 101.6 cm. All courtesy of the artists.

56 BlackFlash.ca

DIABOLIQUE | PART ONE College Art Gallery 2 March 26 - June 4, 2010 Curated by Amanda Cachia Organized by the Dunlop Art Gallery Artists: Jake & Dinos Chapman, Douglas Coupland Dana Claxton, William Kentridge, Fawad Khan Shirin Neshat, Michael Patterson-Carver Raymond Pettibon, Nancy Spero Scott Waters and Balint Zsako

DIABOLIQUE | PART TWO College Art Gallery 2 June 18 - August 14, 2010 Curated by Amanda Cachia Organized by the Dunlop Art Gallery Artists: Matilda Aslizadeh, Rebecca Belmore Mario Doucette, David Garneau, Wanda Koop, Emanuel Licha, Althea Thauberger Jason Thiry and Scott Waters

MEETING POINT College Art Gallery 1 March 26 - August 14, 2010 Curated by Earl Miller Organized by the College Art Galleries and the Doris McCarthy Gallery Artists: Laura Belém, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller cinemari (Cinthia Marcelle & Marilá Dardot), cinemata (Cinthia Marcelle & Tiago Mata Machado) Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, General Idea Anitra Hamilton, Mike Hansen, Chris Hanson & Hendrika Sonnenberg, Micah Lexier Jennifer Marman & Daniel Borins and Rivane Neuenschwander

LINEage: TRACING GENERATIONS OF FACULTY (1936-2008) Kenderdine Art Gallery April 7 - July 23, 2010 Organized by the Kenderdine Art Gallery and the Department of Art & Art History Artists: Eli Bornstein, Robert Christie, Reta Cowley, Stan Day Hans Dommasch, Bill Epp, Mina Forsyth, George Glenn, Augustus Kenderdine, Don McNamee, Wynona Mulcaster, Brenda Pelkey Warren Peterson, Otto Rogers, Gordon Snelgrove, Hilda Stewart James Thornsbury, Patrick Traer, David Umholtz and Janet Werner

KENDERDINE ART GALLERY 51 Campus Drive University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5A8 Mon to Fri 11:30 - 4:00 COLLEGE ART GALLERIES 107 Administration Place University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5A2 Mon to Sat 11:00 - 4:00 t: 306.966.4571 e: kag.cag@usask.ca www.usask.ca/kenderdine

Image: Jake & Dinos Chapman, War, 2004, painted bronze. Courtesy of White Cube, London, England

BlackFlash ART.PHOTOGRAPHY.NEW MEDIA

2.0

featuring Garnet Hertz Kate Armstrong Michelle Teran Ellen Moffat Michelle Kasprzak Blair Fornwald Karen Asher Derek Liddington Mark Clintberg Sarah Fuller Robert Canali

Edward Burtynsky, Alberta Oil Sands #6, Fort McMurray Alberta, Canada, 2007. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

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www.therooms.ca Edward Burtynsky: Oil is organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and made possible with the generous support of the Scotiabank Group.

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