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 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 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, Prishtina, 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 centres, funding models, as well as the activities that go on inside them, I start to see that that how they 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, bioart, 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 3rd 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.

With that, I’d like to end this post and also  thank both Garnet and Kate for such an interesting exchange.

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.

image: http://sperone.free.fr/

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, newsgroups 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:

(Enlarge “Map of Online Communities” by xkcd)

Today our concept of the internet has more similarity to political balkanization of physical geography than universalizing dreams of VRML, for example.

(View Balkanization animation)

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

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 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”.

So throughout this conversation we’ve talked about experiences and methods of mapping real and imagined space as well as the influence of technology. The internet, so I’ve grown up hearing, is a placeless place that has the power to bring together all other places, to create a community that bridges boundaries (utopian thinking again especially considering Michelle’s interesting observation about the age and gender predominance in YouTube videos).

With this last question, I’d like to bring it back to physical geography. Since you’re all in different parts of the world but participating in an international art scene, I’d like to ask how or if your respective locations have shaped your practices. Garnet and Michelle, are there large differences between the art scenes of your respective locations and Canada? Kate, does working as an artist in Canada shape your work? Are borders relevant in this case?

Much of Certeau’s work in The Practice of Everyday Life concerns boundaries and spatial organization: like his defining of strategies and tactics, for example. Strategies are the manipulation of power relationships from an institutionalized and delimited place, while tactics are calculated actions that have no boundaries or center: one is centered (strategies), the other (tactics) is not. It’s almost as if one can imagine lines drawn on the ground for many of his concepts. This focus on the demarcation or stepping across of boundaries carries over into his discussion on spatial stories, which is where fas is brought forward.

The fas is part of stories creating a theater of actions, of building a foundation and opening up a space for action through a story. The Roman priests referred to in the text appeared to function as ambassadors that went to a neighboring country’s border and gave a deadline to when war would start if conditions didn’t change. If the time ran out, the fetiales would apparently hurl a spear with blood on it over the border, which would be an official declaration of war.

For my own work, specifically the OutRun project, I don’t see it as creating a story to lay a foundation for future actions. Building a device/artwork can be viewed as a story that lays out actions in the future, but I think it’s more accurate to think of this project as a style of backward action – not a future narrative. It’s all a tangled network of recycled stories, objects, fantasies, realities, and actions, though. Although I think he articulates a lot of foundational concepts that are relevant to DIY practices and tactical media, I haven’t gravitated toward Certeau in my work. I find that The Practice of Everyday Life leans toward text-based and subtle practices, like moving between spaces, creating narratives, or constructing stories.

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. Certeau’s concept of fas, fetiales, and creating a theater 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 eventually find out that they were just redoing something that had been done before.

I wouldn’t say that what I am doing is setting up new ways of thinking and acting rather highlighting what is already there. I’d like to re-introduce a statement by Garnet about artists serving as good navigators and explorers of the in-between. There’s also been discussion between us about how problematic it is to make a distinction between the digital and non-digital, the physical and virtual, as if these were two completely different situations and/or states. I think I use the word ‘virtual’ not because I make this distinction, but for a gap in the  language to explain this hybridity between the two except by using binaries. 

Regarding the production of space, whether pointing to Henri Lefevre or a multitude of other thinkers, I think that we are always dealing with in-betweeness and hybridity, in connection with technology or not, where space becomes a complex layering of buildings, sensations, social interactions, emotions, memories, etc.  Citing the work of Irit Rogoff and her definition of ‘relational geographies’, the contemporary rendering of space is something that is always relational, unable to be located within a fixed ‘truth’ or ‘identity’ but always somewhere in-between.  I really liked Kate’s Path project about a narrative produced by moving through the city, itself a state of in-betweeness, and created by visibilities and gaps where the culmination of disparate fragments forms into a cohesive whole. It’s the feeling of fragmentation and in-betweeness that I really enjoy about walking through cities, especially ones that I’ve never been to before. 

I’ve also been thinking lately about the writing of history, specifically the public collective memory generated through the production of media and accumulation of personal footage. The industrial ability to mass-produce images creates more opportunities to tell our own personal stories, while also setting up a situation for a type of memory defined by affinity and sameness, not to mention the way data is classified, standardized and stored. These set up the conditions for what is remembered, but also who gets to tell the story. Back to my YouTube adventures, I find it puzzling, but at the same time of course alarmingly not, that most of the videos I’m finding are being made by young boys and men, mostly white, between the ages of 14-40.

Maybe it’s just hindsight that puts events together in a neat orderly fashion, but it’s interesting how your stories seem to point directly to your present day practices. Michel de Certeau described stories as being composed of a “spatial syntax” where actions such as strolling through the city become a vehicle of narrative (as Kate has explored). Most interesting is that this idea finds its actualization in reality in very concrete ways. Certeau notes that buses in modern day Athens are called “metaphorai” (Michelle!) which made me think about the Polish word for the bus transportation system—“communication.”

Now I can’t say I’m going to put forth a concrete question this time but I’ve had a few ideas rolling around my head during the length of this conversation, especially since this blog will be edited down and printed in the May 2010 issue of BlackFlash Magazine. In print, it will be an article generated by three people from different parts of the world. I was reminded of a concept that, once again, Certeau brought up. In The Practice of Everyday Life, he introduces the Latin noun fas which, translated loosely, means “foundation.” In Rome, priests called fetiales would perform rites on specific places to set the stage for future action. Certeau took this to mean that the story precedes the action. It is the story that allows, that authorizes, an actualized social event. I’ve often wondered what this growing narrative that we are making will produce as a print article. I’ve read blogs translated into print before and there’s an odd incongruity about them which is actually quite satisfying to read.

In any case, I like this notion of fas because it’s not so much a causal structure but a form of permission. I feel as if your works, and perhaps this exchange of narratives, is a way of setting fas, a way of permitting new ways of thinking and acting. While I’m not sure what we are setting the stage for, I do have a feeling it’s a vital function of what each of you is doing.

Regarding technological utopianism, 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-utopic 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. 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 softwares and later on things like Nato 0+55 and KeyWorx. 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 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.

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 hold 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 accomodate 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 email 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 email address. When it became apparent that my friend in graduate school at Harvard was also given one, we began to communicate over email 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.

I never felt, through this progression, that technology was going to save us as a culture, but I suppose it must evolve alongside the idea of what it means to be saved, or lost, or anything else.

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, Email, 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 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 Baudriallard’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.

I’m glad you mentioned technological utopianism, Garnet. I am always surprised that it still holds as much sway as it does, even in academia. Has this been an idea, or a preconception, you’ve all had to confront? How much is this notion of technological utopianism an issue or challenge in your respective practices and how prevalent is it in general?

Like Kate, I dislike terms like “virtual,” “cyber,” or “interactive” since they are often used uncritically and tend to allude to a simple binary between digital and non-digital.

One thing that I think is productive – or at least a topic that I’m interested in – is complicating or critiquing utopianistic 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 Baurillard’s terms, work over the illusion. When extended to their limits, media technologies can invert themselves, which I think is nicely articulated by McLuhan through his tetrads of media.

Towards the end of his life, Marshall 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-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.

I don’t envision my work as building an alternate social space, but see it as primarily exploring the interstitial space between ordinary life and simulations of it. In the case of the OutRun project, for example, it plays within a space where reality and dream are intentionally blended, confused and blurred: the video game becomes reality and reality becomes a video game. In some ways it’s intentionally trying to create an uncanny valley between the familiar and the almost-familiar (Masahiro Mori, 1970). The “virtual” has always been with us in different forms through history and is not something unique to digital technologies. However, the continued proliferation of digital media technologies has created a lot of interesting opportunities between everyday life and representations of it.

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 as 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.

I’m really happy to catch up with Garnet’s work and to hear about Michelle’s new projects, specifically “Buscando al Sr. Goodbar”. I am interested in how the project brings into the youtube/map equation a very new and vital thread of connection through and between the network and the world.

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.

I also like how there is a play with scale. Scale of course is so important to considerations of the map and how it functions. We don’t always consider the haptic qualities of the map or of the things that are mapped. Google Earth is so tiny and fluid and swift and gigantic, Borges’ interactive map.

That is why I like the introduction of people, especially groups of people, especially groups of people in a bus (!) when tracking down and connecting with youtube videos. The man playing the piano on youtube is so very small and luminous, but when we meet him in real life he is large and in the centre of a crowd, and the whole things scales up back up again.

It relates to the Baudrilliard quote advanced by Garnet: “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 like how sometimes the world can be rendered “a little more unintelligible” through the provision of detail and specificity, through the actual activities of people and qualities of places and things.

I’ll try to answer Genda’s question in her post Giving Back : creating new spatial possibility.  For me, there is always a potential for de-stabilization 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 GoogleEarth. 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’, 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 GoogleEarth 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 broadcasted 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.

Read more

I’d like to try to tie these comments together a little. I’m particularly interested in Baudrillard’s recommendation to give back more than you get—to overwhelm the simulation with more simulation so to speak. But it seems that each of you implicate the real back into the map or at least highlight its unavoidable reality. I think this is an important thing to do considering all the stories of cars driving off cliffs due to zealous obedience of GPS commands. I even heard of a couple who met on Second Life, moved in together, and then only interacted through their elaborate consoles albeit in the same living room. Do you see your respective practices as a way of resisting the onslaught of the virtual or exploring an altogether different relationship? Have you discovered fruitful possibilities for the creation of new spaces? Do you see each others’ practices as ways of proposing an alternate social space?

I think Baudrillard is a good starting point for this conversation: as I look back at my work over the past fifteen years, I’ve continually worked with the theme of inverting simulations or the virtual.  I initially did this by attempting to invert and play with the internet and notions of reality wrapped around it – see  ”Interface” (1995-1996) <http://conceptlab.com/interface/> or “The Simulator” (1997) <http://conceptlab.com/simulator/>.

About five years ago I started exploring biomimetics and computer simulations of biological intelligence, and produced “Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot” (2004-2006) <http://conceptlab.com/roachbot/> 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” (2009) <http://conceptlab.com/outrun/> I’ve been exploring the theme of simulation in videogames and points at which games cross over into everyday physical reality.  In my Out Run 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” a 800 pound driving video game built by Sega in 1986 and converting it into a small car.  While driving your miniature Ferrari, the 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 videogame.  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 humor, 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 and artistically rewire our understandings of who we are.  Mapping real space using virtual models is a part of “working over the illusion.”

I think one of the reasons I started being interested in the mapping of real space was that it could be looked at as relating to the operation or function of a network, but it was a low-tech network, and it didn’t involve the screen.

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 cafes in Montreal.

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.

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.

In all your projects I’m very interested in how you mix real, virtual and social space. Mapping becomes performative for each of you, perhaps best described as a method drawing itineraries rather than making maps. When I first read about your projects I thought of Jean Baudrillard’s Precession of the Simulacra and the Borges fable 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. I’d like to start off by asking what is it that pulled the three of you to map real space using virtual models and have the projects resulted in any new or unexpected conclusions about the way we navigate or perhaps “perform” space?