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/

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.