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 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”.

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’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 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.

We are very happy to feature our next conversation between Kate Armstrong, Vancouver multi-media artist and scholar, Garnet Hertz, a Canadian artist and scholar based in California, and Michelle Teran, Canadian multi-media artist based in Berlin. All three artists deal explicitly with contemporary ways of mapping space, or in some cases, a contemporary poetics of space. We’re drawing them together from three very different parts of the world to discuss their newest projects as well as the ideas driving them.

Below I’ve included bios taken directly from their websites.

Kate Armstrong:

Kate Armstrong is a writer, artist and curator. Her interdisciplinary practice merges networked media, written forms and urban experiences to create work that examines process and accumulation.

Her exhibitions include the Surrey Art Gallery (Surrey, Canada), Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius, Lithuania), Psy-Geo-Conflux (New York), Western Front (Vancouver), Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Centre A), ISEA 2006 (San Jose, California), ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge (San Jose, California), Yerba Buena Centre (San Francisco, California), Interactive Futures: The New Screen (Victoria, Canada), Prairie Art Gallery (Grande Prairie, Alberta), and Akbank Sanat (Istanbul, Turkey).

She has lectured and held workshops at venues including the Tate Britain, Banff New Media Institute, the Obermann Centre for Advanced Studies (Iowa City, Iowa), and Time’s Up (Linz, Austria). . . . more

Garnet Hertz:

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. He has shown his work at several notable international venues in eleven countries including Ars Electronica, DEAF and SIGGRAPH and was awarded the prestigious 2008 Oscar Signorini Award in robotics. He is founder and director of Dorkbot SoCal, a monthly Los Angeles-based DIY lecture and workshop series on electronic art and design. His research is widely cited in academic publications, and popular press on his work has disseminated through 25 countries including The New York Times, Wired, The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today, NBC, CBS, TV Tokyo and CNN Headline News.
(updated May 2009)

Michelle Teran:

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 such as the Transmediale Festival, Ars Electronica, ISEA, BEAP, V2, Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, Medialab Prado, Theater der Welt, Impakt Festival, CCCB/MACBA, SONAR, ARCO International Art Fair, Vooruit, HAU2, Nabi, Performance Space, Waag Society for Old and New Media and the World Wide Web. She has completed residencies and commissions with several cultural institutions including Tesla (Berlin), Waag Society for Old and New Media (Amsterdam), Mobile Digital Commons Network (Montreal) , La Chambre Blanche (Quebec City) and The Interactive Institute (Stockholm). She has lectured and led workshops on topics such as the relation of artist, performer and audience to networked space and the urban topologies of space, place and non-place at several educational institutions including Bauhaus Universität (Weimar), Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Dance Unlimited (Amsterdam), Willem de Kooning Academie (Rotterdam) and Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen (Bergen).

She has received numerous grants and awards for her work including the Prix Ars Electronica honorary mention within the interactive art category and 2nd prize in the Vida 8.0 Art & Artificial Life International Competition, sponsored by Fundacion Telefonica (Madrid).

She currently lives and works in Berlin.