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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’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.

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.

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.