By John Mankie, October 18, 2008 The Vancouver Sun

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The two giant video screens at Granville and Robson normally snap and crackle with quick-hitting, colourful ads for companies such as Telus, Fido and WestJet.

But next week, they’ll be showing something something completely different: two short films by internationally acclaimed artist Antonia Hirsch.

“You really get a contrast,” Hirsch said with a laugh. “Most of those [ad] spots are like 10 seconds long, then you’ll get this epic one minute.”

Non-profit organizations get some access to the screens as part of the agreement to put them up on the side of the building that houses Future Shop and Winners. Normally, the time is allocated to organizations like the Vancouver Symphony: Hirsch’c films are the first art projects to be screened.

The work is called Vox Pop, and deals with the modern phenomenon, the crowd wave at sports games.

Hirsch has been fascinated by the wave for years.

“I found it interesting how it is really exhilarating in a way to be in it and to be participating, but it’s also a bit scary,” she explained.

“Because it has that herd instinct in it, where you really don’t know if any good intentions are kind of driving this.”

One film is a slow pan of a sports stadium, at the same speed of a typical wave. The other shows a lone fan sitting in the stands, doing the wave.

“By isolating this figure, I tried to highlight the kind of oddity of this gesture,” she said.

“Once somebody’s just by themselves, it seems ridiculous, in a way, what they’re doing.”

As funny as it is to see a lone figure doing the wave, Hirsch said “it could also be a bit sinister. It has something maybe of the sort of raised hand ‘heil,’ or [a] very fervent religious gesture.”

The films will be shown in the middle of the regular ad spots, which she thinks might be quite jarring for passerby.

“It is very slow and uneventful compared to the other stuff that’s going up on those boards,” she said.

“I don’t want to annoy people, but I do want to create a situation where people might stop and go ‘Hang on for a second, what is this?’ There is this wonderful moment that can happen by throwing something into a known context that’s a little different — you start to question what you really know.

“It may make you look differently at advertising, it may make you look differently at the type of imagery that’s thrown at us.”

Hirsch, 40, was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and has lived in Canada since 1994.

Her works are in the collections of institutions such as the Vancouver Art Gallery, The New York Public Library, the Yale University Collection of Rare Books, The National Art Library a the V&A and the Tate Gallery Library in London, England.

Vox Popwill start running at 12:01 a.m. Monday and run through midnight next Sunday, Oct.26.

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Nestled among flashy ads and quick-bite movie trailers at Robson and Granville is a new experience from visual artist Antonia Hirsch called Vox Pop.

The Video project features two separate sequences, one in which the camera pans the stadium at the same rate as the sporting-event fans’ wave would be followed.

The camera then rests on a sole male spectator, who rises as if taking part in the wave. Both one-minute sequences are inserted between ads.

Creator Hirsch says the project creates a tension live action and group activities as it screen every three minutes, 24 hours a day for a week.

While the piece is played, there is no name, no website and no information to identify what it is or who created it.

“I play with advertising esthetic. Look at it once, and you look at everything differently,” says Hirsch. “Just plant that seed: What is this?”

Hirsch says the spot is ideal not only for the pedestrian traffic, but also because the screen is high resolution. It’s also fitting that the screen is between signs for Future Shop and Winners.

“Future and winners — I like that,” says Hirsch.

As the man on screen is solitary, Hirsch says he is taking part in the wave evokes an ominous and unsettling moment, yet one that is deliberate and personal.

Hirsch had a specific type of man in mind she wanted for the piece. He had to be in his mid-20s to 30s and Caucasian, which plays up the stereotypical sports fan. He also had to be bald, which plays into the stereotypical sports hooligan.

“He had to be a regular guy, so you could project yourself onto him,” she says. “The wonderful thing about it is that he looks more like an intellectual.”

This form of art is slowly gaining ground in Vancouver, says curator Barbara Cole, who helped steer the project and is a member of OtherSights, a non-profit group that seeks to create a presence for art in public places.

“This is the first project dedicated to cultural content,” says Cole. “It’s really exciting to see what will happen. It will create a difference between art and advertising.”

The effect is to immediately create an audience when anyone looks at it. “You’re not choosing to go to a gallery for an art experience,” says Cole.

There is an opening event tonight at 5:30 at the Lennox Pub, across the street from the billboard. The public is welcome.

Other Sights presents Storm Sequence (excerpt), a video project by Shaun Gladwell, displayed every 3 minutes on dual urban screens above the intersection of Robson and Granville Streets in Vancouver, Canada from January 15 to 25th, 2009.

In Storm Sequence, the drama and grandeur of a traditional painting of a storm at sea is integrated with the performance of a young man skateboarding on the concrete pilings, caught in that moment of heightened energy just before the storm breaks. Gladwells skateboarder depicts a romantic figure of the beauty and self-absorption of youth, and slowing the speed of the image emphasizes the agility and grace of his movement. Gladwells work typically explores youth subcultures as a manifestation of physical prowess in relation to commerce and architectural space. He positions his work within a tradition of artistic gestures that respond to the city.

Guest Curator: Karen Henry

Please visit shaungladwell.com for additional information.

Credits: Shaun Gladwell, Storm Sequence (excerpt),1:00 minute, from Storm Sequence 2000, DV/DVD, 8:40 minutes, 4:3, stereo

Videography: Técha Noble Sound: Kazumichi Grime Commissioned by Peter Fay Courtesy the artist & Anna Schwartz Gallery

Other Sights is pleased to present Open My Glade by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. The artwork consists of a series of 9 one-minute videos inserted into the flow of outdoor advertising screens. The works sardonic humour and insights intrude on our encounter with urban social space and exert a powerful and sensual presence.

Originally commissioned in 2000 by the Public Art Fund as a presence within the electronic maze of Times Square in New York City, the artist is literally immersed in the corporate stream of images. Eyes fixed on the passersby, she viscerally examines the limits of the screens surface; her contorted face and makeup smears reveal a barrier to escape. Open My Glade disrupts our habitual ambivalence to a relentless consumer spectacle, instilling empathy; we cant help but watch.

by Jeremy Todd, Black Flash

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“The seats are arranged in tiers around the arena, so that everyone can see what is happening below. […] There is no break in the crowd that sits like this, exhibiting itself to itself. It forms a closed ring from which nothing can escape.” — Elias Canetti

Lynne Marsh’s Stadium (2008) and Antonia Hirsch’s Vox Pop (2008) revolve around solitary figures within sports arenas. Grid-like formations of fixed, empty seating serve as both backdrop environments and the presence of absent crowds. Each work adopts the seamless production values and structural familiarity of contemporary advertising and televisual entertainments. Vox Pop is a silent two-channel video work one minute in duration. A panoptic tracking shot moves through an empty and generically modern stadium as if it were tracing the flow of an “audience wave”. The work culminates in a lone man’s gestural efforts to be a part of the inferred mass-movement. Stadium is a video projection ten minutes and fifty-four seconds in duration. An empty Olympiastadion in Berlin is the site of a woman’s constant wandering. A science fiction/ suspense-like soundtrack plays continuously as she does so. Her gestures seem always at odds with the work’s complex and rhythmically orchestrated camera movement. The repetitive symmetry and balance of the architectural environment (enhanced at times by 3D animation footage derived from a model of the building) is also disrupted.

While the protagonists within each piece function in divergent ways, they share a relationship to a spectral invocation of “the people” or “audience” as monolithic entity sited in the arena. Each piece hinges on a rhetorical questioning of what might constitute such collective bodies in the here and now. How is the self constructed in relation to them?

Vox Pop and Stadium are haunted internally by missing congregations or assemblies while inviting the external voyeurism of potential audiences. Built to posit collective experiences and identities, the arena settings within each work are rendered familiar and strange by these dynamics, incomplete and perhaps impossible, imaginary and yet still existing. I am left wondering what is held in common for us in the here and now. Who is this “us” beyond the inherited, inscribed and seemingly empty gestures these sites continue to host. Is this all somehow indicative of what constitutes a body politic in contemporary society?

It is now approximately twenty years after the advent of a so-called post-ideological age, a paradigm formed to a large extent by the collapse of the Soviet Union and entrenchment of perpetually deregulating global market capitalism. The political agency of public commons or an entity such as “the masses” can seem entirely negated by the continuing dominance of neoliberal rationalism within this paradigm. Any preexisting socioeconomic unities that have remained continue to erode under the force of liquid capital, rampant privatization and the exponential growth/fragmentation of markets and market systems (in lieu of any other shared frames of reference within a “global community”). Envisioning “the masses” as an idea or concept is also made difficult by the violent essentialist dynamics of historical collective identifications. Political legacies of “the people” or “masses” (particularly as they relate to failed neo-Marxist projects in the twentieth century, from those of Lenin and Mao to the Khmer Rouge and FARC) further exacerbate the difficulty of such a task.

Trying to conceive of a way out of this dilemma while inspired by the “Battle in Seattle” and subsequent World Trade Organization protests, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri managed to articulate a new genesis for collective resistance that remains, for the most part, unrealized:

“Like the formation of habits, or performativity, or the development of languages, [a] production of the common is neither directed by some central point of command and intelligence nor is it the result of a spontaneous harmony among individuals, but rather it emerges in the space between, in the social space of communication. The multitude is created in collaborative social interactions.”

Hirsch and Marsh address the ongoing delay of such an effective formation and the assumptions it must depend on, redirecting considerations of revolutionary praxis in the present. They examine the persistence of particular social spaces and practices constructed within modernity, revealing channels of communication and relations of power that continue to be facilitated by them. Both explore how expression and reception remain conditioned and imagined in relation to orchestrated conformities. Mass spectacle continues to animate performative constructions of self like a ghost possessing the living, effecting dynamics within public space and the intimate (and paradoxically disconnected) interactions between individuals and various internet, digital imaging, video game and virtual reality technologies. Personal relationships in real-time/space are also compromised by these conditions, along with the egalitarian promises of relational activities and interactive collaborative content generated  in the arts and entertainment industries. Both works infer an ongoing internal colonization of our constructions of individuality in relation to the specter of the crowd. Vox Pop and Stadium render visible ongoing negotiations between the two. That these struggles persist despite claims of liberal inclusivity (through deregulated market systems and the “end of ideology”) suggests that each of us continues to be inscribed by interests that are not necessarily our own — that we do not as yet have alternative constellations of mutual support for individual emancipation which are effectively active.

A key focus for both artists in these pursuits lies in their evocations of gesture. The sports arenas they have chosen function as indexical groundings for recollections of collective and sometimes remarkably spontaneous social practices (such as the orchestrated gesture of the “wave” examined in Vox Pop). Arenas are continually reanimated by such activity, serving as a means to express national and regional identities, shared values, desires, political loyalties, generational and cultural affiliations, etc, long after they have been discredited, complicated or lost. While arenas in the West can be traced back to antiquity (if not earlier) collective gestural forms conveyed in generic and seemingly mechanical ways — what Siegfried Kracauer described in the late 1920s as “mass ornamentation”, can be argued as establishing a kind of normative dominance (absorbing already entrenched performative roles of gender, race and class) within rapidly accelerating conditions of modernization occurring throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Expressive autonomy and its development during these times of rapid flux threaten to break down and eventually cease to exist. In examining these dynamics at the close of the nineteenth century, Giorgio Agamben has observed:

“An era that has lost its gestures is, for that very reason, obsessed with them; for people who are bereft of all that is natural to them, every gesture becomes a fate. And the more the ease of these gestures was lost under the influence of invisible powers, the more life became indecipherable.”

With general decreases in economic and material self-sufficiency, the predominance of wage labour, minimal leisure time and the loss of pre-existing forms of supportive community (geographic family bonds, agrarian lifestyles, localized economies, etc), modes of consumption and creative agency might easily be conflated. Meaningful connection to pre-existing traditions of social practice might be disrupted or forgotten. The twentieth century can be seen as afflicted with a “frantic effort to reconstitute the vanished realm of meaningful movements […].” The nation-state, concentrated wealth and other self-interested players could encroach on resulting gaps in determining a hegemonic re-shaping of populations.

Vox Pop and Stadium are haunted internally by missing congregations or assemblies while inviting the external voyeurism of potential audiences.

Formulaic constructions of expression entering the marketplace might displace organically produced ones connected to “authentic” lived experience, or, in conventionally semiotic terms, the necessity of referents. A predictable end result is summed up nicely in the well-worn words of Guy Debord: “Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.” Gesture, as embodied signification, can be seen to gain central conceptual importance in the orchestration and control of these new forms of simulacral contents, embracing nostalgia for what has been displaced, and the construction/ manipulation of new desires within consumer culture. Hirsch’s Vox Pop protagonist renders this visible as soon as he appears on screen. Without others in the arena around him to effectively dramatize the mass ornamentation of the wave gesture for the camera, his singular contribution to the inferred group movement appears dramatically less than significant or meaningful in relation to the absent whole. Vox Pop was initially screened as a two-part video projection interspersed with regularly programmed advertising on side-by-side video billboards above the busy shopping district intersection of Granville and Robson Streets in downtown Vancouver, conflating expected contents with oddly analogous ones. As the man within Vox Pop looks from the screen directly at viewers in the street and surrounding buildings, he doesn’t possess a “glamour gaze” which looks through them (one that suggests you are not important enough to be acknowledged). There are no coded psychological inferences relating to contemporary advertising. It’s not a desire-related gaze meant to generate envy, emulation, or ironic, deconstructive recognitions. We see a relatively non-descript Caucasian male who is entering early middle age. He is transfixed by his own reflexive participation — as if he were a somnambulist — as if he were “going through the motions”. I wonder who I am and how he might identify me as I watch him.

Both works reveal a compounded reworking of panoptic space (discussed by Michel Foucault and others as a means of regulating bodies within sites of incarceration). Stadium crowds look into a singular point/event and respond in accordance to it, while being watched by others as a spectacular whole through media broadcasting. They also watch each other. The mass ornamentation they enact mimics individual panoptic subject behaviors (conforming to expectations of being surveyed at any time from both a singular point — in this case the camera lens — and the reflection of the larger collective body of the crowd) while inversely serving as a singular point of focus for others (television and film audiences etc). The specificity of site in Stadium serves to draw this out. The second Olympiastadion in Berlin, built by Werner March for the 1936 Summer Olympics with event broadcasting in mind, is a meticulously symmetrical sculptural whole, reducing all those who occupy it to the status of either rhythmically balanced, effectively integrated components, or isolated and disruptive blemishes/aberrations within a closed, inward facing ring formation typical of arenas. As a global platform for the display of Hitler’s imagining of the German people, the stadium typifies a creation of space which functions primarily as a defining apparatus for the terms and grammar of orchestrated bodies. Those who enter are rendered subjects and objects simultaneously.

Construction began in 1934, as Leni Riefenstahl was making the Nazi propaganda film Triumph Of The Will (1934). The needs of her cameras were anticipated in the design of the building (their fluid, dynamic movement, distortions of perspective, telephoto-lenses and sweeping aerial viewpoints). Marsh consciously returns to the “architecture porn” dynamic Riefenstahl developed in Triumph Of The Will and refined in the Olympiastadion-located Olympia (1938), combining this with her precedent-setting use of music to direct a sustained emotional narrative devoid of plot. The building’s wholeness of form is withheld for the fetishization of parts and their trespass — a submissive body broken up and lustily ravaged by the mechanical eye. The dissection, objectification and control of physical intimacy within pornography — its reduction to mechanical repetitions for mass consumption — are reconfigured here to full effect. The movements of individuals within the Olympiastadion conform to the authorial centrality of the camera’s gaze, like the malleable elements of a painter’s composition. They are seamlessly objectified — reduced to a kind of human architectural material. Hirsch’s Vox Pop reflects the imbedded automation of these dynamics in the architectural and televisual present. Her choice of stadium (an average contemporary professional sports arena devoid of any pre-shoot cosmetic primping) and elementally reductive cinematography (an “audience wave” is suggested with a singular panoptic tracking shot) reveal both their commonplace banality and continuing dominance. Vox Pop is silent, paradoxically distilling the sustained drama of spectacular filmic sound as a kind of suspension or acute extraction of something timeless — a coded indicator of being within the moment or immediate present.

Viewers are drawn into these works when negotiating understandings and identifications of each onscreen figure. A kind of replicating chain or feedback loop of spectatorship is triggered (imagine a primary viewer watching a subject within one of the works, then a secondary viewer watching the primary viewer and so on). Stadium amplifies the replication of these relationships through a movie theatre-like installation, elegantly formed by a grid of chairs arranged in front of the projection screen. Vox Pop destabilizes epistemological assumptions within public space (How do we know what we know about what we are doing and looking at and why?) by intervening and rendering it strange. In both instances disorienting conflations of real time events and fixed dramatizations provoke uneasy senses of complicity and loss of control. Relationships between objects and subjects, surface and substance, viewers and viewed are confused, compounding the enigmatic behavioral tensions unfolding on-screen.

Marsh’s figure never faces viewers as she moves through the Olympiastadion. She communicates directly through her gestures, maintaining an antagonistic relationship to the orchestrated movement of the camera recording her and the empty rigidity of the arena. Her white tracksuit-like outfit and hood-covered head accentuate a gracefully athletic, youthful body that continually transgresses the ordered and objectifying architectural frame containing it. Like the sci-fi suspense soundtrack that accompanies her actions, she sustains a constant tension in her ongoing disruptive movements. She does not conform. She is a strange visual doppelganger, mimicking the white jumpsuit-wearing W.T.O. protesters that helped to inspire Hardt and Negri‘s new conception of the “Multitude”. Where is her absent alternative network of difference — of mutually supportive singularities — her world of “collaborative social interactions”? She is as much a specter as the presence of the absent crowd.

The protagonist within Stadium is a neat inversion of the somnambulist other/self within Vox Pop. He is asleep. She is a dream. She embodies a fantasy of free agency. He provides a reflection of contained isolation. Both are uncannily representative of what “we” are now in trying to understand our era.

View Stadium by Lynne Marsh

View Vox Pop by Antonia Hirsch

by Katherine Monk,August 7, 2010, Postmedia News

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It’s really the last place you’d look for art: Behind barbed wire, on the back corner of an abandoned industrial lot, tucked in behind a big pile of dirt and gravel sprouting scrappy clumps of grass.

In the movies, this would be the place to dump a body. In Vancouver, this generic strip of halfpaved wasteland next to the Olympic Village has become a piece of interactive public art. The transformation is coming at the request of Vancouver curator Barbara Cole and at the hands of Folke Koebberling and Martin Kaltwasser, two Berlin-based artists who’ve gained international attention through their conceptual approach to public spaces. From reconfiguring the former viewing platforms that once looked over the Berlin Wall into “negative steps” that lead downward on the same ground, to transforming cars into working bicycles, Koebberling and Kaltwasser are now turning the discards from the Athletes Village into a full-scale bulldozer that will eventually decompose. They are using Microstrand, a material made from compressed wheat chaff, a greener alternative to fibre-board or MDF that uses no formaldehyde binder. Hundreds of boards were used to protect the interior spaces of the Village — now market condos for sale by the city — and over the next few weeks, they will be shaping what was once wheat, then garbage, into faux heavy machinery. At the moment, it’s the forward track and wheel that gives the structure meaning, prompting even more passersby on the South side of the False Creek seawall to stare through the shiny chain-link fence and ask: “What are you making?”

“We hear it all day long. Sometimes, you feel like an animal in a cage but I think this also adds to the work,” Koebberling says. Koebberling says the whole point of the work she and her art/life-parenting partner Martin make is to prompt questions about the way we live by recreating the spaces around us. “It’s also about communication. You have to show [and tell] people you can use a car park for something other than cars, for instance,” says Koebberling, who, with Kaltwasser, has created portable living spaces in parking lots and public squares throughout Europe. The central key to these creations is the material: It’s all reclaimed and recycled. “We want to show how these materials still have value,” Koebberling says. Material reclamation is a concept that’s finding plenty of fans and followers in art circles in London, Berlin, Paris and Barcelona, where the movement has spawned everything from “trashion accessories” and “trashion shows” to a celebration of Mash Ups — movies, videos and film work that use found footage and soundbytes to create new work — at the coming European Media Art Festival in Osnabrueck.

Cole, an established curator and leading expert in the field of public art, says she monitored the Koebberling and Kaltwasser website before including the team in When the Hosts Come Home, a series dedicated to exploring the space surrounding the former Olympic Village and its transformation from venue to neighbourhood. It’s all part of the Other Sights For Artists project, an organization that works to match cutting-edge artists with original public spaces. Cole says she had seen some images of what Koebberling, a former Emily Carr student, was working on in Europe with Kaltwasser. She liked the esthetic and she liked the thought process, so she cyberwatched them for two years. “We (the board at Other Sights) were really interested in creating temporary platforms around the city, and were interested in artists who were working with architecture in public spaces,” says Cole, who invested countless hours filling out the requisite grant applications for funding. In the end, she found support from the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, The Vancouver Foundation and The City of Vancouver, as well as Emily Carr University of Art and Design and Langara College, and UBC’s school of architecture, which supplied support crew. “The clincher was the Olympics were coming, and the body of work [from Koebberling and Kaltwasser] used remnant materials. “We figured there would be a lot of material, and started to talk about a curatorial presence that would reflect on the Olympics, before, during and after the Games.”

Koebberling says the compostable bulldozer is in itself a meditation on time, not only because it will biodegrade over the course of an estimated eight years, but because bulldozers are a symbol of massive and near-immediate landscape transformations. “We had the idea to create a machine that normally destroys,” she says. “If you look at the way a bulldozer is used in war, such as on the border of Palestine and Israel, it just takes things away so fast. But it also can create, because it is used in construction. “The idea is always that you can make your own city. You can recreate the spaces, and this is a point Vancouver should be proud of, because not very many other places in the world would accept art that will decompose. For a time, this will look ugly.” If all goes according to plan, the wheatboard bulldozer will be complete by September, at which point the public will be invited to plant seeds in its plant boxes (disguised as bulldozer parts). After that, nature will take over and shape, and reshape, the entire sculpture through natural processes. They are hoping to install a web camera to document the entire transformation with time-lapse recording, but the main focus at the moment is finishing the monolithic “wooden toy,” which has its set of challenges, not the least of which is the amount of material they were hoping to use. Originally, 5,000 boards were offered. They will make do with just under 1,000. Kaltwasser is confident he can make it work, because he can keep things simple. “Engineers think about how to make something,” he says. “We use a Lego model and take our design from that. Using a tape measure, we can make it larger, and then we add up the cross-sections,” he says. Despite the “simplicity” of the design, the bulldozer is guaranteed to elicit myriad emotional responses from the general public. “Because it is made from one material, it will look neat and nice, Kaltwasser said. “It will look like a giant wooden toy, which reminds us of our childhood. Children always see the world as gigantic, so really, it has this beauty, but it’s also a meditation on childhood.”

© Copyright © The Vancouver Sun

At the Pendulum Gallery until March 3

by Robin Laurence, Feburary 25, 2010

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When independent curator Patrik Andersson invited T&T to create a sustainability-themed exhibition for the Pendulum Gallery during the Winter Olympics, he made this request: “Think about what happens when the Olympic countdown clock goes below zero.” Tony Romano of Toronto and Tyler Brett of Bruno, Saskatchewan—who often make art together under the sobriquet T&T—responded with a cheery, postapocalyptic vision of Vancouver called False Creek. Specifically, their installation is a kind of after-the-gold-rush imagining of the area.

Located in the atrium of the HSBC Building at the corner of Georgia and Hornby streets, the Pendulum Gallery looks out at one of the gathering places for Winter Olympics crowds. The countdown clock, the teeming plaza, the floral-patterned north faí§ade of the Vancouver Art Gallery, sky-high ads from corporate sponsors pasted across neighbouring office towers—all contribute to a hectic and boosterish temporary environment.

Inside the Pendulum Gallery, the huge mobile sculpture by Alan Storey that gives it its name dominates the space. As Andersson pointed out in a recent interview with the Straight, the immensity of the atrium has a tendency to overwhelm the exhibitions it hosts. Not, however, this one. The show consists of three car-based assemblages, a panoramic print, and a designated area where children can colour T&T–produced drawings. Also part of T&T’s project are a children’s picture book and a handsome catalogue with a smart and insightful essay by Jordan Strom, both available on-site.

The freestanding sculptures, which sit on carpets of bright green AstroTurf, represent whimsical houseboats. They’re composed of old car bodies altered with building materials, bicycle parts, flags, planters, propellers, and brightly hued paint. Among their many references are the inequities of Vancouver’s real-estate boom, the construction of the Athletes’ Village, and the now-banished floating homes of former False Creek squatters. The allusion to displaced squatters serendipitously coincides with Ken Lum’s temporary sculpture from shangri-la to shangri-la, on display at the VAG’s Offsite space a couple of blocks west.

T&T’s installation also relates to their established brand of “carchitecture”—their future fictions in the form of computer drawings and sculptures in which abandoned cars are repurposed as structures in which people might live, work, and meet. As seen in the lively light-jet print that serves as a kind of illustrated guide to False Creek, the artists propose a postcar future for Vancouver in which, curiously, the waters of False Creek have not risen but have drained away, along with most of what we know of the area.

T&T’s postapocalyptic vision is not one of blasted nature inhabited by roving bands of thugs and cannibals. It is brightly coloured, optimistic, even utopian. Whether fishing, planting, dismantling Science World’s geodesic dome, working with various low-tech devices improvised from pedals and pulleys, or listening to minstrels, everyone in the community depicted gets along swimmingly. The sky is blue, the trees are green, and life is simple and harmonious. It’s a vision that, while deeply critical of our climate-altering ways, should appeal to both adults and children.

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Years ago, I went on a James Joyce tear. I started with Dubliners, worked my way through Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and then Ulysses. The last challenge was Finnegans Wake. Full of puns, verbal wordplay and made-up words, Joyce’s last book has a reputation as a notoriously difficult book to read.Undaunted, I read on. Or, at least, I tried. Again and again, after a few pages, I was completely lost, unable to figure out what I’d just read.

I’d heard that reading it out loud helped. So I tried that, too. I tried speaking the words outdoors and indoors. I even tried it aloud while sitting in the bathtub.

Nothing worked. I hated to admit it, but I couldn’t finish Finnegans Wake.

My unfulfilled relationship with Joyce remained on hold until I received an e-mail the other day. It referred to Aaron Carpenter and Finnegan Swake. This caught my attention for several reasons, but especially because of that name: Finnegan Swake.

Finnegan Swake, Ffinnigans Wwake and Phinigins Wyake are among the multiple spellings of Carpenter’s art project, Finnigans Wake. He’s done that in homage to Joyce and his liquid nouns, words that change their spellings for various literary reasons each time they’re used. It’s among the many reasons why the novel is so impenetrable.

Carpenter’s take on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake includes a one-minute video that will be shown starting Friday on the outdoor screens at the corner of Robson and Granville streets. What Carpenter has done is display the first page of the 628-page novel in the same rolling-text format as the beginning Star Wars (the original film, now called Episode IV: A New Hope).

The video starts with Joyce’s words describing the Liffey River running through Dublin: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay .” The words scroll against a starry background and recede into the distance, just as in Star Wars.

Carpenter’s cheeky approach both respects and makes fun of the aura around Finnegans Wake. On one level, he’s turned Joyce’s static words on a page into moving images. On another, he’s taken a text revered by high culture and packaged it in a format used and recognized by popular culture. Given Joyce’s own irreverence, he would probably approve.

Carpenter’s Phinigins Wyake runs every three minutes for 10 days, from Friday to Sunday, May 24.

Other works by Carpenter are part of the exhibition Literally, at Artspeak in Gastown. All the works in the exhibition explore words and books as art.

At Artspeak are Carpenter’s book covers inspired by Joyce’s novel. Several of the paper works explicitly refer to Star Trek. In one, the image he’s drawn includes several recognizable science fiction signs, such as a wormhole, Klingon-style spaceships and two portraits of Spock, the half-human, half-Vulcan character.

In addition, Carpenter has made a pair of Joyce reading glasses. One lens is covered in black felt, which mimics Joyce’s eyepatch. The other is a multifaceted prism.

When I put them on, the exhibition area was fractured into rainbow colours and cubist shapes. Like Joyce’s own complex vision, the glasses give the wearer multiple views of the world.

Joel Herman’s works are meticulous drawings of the title pages of books. They’re grouped in pairs, based on similarities in the titles of books on completely different subjects. Meaning and Expression: Toward a Sociology of Art, by Hanna Deinhard, is paired with Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts, by John R. Searle.

Roula Partheniou has painted book covers in acrylic on canvas. They’re grouped in various ways — for example, a group of book paintings with the word “man” in the title, such as Between Man & Man, by Martin Buber.

They look like books, but they aren’t. They’re so realistic that one painting is hidden in plain sight among the books for sale at the back of the exhibition area.

Herman’s drawings and Partheniou’s paintings aren’t just realistic depictions; they’re ready-made copies.

Literally continues at Artspeak, 233 Carrall, until Saturday, June 6.

kevingriffin@vancouversun.com

At a Glance

Phinigins Wyake

Outdoor screens at Robson and Granville

Every three minutes

Friday, to May 24

© Copyright © The Vancouver Sun

by Clint Burnham, April 5, 2011, TheTyee.ca

Original Article | Download (PDF — 934KB)

If you’re crossing Vancouver’s Burrard Bridge and glance at the electronic billboard that rises at its Kitsilano end, you may notice something different. Amidst the Guinness and Jack FM ads will flash the occasional message on a red background. Some of them will seem to be about native issues:

“First Nations. We are not a stereotype. Not gone… not lost! Still connected.”

Or: “Riot 1492.”

Or: “My great-grandfather hid his ceremonial regalia in a cave that we have long since lost track of. Who wants to go spelunking? #potlatch ban.”

The last one gives us a bit of a clue — “#potlatch” is a hashtag, how you provide a hot link in Twitter. The text messages that will be up on the billboard for the month of April are part of Digital Natives, a public art project that Lorna Brown and I are curating, bringing together contributions by 30 native and non-native writers and artists, from Vancouver and from across North America.

Digital Natives is also being previewed as part of the WE: Vancouver exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery (and this article is part of a Tyee series sampling voices from that exhibit.)

In what follows in this piece, I’d like to talk a bit about the process by which we developed the project, a bit about some of what we’ve learned about issues of technology and First Nations languages during that process, and a bit about what we think this all means.

An idea jogged loose

I first came up with the idea for the project in early 2010, when I was out for a jog around False Creek and ran across the Burrard Street bridge. The electronic billboard was newly installed then, and its size and position appealed to me — why not put a Twitter feed onto the sign? It seemed so easy at the time…

I use Twitter a lot, much more than Facebook — I like Twitter’s streamlined feel — just a feed of messages and links, none of the extra garbage you get with Facebook — no comments, no Farmville, no invitations to play Mafia Wars. And I also use it in my teaching, in a class I teach at SFU on autobiography. Twitter’s a digital form of memoir, a kind of 21st century autobiography. And I think I like Twitter too, because as a writer its compressed 140 character limit appeals to me — it’s a kind of discipline.

And I liked the assorted controversies of the site — the bike lane kerfuffles about the bridge, but also the conflicted responses people have to the sign itself. Advertising on native land — the sign is on Squamish land — seems to give rise to all sorts of confusion and, sometimes, outright racism. It’s like non-native people don’t want to be reminded there still is native land around us. Or that native people shouldn’t use their land to make money.

So I got together with Vancouver artist and curator Lorna Brown, with whom I’ve worked before, and we brought the project to Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, a local public art organization. We began by putting together a dream team of artists and writers. Avant-garde writers interested in new media forms, like Michael Turner, Lisa Robertson, Jeff Derksen and Larissa Lai. Aboriginal writers and artists who work at the intersection of politics and advocacy, like Marie Annharte Baker, Peter Morin, Raymond Boisjoly, Edgar Heap of Birds and Marianne Nicholson. Artists and writers from Kamloops (Chris Bose), New Mexico (the Postcommodity collective), Boulder (Lori Emerson) and Minneapolis (Emily Fedoruk). (You can find more info on the contributors here.) Everyone was excited, and ideas started flying through emails and tweets.

We worked it up, applied for funding — first from the Canada Council, and then winning a commission from the City of Vancouver as part of their 125th anniversary public art projects for 2011. We also assembled a crackerjack team of technicians, because we knew that if we were going to approach Astral Media — who run the billboard for the Squamish nation — we had to have product that looked good and fit into their specifications.

Colin Griffiths and Judith Steedman designed the look of our messages — the template — as well as their digital forms. Deanne Achong put together the project’s website. We also knew that we wanted a blog element, an online presence to make a local project accessible from anywhere.

Fonts of wisdom

As the messages started coming in, we started to work on getting them translated.

Some contributors’ messages — like Chris Bose’s “stiʔtíʔxʷ kn qə wíʔ snk y ép: I believe in Jesus Coyote” were already in a mixture of English and native languages (in this case nɬeʔkepmxcín or Thompson).

Working with UBC’s Museum of Anthropology, we contacted Deborah Jacobs at the Squamish nation, (Peter Jacobs did the translation into Sḵwx wú7mesh snichim) and Elder Larry Grant of the Musqueam nation (for translation into hǝn’q’ǝmin’ǝm’). Marianne Nicolson and her mother, Gloria Nicolson handled translations into Kwak’wala.

What we were interested in here was, to put it bluntly, the positive and negative sides of the relation between native languages and modern technology. On the one hand, innovations like podcasting mean that oral languages in danger of disappearing can be preserved and even disseminated. The Squamishlanguage.com podcasts, compiled by Dustin Rivers, for example, teach a word a day in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh snichim, or the Squamish language. Such efforts are amazing ways of melding traditional knowledge and 21st century technology.

But there still remains the “digital divide.” This means everything from questions of access to technology to how digital technology deals with traditional cultures. Many rural bands, like rural areas in general, lack broadband access or wifi — a matter of infrastructure.

ut, as we learned in getting messages ready for the billboard, there are still real difficulties in finding a font that will carry all of the diacritics that come in local First Nations languages. Fonts for Arabic (like the Twitter feeds I follow from Egypt since the Jan. 25 demonstrations) or Korean aren’t hard to find. But ones that will show words like otłasa (in Kwak’wala) or lésiw̓ilh (in Squamish) proved to be a real challenge for our tech guru (and “art whisperer” to the stars of the art world) Griffiths. As he explained it to me recently in an email from Singapore, the font site “Languagegeek was the ultimate source for the look of the translations — the diactritics and font specificities are the result of enormous labour by that team which ultimately renders this aspect of the Digital Natives project possible, once I got my head around the intricacies of the keyboard mapping versus font style versus language choices.”

Colonial colloquialisms

So that’s the tech side; there was also an interesting conceptual gap between English and First Nations languages. After a discussion with Marianne Nicholson about the translations into Kwak’wala, Lorna Brown wrote about some of this on the Digital Natives blog, noting the difficulty in rendering Christian Bok’s message, which only uses the vowel “i,” or Henry Tsang’s tweet, which uses acronyms like “OMG” and “2D4.” But possibly the most symptomatic difficulty came in translating American Indian artist Edgar Heap of Birds’ “IMPERIAL CANADA AWARDED SEX ABUSE TO NATIVE YOUTH BY THE BLACK ROBES NOW PROUDLY BESTOWS BRONZE SILVER GOLD MEDALS WITH INDIAN IMAGE” — as Brown notes, “the only non-English concepts” that could be translated are “gift” and “pride.” So this is very important — Heap of Birds’ political message is almost entirely written in the (conceptual) language of the colonizer. His work is very powerful (he loves using the phrase “Imperial Canada” and does so in a poster work that I walk by every day at SFU), and yet it owes a debt to that colonial language. Heap of Birds’ critique is untranslatable from English.

The history of the site itself is a fascinating study of conflicting forces and interests. Historian Susan Roy chronicles the shifting boundaries of the territory, in images and words.

What’s the point?

So what are we doing with all of this? Partly Digital Natives is about starting a conversation in public about what public space means — public art that isn’t just for the public to see, but (potentially) to create.

In February, with the (massive) help of Phil Djwa and Kristin Kozuback, I coordinated workshops with Aboriginal youth in Vancouver, to get their participation. These kids saw a direct political message as what they wanted to convey — two of their tweets, for instance, are about paying more attention to what marginalized youth need: “Keep resources and programs like EASY and OASIS going strong in communities” and “Programs like the East Side Aboriginal Space for Youth (EASY) shouldn’t be shut down so we can have the support to succeed in life.”

Halfway through April we will start adding tweets that have come in from the public in response to the project. Anyone can tweet us a message @diginativ, or post a comment here or on our Facebook wall.

We will select up to 30 public messages to be included for broadcast.

A free public symposium about the project will be hosted by the Museum of Anthropology on May 1, with many of the contributors participating in roundtable conversations, followed by a closing celebration.

With Digital Natives, we’ve taken back — temporarily — some visual space in the city for messages from individuals, to display a dialogue from this city and beyond. A more complicated process than I first thought — like the public space we share.

And why not use public advertizing for direct messages — as well as poetic ones — for messages that encourage a dialogue? Why not take back our spaces, our public spaces?

Aboriginal artists contribute messages

By Cheryl Rossi, Staff writer April 5, 2011

Original Article | Download (PDF — 594KB)

Interspersed with ads for Air Canada, Starbucks, cars and wine on the controversial electronic billboards adjacent to the Burrard Bridge, new messages are provoking thought in a different way.

“My great-grandfather hid his ceremonial regalia in a cave that we have long since lost track of. Who wants to go spelunking? #potlatch ban,” reads a message in teal script on red.

Another features a handful of words in an aboriginal language before changing to: “Words in Tahtlan that say: What did you hunt today?”

These Twitter-like messages are part of a public art project called Digital Natives that will broadcast the messages until the end of the month. It’s the creation of Clint Burnham, a poet, art critic and English professor at Simon Fraser University and Vancouver curator and artist Lorna Brown.

Burnham jogged by the billboards in 2009 shortly after they were erected and saw a canvas for public art. With Brown enlisted as co-curator, they sought help from Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, a non-profit sponsor of public art in Vancouver, including videos on the city-owned panels at Robson and Granville streets and the bulldozer built from scavenged material near the Olympic Village.

With a Canada Council for the Arts grant and a commission from the city for its 125th birthday April 6, organizers of Digital Natives recruited aboriginal and non-aboriginal writers and artists from across North America and aboriginal youth to contribute 140-character messages, the maximum size of a single message that can be posted on Twitter.

They bought ad space from Astral Media, which operates the billboards, which in turn sit on land owned by the Squamish Nation.

The name for the project comes from communications theory that refers to younger people who’ve grown up with digital and online media as digital natives and an older demographic, dubbed digital immigrants, who’ve discovered online and social media tools later in life. The title also refers to aboriginal people who work with digital media.

Of the 30 artists enlisted, only seven, including Burnham and Brown, were on Twitter. The others simply emailed their messages.

None of the approximately 20 youth, most of whom are poor, that Burnham conducted workshops with at the Native Education College on East Fifth Avenue were on Twitter or owned expensive smart phones.

“If you’re from a rural, community, you probably don’t have broadband there,” Burnham said.

But the youth owned cellphones and were avid texters. Two workshops generated six cheeky and political messages for the billboard, Burnham said, one questioning the concept of having “status” and another that questions the label “aboriginal.”

Many of the messages received by Digital Natives were translated into Kwak’wala and Squamish.

“There are only 15 highly proficient speakers of Squamish today,” Burnham said.

Translations were also restricted to 140 characters.

Organizers have asked Henry Charles, the Vancouver Public Library’s First Nations storyteller in residence, to translate messages into Musqueam.

Other messages were submitted in two languages, including Tahtlan, Thompson, French and Chinook, a trading jargon that spread across British Columbia in the 19th century.

The project hit a roadblock just as it was about to go live this week when Astral Media asked for translations of the messages it was given two weeks ago and initially held back 25 of the posts, according to Burnham. As a result, messages in Squamish weren’t seen on Squamish land where the billboards are rooted, and the Kwak’wala message that included English Twitter-speak “OMG” for oh my God wasn’t posted.

“It’s like cutting a few scenes out of a film or something, or pages out of a book,” Burnham said.

Astral did not return a call from the Courier Tuesday morning, but decided Tuesday afternoon, according to Burnham, that it would run all but three of the messages.

The company won’t post “Your grandparents’ unacknowledged debts return to you as rage against the car in front,” which was written by novelist and poet Larissa Lai, in English or Squamish.

It also won’t post “Imperial Canada awarded sex abuse to native youth by the black robes now proudly bestows bronze silver gold medals with Indian image,” written by American Indian artist Edgar Heap of Birds in all capital letters. Public art by Heap of Birds is permanently displayed at SFU and the University of B.C.

“This message is provocative, and perhaps contentious, but Astral’s refusal to run it seems to ignore the role of art in our society, which surely is to initiate a dialogue, to get us thinking, and perhaps to talk about unpleasant histories,” Burnham said.
New messages, including tweets from the public, are to be added in the second half of the month. Digital Natives continues to accept submissions.

Not all of the messages generated for Digital Natives will be broadcast on billboards but will be available at digitalnatives.othersights.ca.

While the rapid advancement of new technologies forges digital divides, Burnham also sees online tools being used to preserve dying languages. The Squamish Language site (squamishlanguage.com) matches photos of an item with audio of the related Squamish word.

A symposium on the project runs May 1 at the Museum of Anthropology from 1 to 5 p.m. Heap of Birds will attend.

crossi@vancourier.com

Twitter: @Cheryl_Rossi

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