transcanada 3

TransCanada 3 is an upcoming conference at Mount Allison University, July 16-19, 2009, co-chaired by Christl Verduyn and Smaro Kamboureli, Canada Research Chair in Critical Studies in Canadian Literature at the School of English and Theatre Studies, University of Guelph. It will pay explicit attention to literature, arts, and the media, but will also explore the educational, political, cultural, and physical ecologies that have helped, or may in the future help, Canada to renew itself and to embrace its emergent as well as traditional identities. Some themes to be addressed:

• First Nations: Treaty Rights and Justice in the Anglo-French history of Canada
• Acadia: Exile and Return
• Diasporas, Transnationalism / Transculturalism
• Radical and Transformative Methodologies and Pedagogies
• Hemispheric Studies
• Affective Geographies
• Ecology and Mobility

on landscape

Shauna McCabe recently participated in one of two panels that took place focusing on the concept of landscape as it is being used by contemporary researchers, presenting on the artistic rendering of memory and landscape in the work of artist Rebecca Belmore. Held in conjunction with the Association of American Geographers conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, the overarching intent of the sessions was to explore landscape in terms of its contemporary engagement as heuristic tool, cultural artifact, ecological concept, or political entity:

Landscape has a long tradition within the history of geographic thought, though the definition of what landscape is has differed over time. From Carl Sauer in the 1920s to Kenneth Olwig today, what constitutes landscape has shifted, with varying degrees of significance given to the natural, cultural and political aspects engendered by the concept. The use of the term has also been used to describing a portion of the earth's surface, to refer to representation, as well as to describe a way of looking at the world. While the importance of landscape as a topic of inquiry has waxed and waned, it appears that there is a new resurgence of interest. This session seeks to draw together papers which have in common a focus upon landscape in order to explore the manifest ways in which this foundational geographic term is understood and employed by contemporary researchers.

Sessions I and II examined the ideas from ten different critical positions.
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the lost highway project

CHARTS regularly invites visiting lecturers — notable artists, scholars, researchers and theorists — to participate in scholarship and share their thought-provoking ideas and research practices with students and the local community. In February 2009, artist Michael Alstad will work with participants in an intensive workshop within the advanced interdisciplinary seminar offered by Shauna McCabe. Titled Anarchitecture: The Lost Highway Project, the seminar is presented as an architecture/landscape studio and will introduce participants to ideas of "locative practice" and interdisciplinary creative forms as a means of researching built landscapes, at once documenting and inventing place.

Locative art is often described in terms of technologies - tools such as microphones, cameras, GPS, wireless communications protocols, and a host of other sensors and technologies, all means of connecting information to geography, to explore and engage with the spaces which we inhabit. Locative media is not necessarily "high tech," however; even hand-drawn maps and poetry are marks of personal cartographies and senses of places. Extending ideas of Walter Benjamin and, later, the Situationists, many artists use walking and "drifting" as means to generate alternative maps of space.

In Anarchitecture: The Lost Highway Project, diverse creative practices will underlie the locative research tools, and the psychogeography consists of contemporary spaces - transitional zones, outskirts and remnant landscapes - encountered as a global community. Working with a local site which will offer the substance and backdrop for research and creation, the landscape studio will investigate the imaginative identity of this and other “lost,” marginal spaces.

Integrating the research within a web framework, participants will work with Alstad to give virtual presence to the investigation and the new landscape that emerges. The website will merge the creative information and media by utilizing collaborative software, social networks and georeferenced material. By generating new and contrasting myths and stories through space, the project will create 'Anarchitecture', an alternative use of architecture. In this way, The Lost Highway becomes a shared imagined space: it exists only in virtual space, and only as we have imagined it.

Michael Alstad is a Toronto-based researcher, artist and curator working in installation and digital media. He is a founding member of the Canadian artist collectives Year Zero One and Symbiosis. Michael has coordinated several site-specific projects in Toronto including The Bank of Symbiosis, The Hoarding Project, the Transmedia video billboard exhibitions, Geostash and Terminal Zero One. His web/video/interactive works have been exhibited in several media arts festivals and online exhibitions. His previous work includes Pixelgrain, documenting and mapping disappearing prairie structures of the grain elevator, to portray a parallel rural landscape in the midst of transition, and Teletaxi, an ongoing series of videos/animations that examine the mutation of specific urban sites in Toronto documented over multiple time frames and perspectives, created and exhibited via a moving taxi.