Cultural Engineering: Addenda

After nine quarterly issues of an online video magazine (www.culturalengineering.ca), the Cultural Engineering project comes to a close with the opening of the exhibition, Addenda, in SAW Video's new project space The Knot from January 25 until March 3, 2018.

The artists participating in the project have eloquently borne witness to the historic infrastructural investment at Arts Court that has substantially transformed the downtown of Ottawa and given a significant boost to the stature of local arts organizations. Stationed as critical observers more so than cheerleaders of the undertaking, the two stalwarts of the project, Meredith Snider and Tim I. Smith, have contributed videos to each issue of the magazine since its launch in February 2015. A number of guest artists have also contributed videos, expanding the points of view and adding to the diverse range of topics addressed, including city planning, social justice, Indigenous issues, transgender rights, labour, and the conservation of built history, among others. With the exhibition, the first in The Knot, the Cultural Engineering artists have been given an opportunity to go offline and make a physical intervention at Arts Court.

Meredith Snider, Communal Artifact (reused), mixed media, 2018

Each artist in Addenda is contributing work that incorporates and transforms materials that have been salvaged during the demolition phase of the Arts Court renovation. In keeping with the structure of the previous online installments of the project, the exhibition includes new work by Snider and Smith, as well as work by guest artist, Mélanie Myers.

Addenda is fittingly titled since the catalogue for the Cultural Engineering project was produced over a year ago. Information about the exhibition will actually be found in an addendum to the publication. The title of the exhibition is in the plural form to suggest there are many instances within the exhibition (not to speak of the Arts Court redevelopment itself) where things have been added with an aim towards improvement. One could say that it applies to SAW Video too, since it is only now after 35 years that it has added an exhibition space to its operations. The Cultural Engineering project has demonstrated that city building (and the growth of arts organizations) is an unfinished project that is always open to the redress of historical omissions and to an update in plans.

Cultural Engineering: Flow Chart

The Cultural Engineering project was launched over two years ago, and each issue has showcased artworks that were commissioned by SAW Video as way to chart the Arts Court redevelopment and document its transformation. Each issue has also offered artists a chance look at the Arts Court from new perspectives. It’s easy to imagine that flow charts were used for project management on this ambitious infrastructure development. If a flow chart is a diagram of the sequence of actions in a complex activity that helps to illustrate a process, then one that traced the course of the Cultural Engineering project in retrospect would undoubtedly reveal a complicated and perhaps contradictory trajectory: one that might double back on itself just as much as it might pursue an oblique angle down an unfinished path. Like all endeavors that are meant to be democratic, Cultural Engineering has been subject to change, depending upon the individuals who have been invited to contribute to it.

Cara Tierney, Melt in. To Spring, digital video, 2017.

Going with the flow of the previous issues of Cultural Engineering, the final online installment features two new videos by Meredith Snider and Timothy Smith, as well as a third video by a guest artist. In her video for this issue, “Culture Lives Where?” Snider poses two questions to people in the vicinity of the Arts Court (“What is culture?” and “Where does culture live?”) and the results are as diverse as the people who participate. In “Past & Present,” Smith animates archival photographs in order to propel the viewer back to the earliest years of the building’s history, capturing the flow of time and offering fascinating glimpses of the transformation of the site, and you might say its political fortunes. The guest artist for the ninth issue, Cara Tierney, connects and mixes several separate events into one powerful montage that suggests positive change is going to come for transgender rights, but only because of persistent pressure. Tierney and the other artists in this issue offer evidence that we can effect change as much as we are affected by it. Link to the ninth issue here.

Cultural Engineering: Wayfinding

Wayfinding is a term that is used to designate various architectural features or design elements within a building or a built environment that help people to navigate their way through a space. Such items, including signs that lead you to the washrooms or to an information kiosk or map, are especially important in large complicated environments like the Arts Court.  In the second issue of the Cultural Engineering project, Rachel Kalpana James humorously invoked through a series of guided meditations the labyrinthine nature of the Arts Court building and the myriad organizations it houses. The redevelopment will give everyone involved another crack at designing a wayfinding system.

Meredith Snider, Hard To Let Go: I Put My Blindfold Back On, 2017, digital video.

In their own way, the three videos in the eighth issue of the Cultural Engineering project offer signposts to the redevelopment of Arts Court. Meredith Snider’s video, “Hard to let go: I put my blindfold back on,” documents a performance by Lily Koltun that functions metaphorically as a guided tour of the Arts Court in the midst of its renovation.  Tim Smith’s video “SAW Video January 2017” provides a portrait of the physical space of SAW Video contemporaneous with the date in its title. In a different vein, guest artist Awar Obab’s video is an important reminder that with success artists can lose sight of their original intentions and ultimately lose their way. It also serves as a caveat that arts organizations can lose their way too, as they grow into institutions and become less flexible and less responsive to the immediate needs of their communities. Link to the eighth issue here.

Cultural Engineering: Blank Slate

The title for Cultural Engineering’s seventh issue is inspired by the video contributed by the guest artists Adam Brown and Geneviève Cloutier, “Summerhill on Major’s Hill.” It documents the project they ran this summer out of the BLINK Gallery, which they modelled after the Summerhill School and other experimental education initiatives. That the Library of Parliament can be seen as a backdrop to their activities resonates with the fact that Summerhill is a democratic project, wherein the school’s curriculum is determined at meetings in which everyone, teacher and student included, has an equal vote. The “blank slate” or tabula rasa is a very old philosophical concept that is linked to education, but I would simply like to think of it as a kind of “reset” button that is forward thinking rather than fixated on the past. A surface on which you can write, erase what you’ve written, and write again, the blank slate provides an inclusive, permissive environment for everyone’s contributions since nothing is permanent. Over the course of two weeks, the participants in Brown and Cloutier’s project built a space marked by imagination and play, which is exactly what the Arts Court aspires to be.

Adam Brown and Geneviève Cloutier, Summerhill on Major’s Hill, 2016, digital video.

Other videos in the issue are also associated with the theme. The activities of the children in “Summerhill on Major’s Hill” are echoed in Timothy Smith’s video, “Vertical,” where the makeshift play structures are replaced by heavy duty construction equipment. With her video “The Courtyard,” Meredith Snider continues to look at spaces around Arts Court, gathering an informal history of places that will cease to exist or be transformed into something else over the course of the redevelopment. While the concept of the blank slate connotes erasure, I would rather it suggest revision, according to Alexander Sutherland Neill’s principle “Freedom, not Licence.” The founder of Summerhill, Neill intended for those at the school to be free to do as they pleased as long as they did no harm to others. The blank slate, while unable to deny its pre-existing conditions, allows for the necessary interventions in them. Link to the seventh issue here.

Cultural Engineering Book Launch and Panel Discussion

On September 29th, SAW Video is celebrating the launch of its new publication, Cultural Engineering, a limited edition art book which both documents and reflects upon the ongoing, long-term project of the same name. I have been excited to be involved not only as the project coordinator but also the publication coordinator, and I am happy to see this come to fruition. Since early 2015, Ottawa-based artists have been responding both critically and artistically to the Arts Court Redevelopment Project as it unfolds from 2015-2017, engaging the community in an open public dialogue and exchange of ideas. To date, six distinct issues have been published online, each featuring original media art produced by the artists with an accompanying essay by yours truly.

Cultural Engineering. Ottawa: SAW Video, 2016.

The launch event also marks the online publication of the project’s seventh issue. Meredith Snider and Tim I. Smith (the project’s resident artists) gave presentations on their work to date, and the guest artists for the seventh issue, Adam Brown and Genevieve Cloutier, also gave presentations on their work. After these presentations, I moderated a panel discussion with the artists, which was followed by a Q+A period.

The Cultural Engineering publication, designed by Simon Guibord, is an art book that features images and texts that engage with the project from a variety of vantage points. The publication includes an essay by me as well as engaging contributions by artist and writer Tom Sherman, writer Zoe Todd, a visual poem by poet Vera Wabegijig, images and texts by participating artists Tim I. Smith and Meredith Snider, and an introduction by SAW Video director Penny McCann.

The publication is available to purchase through SAW Video. An excerpt of the publication, including my essay, is available online here.

Cultural Engineering: On the Level

If someone says they are being “on the level” with you, it means that they are being honest with you. The idiomatic expression implies more than mere honesty, however. It shows a kind of camaraderie. You can tell someone you’re on the level, you can ask if someone is on the level, and you can request someone to level with you: in each case you discard whatever differences there might be between the two of you and speak as equals. Apparently, the expression has its root in the Freemasons, an organization that takes the tools of the building trade for their symbols. In the Masonic Order, the level is a symbol for equality. Ironically, the Masons are known in popular culture for being secretive and conspiring for world domination. A parallel could be drawn between the Masons’ activities and the Arts Court redevelopment: the building is being engineered as an inclusive public space for cultural expression and yet the arts are often characterized as being esoteric and elitist. If arts organizations are seen to be operating in secret, it probably has more to do with their limited advertising budgets than with any orchestrated attempt to shut people out.

Guillermo Trejo, Eclipsing Justice, 2016, digital video.

The phrase “on the level” provides a lens through which to examine the contributions of the artists in Issue Six of the Cultural Engineering project. Timothy Smith once again brings his incisive focus to bear on the site of the OAG expansion and the actions of the construction workers therein. Another new video by Meredith Snider goes behind the scenes at Arts Court to get some candid reflections on the impact of the Arts Court redevelopment on the lives of the people who work there. And finally Guillermo Trejo, this issue’s guest artist, brings attention to level of a different kind, the balance scale of Justice. His video focuses on a detail of the Arts Court complex leftover from its previous incarnation as a courthouse: a bas-relief of the mythic figure of Justice (blindfolded, holding a sword and a balance scale) that was added as ornamentation to an architectural expansion of the courthouse in 1964. The artists in the Cultural Engineering project have been steadfastly producing work that takes steps to demystify at least some of the goings on at the Arts Court. Link to the sixth issue here.

Cultural Engineering: Action Items

The contents of Issue 5, "Action Items," broaden the scope of the Cultural Engineering project beyond the walls of the Arts Court. However, their interconnectedness suggests that a pattern could be perceived no matter what level of magnification you took to look at this city. It is perhaps unsurprising that the exhortation to think globally and act locally is attributed to an urban planner. The artists in this issue are also thinking locally to act globally.

Meredith Snider, Acts of Decolonization in Space & Time, 2016, digital video.

Action items, in management lingo, are specific tasks assigned to individuals at the end of a meeting. These actions are intended to advance the cause of the group, whatever that may be, and each person is expected to report back about the end result. One video in this issue, Tim Smith’s “Scale,” astonishingly illustrates the manner in which large undertakings are actually the end result of many people accomplishing numerous particular tasks. One uninterrupted take zooms out from a single construction worker and shows his place in the larger construction site and its orchestrated activities. Meredith Snider's contributions reflect the ways that the dominant colonial culture is embedded in the very landscape of the country, down to the “micro-spaces” of the city. This issue’s guest artist, Eric Archambault, presents his video “Autopia,” a meditation on transportation infrastructure and the impact of private development.

As passersby, we tend to focus only on the outsized items, such as construction cranes, and lose sight of the specific part that individuals play. From a variety of perspectives, the artists in this issue reveal the singular actions that in varying degrees constitute the warp and weft of the city. Link to the fifth issue here.

Cultural Engineering: Cement Mix

For the fourth issue of SAW Video's Cultural Engineering project, both Tim I. Smith and Meredith Snider bring their focus to bear on the deep pit that will soon provide the foundation for the new Arts Court tower. If you have been watching the videos from the previous issues, you will note that a lot has changed at this location at the corner of Daly and Waller. Cityscapes act as impressive records of history that appear to be cemented in place. Still, the fixed properties of concrete, stone and rock can also be made malleable through action and erosion. The artists in this issue overtly manipulate their source material, through time-lapses, cuts, jumps, and the addition of electronic sounds, suggesting that intervention in the course of history is always possible. You could say that the artists are remixing the events of the Arts Court reconstruction as it unfolds. Each remix has been constructed to draw your attention to the elements highlighted by the artists.

Timothy I. Smith, The Pit, November 28th, 2015, 2015, digital video.

In Tim I. Smith’s work, The Pit, November 28th, 2015, we witness the end of the excavation stage for the Arts Court redevelopment and the removal of the heavy machinery in preparation for the next stage. Smith has compressed the events of an entire workday into one two-minute video using long exposure photography to record the action. Smith has stated that the main theme in his work is photography, a medium that also once had the property of being fixed. In the digital era, new connotations for “fixed” arise in photography, both positive and pejorative. Smith’s composition reveals itself to be as constructed as the site that is his subject.

Meredith Snider’s Break Ground opens with a “ground breaking” party held in the offices of the Ottawa Art Gallery to celebrate the beginning of the redevelopment project. In her role as a Cultural Engineering artist, Snider has taken a fly-on-the-wall approach, often focusing on overlooked or seemingly peripheral elements of the project. At a training session to gain access to the construction site, she found that the dangerous nature of that environment was something she rarely considered. In response, Snider has created a music video in collaboration with Jésus Tovar to underscore the skillful choreography of the construction work as well as the risk in its undertaking. Her video ends by honoring an often unsung workforce.

Considering the artists’ contributions to this issue as remixes sees them participating in the history of music as well as the history of the Arts Court redevelopment. In the history of music, innovations have almost always at first been dissonant to the ear, only to be later accepted as customary. In that way, new music announces the future. Remixes at least keep the material up to date, reminding us that change is not only a constant but also a main component in the construction of the future. Link to the fourth issue here.

Cultural Engineering: Reverse Engineering

The third issue of SAW Video's Cultural Engineering project is online. The artworks in this issue return to similar terrain in order to deepen their impact on it. Timothy Smith’s contribution, a video entitled Truck Route 95 Southbound, August 7th, 2015 offers a great view of the initial stages of the construction, but it also makes a pointed comment about the heavy traffic that is intractable to the area. Meredith Snider’s video, The Green Space, traverses a space that has now disappeared, which will also be the fate of the corridor she documented in her last installment. Though both videos reflect change, they also reveal perennial issues that face larger cities.

Timothy I. Smith, Truck Route 95 Southbound, August 7th, 2015, 2015, digital video

Also in this issue, the photographer and filmmaker Jackson Couse debuts a series of segmented interviews that will comprise an aggregate social portrait of Arts Court. Couse also presents ‘Scuse, a preliminary field recording of the environment at Arts Court.

Reverse engineering is the process of taking an object apart in order to see how it was made and then perhaps to discover ways to improve it. The intention of the Cultural Engineering project is not only to document this historic change to Ottawa’s cultural landscape from the ground up, but also to involve the community and their voices in the process of its transformation. The third issue is being launched as part of the event Desire Lines organized by SAW Video for Nuit Blanche Ottawa+Gatineau 2015. Link to the third issue here.

Cultural Engineering: Desire Lines

The second issue of SAW Video’s Cultural Engineering project is online, appearing moments before the construction hoarding is scheduled to go up and the first stage of the physical transformation at Arts Court begins. Meredith Snider and Timothy I. Smith have each produced another installment in their ongoing investigation of the redevelopment process, and guest artist Rachel Kalpana James makes a unique contribution to the latest edition. 

Rachel Kalpana James, Meditations on Cultural Engineering, 2015. digital video

In the process of responding to the Arts Court redevelopment, the artists have added to a broader understanding of what the phrase “cultural engineering” might mean. If it is understood as a method of planning to increase public participation in cultural life, then one would hope for every success in the cultural engineering of Ottawa’s Arts Court. An analogy for a sympathetic type of cultural engineering might be found in the way that some urban planners take into account how people actually use public space before they lay down pathways. These paths can be guided by the “desire lines” cut into the earth by pedestrian traffic. Now that change is underway at Arts Court, the interventions of the artists in the Cultural Engineering project can be considered to be making visible the desire lines within the overarching redevelopment. Link to the second issue here.

Cultural Engineering: Investigative Media

Over the next two years, an extraordinary transformation will take place at Arts Court. The Ottawa Art Gallery will be pulling up stakes and moving into a brand new purpose-built high-rise in the lot next door. Arts Court will be renovated and connected with the new building, and a reconfigured interior will see SAW Video take up new digs, including a new media art gallery for the presentation of works. Though physical changes to the site have not yet gotten underway, numerous invested parties have been working towards this goal for a long period of time.

Timothy I. Smith, Daly Avenue And Nicholas Street, November 27th, 2014, 2015, digital  video

SAW Video has commissioned a number of artists to produce media artworks in order to chart, and at the same time contemplate, the progress of the Arts Court Redevelopment. The selected artists will be excavating the complex significance of the site. Though they are participants in the ambitious undertaking, they are at enough of a remove to provide a critical perspective on it. The title of the project, Cultural Engineering, makes reference to an exhibition of video, installations and texts by the artist Tom Sherman at the National Gallery of Canada in 1983. In the 1980s, Tom Sherman was also one of the founding editors of FUSE magazine, which published investigative journalism by artists. The artists in this project are conducting similar artistic research, and what their investigations unearth will be published here for your consideration.

On a regular basis, the Cultural Engineering artists will be publishing their new work on a specially designed website conceived of as a kind of on-line magazine. I am the Project Coordinator, and I will be contributing an introductory text for each issue. Link to the first issue here. Stay tuned for further reports from the field.