Current Projects
Go Queer (Principal Investigator)
Go Queer is a locative media game/experiment about the queer history of the city — a scavenger hunt, where players must literally travel the spaces of the city in the hopes that they will encounter queer history — now disappeared, redeveloped, forgotten. Game play relies on the player thinking, and playing, queerly: Where are the queer areas of the city? Of any city? Why?
efect.ca (Co-Investigator)
This project is developing, testing, and assessing a networked collaboration method to address the current under-employment of women in information, communications, technology, and media (ICT/M) domains. The research partnership draws from academic feminists, gender-focused community-based groups, and ICT/M industry leaders to confront structural barriers that limit: the entry and success of women in ICT/M careers including media and technological production; and in turn, the creation of accurate and diverse representations of girls, women, and gender non-binary people in media.
This digital historical atlas of the North Saskatchewan river valley broadens and deepens engagement with Edmonton’s central geographic feature. It brings original scholarly historical research and new digital technologies to bear on the challenge of understanding the contested engagements among diverse human groups and between human and nonhuman nature along the North Saskatchewan.
Edmonton Pipelines is a collection of digital maps and literary provocations by a team of professors and students at the University of Alberta. We use the site-appropriate term “pipelines” (Edmonton is an oil city) to stand for ways of channelling understanding through dense city space. The objective of the project is to construct interactive digital frameworks that make meaning of the city. We are most interested in stories that come “from below,” stories that represent everyday people making ordinary lives in a city that does not always make such living easy. Hence, we build projects that take on queer citizenship, Aboriginal land disputes, animal neighbourhoods, and – perhaps most surprisingly – the exigencies of suburban life.
http://edmontonpipelines.org
The yeglong projects (YEG is Edmonton’s airport code, and its hashtag on Twitter) are one-day crowdsourcing experiments that ask Edmontonians to submit tweets, narratives, pictures, videos and posts that will help shed some light on what it means to live the longest day or the longest night in one of the most northern cities in the world. The inaugural yeglongday event in June 2013 saw the hashtag reach 400,000 Twitter users and appear 1.2 million times in Twitter streams.
yeglongday.edmontonpipelines.org / yeglongnight.edmontonpipelines.org
ArtCan is the public face of the Canadian Art Commons for History of Art Education and Training (CACHET), a national network funded by the Partnership Development Grant Program of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Founded in 2013, CACHET is dedicated to consolidating and developing resources in the visual arts in Canada for the benefit of national and international academic and museum-based researchers, curators, educators, students, and the broader public.
ArtCan facilitates the exchange of research expertise, knowledge creation, training, and practice in the visual arts in Canada. Projects undertaken by ArtCan’s partners and collaborators are designed for specialist and non-specialist audiences, whether local, regional, or transnational. Its web-based digital commons will present new insights and practical applications generated through ArtCan’s pilot projects, making them available for a broad audience to consult, discuss, elaborate, and apply. ArtCan demonstrates the significance and diversity of Canadian visual art both within and beyond its conventional contexts.
Shaping the City is a revisualization – a methodology that takes conventional or naturalized views of particular spaces and denaturalizing them, replacing them with creative reinterpretations that ask us to question what was so natural about those views in the first place. The project mapped every city block in the city and treated them like puzzle pieces that could be moved around and arranged according to any number of criteria beyond pure GPS co-ordinates. The goal is to challenge both our perception of “the map” and our perception of the city (and to remind us that those are not always the same thing). http://shapingthecity.edmontonpipelines.org
Shaping the City is a revisualization – a methodology that takes conventional or naturalized views of particular spaces and denaturalizing them, replacing them with creative reinterpretations that ask us to question what was so natural about those views in the first place. The project mapped every city block in the city and treated them like puzzle pieces that could be moved around and arranged according to any number of criteria beyond pure GPS co-ordinates. The goal is to challenge both our perception of “the map” and our perception of the city (and to remind us that those are not always the same thing). http://shapingthecity.edmontonpipelines.org
Dis/Integration asks how we can represent and examine a very small space in a very deep way through an examination of the Charles Camsell hospital site — an iconic ruin, simultaneously a crumbling remnant of both 20th century government policy regarding First Nations peoples, and the attenuation of Canada’s state-funded health care system. Dis/Integration is a visual excavation of the site, juxtaposing historical photos and narratives against the eerie stasis of the abandoned grounds. http://disintegration.edmontonpipelines.org